Mustard Seed Faith

The New Revised Standard Version (The Parable of the Growing Seed)

Mark 4:26-34

26 He also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, 27 and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. 28 The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. 29 But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”30 He also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? 31 It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; 32 yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”33 With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; 34 he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.

Intro-Words

A few years ago, Webster’s dictionary did something kind of interesting.

They expanded the definition of the word “literally” to include the way that it is commonly misused.

Like “I’m literally dying of thirst.”

Or “He literally turned green with envy.”

Things like that.

But…it turns out that literally doesn’t have a synonym.

There’s only one word for that in the English language.

So we somehow created a situation where one word can carry two distinct and totally opposite meanings.

I’m literally wearing a black suit today.

I’m literally freezing.

This exposes two really big realities:

When it comes right down to it, the English language makes absolutely zero sense.

Ask anyone for whom its a second language.

And secondly, and more importantly for our purposes today, words fail us more than we recognize.

Which is something that’s hard to admit for the guy who’s made a living trying to use words to explain the big complex truths of the kingdom of God!

But at least I’m in good company...

Bible Breakdown

The big question: What’s heaven all about?

It’s not hard to imagine that as Jesus was wandering the earth going about his ministry, he probably came across a few folks who had a few questions.

It would appear that one of the biggest questions he was asked, or at least the question he was most interested in dealing with, was “What’s the Kingdom of God all about?”

It’s what he’s almost always teaching about when he’s with his disciples.

It’s what he’s almost always teaching about when he’s in front of a large crowd.

It’s what’s on his mind.

What is heaven all about?

Words fail us in answering this question.

Most of what we think we know about heaven comes more from movies and TV shows than from our scriptures.

When we think of heaven, what kinds of images come to mind?

Angels with harps?

Pearly gates?

Streets of gold?

And I mean, what are we going to do when we get there?

Is it going to be just one endless church service?

And if so, can we find out who’s preaching before we go?

Will we know one another any more, or will we just be in relationship with God?

Will we remember the difficulties of our lives down here, or would that be too painful?

In reality, most of what we think we know about heaven comes more from movies and TV shows than from our scriptures.

And that’s because for as much as we think of Heaven as a fundamental piece of the Christian faith, it’s really got shockingly few descriptions in our scriptures!

There are not a whole lot of places where the Kingdom of Heaven is spelled out for us in detail.

Instead, what we get is Jesus speaking about it, but even there it’s not quite what we’d imagine.

Besides, when Jesus is talking about the Kingdom of God, he’s not talking about the afterlife.

When Jesus uses a phrase like “Kingdom of Heaven” in Matthew, or similarly “Kingdom of God” here in Mark, more often than not he’s not speaking about the afterlife.

In fact, the Jewish consciousness didn’t really make a whole lot of room for the afterlife.

You can see this any time Jesus is fighting with the Sadducees, whose main theological sticking point is that they didn’t believe in the resurrection.

Instead, remember the reality of the crowd that Jesus is speaking to:

These are people who were once their own independent nation.

These are people who once had a King who worshipped their God and was in fact called “A man after God’s own heart.”

But now these are people who have been taken over and occupied by an oppressive military force.

And yet they’ve been promised by their prophets that one day they would be liberated, and that they would be able to establish their Kingdom again.

So when Jesus is talking about the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God, he’s not talking about some far off land where we go by and by.

He’s talking about what it would look like if we lived our daily, normal, routine existence here and now according to the standards and realities of God’s kingdom.

It’s essentially the idea we pray for every week, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Let’s bring that Kingdom here.

And yet, even with this, Jesus is struggling for words.

He doesn’t come out with a ten point plan for how to be a member of the Kingdom of God.

Instead, he has to reach for parables.

The word parable literally means “Story along side.”

I’m going to tell you this story, which is going to work alongside the truth I’m trying to get at.

Two Parables:

How do plants actually work?

I should say that I always get nervous when the topic of the sermon turns to agriculture.

I’ve twice in my life killed Cactuses.

I’m less nourishing than a desert.

So I don’t quite feel qualified!

But apparently I’m in good company!

Jesus first parable is about a farmer who scatters seed, but has no earthly idea what he’s doing.

Caterpillars at home

The boys recently got one of those kits where you can order caterpillars which will eventually turn in to crysalises (I’ve learned we don’t call them cocoons) and then grow in to butterflies.

All the caterpillars have gone in to the crysalises, and they’re doing…something.

I don’t know what!

It’s kind of a neat mystery to imagine what’s going on there.

It’s not the kind of mystery that frustrates me, like why the Penguins can dominate their division and lose in the first round...

But it’s the kind of mystery that fills me (and the boys I suppose) with awe and wonder.

It’s the kind of mystery that gently invites me to try to understand more about it.

It’s a mystery to the farmer, who simply shows up and responds to what’s growing around him.

The farmer has that same sense of awe and wonder.

He has no idea what’s happening to the seed in the ground that will eventually become a plant.

Maybe he’s dreaming about it?

Maybe he’s wondering about it?

Maybe he thinks about the mechanics of it a little bit, but that doesn’t seem to be his primary concern.

But the farmer has a bigger role to play in this story.

The farmer’s role is to respond to the growth that he doesn’t quite understand.

He doesn’t get the seed becoming a plant, that kind of escapes him.

But when it does become a plant, he’s ready for it.

He’s got his sickle, and he gets to work.

He harvests the plants in his field, we presume so that he can feed himself and his family and maybe sell some of what he’s grown to his neighbors and maybe even give some of it away.

But if you had to summerize this one,

Growth happens.

A farmer doesn’t get it.

But the farmer responds.

That’s what the kingdom of God is like…?

Just in case we didn’t get that one…Jesus has a second one to follow up with.

A mustard seed

Similar theme, though maybe slightly different takeaways?

Something that starts really small gets really big.

I happen to have here a mustard seed.

It’s…not that big at all!

But Jesus is right, when this thing gets a head of steam about it, it can become quite the shrub.

I did a little bit of research, and these things can get anywhere from 6 to 20 feet tall.

When I stand on my tippie toes I’m about six foot tall, or at least I pretend...

So a seed this small can grow to be a plant that at its smallest is about my size, and at its best is a little bigger than 3 of me.

Not bad.

But what’s interesting is that Jesus doesn’t focus on the food portion of this plant in this second parable.

He’s not putting mustard on a ballpark frank.

Instead, he focuses on what the plant itself has to offer.

It exists so that the birds of the air can come and rest in the shade of this massive plant.

What do the two parables have in common?

They are stories about God working, and others responding.

In both stories, these seeds only grow because God causes them to grow.

The farmer almost hilariously doesn’t know what’s going on, because God’s the one making it all happen.

And in both stories, there is some emphasis on what the response is to the growth.

The farmer responds by taking action and harvesting the grain.

The birds take action by resting and relaxing in the branches.

The thing that grows ultimately blesses others

In the farmer’s case, the grain that has grown is going to become food.

And sure, it could be just for him, but in their society that was insanely rare.

I would say at the least the food is going to bless his family.

He might sell it, so that the food could bless others.

And there were laws in place in the Jewish religion about leaving part of your crop unharvested so that the least of these could come by and harvest it themselves, so there are a lot of folks being blessed here.

In the mustard seed story, the birds of the air are the recipients of the blessing.

Interesting side note: as we’ve mentioned before there are certain metaphors in the animal kingdom around the time of Jesus.

The birds of the air was a phrase that was often used for Gentiles, or people who were not a part of the Jewish religion.

So Jesus essentially says that the Kingdom of God is like a plant that grows so that people who aren’t part of the club are the ones to get the blessing.

Interesting…I think I’ve heard that before.

The kingdom of God is about growth.

The one thing that unites both of these stories is that they are about growth.

Something starts at point A, a tiny little seed, and grows to become something much much bigger that blesses others.

This is kind of fascinating,

The Kingdom of God is not geographical.

It’s not a political system.

It’s not a nation state.

It’s a collection of people.

So is it possible that what Jesus is saying is that when you understand the Kingdom of God, when you get what it’s like to live in that Kingdom on Earth as it is in heaven, then you will be a person who is all about growth?

Growth for yourself, sure.

But also pretty clearly growth that will benefit those around us.

Growth that will bring in the outsider.

Growth that will bless those around you.

Growth that will bless those who don’t have enough blessings on their own.

Growth that will make the world a better place.

Application

The Christian life is not about what happens to us when we die.

1000 Illustrations for Preaching & Teaching Personal Growth

Immanuel Kant declared that no one had the right to talk about immortality until he worked so hard at being mortal that he longed for the immortal.

There are some folks that are so heavenly bound they’re no earthly good.

Jesus Christ came, lived, died, and rose again specifically so that we wouldn’t have to worry about what happens to us when we die.

Jesus Christ went ahead to prepare a place for us, it’s taken care of.

Jesus Christ offers us grace upon grace so that we don’t have to carry the burden of our failures.

Jesus Christ is pleased to welcome us in to the never-ending Kingdom of the Father purely and simply out of love.

That means we don’t have to worry.

We don’t have to worry about ourselves.

We don’t have to twist ourselves in knots about who is in and who is out.

And when someone we love passes away, while we feel the sting of grief for a little while, we can receive the comfort of knowing that Jesus Christ holds them in his heart for all time.

And when we are set free from all those worries, we can focus on something substantially more exciting.

The Christian life is about what we’re growing in to while we’re alive.

We can start to recognize that the Christian life is a journey, and we aren’t done yet!

If you have air in your lungs right now, you have the capacity to grow and continue to become who Jesus Christ has crafted you to be.

And that’s an exciting thing!

But, growth does come with a few requirements that we ought to take seriously.

Growth requires humility.

On the very face of it, to acknowledge that you have somewhere you need to go is to acknowledge that you aren’t there yet.

It requires the humility to allow for the possibility of improvement.

I see this on a national level in a pretty neat line from our history:

In the preamble to our constitution, the framers wrote that “We the people, in order to create a more perfect union...”

Did you catch that?

Not to create a perfect union.

That’s a goal that we might never actually see come to fruition.

As long as people are involved, there’s likely never going to be perfection.

But it’s written in to our founding document that we are going to strive to be a little more perfect every passing day.

We’re going to work as a nation to improve ourselves.

We’re going to work to make things better.

We’re going to have the humility to acknowledge where things aren’t quite right.

Not so that we can beat ourselves up, but instead so that we can open ourselves up to another step closer to that more perfect union.

What does it look like to be on a mission to become a more perfect version of yourself every day?

To get honest about the places where things aren’t quite right?

To acknowledge your failures?

To be open about your pain?

Not to beat yourself up, but to open yourself up?

Growth requires nourishment.

There’s a neat term in cycling called “bonking”.

Bonking is when you don’t eat or drink enough before the ride.

You’ll be chugging along, and all of a sudden, everything comes to a screetching halt.

I’ve said that bonking most feels like my soul leaving my body.

Even when my brain is actively telling my legs to pedal…there’s not enough nourishment in my body to keep me going.

Like any good plant, our growth depends on our nourishment.

And yet I know so many people who are spiritually bonking.

We keep ourselves so busy that we don’t have time to rest.

We’re moving so fast that we don’t enjoy the creation God has give us all around.

We’re so focused on growing in our own way that we forgot to nourish ourselves with God, the source of our growth.

Set aside some time this week to seek nourishment.

Trust me, you can afford the time.

Or rather, maybe you can’t afford to not take it.

Growth requires grace.

Know this, growing means that we will make mistakes.

We will grow in ways that we don’t want to, and we’ll fail to grow in the ways that we do.

Part of that humility earlier is the ability to receive the grace that Jesus Christ is endlessly offering.

Take it easy on yourself.

Don’t let any single failure get in the way of a bigger endgame.

May we continue to grow this day, and all our days, to establish God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.