The Mysterious and Unmanageable Kingdom of God (Mk 4:26-32)

Sermon manuscript from 5 July 2009

Welcome

Children:
Bring the kids up front and reading Kingdom parables:

Come on up. Have a seat wherever you want. It is all yours.

Where should I sit? Do you want to see the pictures? You do? Alright, is this good? Alright. Perfect.

This is a story called “A Tiny Seed and a Big Tree”

“Many people came to hear Jesus’ stories. Jesus told stories about God’s kingdom. And wherever God is king, God’s love will be found.” Do you see the people coming and sitting to listen to Jesus?

“Jesus said, ‘God’s kingdom is like a mustard seed. It’s one of the smallest, tiniest seeds in the world, but it grows and it grows and it grows and it grows. And when it’s grown, it’s one of the biggest plants in the garden. It’s so big that birds come and rest in its branches. And God’s kingdom can start very small, just like that. God’s love may only be in one person’s heart, but when his love is shared, his kingdom grows and grows and grows. And more and more people want to follow God.’

“And then Jesus told another story. ‘God’s kingdom is like yeast. Bakers use yeast to make dough puff up and get really big. It makes the dough soft and fluffy, then you can make great loaves of bread.’ Jesus said, ‘God’s kingdom is like yeast. A woman mixes the yeast with the flour. She makes the dough and the yeast gets worked through all of the dough and it makes the dough big and puffy. God’s love can start like yeast. It can mix into our hearts, and there it grows bigger and bigger and soon we have enough love to share with everyone.’”

Huh, so God’s kingdom, Jesus says, is wherever God is king. And wherever God is king, we will see God’s love. So I’m wondering, can any of you tell me a time when you were able to show God’s love to somebody else? What do you think? Has there ever been a time like that?

Remember that wherever God is king, you’ll see God’s love. So today what I want you to do is make sure to show God’s love to everyone you see. Then, God’s kingdom will be just like that little bitty mustard seed. It will grow bigger and bigger and bigger. And it will be just like that little bit of yeast that makes the dough puff up really big and make a nice, fluffy loaf of bread.

Kids head back to their seats.

Let’s hear the Word of the Lord this morning as we begin:

Mark 4:26-32 (tNIV)
“Jesus said to the crowd that gathered, ‘This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.’

“Again he said, ‘What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds can perch in its shade.’”

Prayer – “God, today we step once again into an ancient text, but a story that lives with more power, with more meaning, and with more import than most any other text we know. And so God we pray that you will help this text to live anew in our hearts and in our lives, that we can be drawn into your life, that we can live under your reign as people of your kingdom, and that through us that kingdom will be realized in the world. It is through the name of your son that we pray. Amen.”


Well, today we find ourselves in the gospel of Mark. The gospel of Mark is an interesting one. At least I think it is. It’s interesting for a lot of reasons, but one of the most interesting is that Mark’s gospel just wears me out. I confessed this a couple of weeks ago on Wednesday night. Mark’s gospel wears me out because, even though, it is by far the shortest of the four gospels in our Bibles, Mark sprints through the first 9 chapters at breakneck pace. Mark opens his gospel with these powerful and really deeply loaded words. He writes, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus…, Messiah…, Son of God.” That simple, but deeply loaded, first sentence is like Mark’s call to the starting blocks. When I read it I get these nervous twitches in my body like I am back running high school track again, and I have to start shaking out the legs and getting ready to get in the blocks and steady my hands starting line, and anxiously wait, because I know that as soon as Mark finishes those words we are off to the race. The gun is going to fire and we are going to go. As soon as he finishes those words, we hear the bang and we “immediately”, one of Mark’s favorite words, move from one story to the next, one telling about miraculous healings, to the next encounter with demons, to the next controversy with religious leaders, and even to short, very short times of silent prayer. We think the prayer is a reprieve, but it’s just to drive us back into another very quick story.

As a sprinter though, I would like to think of it as a 100-meter dash, because I liked that race. It was quick. I was alright getting out of the blocks and I was fast. But I think that Mark is a little bit more like the 400-meter dash. I hated that one, because for me, being a short distance sprinter, it seemed like it took an eternity. I felt like I was just constantly going and just wanted to die after that race. (Joke with AH, a gifted cross-country runner.)

As you race through Mark, you discover that there is definitely a lot of action. Mark’s Jesus is not so much about talking the talk as walking the walk. Most of Jesus’ teaching, especially in these first nine chapters is in response to questions, in response to doubts, and in response to challenges from other people. There are very few long teaching segments like you get in the other Gospels. In fact, at times you desperately want them, so you can just slow down a little bit. This is really interesting to me, especially since Mark’s gospel is probably the earliest gospel we have in our Bibles. It was the earliest one written. So, Mark’s approach to telling the story about Jesus is his own choice. There are a lot of other stories about Jesus and what Jesus did out there. I mean we know this from the end of the gospel of John, right. There, John says, “Jesus did a whole lot of other things that I didn’t include…” So, when we read Mark, one of the questions we ask is “why do we keep running from one thing to the next when we could slow down?” But, Mark seems to have been the first to attempt to tell the story of Jesus’ life in a way that shaped his community to understand who God is, to understand Jesus’ life and ministry, and to come to find their own place in the reign of God. He could have focused primarily on Jesus’ teaching, but instead focused on short vignettes of Jesus’ actions to help his church family discover what it means to be Jesus’ disciple, his “learner”

Chapter 4:
And so, it is in this mix of these short, quick, changing vignettes that chapter 4 breaks in abruptly. It begins, “Again he began to teach beside the sea.” Now, that’s not surprising to us. It’s not teaching by the sea that’s unique. If we have been following Mark since chapter 1, we know that Jesus has taught people by the sea several times. But each time it’s just been for the briefest of moments, just to transition into another action, but here, all of a sudden, Jesus starts telling these convoluted parables that are in some ways meant to confuse people, meant to be shrouded in mystery, as he says in verse 12.

Now, why, if Mark wants to have Jesus teaching, doesn’t he use something that makes a little more sense? Why this teaching? Why these parables? Why doesn’t he use something from the Sermon on the Mount, like the Beatitudes, or maybe one of the long teaching sections from that we see in the John. Why these parables? If this is all that Jesus is going to say to us in these first nine chapters, why these parables? What is going on?

But as much as I would like to dictate and provide a few editorial suggestions to Mark, he doesn’t take my advice. Mark thinks that the most important thing for us to hear Jesus teach right now is these mysterious parables on the kingdom.

The parables go against every sensibility and rational desire we have. We tend to be people who like to plan, to organize, to think through things and have everything nicely mapped out. But here, in contrast to our desire to control, the kingdom of God is more a mystery than something we master. We, like the sower, are called simply to scatter seeds, rather than control and manipulate its growth.

When we were talking about these parables a couple of Wednesday nights ago, Ken acutely put his finger on the uncomfortable tension in these parables well, at least the one that I have. He basically said, “If I were the sower, I would make sure that the seed fell right where I wanted it to. I would dig a nice little hole and plant it right there and make sure it grows.”

I like that idea, because it puts me in control. It keeps things under my grasp. It makes it so that things work according to my plans. I think that Ken’s sentiment is not a unique feeling. Most of us want to control and master the growth. We want to manage and artificially manipulate the results and the growth of the crop.

But that wisdom is not the wisdom of the Kingdom in Mark’s gospel. In Mark, we see Jesus scattering the seed of the kingdom, pieces of his very own life, into the lives of others. As Jesus’ disciples, as his learners, we pattern our lives after his. We scatter pieces of our own lives, the seed of the kingdom, into the lives of others, and then sleep and rise and watch, trusting that we are participating in the mystery of the kingdom of God.

Father Joe:

As I was thinking about these parables, a book came to mind. I was in seminary at ACU when Randy Harris suggested that I read Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul by Tony Hendra. The book was a surprising best seller here in the U.S. It is basically Hendra’s spiritual autobiography. Some of you may know Hendra’s name, others may not. Tony Hendra was one of the scriptwriters for Spitting Image, which someone called the most uninhibitedly scurrilous and outspoken satirical program on British television in the 1980s. That basically means that it was an unhibited, no-holds-barred attack on whatever was out there. There was nothing that it left as sacred. He wrote for National Lampoon and played Ian Faith in the brilliant spoof rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap.

In the book, Hendra describes his friendship with a Benedictine monk named Father Joe. Their friendship started under the most awkward of circumstances when Hendra was 14. Father Joe was a monk in a community called Quarr and, since making his vows and commitment, he had hardly ever left the grounds of his monastery on the Isle of Wright. During the next forty years, as Hendra’s life and career drastically ebbed and flowed, he discovered that his visits to Father Joe remained the one constant in his life. It was the one relationship that, in the most serious sense, saved it. During those four decades, Father Joe remained a constant, a point of utterly reliable orientation for Hendra, accessible and compassionate through crises of faith, through successes and failures, marriage and divorce and remarriage, problems with drugs and alcohol, and even an attempted suicide. (fr. Father Joe and Tokens of Trust)

Through those years Father Joe never tried to score points with Hendra. He never tried to manipulate growth in Hendra’s life. Instead he constantly sowed small seeds of himself, really seeds of the kingdom of God, into the soil of Hendra’s life, seeds that patiently punctured through all of the illusions and ambitions of his heart and took root in his soul, and slowly called Hendra back to God. Father Joe knew he couldn’t control or manage the way the kingdom of God grew, but he faithfully scattered the seeds of his own life, the seeds of the kingdom.

The kingdom of God is like a man who scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or rises, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how.


JP:
J, it reminds me a little of the story that we were talking about this morning, doesn’t it? The story of Sister Agathilla, who played such a vital role in your life, when you were a struggling young girl, not wanting to go to school. She touched your life and made it so you went from being a person who didn’t want to go to school, who didn’t want to learn, to being the first person on the steps of the doors in the morning, waiting for the school to be unlocked, knowing every answer to every question because of the way that she touched your life.

You see, the kingdom of God is like a woman who scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether she sleeps or rises, the seed sprouts and grows, though she does not know how.

B: Reciting Psalm 23 to me on Wednesday night….
I thought of this a little bit on Wednesday night. For those of you who weren’t here on Wednesday night, we had our first chance to spend some time together “Beside Quiet Waters.” During that time we heard from the 23rd Psalm. Afterward, this really excited little tot came up to me and said, “Mr. Magnusson, Mr. Magnusson. I know that memory verse that you read today.” I said, “Really, you know the 23rd Psalm?” And he said, “Yeah, can I tell it to you?” So, I sat and listened as B quoted to me the 23rd Psalm. Then he went on to tell me the story about how L (his mom) works with them every morning reading and teaching them this Psalm, so that it becomes a part of their soul.

You see, the kingdom of God is like a mother who scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether she sleeps or whether she rises, the seed sprouts and grows, though she does not know how.


G and K taking the guy to the dentist.
I think a little bit about the story GM told a couple of weeks ago on Wednesday night. It was a story about a guy that she and K take to the dentist, who has a life and beliefs very different from their own. They take him there because he needs to be taken. Maybe a lot like that story in the children’s Bible that we read when we started, that wherever God is king, God’s love will be seen. So, G and K selflessly take this man to the dentist.

You see, the kingdom of God is like a couple that scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether they sleep or whether they rise, the seed sprouts and grows, though they do not know how.

C:
Or, I think about a woman named C. C is one of L’s coworkers. She’s a fabulous lady, very kind. Every time I go in and get coffee from her, she gives me a hard time, which means she must be a really good person. Just even puts up with me enough to give me a hard time is really great. But she has hit crisis lately. Her mother died, leaving a gaping hole in her life. She desperately needed to blame God, but God wanted there to be on trial, but L was, and she knows that Leanne is close to God. So, L bore the brunt of C’s pain and frustration as she dealt with those struggles. And L was able to receive those graciously and patiently. Know C finds herself in crazy financial difficulty because her husband has basically abandoned them. Instead of depositing paychecks where they should be, he is keeping them for himself. So, her son, who is a gifted ice skater, isn’t able to buy time on the ice. They are desperately struggling financially, and they discover that their A/C is on the brink.

So, L calls me one day and says, “There is a lady who needs us.” And I say, “Well, I don’t know anything about air conditioners, but I know a guy that does.” And so GR takes time out of his own schedule and goes and tries to help C. And somehow, everybody gets changed in the process. And we don’t know what’s happening, at least we don’t know how it’s happening, but somewhere we are trusting that the kingdom of God is taking root.

You see, the kingdom of God is like people who scatter seed on the ground. Night and day, whether they sleep or whether they rise, the seed sprouts and grows, though they do not know how.

Becoming a scattered people… the church has left the seed bag.
Mark’s Jesus is constantly scattering the seed of the kingdom, small pieces of himself, into the lives of others. As Jesus’ disciples, as Jesus’ learners, we are called to scatter pieces of our own lives, the seed of the kingdom, into the lives of others. And then we sleep and we rise and we watch, trusting that we are participating in the mystery of God.

You see, the kingdom of God is like a church that scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether we sleep or whether we rise, the seed sprouts and grows, even though we do not know how.

This is God’s promise… and this is the Word of the Lord.