Mystery Seeds

2nd Sunday after Pentecost

Mark 4:26-34

The Kingdom of God is to us a mystery. Not a mystery in the sense that you and I have come to know mysteries. We watch a mystery unfold on the television, and we come to know the explanation for the mystery in 60 minutes, time taken away for commercials (which are a mystery in themselves, aren’t they). No, the Kingdom of God is a mystery that really can’t be comprehended fully, and that becomes something of a problem.

You and I want to have things explained to us? We need to have things explained to us. And then Jesus comes along, and we have questions about this Kingdom of God that He keeps talking about, and His explanation is in the form of parables. In fact, Mark says that He didn’t teach anything that wasn’t in the form of a parable.

You and I don’t encounter parables enough to really know what to do with them. In seminary, I took a course in the book of Luke under Dr. Lacoste Munn. I actually took two courses under Dr. Munn – one was New Testament survey (which we called “Fun with Munn” – I think it’s because he was known to be the easiest of the professors for that particular class), and the second was this little survey of the book of Luke. I’ll tell you a rather humorous anecdote about Dr. Munn and his course. It seems that several of us had his final and two other finals on the same day. So, we collaborated and decided to approach Dr. Munn with our dilemma. We said, “Dr. Munn, several of us have your final and two other finals on the same day, and we were wondering if we could schedule your final for another day, just to help us out?” He replied to us, “Well, let me tell you my philosophy on that sort of thing – that’s just kinda the way life is – some days you have three finals, and other days you don’t have any.” I can tell you - the day of finals in that class wasn’t “fun with Munn.”

Anyway, back to my original story. Dr. Munn had one “important point” that he wanted to make with us about parables. His one important point was that parables had one central point – we might see more than one, but the parable teller usually only had one point that he was trying to get across.

As illustration, let’s take the second of our parables first this morning – the parable of the mustard seed. It really just has the one point – that the Kingdom of God, small in its inception, will experience incredible growth. That’s it – that’s the entire point that Jesus was trying to make with the parable. But we take off from there into uncharted territory, developing themes and theologies and alternate theologies, until we could write a book just about the alternate ways one could interpret this parable.

I’ve done it myself. When I was younger, just out of seminary and starting to get my feet wet in church work, I heard someone say that 40 percent of what Jesus taught, He taught in the form of parables, and that 40 percent of what He did He did in the form of miracles – and that if we could get our mental arms around the parables and the miracles, then we’d have a grasp of 80 percent of what Jesus was about. I generally like playing the percentages, and so this philosophy appealed to me. I started studying parables – with a passion. I must have bought a dozen books in those first five or six years on parables alone. All of them said the same thing about this particular parable – whether you take it from Mark or from Matthew or Luke – that the Kingdom would experience magnificent growth, and that it would be so large that it would encompass even the birds of the air, which they went on to describe as the “gentile” nations – you and me. Notice how they already went beyond the main point to a “secondary” point.

Then a few years later, I stumbled across my friend, author Robert Capon, and he had three books on parables. I immediately bought all three – Parables of Grace, Parables of the Kingdom, and Parables of Judgment. I devoured them – he did things in explaining the parables that were so different – in some cases so diametrically opposed to what others had done with them, that I was enamored. But he made the same glaring faux pas as others did – he insisted on taking the simple explanation and expounding beyond it. He advocated that the growth of the mustard plant was so beyond the imagination that Jesus must have intended to indicate that it represented abnormal “structural” growth of the church, and then he made note of the fact that in Matthew’s gospel, this parable is in proximity to other parables in which birds represent evil workers – so, the conclusion he reached was that Jesus was telling us that the church would grow abnormally large, to the point that even Satan’s workers could find a place of safe harbor within its branches. I was stunned at his analysis, but I was working with deacons at that point in time, and so some of what he had to say made sense to me.

If we take Mark’s first parable for today’s lesson, we might very well do the same thing. The rather obvious point of this parable is that the Kingdom of God will grow - out of its nature – just like seeds sprout, grow, and eventually produce fruit. That’s the point. But we could very easily do so much more with this parable. We could take note of the fact that the sower sowed the seed, and we could take off on a series of summer sermons on evangelism in our world today. We could talk about the need for Christians to take witnessing classes and to develop a plan for working out a plan of concentric circles of influence among friends and neighbors and co-workers, so as to present a witness to persons in each of those categories. We could develop a theology about planting and cultivating and harvesting, and we could seek to salve our consciences by defining ourselves as the kind of church that doesn’t do much harvesting, but is really great at cultivating. All of those ideas are noble, and have value in and of themselves – but they aren’t the point of the parable. This parable intends to remind us that the Kingdom of God will grow – out of its nature – and not so much out of the work that we put into it.

There – we did it again. I added something to the point – that line about “not so much out of the work that we put into it.” That makes it sound like you and I aren’t important to the growth of the kingdom. If we believed that, we could develop a theology that suggests that we need not do much in the way of evangelism because things have already been predetermined as to what will happen in the end. Oh, wait – that’s already been done. I think they call it Calvinism. The point of the parable is that the kingdom will grow – it’s in its nature to grow.

There’s a larger point about the kingdom of God this day for us to comprehend. Jesus said - and three different guys wrote it down – the Kingdom of God is like – well, a mystery. Except it’s not the kind of mystery that you’re necessarily going to see played out in this lifetime. I know that’s hard to take – we like explanations to our mysteries. We like to see how it all comes out in the end.

I want to say a word about context. I’ve decided that in some ways, it’s harder to be a Christian in this country, in this time, than any previous place and time. Jesus spoke this parable the first time to a group of people, and in the context of their lives, His words had merit and specific meaning. We can’t put our mental fingers on the exact nature of the context in which they lived, but we have a couple of clues. This was spoken to 1st century Jews who were looking for a Messiah. They were looking for someone who had been promised for generations, and this Jesus looked like He just might be the One they’d been waiting for all those years. Then, roughly 30 years later, Mark penned these words for some followers of Jesus who were living in a slightly different context. These followers had now committed their lives to following Jesus, and they were experiencing rather intense persecution as a result.

You and I live in a different context as we read these words today. We live in perhaps the most affluent society to ever exist. By virtually any standard you and I might apply, we have more wealth than 80 percent of the rest of the world. I started thinking about all the things I own – and at this particular point in my life, much of the stuff I own is broken. It’s a good thing I took a year off from Habitat – I seem to be “habitating” at the Dunn house this summer. Everything I am a steward over is in need of repair and maintenance. The pool is broken, I’m cutting the yard twice a week, the boat broke the other day, and don’t even get me started on the state of my garden. And then the house needs painting, the back yard fence needs mending, and the dog pens need repair. The context in which I personally encounter Jesus’ stories about the Kingdom of God is sobering affluence, to say the least – much more so than most of the people in our world enjoy, and certainly more than in the world in which these words were first spoken.

I’ve been thinking about the context in which I encounter these parables this week. I am preoccupied with stuff. Now, don’t fuss at me – you are preoccupied with stuff, too. And add to all the stuff the other various distractions – ball games and dance lessons and second jobs and extended family responsibilities – and you and I come to realize that the context in which we encounter these stories about the kingdom produces for us a warning. We mustn’t get so preoccupied with life that we miss out on the mystery of the kingdom of God. It is a mystery, and we simply must take time to observe if we are going to participate in the mystery of this Kingdom of God.

I can offer to us this morning something of a synopsis of the point of these parables, and it comes in the form of a little parable itself. It is the parable of “Amy the puppy.” You know that I picked up a new pointer puppy just a couple of weeks ago. I can say two things about her. She is growing – it is in her nature to do so. And secondly, she started out as something quite small – she actually was the runt of the litter – but she will become something significantly larger, in so many ways, than she was when she was born.

Whether we can see it or not, the Kingdom of God is alive and well in this world. It will take root, grow and produce everywhere it is sown – it must – it is in its nature to do so. And the smallest of things related to the kingdom will grow into something quite magnificent.

It occurs to me - you and I ought to keep our eye on this Kingdom – it is growing, and we want to be a part of what God.

Richard W. Dunn, PhD.