Here’s a sermon for the 3rd Sunday after Trinity focusing on Jesus’s parables of the seed growing secretly and the mustard seed. They speak of uprisings and encouragement, perseverance and patience.
June 16th 2024
Our scriptures are the creation of a bruised and battered people, treasured and passed on by bruised and battered people for the sake of other bruised and battered people. It is a troubled people who have chosen the scriptures we inherit, and who have handed them on.
I keep saying this to remind myself whose these scriptures are and to remind myself to read the scriptures from that point of view.
Today’s gospel features a couple of parables used by Mark to end a sermon by Jesus. The sermon is given from a boat, to a crowd of people on the shore.
Their place on the shore is significant. Jesus and the crowd are from poor peasant communities, subsistence farming communities pushed to the edge by the taxation policies of the temple and Roman authorities. They were clinging on to life in any way they could. Jesus is one of them.
His sermon was particularly for them, the least and the frequently lost in the kingdoms of the world. Appropriately, for an audience of the least Jesus uses what is the least to make his points. Today, he picks a seed that grows secretly, and a mustard seed, “the smallest of all seeds”, which amazingly grows to be the “greatest of all shrubs” – and that picks up the prophecy of Ezekiel in our first reading.
Ezekiel points us to a “lofty tree”.
In his mind it stands for empire and the highness and might of emperors and kings and all those who problematically lord it over others.
Ezekiel sees God cutting a sprig from the lofty top and planting it on a high mountain so that it produces boughs, fruit and shelter for all kinds of bird.
He calls this a “noble” tree rather than a “lofty tree”.
What makes the lofty tree is its highness, whereas the nobility of the noble tree rests in the shelter it gives.
Jesus is the sower.
He sowed seeds in his preaching – seeds of faith, hope and love – seeds of imagination which would grow in the hearts and minds of those poor enough in spirit to have the ears to hear and the eyes to see Jesus’ meaning of love in these parables.
They will have loved his talk of the seeds for him highlighting the smallest of things as being full of life. They will have known that about themselves though generations of occupation, foreign rule and religious oppression will have eaten at their self belief.
Jesus takes two seeds. That in itself reveals so much about the kingdom of God, namely that the rule of God focuses on the smallest of things, the miniscule, on the least. When did you last hear an emperor, or a Mr Big, or a gang leader wondering about the smallest and least in creation?
Jesus casts the mustard seed as the smallest seed, which grows to become the greatest of shrubs giving shelter, shade and blessing to all the birds of the air. His hearers will have loved that. This is what can become of us is what Jesus is leading them to imagine. This is what can happen to the least of us. The least of us can become the most hospitable. The least of us can be the shelter, shade and blessing for so much and so many.
These are parables for the poor in spirit, for the weary, for the belittled.
They encourage us to believe
life will change for the better for the least, the lost and the last –
that the little, least, lost are great in the eyes of God and come first in his kingdom,
They remind us that the seeds of the kingdom are already embedded in the world
by Jesus the sower,
in our own paths and ways
a seed in edgeways
And those seeds have a life of their own.
We don’t know the effect of them – and we can’t control the effects of a kind word, or affirming gesture.
And they make small beautiful.
Small is beautiful in the eyes of the one who puts the least, the lost and last first.
We don’t need to lie
about how little we are
or what little we have
when Jesus sees the kingdom in a seed.
These parable have always encouraged the church,
particularly encouraging us these days
when the church is struggling,
when you’re feeling like there is so much to do
with fewer and fewer people – in a vacancy as well
we can love being small,
being the unlikely seed of the kingdom,
for ever unsure how it’s going to turn out,
just going day to day
with our small seed of faith
our small seed of hope
and our small seed of love,
sprigs cut from the high and mighty,
cut down to size and carefully planted
to be noble in the kingdom.
These parables encourage us to persevere with patience,
to carry on scattering seed in our small ways along the paths of our lives,
never put off by the idea of a harvest we will never see,
to carry on with those small things
that come naturally to those with a joyful heart:
a smile,
a touch,
a word of welcome,
small kindnesses
in all our ways
scattered like seed.
There was a song Jesus heard at home. He’d heard his Mum singing it. We know it as the Magnificat. It goes like this:
Her song praises the work of God showing mercy on those that fear him from generation to generation, scattering the proud in their conceit, casting down the mighty from their thrones, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry with good things, sending the rich away empty.
This is the song that seeded Jesus’ imagination.
It is no wonder that he turns to the smallest in his preaching, to seeds to show us faith, hope and love. The seed growing secretly and the mustard seed represent an uprising – an uprising of the least, the tired and the broken.
Mark 4:26-34
He also said, ‘The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.’
He also said, ‘With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; 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.’
With many such parables he spoke the word of to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.
Ezekiel 17:22-end
Thus says the Lord God:
I myself will take a sprig
from the lofty top of a cedar;
I will set it out,
I will greek a tender one
from the topmost of its young twigs;
I myself will plant it
on a high and lofty mountain.
On the mountain height of Israel
I will plant it
in order that it may produce boughs and bear fruit,
and become a noble cedar.
Under it every kind of bird will live;
in the shade of its branches will nest
winged creatures of every kind.
All the trees of the field shall know
that I am the Lord.
I bring low the high tree,
I make high the low tree;
I dry up the green tree
and make the dry tree flourish.
I the Lord have spoken;
I will accomplish it.
Grits and Grains 