Isaiah 40:27-29; Psalm 126; I Cor. 2:6-10; Mark 4: 26-32
“With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?”
Does it strike any of you as strange that the parable of the mustard seed describes something that, in the usual way of things, does not happen? As you may have heard, Education for Ministry, EfM, is rolling out a new curriculum this year at Sewanee, and in their New Testament unit, this is one of the passages that EfM will examine closely. The mustard seed is one of the parables that occurs, in virtually the same form, in all three synoptic gospels. Whatever their overall intentions or the texts that the gospel-writers had to hand, there was something about this text, this parable, that all three found important enough to include, with virtually the same framing in each case. It’s such a familiar text to us now, almost a children’s story, that I’m not sure we see how weird it actually is. I’m sure we’ve all seen children’s church sermons where the priest brought in a spice jar of mustard seeds as an object lesson about big things found in small packages. Which they are, fair enough, and yet, go out and plant those seeds in the ground, I dare you: what you will get, every time, is a bowl of salad greens. What you do not get is our reading for today: a great tree, a cedar of Lebanon.
The parable is a deadpan miracle, a supposedly “natural” process that does not “naturally” happen. It’s very similar to that other parable where the farmer harvests eighty, a hundred times what was sown: in the real world, even genetic engineering cannot pull this off. But in the kingdom, mustard seeds turn, apparently, into giant redwoods. This is what the kingdom is, how the kingdom works. How, you ask? The first part of our gospel reading is quite clear: in the present moment we don’t know or cannot see how. Usually we find out when it’s already happened, when the thing is full-grown. The growth, to borrow from another bit of Corinthians, belongs to God.
Of course: when I talk about how nature works, I am exaggerating the extent to which even the here and now is really that “predictable.” I am a historian by training. One of the spiritual disciplines of the true historian is actually not to be a prophet, but to try to recapture what it must have felt like to have lived, for example, in 1937, 1938, 1939, before we knew how that particular story would turn out, before we knew which bits would be crucially important to generations to come. There is always a “black swan” element, a random irreducible energy, to the present that makes the facts, such as we know them, always much stranger than fiction. My husband relayed to me a story he heard on a podcast recently: in 1917, Germany deliberately exported Vladimir Lenin to Russia on a famously closed train, fully intending him to act as an anarchist and disruptor of world affairs.
However, in a perfunctory nod to international law, the train cars were divided into “German” and “Russian” halves: but they were united that it was a non-smoking train. Except for the bathroom. Therefore, in an era of chain smoking, it quickly became apparent that time in the bathroom was a very hot commodity. Lenin, of all people, ended up devising a system of first- and second-class tickets for all passengers, to be turned in depending on what you wanted to do in the bathroom. So the exquisite irony goes, before Vladimir Lenin became a destroyer of worlds, he arranged the loo rota.
Our readings, in different ways, all point to a particular way of seeing which comes from God, a deeper wisdom that runs counter in many ways to our immediate experience of the moment. Isaiah articulates the people’s cry—God has forgotten us, there is no justice—only it is not so, because God’s strength is deeper than our immediate experience. The psalmist seems caught between a disbelieving moment of restoration and fulfillment, and the still unrolling prayer that the restoration and fulfillment might still happen.
The Corinthians reading speaks of, “Not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age…[but] God’s wisdom, hidden and secret…these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God…” “The depths of God” is such a wonderful phrase: God as primeval ocean, God as deep space, God as country in and of Himself. Someone different, and much, much bigger than we are, operating according to very different rules than what we are used to. And that means that we, in relation to God, must also be seen differently. Augustine’s famous vision of the church on pilgrimage has two levels: in the present, a motley crew of dysfunctional sinners. From the point of view of eternity, however, we are part of a long procession of saints journeying toward a very different destination than the world around us wants us to go. When we get there, or at least when we get a lot further on our way, we will be very different people, I have a feeling, in God’s kingdom, than the bundle of inadequacies that looked us in the eye in the bathroom mirror this morning. And perhaps we will look back on the person we are today, this morning, or in this room, and maybe we will just barely remember the flecks of faith and goodness from which that future wisdom has grown. As one of the saints of Lewis’ The Great Divorce comfortingly tells a new arrival, “When you’ve grown into a Person (it’s all right, we all had to do it)…” We think we know who we are as Christians. Let’s be clear, mustard seeds: we have no clue.
As you have no doubt heard by now, Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe came to visit Sewanee a couple of weeks ago. He was his customary forthright, plain-speaking self, and one of the images for the Episcopal Church that he used twice, in my hearing at least, was that we in TEC are in possession of an iPhone—an electric car, insert cool gadget of your choice—that we, for the life of us, cannot seem to sell. We have inherited a rich and precious tradition, a complex sacramental and liturgical life, a glorious musical heritage, that we cannot seem to communicate well to others. Of course there are aspects of that tradition which are freighted and difficult, but that is not an unusual or unique problem to have in the world today. I believe that, for many complicated historical reasons, the Episcopal Church is not a “natural” American church, the existence of the National Cathedral notwithstanding. We will always be counter-cultural—and that is not a bad thing, in this day and age. But what I believe Bishop Rowe was getting at, at least in part, is our seeming difficulty in the Episcopal Church of talking, to each other and to the wider world, in the pulpit, at a funeral, at a baptism, at a wedding, about how a mustard seed transforms into a giant cedar.
I was last in Knoxville only two weeks ago for the funeral of a very dear friend who died unexpectedly of complications from a stroke. She was born in Cleveland but Knoxville was her city; she loved its blue-collar history, the people it produced, and she was positively evangelical about Big Ears. My friend was an academic by training but at heart she was a creature of many, many enthusiasms: passionate, uncritical, infectious, and just so much fun. She was also chronically ill, and in the twenty-five years I knew her I watched her life, according to the world’s measures, shrink and shrink and shrink as she made decision after decision about what she could and could not handle: as the job went, as that job went, as any job went, as she became more and more dependent and physically frail. And yet, at my friend’s funeral, what was immediately clear is that very few of us who were her friends and family knew one another well, but we were all connected through her. And the person we described to one another was manifestly the same person, who got us interested in weird new things only she cared about, who, when the world backed away, showed up amidst grief and trouble, for example, to her childhood friend’s father’s funeral and its aftermath, only two weeks before her own death. It was Sarah’s profoundly relational approach to the world thatchanged so many people’s lives and imaginations for the better. A mustard seed to the world, a giant cedar, I am convinced, in the eyes of God.
“Our” possibilities are only possibilities in as much as we recognize they are God’s possibilities for us. We are only able to imagine the limitlessness of those possibilities inasmuch as we allow ourselves to be in relationship with God and relationship with each other. And to be in relationship with each other means to be open to the possibility of being changed, transformed, beyond anything we could ever imagine: we might think our calling is to be a mustard seed. We may even be content with that calling. But what if God is not content with that? What if He requires us to be different? More? The greatest of all trees?
How willingly will we accept that calling?