June 17, 2012 – Mark 4:26-34
Mark 4:26-34
Wild Kingdom
3rd Sunday after Pentecost [Lectionary 11] – June 17, 2012
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
The parable of the mustard seed is a parable of the kingdom of the triune God.
In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus first public words proclaim that in him
The triune God’s kingdom is coming near.
Now, before we go any further, we need to remember that Jesus is not talking about a place.
The kingdom is not a place.
It’s an event: a better translation is “God’s active rule is coming near.”
Lots of other things reign now, Jesus is saying: brokenness and hunger and violence.
But I am bringing God’s rule of justice and mercy and peace, God’s reign of healing, near.
And you see it everywhere he goes: he embodies and he brings it.
This is what Jesus is saying is like a mustard seed this morning.
This active rule of God in healing and feeding and caring and including is like a mustard seed.
At the study conference this week, I learned a couple of amazing facts from our speaker,
David Lose, who teaches biblical preaching at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.
When immigrants began to come over to N.A. in large numbers in the 19th and 20th centuries,
did you know that only one in five of those immigrants remained church goers?
Only one in five! Including Lutherans! Including, presumably, Icelanders!
Yet – and here’s the other amazing statistic – 1 in 50 people are served every day by
an institution started by Lutherans.
Isn’t that amazing!
Every day, over 6 million people are served by an institution started by Lutherans.
Schools, hospitals, hospices, relief agencies: you name it.
Isn’t that incredible?
From small communities of Lutherans being seeded by the love of God each Sunday,
God’s reign has branched out through their lives to provide nests for people to shelter in.
I got to thinking about this this week.
And I realized that God’s loving reign extends to many, many people through
not only through the formal activities of this congregation.
But also through the myriad branches of our congregation that
reach out into the world through you in your everyday lives.
Justice in our province is overseen by our own Andrew Swan,
and our lawyers participate in that: this is God’s work when done with integrity.
Tax time has just ended and our accountants and associated workers have been putting in
long, long hours to keep the whole system going!
Our nurses and physicians have been agents of God’s healing this week.
Our business people have been providing countless services in an ethical way.
Our school teachers have been nurturing and forming countless children,
loving them and teaching them about God’s world and
the respect and understanding each person deserves.
Our teens have been agents of acceptance and lovingkindness in their schools.
Our parents have been bearers of care and vigilance and wisdom and oversight to
so many of our children.
Our grandparents have done yeoman’s work – God’s work – in caring for
grandchildren and in keeping families running smoothly and
helping to manage the stress of very busy parents.
Volunteers like coaches and Big Brothers and Sisters among us have strengthened
our neighbourhoods into being places where friendships and community can flourish.
Bankers among us have assisted in securing people credit to finance homes and
safe places to live.
Friends among us have offered hospitality to neighbours in their homes this week.
Visitors of the sick among us have alleviated loneliness and extended God’s love and concern
and healing into hospitals and nursing homes.
What I think we need to lift up and celebrate right now is this:
God is working in your everyday life for the benefit of many, many people.
And this is just in the last week!
Last Sunday (or the last time you were here) you received a small but immense gift:
the gift of God’s love.
That love came packaged in something concrete and mundane and real:
a few meagre words, a bit of bread, and a little wine.
The few words I fashioned spoke of God’s loving grace,
but they were fashioned with love and care.
The bread we broke was made with great love by Maria.
The wine we shared was made with loving care by Albert.
A small seed of the kingdom of grace was planted in you last week.
And yet how that seed has grown!
How it has branched into countless nooks and crannies of this world.
How God has extended God’s loving, gracious, peace- and justice-sharing reign through you
every day of this week!
Thanks to our speaker David Lose this week, I came to realize that you need to hear
and understand that what happens here on Sunday morning matters for
the things you do the rest of the week.
And that what you do the rest of the week really, really matters.
It makes a difference.
And not only does it make a difference:
it extends the beautiful, life-giving reign of God announced by and embodied in Jesus.
Truly, in a very concrete say, you are the body of Christ.
And where you go, the kingdom of God comes near.
Where you go you bear that loving healing reign.
You might feel like your life is a higgledy-piggledy patchwork quilt sometimes with
no rhyme or reason.
But the fact that you are bearing the reign of the perfectly loving triune God and
carrying it with you and extending its reach everywhere you go is
the thing that ties everything you do together.
And not only that.
You are connected to others in this congregation who are bearing it in their own ways
You are not alone: you are one branch in the mustard shrub that is First Lutheran Church.
And together you provide shelter and shade for many in your branches.
You have sprung from a seed that is planted by God right here: the seed of God’s love.
And you are the branches of that love.
In your homes. In your schools. In your workplaces. In your communities.
Truly what happens here matters for the rest of your week.
And truly what happens here matters for the rest of the week for many others.
So then: why, exactly, a mustard seed?
As Dr. Lose mentions elsewhere, any seed would do, wouldn’t it?
Don’t all seeds start out small and become something much bigger?
So why does Jesus specifically say God’s reign is like a mustard seed?
He chooses it because mustard is more of a weed than a plant someone would plant and cultivate.
In fact, in his part of the world, no one in their right minds would plant mustard seeds.
They’re kind of wild: they just take over an entire garden.
In our part of the world it would be akin to someone planting dandelions:
no one in their right mind plants dandelions.
But Jesus, as we learned last week, is in fact thought to be out of his mind.
Jesus plants the seed in all kinds of crazy places.
You know how dandelions get everywhere? I mean everywhere?
You know what I’m talking about.
Jesus just picks up that dandelion stem in seed and just blows it everywhere with
the breath of his Spirit.
He blows that seed into you, and through you into the world: the seed of a wild kingdom.
It’s kind of a dangerous image, isn’t it?
Through you, out there, every day, God’s loving reign is infiltrating and
kind of taking over the world.
It gets everywhere like those beautiful dandelions in your yard and in the parks and
on the verges of roadways and in the ditches beside the highway and in the
Alleys where some not so great things take place and in fact just everywhere.
Because God’s love is needed everywhere.
It can’t be confined to the nice places, the cultivated places, the tony upscale places.
It needs to get into the cracks of the broken pavement of the inner city school.
It needs to infiltrate the exercise yard of the prison.
It needs to flourish along the daily paths of the homeless.
Like those damnable dandelions in your yard, it needs to take over even where it’s not wanted.
And maybe that’s the real point of Jesus’s parable.
Your kingdom come, Jesus taught us to pray.
And as Luther wrote so long ago, we pray that it may not only come,
but that it may come among and through us.
So come to the table where this tiny seed may be planted again.
Come so that you may receive this gift and so that we might together be the branches of this
wild, nurturing, shading shrub that just gets everywhere.
Because you get everywhere.
Truly what happens here does indeed matter for the rest of your week.
For, as the theologian Samuel Torvend writes, “Where God is ruling,
all of life is shaped and ordered by that presence.” (Flowing Water, 18)
May your kingdom come, Jesus taught us. May it come through us, Luther prayed.
So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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