"...all by itself..."
Mark 4:26-34
He also said, "This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground...the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain..."
OK. I have something I need to confess. I am a littel bit of a control freak...well, maybe more than a little. I like to solve problems and fix things. I'm not totally a control freak, though. If I have a good leader, I can be a good follower. But if that leader refuses to lead, balks at the plate, is uncertain and wavering--then it drives me crazy! I want to get organized and get going! I suspect that if we were all honest with one another, the need to be in control "controls" many of us. Just tell me what's happening so I can be prepared for it. I want to have a program in my hand and know what to expect.
In case you're protesting that you're not a control freak, too, let me ask a couple of questions. When the doctor tells you that your test results will be back in a few days and they aren't, how do you feel? When the job interview you had said they would call back by the end of the week and they didn't, how do you feel?
Truth is we don't like waiting and wondering. We don't like putting important things in someone else's hands. It's almost like if we knew what was coming next and didn't like it, we might somehow have the power to change it before it happened! This has been a popular theme in several movies!
Jesus understood that very human quality and addressed it often. He chose stories to make his points. We call them parables and try to make them neat little moralisms that will prove God agrees with us. Anne Lamott says we like to think that God loves the same people we love and hates the same people we hate.
Parables are meant to be confusing and confounding. Nadia Bolz-Weber suggests that those parable-stories were so shock full of irony and humor that they must have "provoked some to want to laugh out loud, but then quickly notice that hardly anyone else is laughing and we all know that if you have to explain a joke, it just isn't quite so funny."
She suggests that parables are "living things meant to mess with our assumptions and subvert things we never even thought to question." I totally agree!
Jesus' stories don't begin with, "Once upon a time..." or "It was a dark and stormy night..." Most of the time they begin with, "The kingdom of God is like..." And he is not talking about heaven, but rather God's kingdom right here on earth (as in Lord's Prayer: "on earth as it is in heaven"). He's talking about kingdom people who plant seeds and do faithful things and wait...
Did you ever think about what an enormous act of faith it is to farm? You spend a lot of money on seed, fertilizer, equipment and fuel--a little like throwing down a wad of money on the casino table, hoping that you will win it all back and more. But with farming, weeks and weeks of sweat equity are built in first. And then, the waiting begins.
And then, Jesus says, although the planter "doesn't know how, all by itself" the seed produces a harvest!
Then Jesus tells another story: It's about tiny seeds that produce big trees. His audience likely knew many prophecies of how the children of Israel would be planted like tall, cedar trees high on a mountain--majestice and towering over everything! The high and mighty would be brought low; the lowly would be lifted up! Glorious promises of hope and justice.
I can just imagine their ears perking up as he began talking about the tiny mustard seed and wondering how he was going to transform it! But, what? He says it will grow up to be a...shrub! A shrub! Not a magnificent towering tree, but a common shrub--a weed! The only spreading it does it spread out! A little like the Kudzu of the South, it is annoyingly fertile and hard to kill and spreads...and spreads...This is hardly the image they wanted to hear!
But should they have been so surprised? Here is the man some say is "Messiah," but was born in a stinky stable to an unwed mother; as a know-it-all pre-teen his parents left him behind and he was "lost" for several days; then he spent big blocks of time in the wilderness doing heaven knows what; and was even rumored to have spend lots of time with drunkards and prostitues--which is likely true since his first miracle was turning water into wine at a big party! Really now! His whole life was about the unexpected, the embarrassing, the shocking, the unlikely. So why were they surprised? And, why are we?
Frederich Buechner asks: "Is it possible, I wonder, to say that it is only when you hear the gospel as a wild and marvelous joke that you really hear it at all? Heard as anything else, the gospel is the church's thing, the pastor's thing, the lecturer's thing. Heard as a joke--high and unbidden and ringing with laughter--it can only be God's thing."
So we read the parables and wonder at the mystery and irony. We don't take ourselves or anyone else's interpretation too seriously, lest we miss the point completely. And we are reminded that our puny acts of worship, service and faith are all we have to offer and if we do it faithfully, then God comes along beside us and "all by itself," we can sprout and grow--possibly more like weeds than beautiful flowers and trees...
