Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship · June 14, 2009

Second Sunday after Pentecost

Prayer of the Day

Gracious and loving God, as we celebrate the long days of summer, we pray that you will help our hearts, minds, and souls grow deeper in relationship with you. Remind us of our calling to serve you. Through Christ, we say together, Amen.

Scripture

Mark 4:26-32

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.”

Message

Tending the Seeds of Heaven

Jacob Thorne

The other day, I came across the book Open Secrets, by Richard Lischer. Richard Lischer now serves as the professor of homiletics at Duke Divinity School. But more than 30 years ago, after earning a masters of divinity and a Ph.D., Richard was a newly-ordained minister in the Lutheran denomination getting ready to be assigned to his first call. Open Secrets is an autobiographical account of Richard’s experience at his first church.

Richard still has a very vivid memory of his first impressions. He had spent all day driving in his brand-new, yellow Pinto. (A classic.) The town where he and his family were moving to, New Cana, wasn’t even on the map. It is just outside of Alton, Illinois. It is still there today. This didn’t matter to Richard, because he was full of energy and enthusiasm. He was excited about what he might find.

For the last several months he had these very romantic ideals about serving a little, country church. His first impression of New Cana, though, wasn’t exactly what he had hoped for. He writes: “Nothing was awakened in me when I saw the place for the first time. My first look of the town reminded me that I was from a large city, and I probably belonged in a large city.”

As he drove up to the church, he started to look around, and then he says, “I felt something flop in my stomach. Then a crushing sense of disappointment.”

You see… New Cana, to Richard, at first glance, seemed like a tattered church with a run-down parsonage in the middle of nowhere. As he looked at the 50-year-old parsonage that badly, badly needed a new coat of paint, he asked himself, “What kind of life will this be?”

Eventually, Richard moved from a moment of let-down and anger to a season of discovery about the people of this rural congregation and about himself. But those discoveries did not come easily. 

Early on in his time at New Cana, Richard, like any new minister – they teach you this in seminary – decided it would be a good idea to visit the parishioners of his church and meet them in their homes. So, this in theory, sounded like a good idea. 

One day, Richard arrived at the home of Lois and Birdie. But because he was from the city, Richard really didn’t know how to react to the large farm dog that greeted him in the driveway at the home of Birdie and Lois. So he just waited in the car to be rescued. He could see Birdie and Lois peeking through the widows.   Finally they came out to ask him why he hadn’t decided to come to the door. He got out, and the dog just licked him, and he realized it was a mistake. 

He is motioned to this side door in the basement. He walks down into the basement. Remember, he thinks he is visiting Birdie and Lois, but much to his surprise, when he gets to the basement, he realizes there is a semi-circle of older men from the congregation, seven of them, along with Birdie, and they have placed his chair right in the middle of the circle.

After the introductions, the men sat around and exchanged a series of formal statements about the weather, about St. Louis, about the Cardinals, about the treacherous roads, about the broken cross at the church, but mostly Richard would look at the linoleum floor in silence. Occasionally he would exhale and say, “Yeah,” or “Well,” or “Um-hum.” In an extremely long lull in the conversation, Birdie looked at Richard with his cagy blue eyes (remember Birdie is in his eighties), and he asked very off-handedly, “Pastor, will you have a beer?”

Richard writes, “Everyone looked at me, and with only an extra second’s hesitation I said, ‘Sure’.” So Birdie went to the refrigerator. He selected exactly one bottle. He opened it, and he brought it to Richard. The seven old men watched intently and intensely as Richard drank the beer. Finally Richard asked, “Is anyone else going to have a beer?”

And Birdie replied, “No, pastor! What kind of man would drink a beer at two o’clock in the afternoon?”

Richard left, never to return to Birdie’s home. He knew he had been tested, but he was unsure of what kind of grade he had received.

You see… Richard’s account of the transition from seminary to the parish is full of confusion, uncertainty, and at times, frustration. But in the end, he discovers a much deeper sense about himself, about who he is, and about what it means to live in a small, Christian community. He realizes that the church, as God sees it, is not just a single number of individuals with their own minds and attitudes, but a single heart that is full of love and sorrow. In the closing lines of his book, Richard writes: “I knew as soon as we pulled out of the driveway that I needed New Cana more than New Cana ever needed me. I do make sense of my life from that ministry.”

Ultimately, Open Secrets is a book about self-discovery and discovery as a community. At times, even though he was completely unaware of what was taking place, ministry and life were flourishing around Richard Lischer and the church in New Cana. Open Secrets reminds me that the seeds of heaven are found in the most ordinary, everyday occurrences in life.

This morning, Jesus tells us the kingdom of God is like a seed that has been scattered carelessly on the ground. Night or day, whether it is tended to or not, the seed grows. 

Then as we also heard from our reading this morning, Jesus tells us the parable of the mustard seed. Now first, the parable of the mustard seed seems fairly straight forward, especially if you know a little bit about the history of ancient Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, during the time of Jesus, the mustard seed was considered, and still is considered, a weed. If you lived within the city limits, it was against the law to have mustard planted in your garden. What Jesus is trying to say, I think, is that the kingdom of God, like the mustard weed, is ubiquitous. You can’t ignore it. Whether you tend to it or not, the kingdom of God is going to flourish. The extraordinary will take place within the ordinary. It is also significant that Jesus chooses the tiniest of seeds and the tiniest of bushes to explain and depict the kingdom of God. 

Throughout the world, but especially in the nation in which we live, we are obsessed with size and greed. It seems like the trend may be slowly changing, but there are still competitions among individuals and communities to see who can have the biggest cars, the biggest houses, the biggest salaries, and the biggest vacations. But Jesus intentionally chooses to focus on the small, not the large.

There is a second meaning, though, in this parable, a deeper meaning that is easily overlooked. The gospel of Luke, borrowing from Mark, also quotes Jesus comparing the kingdom of God to a mustard seed. But Luke takes things a step farther. In Luke 17:5-6, the author writes:

The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” The Lord replied, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea’.”

Now, the Jesus Seminar believes that the comparison to the mustard seed is most likely one of the most authentic sayings of Jesus. So, for years, I thought of the parable in this way: all you need is just a little bit of faith, nothing larger than a mustard seed. But as I was preparing for this morning, I realized that I was misinterpreting the meaning of what it means to have faith the size of a mustard seed. 

When you study the Greek in the gospel of Luke, most scholars agree that the conditional clause, or the “if – then” clause, is constructed to imply that the condition has been met. So, in Luke, in Greek, it really reads like this, “If you had faith, just the size of a mustard seed, and you do (that is the key part), you have everything that you need.”

So, what does this mean for us today? In my mind, this is Jesus saying quietly but confidently, “You do have the faith you need to accomplish the ministry that you want to do and live the life that you want to lead.” 

Jesus is telling us that there is no room for excuses. If we are honest with ourselves, we admit we avoid particular challenges. We might say to ourselves, “I would forgive so-and-so if I had more faith.” Or, “If I had a little more faith, I would be more compassionate or more generous.” Or, “I can’t spend time with my friends and family until I am tenured, graduated, or retired.” Or, “I can’t go on a mission trip until I get another week of vacation.” Or, “I would change jobs and do something more meaningful if I only had another degree.” 

The list could go on and on and on. But you get the idea of what Jesus is saying here. There are no excuses for not doing what we are called to do. We already have the gifts that we need. 

Two years ago, the church that I grew up in, First Christian Church in St. Joseph, Missouri, called the Rev. Chase Peoples to be their senior minister. In terms of denominational affiliation, Chase has a very interesting background. He grew up in the Baptist Church. Then he joined the United Church of Christ when he went to seminary. He now has dual partnership and standing with our denomination, the Christian Church – Disciples of Christ. 

As a teenager, Chase would often attend church camp, much like the church camps we host at Rickman. One of the key differences, though, between the camp that we host and Chase’s camp was that each night at camp worship, Chase and other young campers were invited to come before the altar and once again rededicate their life to Christ. Unsure of where he stood in relationship with God, like most of us, and especially as a teenager, Chase would go to the altar each night, year after year after year. But one year, a youth minister, serving as a camp counselor, pulled Chase aside. He shared with him a verse from Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Paul says, “He who has begun a good work in you will be faithful to complete it.”

After reading the Scripture, the youth minister said to Chase, “So, Chase, maybe you need to trust God a little bit. Maybe you need to believe that God has begun a good work in you. This good work was started in you when you became a Christian, and God will be faithful to complete it in your life. Maybe it’s not just about how you feel at a given moment. Maybe what this is really all about is God’s faithfulness to you.”

Once Chase heard these words of advice, he quit walking down that aisle each night at camp, because all of a sudden, Chase realized that he already had the faith that he needed. He had been searching all of those times for the faith that he already possessed.

I shared with you before how much I enjoy reading the works of Thomas Merton. In a biography of Merton, Raymond Bailey writes that Merton arrived at the monastery in Kentucky in December 1941. He came there, says Bailey, “to die as a seed in the earth, to permit the seed of life within him to grow.” 

After several months of complete silence, though, in contemplation, Merton’s romantic ideals of the monastic life began to lose some of their appeal. In his book, Seeds of Contemplation, Merton reflects on how difficult it was to recognize the seed of God that was flourishing within him. He writes: “If you can never make up your mind what God wills for you, but are always veering from one opinion to another, from one practice to another, from one method to another, it may be an indication that you are trying to get around God’s will and do your own will with a quiet conscience.”

Reflecting on his own lifestyle, Merton says, “As soon as God gets you in one monastery, you want to be in another. As soon as you taste one way of prayer, you want to try another. You are always making resolutions and breaking them with counter-resolutions. Before you finish one book, you begin another, and with every book you read, you change the whole plan of your interior life.”

For me, Merton’s words ring true. Maybe they do for you as well. So often in life, I think we move – all of us – from one passion to another. We are searching so hard to find our true calling in life. We try so many different activities in so many different events. “But eventually,” says Merton, “the silence of God embraces us, consoles us, and answers our prayers once we have the sense to stop asking.”

Seeds are meant to be planted in order that new life may be grown. As we prepare to leave next week for a mission trip to New Orleans and spend yet another week at Westside Christian Church, those going on the mission trip leave knowing that our lives will be touched in ways that, perhaps, we can never even imagine. 

Last year, when we arrived at Westside for the first time, I looked around this giant room where you sleep, eat, and prepare your meals. I studied all of the different murals and mission-trip shirts that had been hung on the walls. It is a tradition at Westside to leave some type of item from your church on the wall, signed by members of your church. Some of these artifacts have short, little messages. 

As I was looking at the chalice cup cut out of a piece of wood, I recognized one of the names. His name was Brandt. Brandt was in my youth group when I served at a church in St. Louis during seminary. Brandt also participated in my ordination. Even though I hadn’t seen him for years, I knew exactly what Brandt meant when I read his words on the wall. Brandt had written, “Spring Break 2008: I feel alive. I feel alive once again. I feel alive!”

Those three words, “I feel alive!” is what the kingdom of God is all about. We all have the seeds of heaven sewn in our hearts and souls that are dying to be brought forth and grown into fruition. God’s love, God’s faith, God’s justice, God’s mercy, all grow within each one of us just waiting to be released.

As we prepare for next week, for the official start of summer, and the longest day of the year, take some time to feed your soul. Nurture and tend that seed of faith that is waiting to burst forth within you. Do whatever you need to do in order to say, “I am alive. I am alive. I am alive!”

Through Christ, we all say together… “Amen.”

Benediction

Sower, thank you for planting the seed of your kingdom here upon the face of the earth. Please hear our joyful hearts that celebrate the plentiful harvest. Please hear our hopes for the abundance to come. And mostly, God, give us the faith to develop your love more fully and complete the good work that you have started. Amen.