Mark 4: 24-36
June 17, 2012
When we bought our first house in West Philadelphia, I didn’t know what Wisteria was. I only knew that it was growing on the porch, was beautiful, smelled great, and would flower in the spring. That’s what my neighbors told me anyway.
Two months after we moved in, I saw the beauty of the vine. As spring warmed up, the vines became green and leafy, and provided shade for our porch, perfect shade for a future warm and sunny afternoon. Then, it bloomed a spectacular purple flower that hung from the vine, and smelled better than any flower I’d ever smelled. It was intoxicating. My neighbors would walk by and find me with my nose in a wisteria flower. I was smitten by this beautiful fragrant vine.
When the last blooms had gone, I realized that there is another side to the wisteria vine that no one had told me about…It is really invasive.
I felt like I was out there every day, clipping away the vines that were trying to get into my porch structure, trying to keep the vines away from my neighbor’s porch, and trying to keep the wisteria from taking over my entire front yard.
I knew that I was fighting a losing battle when I was weeding another part of my garden, about 10 feet from the site of the wisteria, and there was a wisteria vine, sneaking through the grass like a snake, weaving its way through my azalea bushes, and trying to lay claim on the front retaining wall of my garden.
I also found bird nests in the wisteria. Three of them. Which is sweet and lovely with all the tweeting and chirping and the new life growing, until the families of birds began to poop on my porch and porch furniture, preventing me from enjoying the part of the porch that was shaded by the wisteria.
This beautiful vine has a sinister side to it. It gets into things, sneaks around, and develops a life of its own. It allowed a little ecosystem to blossom within its hardy vines. I had no control over it. Despite my efforts to control it, it did what it wanted to do.
This morning we look at two parables from the gospel of Mark. Before we jump into these agricultural parables, allow me to clarify exactly what a parable is and is not. It is kindof like a fable. Kindof. Fables are stories with animals that take on human characteristics, and they depict some sort of human truth or principle. They are life lessons made easier to hear because they are done with cute, furry animals.
Parables are human stories, using human scenarios to illustrate a truth about the reign of God. We like to think that parables illuminate the reign of God, shed light and truth on it, make it easier for us to understand and wrap our heads around. Often that is true. However, to define a parable as such is too limiting, too easy.
I’d like to think of a parable more like this (and I borrow this definition from David Lose, a professor from Luther seminary whose work I admire): Parables are stories that are meant to overturn, to deconstruct, to cause frustration and, for those who stay with them, transformation.
This is not a comfortable definition. It’s not easy—it makes the gospel more complicated, not less. It makes understanding the reign of God seem less possible. Was Jesus trying to frustrate us? Was he trying to make the message impossible to understand?
Well, yes. Kindof. A parable is meant to enlighten, but it’s also meant to complicate the picture, because the reign of God is not a simple thing. If we think know what the reign of God looks like, we have it all wrong.
Today’s parables are a great example of the complicated nature of the reign of God.
The reign of God is like this: it’s like farmer scattering seed on the ground, and the seed sprouts and grows, and the farmer doesn’t know how it happened. The earth takes care of these seeds, and they grow--first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. When the crop is ripe, the farmer goes in and harvests.
There’s a kind of obliviousness to the gardener that is unsettling. The farmer is throwing seeds out on the ground, and just hoping that something happens. There’s no weeding, no watering, no miracle gro. The farmer plants seeds, and when the plants look good he goes out and harvest the fruit of the land.
It’s a rather whimsical image—to just throw out the seeds and hope for the best—but it’s not how my grandfather taught me to garden. My garden this year involved making a raised bed, filling it with good soil, and using every square inch of the soil for plants so the neighborhood feral cats wouldn’t take it over as an litter box. It was carefully orchestrated and negotiated. I didn’t just throw plant seeds out there and hope they’d grow. I carefully selected seedlings of a variety of tomato plants, so we’d have options for canning, eating, and making sauce—all of this in 4 square feet of soil.
But the reign of God is like a farmer that throws out seed, willy nilly. The farmer doesn’t really know how the seeds gorw, but he is ready to reap whatever comes of the random seed throwing.
Maybe we are thinking that the kingdom of God may need a little help from the more organized among us—perhaps a good business plan or a lesson in farming techniques. Or, perhaps the parable is doing exactly what a parable is supposed to do. It’s inciting discomfort and frustration, it’s making us nervous about the reign of God, for which we long.
The second parable is no less assuring about the wonders of God’s reign. It’s the parable of the mustard seed. How many of you were hit over the head with the “if only we had the faith of a mustard seed” line in your youth? That’s an important part of the parable. We do need just a tiny little bit of faith for the reign of God to grow within us. But that’s only half of the truth of the parable of the mustard seed. The other part of the story is about the mustard plant itself.
The mustard seed is not a crop that people intentionally planted. It grew up—like a weed. It was an unwanted, undesirable plant. It has some medicinal qualities, but mostly it grows wild. It is uncontrollable plant, and once it takes root it can take over a whole planting area. Farmers do not want to see this stuff anywhere.
But on the plus side, it provided shade for birds, right? That’s a good thing. But, in Mark 4:1-9, in the parable of the sower, we hear about what the birds to do the good seed: the birds come and eat it up. I don’t think the fact that the mustard bush sheltered birds is a good thing. This weedy bush is sheltering the creatures that a few stories earlier have eaten the good seed.
So this is what the reign of God is like? A small seed growing into an invasive plant that ends up sheltering the creatures that eat the good seeds?
John Dominic Crossan says this about the mustard seed story:
The point…is not just that the mustard plant starts as a proverbially small seed and grows into a shrub of three or four feet, or even higher, it is that it tends to take over where it is not wanted, that it tends to get out of control, and that it tends to attract birds within cultivated areas where they are not particularly desired. And that, said Jesus, was what the Kingdom was like: not like the mighty cedar of Lebanon and not quite like a common weed, [more] like a pungent shrub with dangerous takeover properties. Something you would want in only small and carefully controlled doses -- if you could control it (The Historical Jesus, pp. 278-279).
The kingdom of God is like an invasive weed. Some good properties, but mostly a real pain in the rear. The kingdom of heaven is like a wisteria vine, intoxicating at first, but then you find out that dirty birds live in it and poop on your porch.
The kingdom of God is sometimes pretty great—it’s freeing, and beautiful, and full of promise. But then you discover that it is out of your control, it is not what you hoped it would be, and it brings in the undesirables.
If you think the reign of God looks like a careful organized worship service, or perfect four part harmony, I think you are in for a surprise. If you think the reign of God looks like a well-manicured English garden or a perfect piece of art, think again. This is not what God’s reign looks like. These things that we aim for—beauty in perfection—are not where the reign of God is to be found. And that—for most of us—is very disconcerting.
God’s presence, God’s power, God’s reign, is not what we think it is, or what we want it to be. God’s reign is elusive. It is disorganized, like the farmer who just throws out seeds without watering it or nurturing it. It is small like a mustard seed. It is unwanted, like a mustard bush. It is invasive. It is out of control. It’s not safe, at least not if we’re even a little bit satisfied with the way things are. The reign of God comes to overturn, to take over, and transform the empires of this world.
We say we long for the day that God’s justice will roll down, that God will make things right. But, when we say this, we can forget that God’s justice will have an impact on us too. God’s reign will break up our structures and systems, and will demand something of us.
The reign of God, begins as small as a mustard seed, and it’s invasive plant grows unto an unwanted, unwelcome presence in our landscape. And yet, with faith and hope we pray for such a disruption. We pray that the invasive qualities of God’s reign will transform us. We hope and long for the day when we let go of our own need to control and prune, and can allow God’s invasive work to grow—with all its fragrance, beauty and destruction.
AMEN.