4th Sunday After Pentecost
When I was a little kid, one of my favorite fairy tales was the one of “Jack and the Beanstalk”. Not so much because of the giant, or the journey up into the clouds, the goose that laid the golden eggs, or the singing harp. No, my thing was the beans. The magic beans for which Jack traded the family’s old cow, the only thing they had left which was of any value. Of course, Jack’s mother doesn’t think much of the beans. She scoffs at Jack’s foolishness and throws them out. Of course, they then grow into a giant beanstalk and that’s when Jack’s story really begins.
I don’t care what Jack’s mother or anyone else says. There is something kind of magical about beans. I remember when I was in first or second grade. (And most of you probably have a similar memory, somewhere along the way.) Our teacher brought in a bag of dried beans. One of us was charged with passing out couple of beans to each of the kids. Another student got to get a pile of folded brown paper towels from under the sink in the classroom. Each student got a couple of paper towels, and we then waited patiently in line at the sink until we go to soak our paper towels, squeeze them out, and carry them back to our desks. We placed the folded paper towels onto the paper plate that the teacher had placed upon each of our desks, we placed the beans in the middle of the paper wet paper towels, and then we folded them over, and then we lined up all our plates along the windows in the classroom. And every day, we got to check on them. We got to check to make sure that the paper towels weren’t too dry. And we got to see if anything about the beans had changed. Of course, the beans swelled with moisture. And then one day, finally, there was a crack, and a little green shoot. And it was almost magical.
I mean, I wasn’t a dummy. I knew where food came from. I knew about gardening. My mom was a gardener. My grandparents were gardeners. I’d seen both my mom and my grandparents working in their gardens plenty of times. I was growing up in the middle of farm country in central Pennsylvania, so farmers working their fields, planting their seeds, harvesting their grain… That was all perfectly normal, everyday stuff. There was a cow pasture right across the street from us when I was growing up, for cryin’ out loud. But this thing with the beans was different. Because we didn’t do any planting. Mrs. Kissinger took the dried beans out of a bag that she’d bought at a store. We slapped them between two halves of a couple of wet paper towels. And that was it. And…? They grew! Magical!! Mysterious.
In today’s reading from Mark we read in verse 33, “33With many such parables [Jesus] spoke the word to [the people], as they were able to hear it; 34he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.” And we may read that with a certain degree of smugness over and against the people to whom Jesus was speaking because we, like the disciples, have the inside track here. We even have the inside track on the disciples because we’re reading the story in which they appear.
Well, not so fast. The fact of the matter is that we’re in the same boat as the people to whom Jesus was talking, because we don’t get the explanation that he would have given to his disciples. Since we don’t have access to the private meetings where Jesus “explained everything,” we will have to do our best with the help of the Holy Spirit.
Pentecost teaches us that the Holy Spirit is present and active in our world. God does not abandon God’s people. The Holy Spirit is always there, always present, always available to us, prodding us and poking us, inducing us to turn to that same Holy Spirit and to open ourselves up to its power and grace. The Holy Spirit empowers to do ministry in Jesus’ name and to speak the truth about God’s love. And in these two seed parables we learn about that which seems to have been the most important topic for Jesus: namely the kingdom of God.
What is it that Jesus wants to teach us about the kingdom of God with these two parables? The first thing he wants to teach us is that the kingdom of heaven is something that is mysterious. The problem is that many of us don’t like mystery in our lives. We want things to be clear and simple. We want order. We want… Well, we want control. But that’s not how God works. In fact, this parable would seem to suggest that even if we’re oblivious to what’s going on around us, God is still at work. It’s the mystery of the bean! Or, in the case of Jesus, the seed. A seed that’s been planted is a mystery being revealed. It unfolds by its own operation in the soil. The farmer goes to bed and wakes up again. The days come and go, and the farmer doesn’t have much of anything to do with the seed that’s been planted. But a seed’s work is done all by itself. Automatically, mysteriously, with no outside assistance. The seed just grows and suddenly the day arrives when you’ve got a whole field of grain ready to be harvested.
Now it may be that it goes without saying, but just in case that’s not so, I will say it: The takeaway from this parable is not that we don’t need to do a thing, that God will take care of it all, and we can just be on our merry way. Far from it. For the moment, now, let’s shift our attention to the other parable. To quote Rev. Dr. Scott Hoezee of the Calvin Theological Seminary, “If the growing seed parable seems to be about the mystery of kingdom growth, the mustard seed image is about the apparent weakness of the kingdom. The day will come when the results of the kingdom’s silent, steady growth will be impressive. Meanwhile don’t be surprised if the seeds you plant look ineffective. Don’t be surprised if the witness you have to offer gets laughed at on account of looking so puny. It’s the old ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ fable: Jack’s mother scorns the tiny beans he brings home from the market. They can never live off those! So in anger she hurls them out the window. Those beans were a non-starter, a mistake, a dead-end nutritionally and in every other sense. Except that, of course, they ended up sprouting into a beanstalk that went, in a way, clear up to heaven.”
Separated from one another, the parable of the sower and the parable of the mustard seed are curious little stories that come to us with no real explanation.
It’s when we put these two parables together that they become something else that is more than the mere sum of its parts. The seeds of the kingdom are dutifully sown, and how they grow is something that lies beyond our control. Nevertheless, we are called continually to sow the kingdom seed. We are called continually to engage in the work of ministry. We are called continually to engage in works of justice, mercy, and compassion. We are called continually to embody the loving grace of Jesus, not only individually, but corporately. Our task is not to sit around and worry about what is to become of the seeds that we’ve planted. Our task is not to try and calculate the potential harvest; the rate of return on our investment. Our task is not to try and hedge our bets, to hold back seed for some future use, should this first planting not produce anything. Because the fact of the matter is that there’s no knowing how or when the fruit of the kingdom will become apparent until its right there in our faces.
Let’s take our lesson from the mustard seed. An innocuous little seed that grows into an annoying weed, to most farmers, that has the power to spread over an entire field before you realize it! There’s tremendous power in that. But it’s a power that we can tap into only when we permit ourselves to let go of our preconceived ideas as to how things ought to be. It means leaning into the mystery of Christ and the kingdom.
In her book, The Hours of the Universe: Reflections on God, Science, and the Human Journey, Franciscan Sister Ilia Delio writes:
We have not accepted evolution as our story. We treat evolution as a conversational theory or something that belongs to science, as if science is something separate from us and outside our range of experience…
By evolution, I mean simply that change is integral to life. We are becoming something that is not yet known. To live in evolution is to let go of structures that prevent convergence and deepening of consciousness and assume new structures that are consonant with creativity, inspiration, and development.
Evolution requires trust in the process of life itself. There is a power at the heart of life that is divine and lovable. In a sense we are challenged to lean into life’s changing patterns and attend to the new patterns that are emerging in our midst. To live in openness to the future is to live with a sense of creativity and participation, to use our gifts for the sake of the whole by sharing them with others…
She concludes: It is time to come together to work for what we share together, the future, into which we are being fearfully but irresistibly drawn. This is the true test of our faith, what we really believe in, because God is the power of the future.
Rather than shying away from the mystery, we need to embrace it. When we talk about embracing the mystery, what we’re really talking about is walking by faith. Ironically, what lies at the heart of walking by faith, what lies at the heart of embracing the mystery is something very real and concrete, and that is love.
The true love that every human being deeply longs for has already been given to us in Christ. It’s the transformative love that has the power to bring about something new. “A new creation”, as Paul puts it. When he writes: “17So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”, he’s not just theorizing. He’s speaking from personal experience. It’s that same love that transformed him from a persecutor of the church to an apostle for Christ. It’s a love that knows everything about us and embraces us anyway. It’s the love that transforms us to reflect Christ to our neighbors. It’s the powerful, reconciling love that makes it possible for people who mistrust or misunderstand each other to be brought mutual caring relationship. It’s the mysterious love that the kingdom is already in our midst, growing and yearning to bear fruit, even when we cannot see it. It’s the love that convinces us that the old life has passed, and God’s new life has already come. It’s the love that spurs us on to act in faith, to be Christ made manifest to this community. It’s the love that refuses to be complacent with anything less than what God has promised us: the kingdom of Heaven. AMEN