THE FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST | JUNE 16, 2024 | Mark 4: 26-34 | David Zersen |

A Sermon based on Mark 4: 26-34 (RCL) by David Zersen

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.” With many such parables, he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.

SURPRISED INTO SELF-CONFIDENT FAITH

Humans typically assume that actions in our world take place according to some kind of rule or law. After all, we have the scientific method—we know how to make observations, formulate questions, establish hypotheses, and then make predictions. We assume, all too quickly, that the predictions are laws and that they are then inviolable. However, our assumptions about these laws are regularly challenged by discoveries about everything from the nature of the universe to the relationship between current humans and their supposed ancestors.

This is an interesting development because for a time many have challenged the teachings of Christianity simply because they are based on faith, while science is based on fact. Using this perspective, modern secularism has continued to grow. Religious faith is pressed by media and the latest podcast interview into the background, as increasing scientific certainties are hailed as the only bases on which to build human life and a sophisticated culture.

Today’s Gospel lesson contains some parables, but their surprising implication suggests that we may not want to buy into the current secular paradigm too quickly. On the surface, the two parables deal with surprising observations about gardening with which most of us can identify. However, there is more in these parables than we imagine. They point to stunning growth, but it’s not initially obvious what’s growing and why this is a funny story. There’s real humor here, and the joke is on the secularists, not on the Christians.

Learning how things change

At one level, the parables are about gardening, about observing how things in a garden result from both hard work and outside influences. I know this well; I planted my Midwestern garden late this spring because of a bursitis problem that limited the movements in my leg. Yesterday, June 9, I finally got everything planted, tied up, fertilized, and watered. Now I can watch my vegetables grow. Of course, there will be weeding and watering as the summer months move along. Experience, however, lets me know that things are not always as hoped for. My spinach never even seems to come out of the ground. The bugs in some years get the beans as soon as they sprout. Sometimes the first frost comes early before the melons are ready to be picked. So, there are these challenges. Nevertheless, I have planted a garden each year for most of my adult life. I don’t know what the results will look like in a given year, but I plant because I love the process of watching, watering, and waiting. I love the anticipation. I’m a gardener!

In God’s garden (read “kingdom”), according to the parable, we are planted, nurtured, and harvested. Many changes occur along the way. Some growth is surely stunted, some plants die or get eaten by rabbits, and some produce a bountiful harvest. In the process, we view the gardener in different ways. We expect that he nurtures and waters when we need it. We expect that he is there to ensure there will be a fruitful harvest. We often forget, however, that we have a role to play in this process. We interact with the gardener in significant ways throughout our lives– sometimes positively and sometimes negatively. In William Kent Krueger’s 2019 novel, This Tender Land, there is the fascinating odyssey of young Odie (Odysseus) O’Banion who moves through a challenging and difficult life trying to understand who God really is. His parents die and he’s raised with his brother as two white boys in a brutal environment in a Minnesota Indian Training School. After a terrible tornado, he and three others escape. They travel the country in a canoe inextricably tied to murders, starvation, first love, immoral relatives, and surprising care. Through it all, Odie wonders what God is really like. At one point, he is sure that God is like a tornado, that he ravages unmercifully. With time and experience, however, he comes to feel that God is more like a smoothly flowing river and that he finds peace only when he yields to it and embraces it.

I think that most of us can identify with Odie There are times in our lives when things are not going well and we blame the gardener, God. It is his fault that we are not developing along the lines that we think we should. And when growth develops according to our expectations, then we attribute it to our own expertise or at least to chance, so God doesn’t need to be involved. This is of course the temptation of secularism, to believe that the garden functions without the gardener, and that succeed or fail, we are on our own. It is a world without God, a world Odie would not have known and that you and I sometimes play with. After all, the media suggests that increasingly growing percentages of people no longer go to church or believe in God. Perhaps, we may think, it’s inevitable, and that a garden without God is the destiny of a truly modern person. At one point or another, you and I have all been there. Our attitudes and feelings about God change with time and experience. And, frankly, that’s a scary thing.

Learning how things really are

Let’s look at the parables once again and see if we have missed anything. I sympathize with the crowds that listened to Jesus and especially with his disciples. To read Mark’s words, “he did not speak to them except in parables” is bewildering. Overwhelming! The intellectual challenges of trying to understand what Jesus was saying in these cryptic mini stories, especially if they’re coming at you rapid fire, is disconcerting. My great New Testament teacher, Joachim Jeremias, made it clear that a parable has only one point of comparison and that one should not get lost in the details with the birds and weeds, etc. In the second parable of today’s Gospel, that would mean that we allow it to read “The kingdom of God is to be compared with a mustard seed that sprouts, grows, and becomes a tree”. That’s it! In other words, the people in whom God’s word rules stand tall in the garden. What’s surprising about that? A mustard plant was a weed!!! It took over ground better occupied by what we might call the proper vegetables. And that is an awkward thing. Using our illustration about secularism, there amid the godless world with a lack of concern for things we’ve learned to call human decency, stands a faithful weed, embarrassingly obvious to all.

In other words, at the heart of this parable is some good humor. A joke. It’s not at all what you expect. In the very world in which human relationships increasingly become dominated by faithless secularism stands larger than everything, the weed, that thing that doesn’t belong there, the sign of what was and is and ever shall be. In the final analysis, it’s how you see it. It is bigger and better than everything around it, an out-of-place weed to the world, but living and thriving good news for those who believe that forgiveness and reconciliation are better than a secular world run by vengeance and retaliation.

At what point did Jesus think the crowd or his disciples would grasp this? He who had come to bring real life, a life comprised of love, mercy, kindness, caring, and support, was confronted as we are today with people who think that justice, control, brute strength, and payback are the proper rules of engagement. And when the very lifestyle he opposed took him to his death, his Father said, “This one is on you—but it doesn’t ever have to happen again.” This is not the way to settle differences. This is the beginning of a new way of life, the life of the weed in the garden pointing to a topsy-turvy world in which weeds and acceptable plants are not what they seem.

So, if you’ve ever felt, and we all have, that things are not going well, that God is not who you want him to be, that what we have believed as a Christian is being threatened by secularists, think again. The disciples did. The crowds had too—after the crucifixion and resurrection. It became and will become clear when all things are revealed that the weed in the garden was never in the wrong place at all. It was planted, nurtured, and valued because it was intended to give hope to all.

It’s important for you to understand, if you feel challenged by the growing numbers of secularists, that you are what you are meant to be. Don’t ever agree that you are an alien plant, an archaic holdover from another era. Don’t ever assume that your place in the garden will be taken by majority rule and planted with modern growth that some find to be acceptable. For weed though you are, you are also “a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light”. (1 Pet. 2:9) If circumstances ever make you feel like an alien Christian weed who belongs to another time and place, remember those words. They were spoken two thousand years ago to people like you, like Odie, who weren’t sure how to fit in., who weren’t sure how God fit in. And they were as true then as they are today.

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David Zersen, D.Min., Ed.D., FRHistS                                                                                                 President Emeritus, Concordia University Texas                                                                                    zersendj@gmailcom