Preached at All Saints Episcopal Mission in Linville, North Carolina
In the name of God ☩
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
It is a known rule of comedy that if you have to explain the joke, it’s not a very good joke. Humor is something that happens when we’re expecting one thing, but are given another. But explanations take away that element of surprise and leave the joke flat. It’s why in English class, when the teacher has to explain a joke in a Shakespeare play, the class doesn’t erupt into laughter. But you watch a Jerry Seinfeld bit and we’re laughing like someone is tickling us.
Well,
today’s parable by Jesus is a joke that we’re missing out on. When Jesus says “With
what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It
is like a mustard seed” we’re supposed to roll our eyes or chuckle. But we don’t
because we don’t understand that this is satire. This isn’t Jesus’ fault though
– we’re the ones who have gotten so disconnected from the earth and agriculture
that we don’t see the humor that’s right in front of us.
Before
I get to the joke though, let’s stick with the flat, non-ironic reading. It’s
not a wrong reading of the parable at all, and it’s a part of what Jesus is
gesturing towards. As we heard, “It is the smallest of all the seeds on the
earth, yet when 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.”
It’s a parable of humility. The Kingdom of God does not come with trumpets, horses,
and fireworks. No, it comes through a Jewish peasant from the backwaters of Galilee
who lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly.
So
often our expectations dictate the outcomes that we experience. Psychologists
call it the expectancy effect and it has been shown to be operative in all
sorts of situations. If you’re weightlifting and you have some doubts about whether
or not you’ll be able to lift the weight, you probably won’t be able to. If you
go to a restaurant and are expecting a great meal, you’re more likely to taste
one. If you come to church expecting a boring sermon, that’s what you’ll likely
hear.
And
so if we expect God to show up by always doing the miraculous, we might miss
the small acts of grace and think that God has forgotten about us. If we’re
looking for the shooting stars, we might miss the fireflies. This is the
dynamic we heard about in the Old Testament reading from First Samuel. When Saul,
the first king of Israel was failing, just as God had said would happen with a
monarchy, it became time to anoint a new king to replace Saul.
So
the prophet Samuel was sent to the house of Jesse of Bethlehem. Samuel thought
he knew what he was looking for in a king – something like a great oak tree, not
a mustard seed. So he assumed the next king had to be Eliab who had the look of
a king – tall, strong, and confident. But God said to Samuel, “Do not look on
his appearance or on the height of his stature; for the Lord does not see as mortals see. They look on the outward
appearance, but the Lord looks on
the heart.”
Samuel,
like so many of us, struggles to let go of his expectations. So he next assumes
he is to anoint Abinadab, who was presumably the next tallest and kingly
looking. But that wasn’t the one. Nor was Shammah or any of the remaining sons
the chosen king. Samuel was probably flummoxed at this point. How do I anoint a
son of Samuel as the next king if none of his sons are chosen? Jesse, are you
holding out on me, do you have any other sons? Oh, yea, forgot about the little
one. He’s out in the field keeping the sheep.
David
was seen as so small and insignificant, like the mustard seed, that when Jesse
heard that one of his sons would be anointed as the king, no one thought to
bring David in to be a part of the lineup. But, just as the mustard seed grows
into the greatest of all shrubs, forgotten and overlooked David becomes the greatest
king of Israel.
As
we heard, God judges differently than we do. And the goal here isn’t to try to
learn how to judge as God does. As we know from the Prophet Isaiah, “For as the
heavens are higher than the earth, so are God’s ways higher than our ways, and
God’s thoughts than our thoughts.” We’re never going to be able to see things
as purely and clearly as God does. The goal isn’t to become better judges, it
is to become less frequent judgers.
Back
in Salisbury, I’m an adjunct professor at Hood Theological Seminary and this
past semester I taught a class about preaching from marginalized perspectives.
One of our class discussions was based on an article from the Harvard Business
Review in which the author says that we should stop saying “underrepresented.” We
shouldn’t refer to a minority group as “underrepresented” because that is not
an accurate term for what is going on. It’s not that Native Americans are
invisible and the burden ought not to be on them to address their exclusion. To
say that black women are underrepresented on Fortune 500 boards is to suggest
that if they tried harder, they’d be better represented. No, the better term
for this inequality is “underrecognized.” Underrecognition puts the onus on
those with power to acknowledge and address our blind spots.
How
many of God’s miracles do we overlook because they are too small or seem to be
too insignificant? So often we fail to recognize the burning bushes of God’s love
all around us. Some rabbis even say that the burning bush that Moses saw had
been burning since the beginning of creation, it’s just that Moses was the first
one to actually notice it. Are we underrecognizing what God is up to because
our expectations are out of alignment?
We
love to sort and categorize into things that are important and things that are
not, into things that we think will make an impact and things that we think are
just distractions. But the anointing of David and the parable of the mustard
seed calls such judgments into question. In fact, the word “just” should be
eliminated from the Christian’s vocabulary. Because God is always up to
something, and often through the small and the overlooked, we should never say that
something is “just” a piece of bread, or that a person is “just a minimum wage
worker,” or that the Church is “just” an institution, or that prayers are “just
words.” No, all things and people, particularly the small and underrecognized
ones, are the ways in which God is doing something more glorious than we can
ask for or imagine.
So,
at the surface level, this parable shows us the way in which God operates
through the small things and transforms them into grand things. But, as I said,
this parable is comedic satire. The joke comes when Jesus says that the mustard
seed grows in the “greatest of all shrubs.” Ha! This was probably the first
time in history that anyone had ever combined the words “mustard bush” with “great.”
If Jesus were telling this parable to us, he would have said, “With what can we
compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like the
kudzu vine, which, when planted grows into the most beautiful and desirable of
all the plants.” It’s absurd, and that’s exactly Jesus’ point.
The
mustard plant is relatively scrawny and does not respect boundaries, grows
rapidly, is extremely hardy, difficult to eliminate, and grows unnoticeably until
it takes over an entire field. In the barrenness of a desert, one mustard seed
can transform a landscape into a colorful field. And the mustard shrub is prodigious
– it produces far more mustard than any single person could ever use, so it’s good
for the entire community. As Jesus said, it provides large branches for birds
to find shade and rest.
Because
the mustard bush would grow so well, sometimes it was viewed as a weed –
something undesirable. But Jesus reminds us that the birds don’t find it to be
undesirable at all. Rather, it is their home. Here, Jesus might have been
thinking of a passage from Ezekiel in which God’s plan of redeeming all the
world is described in terms of a great tree in which there are enough branches
to make sure that all peoples, even non-Jews, would find refuge. And Jesus is
playing with our expectations of the fulfillment of this promise. God’s plan
for restoring all things and unity people together isn’t through some great
cedar of Lebanon or a giant Sequoia, but through the often underrecognized mustard
bush. In a sense, this is a parable about himself. No one was waiting for a
crucified Messiah. No one expected the great lesson to be “It is more blessed
to give than to receive.” No one anticipated the kingdom to come through humility.
But it does.
And
like a mustard seed, or kudzu, the kingdom grows and grows and gets into everything.
For those who like to have a segmented life, Jesus isn’t the sort of Messiah
that we’re going to like. Jesus won’t stay where he’s put – he’s going to get
into our relationships, our wallets, and our calendars. So when we are so bold
as to pray “Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven,” we better watch out.
For Jesus intends to do just that.
Like
a mustard seed, Jesus comes through small and seemingly insignificant things.
We pour a bit of water on a baby’s head, and look out, now that child has been conscripted
into God’s mission. We do something as seemingly innocuous as breaking bread
together and all of a sudden, we are formed into a beloved community. We pray “thy
kingdom come,” and like kudzu, generosity, mercy, and hope start popping up in unexpected
places.
Speaking
of jokes, this reminds me of one. There was a man who lived on the US-Canadian
border. His business would take him from one side of the border regularly, and
so he had to go through customs a lot. He didn’t drive a car though, he rode a
bicycle and on the back of his bike, there was a box strapped to it. This, of
course, intrigued the customs officials, so they asked him to open the box.
Sometimes it was empty, sometimes there were packing peanuts in there,
sometimes just some sand. They knew he was up to something – what was he trying
to smuggle into the country in that box? Well, for years this went on and they
never figured out what was going on. But one day, one of the customs officials
saw the man in a diner and went up to him and said, “Hey man, I’m retired now,
I don’t care what you were bringing across the border, I’m not going to report
you, but I’ve got to know – what were you smuggling.” The man smiled and said,
“Bicycles.”
Jesus is saying that the Kingdom of God is something like a bicycle smuggler. And this unexpected kingdom has branches for you and me. There is a peace and belonging that is ours because the kingdom indeed is coming on earth as it is heaven. Just as the birds of the air don’t have to do anything to deserve having a branch in the mustard bush to build a nest in, neither do we. We belong in the kingdom not because of our accomplishments, wealth, or the sincerity of our prayers. We have a place in the expansive, unexpected, and glorious kingdom because God loves us. And that’s no joke.
