3 Pentecost B
Text: Mark 4:26-34
sermon by the Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood
June 13, 2021
The Earth Produces of Itself
There is no doubt that it is for a discouraged early Christian Church that these parables in the Gospel of Mark are written. We think of those early days as the Pentecost time, when new Christians were baptized three thousand at a time. But for every one of those big success stories in the book of Acts there are many stories of struggle, stories of words falling on deaf ears, stories of imprisonment or, worse, indifference to the Word of God.
For the early Christians, who believed that the fate of all creation and all of history turned on the life and death of this Christ, it must surely have been discouraging and mysterious that the rest of the world did not see it that way. The Christians believed the gospel they held was capable of the life-giving transformation of people, societies, worlds; how could it be, then, that so few listened to them and took the message to heart? How could it be that they remained in those days a relatively small and inconsequential band?
It was then that the gospel writer Mark remembered for them some of the parables of Jesus. Why doesn’t everyone follow Christ? Well, a sower went out to sow, Jesus told them, and some of the seeds landed on rocky ground, some on the beaten path, some among weeds, and only a few of the seeds you sow are going to find receptive, fertile ground.
Was the Church in its early days tiny and weak, inauspicious in the broader society, inconsequential? Well, the Kingdom of God, said Jesus, is like a mustard seed. It’s the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet it grows to be the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches. Inauspicious beginnings can lead to a vast conclusion.
Are you frustrated with the little fruit you have to show for your efforts in the ministry? Well, the Kingdom of God is as if someone scatters seed on the ground, and then simply sleeps and rises, night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows. You say you don’t even know how that happens? That’s the point: The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.
The key to understanding these parables, and their meaning for a frustrated and frightened first-century Church, is the first few words of each: “The Kingdom of heaven is like ….” It is the Kingdom of heaven that is like this. The promise of growth and fruit and harvest does not have to do with the immediate success of the Church (membership, budgets, and so on). Nor – and I’m sorry to disappoint you here – does that promise have to do with the financial prosperity of individual believers, or even with the good health or even the survival of individual believers. The promise has rather to do with the ultimate triumph of the Reign of God. It is in that Reign of God, the Kingdom of heaven, that we can expect with confidence to find the abundant harvest. We’ll get there, Jesus seems to be saying. It might not be right now, and it might not be in the way you expect, but be assured that we will get there, in some divinely mysterious way.
It is because these promises are about the Kingdom of heaven that they are always shrouded in mystery. Why does Jesus speak of these things only in parables? Because these things are mysteries that cannot be explained away but can only be talked about in stories, in images like the ones we have here of planting, growth, and harvesting. We would be more comfortable with a straightforward, scientific, rational explanation because we are more comfortable living without mystery, but stories are what we are given.
This week Peter and Ellie, the twin children of my niece, graduated from high school. At the party on Tuesday my niece and I were wondering how exactly it had come about, that Peter and Ellie got to be that old, and got to be as accomplished as they are.
It’s a mystery how these things happen. We were remembering and swapping stories about them when they were young, and remembering how her son, then 5 years old, stunned her when he picked up a children’s book they’d recently brought home from the library and read it, cover to cover as his mother watched, recognizing most of the words and carefully sounding out the words he did not immediately know. His mother, my niece, hadn’t known he could read even one word. How had this happened?, she wondered. It was for her a jaw-dropping, head-tilting, skin-crawling experience of mysterious change and growth. It was so not because it was a prodigious feat; he was just about the age when people begin to do this, you know. And this event was not entirely without explanation: his parents used to read to him and his sister a lot, and they knew that their kindergarten teacher had been working with their class all year long on the sounds of letters. Nevertheless my niece knew that most of what she saw that day, and most of what we saw Tuesday as two young adults now graduated from high school, most of it was without explanation, was mystery. How does a human being come to know? How does a human being come to grow? No parent or teacher, no one but God, could take responsibility for that. The earth produces of itself, indeed.
So much of this child-rearing business turns out to be really beyond control. You try to be a good parent, but in the end, how does a human being come to grow? Parents turn out to have remarkably little responsibility for their growth, when you think about it; certainly for their physical growth, but for emotional, social, intellectual growth as well. The sense I have is that in the end we who fancy ourselves “raising” our children do little more that sleep and rise, night and day. We sleep, then rise one morning to find him reading his library book. We sleep, then rise to find her developing into a strong young woman. We sleep, then rise to find him graduating from school, cultivating a curious area of interest that is his own; to find her with a committed relationship outside the original family; we sleep, then rise, to find her – our daughter, isn’t she? – a person of considerable respect in her field of work. How do these things happen? The seed sprouts and grows, the sower does not know how.
And Jesus says the Kingdom of heaven is like that. You would like to think that more of it was up to you, but the consummation of God’s reign is not dependent even on our very best efforts, even on the things we do in social ministry, or evangelism work, or our work to bring about God’s justice in the world. The basis for all hope about the future rests in God, who is the giver of all growth and the only one who determines the time of the great harvest.