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Foundry United Rev. Peter DeGroote, Minister for Administration |
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Yeast, Seeds and Weeds Sunday, July 17, 2005 |
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Matthew 13: 24-33
Rev. Peter DeGroote |
I first
started singing that hymn, “Spirit, Spirit of Gentleness,” about fifteen
years ago, maybe a little longer, at Over
the time, that hymn has come to remind me that there is a gap between what we
like to think about God, sometimes what our theology talks about God, and what
Jesus seemed to be trying to tell us about God. The gap began to appear in
the New Testament. Then it sort of widened as the church became pre-occupied
with the problem of trying to explain to the world just who Jesus was, what
role Jesus played, what role we expected Jesus to play in the future. That
was a necessary and demanding function, but it also had its consequences. One of
those consequences is that many of the primary teachings of Jesus are
ignored. Instead, we find ourselves preoccupied with ideas that seem more
comfortable, sometimes ideas that seem more fashionable. Two illustrations:
I am going to talk about two parables: the Parable of the Yeast and the
Parable of the Mustard Seed.1 Out
of curiosity, I thought I would look into some of those guide books that are
available to preachers to help them put together sermons. I suspected this,
but I wanted to check to see if on the Sunday on which these parables were
scheduled for use in the church what they suggested preaching. Nearly all I
consulted suggested preaching Paul. And then, I said, let me check another
way. I went and looked at some of those websites that provide us ideas that
can be used in children’s sermons. I wanted to see if any of these folks who
specialize in children’s sermons gave us some assistance in putting together
an introduction to these two parables for young minds. Nada. No help. I
congratulated Rev. Vicky between services for going where others have not
gone. The
irony of this is that many of Paul’s ideas about God and the nature of God’s
kingdom seem to be a little different than those that Jesus expressed. Consequently,
and because Paul was so influential in laying the foundations for later
theologians, we are often overlooking what Jesus is trying to tell us,
overlooking the grappling—walking away from the grappling with Jesus’ messages
as we try to understand what it is that Paul and later theologians have told
us. Now, we
are also talking about these two parables in our Wednesday evening Bible
Talk. I said in the first service that this wasn’t a recruitment effort, but
why not? We dealt with the parable of the sower last week. We are dealing
with the parable of the leaven this Wednesday night. And because you can
never say enough about any parable, there are ideas in the “Bible Notes” that
you can pick up at the front desk or on the website that will also enlarge
what I am going to be talking about this morning. And then if you want to
talk about them further, you are certainly welcome to join us Wednesday
evenings. First,
the parable of the leaven: “The One of
the methods that we use is to think about it like we would think about a sculpture.
When we go to a museum and we look at a sculpture, we seldom just stand and
look at it from one place. We walk around it. As we walk, we get different
views of the sculpture. As we completely walk around it, sometimes more than
once, sometimes going back again and again, all of those impressions, all of
those perspectives add up to what we think about that sculpture. So too
with a parable; we can walk around it many times. I promise you, you can take
any of Jesus’ parables, read it to a group of folks and there are going to
any number of perspectives that are expressed as a result of it. Walking
around a parable, sometimes walking around it several times, sometimes
putting it away and going back later. As we go back later to most of the
passages of scripture, we find new things as we have become new beings living
with it. But
with this Parable of the Leaven, let’s take just a couple of the perspectives
we might think about. Some of Jesus’ listeners would have said: “How can you
say such a thing? You said God is like a woman, a woman putting leaven in
bread. God is like a woman; the actor here is a woman.” Well, that was certainly
was an unpopular thing in Jesus’ day. But we know that Jesus used both men
and women to illustrate the activity of God. Jesus made it possible for women
to hear the message in ways that they could be included, in ways that they
would not be marginalized. He also made it possible for men to begin dealing
with some thinking that they had never thought before. It is true that in
some places it is still unpopular to speak of god in feminine images, but
there it is for any follower of Jesus to see, hear, and follow. Others
would have laughed, at least in Jesus’ day, over the fifty pounds of flour. A
question: How many of you, without the help of a bread machine, have made
bread? Well, congratulations, because nobody at the 9:30 service had ever
made bread, or admitted to it. I made it once, without a machine. I had
somebody who knew how giving me instructions. I found it difficult to work
with just two pounds of flour. How about you? But fifty pounds! Think about
it another way. That’s 12 gallons of dough that you have to knead yeast into,
all at once. That’s why they would have been laughing. This is beyond human
capacity. This is even beyond human imagination. There is part of the lesson
in that. Jesus
is suggesting to us that the scale and the intentions of God’s activity are
beyond our imagination, beyond our comprehension, but yet it seems to be
something from which we are able to benefit. We also find another symbol here.
The amount of bread being made is a symbol of the abundant life that Jesus
promised to those who follow his Way, the abundant life that Jesus promised
that comes from following Jesus’ teachings. “I have come that you might have
life, and that you might have it more abundantly.” Another
way to look at parables is to rename them – to live with them for a while and
then to say: “Wait a minute. I want to try this parable out with another
hypothesis. I want to rename it and see if that works with this parable.” I
like to rename this parable: “The Parable of the Energy of God.” Jesus
has given us an image of God at work – a picture, by the way, that challenges
all of our human expectations. Now, what do I mean by that? The challenge was
certainly true for the early church and remains true for us today. Ancient
societies spoke and thought of God’s kingdom in the language of empires,
kingships, and power. God’s kingdom is a place where God is the ruler. Now
think about this parable. That language of royalty, of rule, of power doesn’t
help us understand what is meant by God’s kingdom being like the energy
released by hiding yeast in dough. There’s a gap there. There is a barrier we
cannot cross if we use the same language. That barrier continues to exist
because we have traditionally continued to use the language of royalty, the
language of power. As long we use that language, it gets in the way of our
trying to grapple with what it is that Jesus is trying to tell us about what
God is doing. It is
risky to draw too many conclusions from a single parable, but let’s draw
some. What does Jesus seem to be telling us in this parable of the leaven, or
the parable of the Energy of God? First, it tells us that the structure of
God’s kingdom seems to be built into creation already. Second, that God is at
work in that structure. Third, that energy of God that is at work in creation
is what we have to call “mysterious.” It is free. We can’t seem to be able to
predict it and we can’t seem to be able to control it. It is Spirit, a
“Spirit of restlessness.”2 Fourth, if we do what Jesus tells us to do,
if we follow the way of Jesus, we will discover what it means to live in
God’s kingdom, to live in harmony with God. Maybe I have stretched that last
conclusion a little too for this particular parable. But there is some more
information that we get from the second parable, the Parable of the Mustard Seed. There
are three versions, Matthew, Mark and Luke all have three different versions,
and when the scholars get through working them over and trying to decide what
the basic parable was that Jesus told us, it reads like this: “God’s imperial rule is like a mustard seed that someone
took and sowed in the ground. Though it is the smallest of seeds, when it has
grown up, it is the largest of bushes so that the birds of sky come and roost
in its branches.” The
contrast between the ideas of imperial rule and a mustard bush are obvious.
But let’s move on to some other ideas. If you
have ever seen a mustard seed you know it is a small, unpretentious seed that
you could easily overlook because the world doesn’t expect much from really
small things. But that tiny seed grows into the largest of bushes, not a
tree, but bushes. It has
sturdy branches. It provides a place of shelter, a place of safety for the
birds. We have
a picture, it seems to me, of God having created communities in which people
can find places of safety and security and protection if we but follow Jesus.
Already created, the formula is there. We can find them. We can find the
protection and safety that the
community of the mustard seed provides. When we
think about the additional information that Jesus gathered people together in
the community and then that Jesus sent them out from community and they came
back to celebrate, we have a picture rounded out of the community of God
being a safe place, a base for people to go out into the world, but then to
come back for relaxation, for recreation, for rest, to recuperate, but most
of all to be re-charged by the energy of God. Another
image that we get from this Parable of the Mustard Seed has to do with its
many flowers. When I was a kid in upstate Once
more we have an image of Jesus talking in ways that cause us to want to draw some
conclusions that are not in harmony with normal, human ideas or popular
theological ideas. Those conclusions are similar to those we can draw from
the previous parable. One, God’s rule is not like that of a king. Two, God’s
rule is not about royal glory. Three, God’s rule seems to be something
already built in creation, not something that God still has to do. Four, it
seems that God’s rule is something that we can wrap our lives around,
something that requires our action, something that represents an energy that
we can be plugged into. (There
is third parable we hear, about weeds, and there will always be weeds. As I
said earlier, we will return to that in August.) There
is one more comment about the Parable of the Mustard Seed that I would like
to conclude with: The
mustard bush is an annual. It is not a perennial. Every year it grows from
seed, it sends out thousands of other seeds, and it dies. Again, Jesus seems
to be suggesting to us something other than what many later theologians would
have us hear. The But, my
real comfort in this observation is personal. When you’re 65 years old, you often
feel like retiring from some things. I am sure that some of you understand
that feeling. Now I don’t have any doubt that there is no retirement from trying
to live the life that Jesus taught. There is no retirement from the Way of
Jesus. But I do know that there are some things I do not have to worry about
anymore because I am assured that another generation is going to come along
where mine didn’t succeed. It will come along with ideas that mine didn’t
think of. The
fact is, I can still be a part. I can share some ideas, pass on some seeds,
tell the stories, offer a little advice that may or may not be taken. That’s
OK. I have a freedom but not a release
from responsibility. I still must be a part of the community. And most of
all, I must be sure not to punch down the dough that may be rising around me
or digging up mustard plants that have been planted nearby. That
means I am still at work, still trying to discover more about how to wrap my
life around the energy of God. |
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