"All in a Day’s Work"

If given a chance we all tend to think in pictures. If I were to ask you to think of your favorite place or picture or beach or flower – whatever… You’d be able to conjure it up in a matter of seconds. Well, Jesus knew that was the way the human mind worked so he spoke in pictures and taught and preached in pictures… verbally. He helped people remember his messages because he enabled them to remember the visual impact his story or message had for them. That’s why Jesus told so many parables. They were memorable.

This week and next we see the Gospel of Mark identifying several of those stories as the means of communicating memorable messages. Today’s Lectionary reading includes two simple and complicated parables from the realm of agriculture, primarily in Galilee. The Parable of the Growing Seed and the Parable of the Mustard Seed. You could really do a whole sermon on each one of them… which I think Jesus probably did.

But let’s squeeze the messages Jesus communicates into one.

In Jesus’ day the Jews were desperate to throw off the yoke of Roman occupation. Rebellion was in the air. This parable tells the hotheads, that the way of violence is not God’s way, that God’s plans are working themselves out and that too much haste, instead of helping – only hinders.

The universal message is the warning to all of us who are in too big a hurry. It’s almost axiomatic that if we want something we wanted it yesterday – at least by today. My favorite story of that impatient attitude is that in the early days of our country, people would leave the East heading West. They’d arrive in Pittsburgh and winter there. Then they would get a flat boat and head down to St. Louis, and they would winter there. Then that next Spring they would connect with a wagon train and head West for their new life. Today, however, we get all bent out of shape if we miss a section of the revolving door.

There are times when there’s nothing we can do but wait. A fracture doesn’t heal overnight. A seed that’s been planted has a whole process of growth that goes on at the seed’s own pace. But it does grow. This parable is intended to teach patience.

I think it’s also intended to teach us that the kingdom of God is a gradual growth. Remember how Jesus pointed out that first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain. Unless those essential stages are followed nothing can happen.

That’s a universal law of life. No one learns a language overnight. No one woke up in the morning a mathematician. No one became a musician just by wanting to.

Remember the experiment back in school when the teacher took a beaker full of clear water and a little test–tube of dye. The teacher dropped one drop of the dye into the water and nothing seemed to happen. The teacher kept trickling in the drops. Then all of a sudden, as one drop went in, the whole beaker began to color.

This parable also teaches us that God is the basis or the foundation of all things. It is a parable that puts us in our proper place. In the parable we’re told that the earth makes things grow itself. We can’t make it grow. Only God can do that.

What we can do is to make sure that the Conditions exist by which the seed has a chance to grow. Our job is to get the water to the right place as well as the fertilizer – to assist the plant in God’s process.

There are people living today in very difficult circumstances. The Christian cannot say, “Well, let God take care of them.” It’s our job to help God mend some of those things in the broken human condition. It’s our responsibility to be laborers with God. We’ll not bring in God’s kingdom – but we sure are expected to grease the skids.

This parable tells us that there’s nothing so unstoppable as the power of growth. We’ve all seen a tree crack a concrete sidewalk or a tiny flower grow out of what looks like solid rock. And our next door neighbor’s vine has sure found a crack in our wall.

I think this parable wants to show us with some sense of confidence that God’s ways will endure, are capable of cracking the toughest situations, and will produce a healthy product.

The Second Parable is the Mustard Seed. In Jesus’ day it was proverbial for the smallest of all things. That’s not strictly true since the cypress seed is supposedly smaller

But the mustard seed was used as the epitome of anything that was minutely small.

The main point of the parable as Mark tells it – is that in time, the smallest seed grows into the largest of shrubs or herbs. Mustard then was a field plant. It would grow to 8– or 10–feet tall and it was large enough for birds to build nests in its branches. The basic message of this parable is that from the smallest beginnings can come something significant.

When Jesus first told this story I think it had a special message for the disciples. They had undoubtedly become discouraged. They had hoped for so much and so little had apparently happened. And they were in danger of being overwhelmed by the growing opposition to Jesus. They’d started with high hopes and the crowds were seemingly getting smaller and smaller. So Jesus told the parable to help them see that the beginnings might be small but no one knew how they would grow and develop.

Some of the greatest things do start from the smallest beginnings. Just think of it.

All music comes from the octave– just 8 notes for every song or symphony ever written. All of our English literature is built on 26 letters of the alphabet.

We live in a really frustrating time. On the one hand we seem to want things ever larger and larger – and at the same time we want to miniaturize everything we carry around or put on our tables and desks.

One of the staggering things to think about is the comparatively small number of people who could ever have seen or heard Jesus. Just think of our world of mass communications –where a person who has something to say can get that message out in a multitude of ways very simply – compared to the limitations Jesus had to deal with.

Just think of how few people where a part of that early community of Jesus followers.

This parable teaches that Christianity is a living organism. The mustard seed is growing all the time. From day to day that growth may not have been measurable – but when compared to then and now – the growth is plain for all to see.

I’ve always been impressed with the statement someone showed me which says:

“If you’ve tried to do something and failed, you are vastly better off than if you had tried to do nothing and succeeded.”

We may think that anything WE can do is so little as to be ineffective – but the cumulative effect of the small efforts of every person can be used significantly by God to accomplish the purpose God has in mind. Don’t ever say, “I don’t count of make a difference.”

This parable also says something about the issue of personal religious experience. One of the great faults in any area of human experience is to take one type of experience and insist that it alone is the pattern to which all other experiences must conform. Some folks say that only the sudden, dramatic transformation of a person becoming a Christian, like the Apostle Paul, is THE model of creative Christian experience. What a tragedy.

What happened to Paul was great and significant and noteworthy. But no more important than all those of us who were brought up in Christian homes – where we were taught to pray, hope, love, forgive, by parents who brought us to church and enabled us to become a vital part of a living Christian community. I’m not sure there is really all that great a distinction between the Born and the Born Again Christians… as long as we keep doing it. We all have to keep growing for the whole of our lives.

You can either open the door to a room gradually or with a great jolt. Either way you can see and experience what is in the room.

These two Parables today talk about Patience and Confidence, Constant Growth, Small beginning and Large results. They talk about the sense of Hope we share together and the awareness that for each of us – and all of us together, God is not finished with us.

And it’s all in a day’s work. Ours and God’s.