Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
July 27, 2008
Year A
1 Kings 3:5-12
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
When God’s involved, even small beginnings can have big outcomes.
That’s the punchline of Jesus’ parable of the mustard seed. And I have seen it played out many times in the course of my ministry.
An idea starts small, and then it just takes off.
The start of Sharing the Dream -- the Guatemalan handcraft organization I’m a part of -- was like that.
It started with one woman bringing home a few crafts in her suitcase and selling them at our church.
Today, their gross sales are well over $100,000 annually! Sharing the Dream has helped Guatemalans built libraries and clinics, put kids through school, funded an orphanage, and provided funds for more than one successful micro-business start up.
All that, and no one in the group has so much as a business degree, or had ever done anything like it before in our lives.
It was a God thing.
And even that is pretty big on God’s scale of turning tiny seeds into grand bushes!
Take the example of Sandra Robinson.
A Sunday School teacher for over thirty years, she touched the lives of many, many kids with the love and grace of God. Who knows how many in all?
And from her classroom came pastors, missionaries and lay workers in the church. From her classroom came doctors and lawyers, city workers and mechanics, moms and dads and others who take their faith seriously, live it, and share it because of what Mrs. Robinson taught them.
Of course, we’ll never know the full impact of her compassionate teaching.
It’s a God thing.
But, it’s easy to miss those things. It seems much easier for people in the church business to get discouraged.
You look around at everything that’s wrong in the world and you begin to wonder where God is and what God is up to. How many times have you heard someone (including yourself) lament that the world is in a lot worse shape than it used to be?
How many times have you heard someone (including yourself) look around the church and lament that things aren’t the way they were years ago?
Or wondered why this program or that activity or that group isn’t what it should be (or what we’d hoped it would be)?
Trust me, I’ve heard those same lamentations coming out of my own mouth from time to time… or at least heard them floating around inside my own head!
It’s easy to lament.
It’s easy to complain and wonder why someone doesn’t do something about it.
It’s easy to just blame God for not fixing up the messes in our world.
But it’s harder, much, much harder, to get involved and to do something about it ourselves.
And it’s even harder to trust that God will do something about it through us – and maybe even in spite of us!
I think the community Matthew first wrote this Gospel for was having a similar problems with discouragement.
Maybe it was persecutions.
Maybe it was the aftermath of
Maybe some fifty years after the Resurrection, some people were just beginning to have some doubts.
We really don’t know.
But the Gospel of Matthew seems to have been written to encourage a community that was struggling with their faith.
And to encourage them, Matthew stresses commitment. In the Gospel Jesus’ expectations
for his followers are high (Just re-read the Sermon on the Mount). He regularly tells parables that
challenge us to stay focused on the mission, and to stay confident that God is
at work in the world, and that the
The Parables of the Kingdom in Chapter 13 certainly take this tone.
It starts out with the Parable of the Sower… which we heard a few weeks ago. That’s the one where seed falls on all sorts of bad soil, and eventually dies out… but the seed that falls on good soil multiplies.
A reminder that not everyone who hears the Word of God is going to get it. In fact, sometimes it will feel like very few respond to our ministry or our witness.
Then we had the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds. A reminder that there will always be a mix of good and bad, righteousness and evil, life and death, saint and sinner in this life – and that’s true whether we’re talking about the world, the church or our individual lives.
And now, these parables: of the mustard seed and the yeast. A reminder that God is at work, even if we can’t always see it. And even more, that, when God is involved even the smallest thing can grow into something great.
After Jesus tells these three parables to the crowds, he shares a few more – but just with his disciples.
And these underscore the great value of the Kingdom – in spite of the fact that we can’t always see it, and it’s not always big and splashy and powerful.
You see, that’s the crazy, mixed-up, upside down nature of the Kingdom.
It always turns the values and priorities of the world – and often of our lives -- on their head.
It declares blessing for the weak and judgment for the mighty.
It reaches out to outcasts and rejects those with status and wealth.
It is found in a cup of water given to the thirsty.
And when we show love to our enemies.
And a lot of times it’s just missed… even by those who God is using to do Kingdom work.
The truth is, you’ve got to look and sometimes look hard for God’s finger prints and foot prints and DNA in the mix and mayhem of the world.
And sometimes you just gotta believe it’s there… even when you can’t see it!
So, where does that leave us?
Well, first, I think it assures us that we do not have to be discouraged – in spite of the evidence -- and that we shouldn’t let ourselves get caught up in laments and nostalgia about days gone by.
Because God is still at work. Right here. Right now. Always doing something new in our world. God didn’t perfect the Kingdom ten, or twenty or fifty years ago… it’s still a work in progress. “The good ole’ days” are still to come!
We may not always see it. But that’s the truth.
Second, as Jesus tells the disciples at the end of this text, those of us who have been trained – those of us who already know about God’s goodness, grace, mercy, love and about what God did for the world in and through Jesus – need to bring that treasure out and not hide it away.
And that will mean holding on to some of the old, and embracing some of the new. It will also mean giving up some of our old “comfortable” ways of doing things but also not jumping on every religious bandwagon and trendy program that happens by.
Finally, each one of us needs to be open to God using us to do his Kingdom work. And that may mean doing some unexpected things that will stretch us.
But then, like the guy with the treasure and the merchant with the pearl, isn’t the Kingdom worth a little stretching?
Just start small… and God will use you to do some great things… even it they do seem a little crazy sometimes!
Amen.