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God help me, I
was going to preach something safe and comforting today. I thought I could play
it safe and say a lot of comfortable things about how we need to let God do
what God does. All we have to do is plant the seeds. Or with the second
parable, I could talk about how God takes a tiny mustard seed and makes a huge
plant out of it. The Gospel stories for today can certainly be preached that
way. We don’t even have to think of them as parables. We can make them safe by
turning them into fables or allegories.
A fable about the mustard seed could
be interpreted like this: Large things can grow from something very small. An
allegory about the mustard seed could be interpreted like this: If your faith
is small and you nurture it, it will do the same thing the mustard seed did.
But parables, especially the parables Jesus tells, are neither safe nor easy.
Parables are designed to have multiple interpretations, and multiple ways of
twisting our brains around. Parables make us think, and oftener than not,
disturb the status quo by making us think about things we’d rather not think
about at all.
Parables are intended to mess with
our normal way of thinking. Parables are intended to be subversive in a variety
of ways. And parables get inside our heads and cause us to think differently,
to sometimes get us so frustrated we don’t know quite what to do about them. But,
if we’ll stay with them and keep thinking about them, parables can be life
changing. We might be transformed before we know it. Maybe that’s what Jesus
had in mind. You think?
There is
nothing wrong with interpreting parables as allegories or fables. Interpreting
them that way can say some really important things about what we believe about
the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God may not be easy to spot. The kingdom of
God may appear really tiny but end up being large in influence or size or scope
when we least expect it. And yet, if we treat these parables like parables, we
might begin to look at them differently. And, when we look at things
differently we may not always be safe.
Suppose we
focus on what a very odd thing a mustard seed really is. Some varieties of
mustard seeds are used as spices, some are used as medicine, and some are used
as food. But in general, in a field or garden, in Jesus’ time, they were
considered weeds, and noxious weeds at that. Dangerous weeds, uncontrollable
weeds that can choke out other plants and take over an entire area. In Jesus’
time, mustard would not be purposely grown in someone’s garden. Instead, it
would grow unchecked in a fallow field, or an open uncultivated area.
If you’re a
lawn guy or gal, or a gardener or a farmer, select your least favorite weed. (Pause)
Do you know that in some places there are laws that say certain weeds must be
controlled? Do you know there is such a thing as the Ohio Noxious Weed List?
Which, by the way, if you’re interested, you can hop on the conveniently named
and easy to remember website: invasive.org and search for Ohio.
A few of the noxious weeds listed in
Ohio are Johnson grass, musk thistle, Canada thistle, giant hogweed, and of
course there’s the appropriately named mile-a-minute weed. And yes, wild
mustard is on the list. If you’re more familiar with garden-variety weeds,
there’s the mowers’ favorite: dandelions, and of course there are a host of
other weeds that seem to grow stronger every time you mow them down. Most of
those weeds aren’t considered noxious but sometimes when you have the mower out
you think they ought to be.
I find all this
interesting, because it seems to me that’s what Jesus is doing here. He’s talking
about the growth of the kingdom of God as a noxious weed that is difficult and impossible
to control.
Now do you think that’s a comforting image? But maybe that’s a
part of what Jesus is doing with that obnoxious and noxious mustard seed. Maybe
that’s part of what Jesus is saying about the mustard that won’t go away and
keeps on growing unchecked. Maybe part of what Jesus is asking us to hear is
that the growth of the kingdom of God can be annoying and invasive and may
involve people who can’t be controlled easily. People who may not want to do
things the way we’ve always done them here.
When the
kingdom of God grows unchecked and really takes root, undesirable things we’ve
never thought of begin to happen. Perhaps even undesirable people show up.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons we find unchecked growth uncomfortable or even
threatening. We can’t control it or shape it to our image of what “nice” church
should look like, or sound like, or be like. It isn’t safe anymore.
Maybe what Jesus has in mind this
morning is something other than a nice little parable fit for public
consumption. Maybe instead Jesus is offering us a subversive, dangerous and
risky plot to transform us and change the church and the world. Are we up for
that? AMEN.
The Rev. Nicolette Papanek
©2018
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