Small Things that Change the World
Mark 4:26-34
A Sermon
Preached at Centenary United Methodist Church
Richmond,
Virginia
June 17, 2012
Third Sunday
after Pentecost
God’s kingdom of
justice, peace, and love grows, spreads, and overcomes evil from even the
smallest of beginnings
**********
Sometimes
realities and expectations are two different things. That discrepancy is probably one reason Jesus
used parables. He knew that people had
one set of expectations about the kind of kingdom he had come to
inaugurate. He had another. He told parables to try to explain the
reality of the kingdom of God, but the parables aren’t always
straightforward. They often mystify
Jesus’ opponents because they don’t want to understand his message in the first
place. They’ve already made up their
minds. They’re enigmatic riddles to
Jesus’ disciples, but because they’re sincerely trying to understand, Jesus
takes time in private to help them unpack their meaning. Parables are like jokes in that they employ
misdirection—they start with something you’re familiar with—trees, shrubs,
birds, seeds, soils—and you wind up in a place you hadn’t expected. A good friend put me on to the quotations of
comedian Stephen Wright this week. Some of
his one-liners are like Jesus’ parables—they make you laugh because your expectation
at the beginning is turned on its head by the line’s end. Here are a few from a website published by
Donald J. Hunt:
“I
stayed in a really old hotel last night.
They sent me a wake up letter.”
“I
have a switch in my apartment that doesn't do anything. Every once in a while I
turn it on and off. One day I got a call from a guy in France who said, ‘Cut it
out!’”
“I'm
taking La maze classes. I'm not having a baby.
I'm just having trouble breathing.”
“I
just got skylights put in my place. The people who live above me are furious.”
“I
used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn't park anywhere near the
place.”
“When
I get real bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot, then
sit in my car and count how many people ask if I'm leaving.”[1]
Many
of Jesus’ parables about the kingdom of God offer people more than just a
rhetorical challenge to their perception of reality. They address the disappointment and
disillusionment that arises when the beautiful nature of God’s kingdom is
finally understood and then compared with the every reality most of us inhabit
every day.
The Hidden
Nature of the Kingdom
The
kingdom of God was the central theme of Jesus’ teaching. Its establishment on earth was the reason he
came. It is a social and political image
that refers to the state of affairs that exists when God’s rule and reign over
us and our world is fully enacted. This image is not easy to completely
define. Some people have focused on the
internal dimension of the kingdom and try to describe what happens in a
person’s soul or psyche when they embrace the kingdom of God. Others focus on the external nature of the
kingdom of God and envision a state of affairs where the poor are fed, the
homeless housed, war is eradicated, and justice is equally distributed. Some people have focused on the kingdom’s
future reality and see it more as an ideal that won’t be realized until the
final day of judgment; others see it as
a present reality that is slowly evolving or organically developing. We are taught to pray in the Lord’s prayer,
“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The kingdom of God in general terms is that
time, place, situation, circumstance where God’s will prevails.
The
problem with this grand ideal, as Jesus was apparently aware, is that whether
it is primarily present or future, internal or external, social or personal—it seems
so unimpressive when compared to the realities of our lives.
In
Jesus’ day, to claim that God’s kingdom had come in his appearance on earth
raised many people’s expectations—and created enemies. To the poor Jews who were tired of living
under Roman oppression, talk of the kingdom of God signaled that Israel was
about to be restored to the place of worldly prestige and power it had known
under its greatest King, David. To those
who had a vested interest in the status quo, the Pharisees, Sadducees, and yes,
the Roman authorities, talk of establishment of a new kingdom sounded like
sedition, a call to armed rebellion. The
kingdom Jesus had in mind was ruled by love—love that suffers, love that
refuses to embrace violence as its method, love that sees rich and poor, old
and young, male and female, as of equal worth and value in God’s eyes. That ideal frankly looks rather pitiful
compared to a legion of well-trained, well-armed Roman soldiers.
As
the early Christian community to whom this first of the gospel’s in chronology
was written looked back on Jesus’ life, teaching, death, and resurrection, his
efforts to change the world with love and their recognition that his disciples
were called to suffer as he’d suffered, undoubtedly raised questions about the
efficacy of such a strategy—a strategy of patience, refusal to take up arms,
willingness to suffer. Where is this
kingdom Jesus seemed so confident about?
Where’s the
Kingdom Today?
We
have similar questions, don’t we? Where
are the signs of God’s kingdom among us?
Yes, it is true that we have in recent years become more aware of the
frailty of the big institutions and powers we humans have created. We’ve seen that the most brilliant minds in
the economic and financial arena could not really foresee how their actions
could lead to a colossal economic collapse that affects everyone. We’ve seen that the most brilliant military
strategists can embrace faulty assumptions about how easily or quickly a war
can be prosecuted and won.
But
beyond our human inabilities to predict the consequences of our actions, we are
made aware daily of all the ways God’s kingdom is not yet a reality.
You
can see why Christians struggled with their faith in the early years after
Jesus death. They were certain that after
Jesus’ death and resurrection, the kingdom he’d begun was going to come in its
fullness in their lifetimes. They could
endure anything—ridicule, persecution, tension within their families over their
newfound faith—because Jesus was going
to come again—soon.
But
that didn’t happen. They had to readjust
their thinking—either give up their hope of God’s kingdom altogether, or
reconsider the nature of this kingdom in light of the kind of king Jesus in
fact proved to be.
Jesus Embraces
Small Beginnings
We
don’t just wonder about the kingdom’s presence because of the big tragedies of
human history—nuclear bombs, world wars, economic reversals. There’s enough in most of our personal lives
to cause us at times to question the power of this kingdom, it’s presence among
us.
So
Jesus had some teaching to do. He was
determined to change people’s expectations about the kingdom of God, not by diminishing what it would look like in
its final form, but by teaching them about how it begins and how it grows. Jesus’ kingdom doesn’t begin with great fanfare. It is not initiated or sought by a
multi-billion dollar political campaign.
It does not depend on huge armies supported by huge budgets. It does not even begin from the efforts of a
powerful, prestigious contemporary mega-church.
It
begins like a mustard seed—a small seed,
one of the smallest of seeds. That seed
is sown, and slowly, out of the
limelight, away from public adulation, unseen, hidden, it slowly, but
inexorably grows. It issues not in a
huge cedar tree, an oft-used symbol in the Old Testament for one of the great
nations of the world, but a humble shrub—a a healthy shrub to be sure, a shrub
large enough to offer shelter and refuge for a large number of birds, but
nonetheless a shrub.
Jesus
had this deep-seated confidence not in human ability, ingenuity, wealth, or
even force of arms, but in God to take the smallest of beginnings, and use them
to change human lives, even the course of human history. His own story was an illustration of that
confidence. He was born, not in
Jerusalem, the seat of spiritual power, nor in Rome, the seat of imperial rule, but in a little out of the
way place called Bethlehem, and there not in a nice hotel, but a humble manger
as his parents sought shelter with the livestock. He lived in Nazareth, a small town people
often poked fun at. And he chose 12 ordinary men to be his
disciples, men without impressive resumes or pedigrees, some who had
questionable pasts and few earthly achievements to commend themselves, just
ordinary people. And the people who were
drawn to his movement were often people others looked down on for one reason or
another—a woman caught in adultery, another woman in Samaria who’d had more
husbands and affairs than you could count, a tax collector who’d made a lot of
money cheating people, several blind, deaf, and sick people—not people you’d
read about in the society page of the Sunday paper.
When
it was all said and done, his strategy for bringing his kingdom into being was
not to amass power and wealth, but to let those things go. His strategy could not be mapped out neatly
in a glitzy power-point presentation, but was finally defined by the symbol of
failure and judgment prevalent in his time—a cross. His own life was a testimony to the truth of
this parable of the mustard seed—that God takes small things, ordinary people,
experiences others regard as signs of utter failure, and turns these things
into the seeds of a great movement that brings shelter, healing, life, and
peace to any who will receive it.
Small Things Can
Change the World
It’s
not such a strange notion when you think about it. I know it’s not the way the world normally operates,
but it is true, that sometimes great things do come from small beginnings!
Imagine
a giant sequoia tree, one that is between 500 and 750 years old, the age at
which these trees reach their height. It
is 250 feet tall, and 30 feet around.
How did that tree begin? It had
its beginnings from a cone that possessed seeds the size of a flake of
oatmeal—a great sight to behold from such a small seed.
People grow and mature at different rates. Thomas Edison's
teacher said he could never amount to anything and advised his mother to take
him out of school. Winston Churchill was admitted to school in the lowest level
classes and never moved out of the lowest group in all the years he attended
Harrow. Albert Einstein seemed so slow and dull that his parents feared that he
was mentally deficient. You can’t
always predict how a person’s life will turn out just by the way it
begins.
John
Buchanan is a wonderful preacher. He
just retired as the pastor at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago. He tells about returning to be inducted into
the 50 year club in celebration of his class’s graduation from his alma mater,
Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Five of his classmates were scheduled after a
nice luncheon to tell about what they’d accomplished since their graduation
from college. Buchanan wasn’t very
excited about hearing these stories. The
first, a man named Earl he remembered as being studious and quiet told about
his work as a neurologist doing groundbreaking research into the causes of
Alzheimer’s disease and his work to find new methods of early detection and
treatment. Buchanan said his
presentation was breathtaking. The next
presentation was from a man who’d been one of Buchanan’s fraternity
brothers. He’d gone on to earn a Ph. D.
in inorganic chemistry and after working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory
and for Union Carbide, he landed at Michigan State University where he taught
and did research into what makes tumors grow and had developed an anti-tumor
drug used by oncologists everywhere.
After hearing these presentations, Buchanan admitted how surprised he
was.[2]
He wrote, “The
presentations were thrilling, and I began to look around the room at my old
classmates in a whole new light. What an unpromising group we were as freshmen:
unsophisticated, naive, full of ourselves, and so young—still adolescents
mostly. And what an interesting group we had become: physicians, business
executives, attorneys, research chemists, college professors, clergy, and a
White House assistant to President Ronald Reagan in charge of First Lady Nancy
Reagan’s office. Each with a fascinating story to tell; each of us with a story
to tell that began with a seed or two or three planted at that college fifty
years ago.”[3]
The seeds Jesus planted
were small. He had a few dedicated
followers, he died on a cross. But that
movement spread until the point that it became the official religion of the
empire that had once persecuted it—a mixed blessing to be sure, but
nonetheless, testimony to the power of the ideas Jesus proclaimed.
Howard Zinn was a
historian who studies history from the side of ordinary, forgotten people
rather than from the vantage point of winners and rulers as is often the
case.
In an article in the National Catholic Reporter written
shortly after Howard Zinn’s death, the writer told of hearing him advise a group of students who wanted to make an impact
in the world:
“Look for a peace movement to join,” he told students last
November in a talk. “It will look small, pitiful and helpless at first, but
that’s how all movements start.”[4]
The writer of this
article said that over lunch in Santa Fe a few years ago Zinn told a group that every major movement for social change in
our history was hopeless.
To John Dear , Zinn’s
words sounded hopeless. He summarized
Zinn’s thoughts, “Hopeless from the beginning, hopeless through the middle,
hopeless up to the very end -- people laboring toward a hopeless goal. But
then, like a bolt out of a blue sky, a breakthrough. The key [ Zinn]said, was that ordinary
people kept at it despite all evidence. Ordinary people doing their small acts
for justice every day -- here was the key. Over time peaceful acts add up to
something big. What the powerful fear most, he said, are the grass-roots
movements that won’t go away.”[5]
And then these words of
encouragement from Zinn, “Small acts,
when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government
can suppress, a power than can transform the world.”[6]
So, my friends, I invite
us to keep looking, not for the big things that make a splash for a moment, but
those small acts of faithfulness and love that Jesus promised would change the
world. Pray—for your friends and your
enemies, for our church, our city, and our world. Share your faith—not in some condescending,
brash, off-putting way, but by letting
other people know what God’s love has done for you. Invite someone, or better, bring someone to
worship with you and let them experience the joy of worshiping God and being
loved and accepted just as you are.
Serve—whenever and however you can.
Give—of yourself, your time, your money.
God’s promise to us is that when we sow the smallest of seeds, God will
use our efforts to change the world, to increase the reality of the reign of
God’s love, until one day that reign of love has the final word!
[1]“The World According to Steven
Wright,” accessed June 14, 2012,
[2] John
Buchanan, “Seeds Planted,” (sermon
preached at Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, June 14, 2009)
.
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