Mark 4:26-34 "Mystery Seeds" Scott Hoezee

If I begin this sermon by pointing out America's obsession with size, with bigness, with large quantities and huge selections of almost everything, you may merely yawn. You know this already. It is almost too obvious to point out yet again. But because this ethos affects also the church--in ways that may work at cross-purposes with Mark 4's words on the kingdom of God--perhaps it's worth pondering this for a bit anyway.

Because we are a nation obsessed with big things. In recent years people have made what could be described as pilgrimages to the Mall of America in Minnesota. Why? Is it because there is merchandise available there that cannot be found anywhere else? Is stuff cheaper there? No, but the Mall of America is the biggest mall in the country. Go to its website and you will see the vital statistics being loudly trumpeted: over 520 stores, employing over 12,000 people and attracting upwards of 42 million shoppers per year. This makes the Mall of America one of the most popular destinations in the country, receiving more visitors per year than Disney World, Graceland, and the Grand Canyon combined.

McDonalds and other fast food chains draw people in with the promise of being able to "Super Size" your meal. Seven-Eleven gives not just Slurpees but what they call "the Big Gulp," one of the largest fountain drinks anywhere. Better yet, there is the Super Big Gulp and most recently the Extreme Big Gulp served in a cup that looks like a NASA rocket booster and containing 54 ounces of soda (that's 1.3 liters if you are curious and if it is a non-diet soda, you are looking at about 700 calories of pop).

SUVs keep getting bigger, and people assume (wrongly) that bigger means not just better but safer. The governor-elect of the state with the biggest pollution problem drives a massive Hummer that gets about 11 MPG and looks like an armored personnel carrier barreling down the highway. Meanwhile "bigger is better" is the slogan behind satellite networks as well. Buy the premium package with some satellite-TV networks and you can receive no less than 500 channels. Who cares if nothing is on any of those channels, you'll never be bored again because it takes the entire evening just to surf through them all.

If you can put the prefix "mega-" in front of something, it is a good bet it will become hot. Megastore, Megaplex, Megamall, Megachannels, and yes, Megachurch--all such monikers flag places that people assume they should check out because if they are that big, they must be successful and if they are successful, they must be the best at whatever it is they do. This mentality infects our thinking so much that we end up feeling sorry for small businesses, for the tiny country church, for those who can afford only the modest-sized vehicle, the cracker box little house, the one-quarter carat diamond engagement ring.

Hence the focus of business, and also of churches, is growth. But you don't grow things simply by hoping for the best. To grow the economy, to grow a business, to grow your ministry requires due diligence, savvy marketing strategies, the investment of a lot of time and energy and capital. Success comes from hard work alone, failure from doing nothing. Or as one old saw has it, "People don't plan to fail, they fail to plan."

All of which makes Christianity a tough sell. At least that's what Mark tells us. If you gather together all of the parables of Jesus that had to do with the kingdom of God, generally speaking what you will discover are words to the effect that the kingdom, though the grandest, boldest, brightest reality of them all, will nine times out of ten look small.

The kingdom of God is over and again that small thing that all-but gets lost in the hubbub of the wider world. The kingdom is not advertised on some glitzy neon sign towering over Times Square but rather it's the treasure buried in a field. It's not an expensive jewel displayed under plate glass and bright lights at Saks Fifth Avenue but it is the pearl of great price that someone just happens to stumble upon in an unlikely place. The kingdom does not call attention to itself like a marching band coming down the street with brass and drums blaring but is instead the yeast that disappears into the larger lump of dough, the tiniest of all seeds that vanishes almost the very moment it hits the soil.

In the first of tonight's two parables, Jesus points to the mystery of the kingdom. It's like a farmer who tosses seed out onto a field and then walks away. He sleeps, he gets up. Days come and days go but somehow, even as the farmer is doing apparently nothing, the seeds grow. In verse 28 you read the phrase "all by itself," and in Greek that is the word automate, from which we of course get our word "automatic." Automatically, mysteriously, without any apparent outside assistance, the seeds just grow and suddenly the day arrives when you've got a whole field of wheat ready to be harvested.

Although this parable of the growing seed is among the shortest of all parables, it has proven to be surprisingly difficult to interpret. Scholars cannot agree what the key element is here: is it the power of the seeds, the inactivity of the farmer, the mystery of how seeds do what they do? What is the point here? Surely this is not meant to foster inactivity on our part. Following on this morning's sermon, it would be profoundly odd if now this evening I suggested that it doesn't matter whether you witness to the kingdom or not. It would even be a bit startling if the bottom line here was that we really shouldn't think much about the growth of God's kingdom one way or the other.

In short, don't walk away from Mark 4 singing "Que sera, sera--whatever will be, will be." Just because the word "automatic" gets used here, don't assume that this sermon will suggest switching your life onto autopilot and just coast. That would be a profoundly inappropriate way to finish off our Mission Emphasis week! But before suggesting what this parable of the growing seed does mean, let's first tie it in with the following story.

If the growing seed parable seems to be about the mystery of kingdom growth, the mustard seed image is about the apparent weakness of the kingdom. The day will come when the results of the kingdom's silent, steady growth will be impressive. Meanwhile don't be surprised if the seeds you plant look ineffective. Don't be surprised if the witness you have to offer gets laughed at on account of looking so puny. It's the old "Jack and the Beanstalk" fable: Jack's mother scorns the tiny beans he brings home from the market. They can never live off those! So in anger she hurls them out the window. Those beans were a non-starter, a mistake, a dead-end nutritionally and in every other sense. Except that, of course, they ended up sprouting into a beanstalk that went, in a way, clear up to heaven.

But Jesus says the gospel message will get a similar reception. We live in a universe and in a world with huge threats to existence and with sickeningly large social and geopolitcal problems. There are meteors hurtling through space, many of which would wipe out life on earth if they struck us. There are dictators harboring or seeking weapons of mass destruction, many of which threaten our survival as a species. In the Middle East but in so many other places, too, there are seemingly intractable hatreds and prejudices between and among various ethnic groups. There are diseases like AIDS galloping through Africa, threatening to wipe out the better part of an entire generation of people. Hunger and poverty loom up like a whole mountain range of daunting problems whose heights we don't know how to scale.

Yet in the midst of all these threats from within and from without, in the face of great sin and evil, faced with maladies that are global in scope, we Christian people swing in with no more than that simplest of all messages: Jesus saves. A Jewish carpenter's son from halfway around the world and from over 2,000 years ago is the one we hold up as some kind of solution. And not a few folks today want to say, "Give me a break!"

Every day the "Congressional Record" is published and it is each and every day a very thick book detailing every word spoken on the floor of the House and Senate. Every week the Bush Administration issues a flurry of new policy initiatives, also totaling into the thousands of pages. The United Nations works hard to cobble together solutions and coalitions aimed at addressing what ails this world. Were you to bring together all the newspaper sections that record the daily activity on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nikei Index, the Chicago Board of Trade, and all other financial markets in the world, you would have a stack of newsprint many inches thick.

Such a huge output of words, such a thick volume of records detailing the policy efforts of governments: that is the kind of thing you expect when people seriously tackle this world's challenges. Yet we Christians stand on the sidelines and what do we offer? The thin, sixteen-chapter little volume called the Gospel of Mark. It's small. It's old. And although we don't say we could do without the efforts of government or of those involved in commerce, we do make the audacious claim that none of those things is ultimately very meaningful compared to the gospel.

But to so much of our size-crazed culture, the gospel is too small for the task at hand. In the face of untold millions of starving people, we seem to offer just five loaves and two fish. In the face of trillion-dollar federal and international budgets, we seem to celebrate the widow's penny going into the collection plate. In the face of hostile terrorists and repressive regimes headed up by the hounds of hell itself, we dispatch lamb-like folks to China and the Sudan and Afghanistan as missionaries witnessing to the Lamb who was slain. None of it seems equal to the task of reaching, much less changing, this sorry and troubled old world.

But we do it all because we believe that somehow, some way, it's going to work. If we yoke these two parables now, we can see both the theme of how puny our efforts look and our ardent faith that even though we don't understand how these kingdom seeds grow, they do whether we are watching or not, whether we are tending them every moment or not. They grow silently and mysteriously in people's hearts. The seeds didn't look like much to begin with and they grow without making much noise. If you go sit next to a wheatfield a week or two after the seeds have been sown into the earth, you could sit on the edge of that field all day and throughout an entire night and you'd never hear a blessed thing.

On Wall Street, the moment that opening bell sounds each day, there is an immediate frenzy of activity. That loud baying for money creates a cacophony that pierces your gizzard with its shrill intensity. If you were on the Senate floor during a debate, you'd feel the sizzle in the air. They say that when Lyndon B. Johnson was the most powerful Senator, he would give people what became known as "the Johnson treatment." He'd loop one of his powerful and long arms around another Senator's shoulders and then lean his massive face directly into the other man's face, all the while poking and jabbing and thumping his index finger into the man's sternum until he cowed him into agreement. Now that's power at work!

But a growing wheat field makes none of the noise of a stock exchange and has none of the sizzle of high-powered politicking. The Jesus whose kingdom we present jabs no fingers into anyone's chest. He invites with gentle words, "Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest." But people don't want quiet invitations to rest. They want powerful and inspirational promises of success. But our Lord himself said that this is not how you get into his kingdom.

We know this, but we have a hard time holding onto this message in this society. We want to Super Size the gospel. If we can't be a megachurch, we want to at least take on the trappings of a megachurch and so we install rock bands and praise teams, PowerPoint-driven sermons illustrated with movie clips on a Jumbotron videoscreen. We take our cues from savvy church marketing executives who sell prepackaged kits to help you grow your ministries in ways that will make people flock to your doors as though you were the Mall of America. Churches hide the baptismal font and the communion table but they do visit the local Starbucks to get design ideas to build churches that look like coffee houses.

But, of course, it is not as though it is all wrong to seek ways to reach people with the gospel. Calvin is no contemporary church and has generally avoided the excesses of the megachurch movement, but we are not adverse to trying to make a good impression on our city. In our own building refit, we knew that nicer and more convenient nurseries, brighter fellowship space, room for dinners and after-church coffee were vital if we were to be a vibrant ministry center. But Mark 4 claims that we must never forget that none of our external looks, none of our savvy strategies, and none of our various attempts to stay current finally makes the difference.

Because if we become too focused on technique, we may be tempted to retool the one thing we must never retrofit: the simple gospel that Jesus is the Son of God who saves us by his death and resurrection. That core message must never change, and we must never try to change it just because people deem it old-fashioned, out of step, weak, vulnerable, silly, or inadequate-looking given the challenges facing the world today.

Some weeks ago we looked at the first part of Mark 4 where Jesus explains why he taught the crowds in parables. We were surprised to hear Jesus say that the reason he spoke in parables was because he did not want the people to understand. He did not want them to hitch their wagons to his supposedly rising star too quickly. Now near the end of Mark 4 we see in verses 33-34 a similarly startling image. Jesus takes care to explain things in private to his disciples in a way he apparently did not explain matters in public.

These days churches will do everything possible to be understood. Some will even throw out massive pieces of the tradition in the fear that theological language, creeds, conventional sermon forms, and the like may be too difficult for people to accept. So we borrow formats from TV in order above all else to be intelligible to postmodern people who doubt there is such a thing as truth. Yet oddly enough at the center of the very gospel we want to present, we find a Jesus who explains privately why the gospel sometimes simply must be publicly confusing and apparently weak.

As we close Mission Emphasis tonight, we are faced squarely with as large a challenge as the church has ever faced: the challenge of reaching a success-oriented, "big is better" culture with the gospel yet without turning that gospel into yet another piece of cultural bric-a-brac.

This morning we wondered if we have the right dual vision to be motivated to say something rather than nothing to a lost and dying world. Tonight we need to dovetail with that by asking for the Spirit's guidance to help us not just to say something but speak the real gospel truth without compromise. We need courage to offer the world the only thing we have to give, no matter how foolish, no matter how seemingly weak, no matter how apparently silly it may look to the power-hungry people around us. Yes, we do finally need to be understood by those around us. But may God give the resolve and the courage to make sure that what gets understood is, in the end as in the beginning, the words of life that only Jesus can give. Amen.