Pentecost 2 Year B

1 Samuel 15:34-16:13 NRSV text
Psalm 20 NRSV text
2 Corinthians 5: 6-17 NRSV text
Mark 4: 26-34 NRSV text

 

Our task is to be faithful, not successful. In a culture that is outcome-oriented, constantly devising measurable goals in order to quantify performance and achievement, the two parables of the seed growing secretly and the mustard seed stand as a profoundly counter-cultural sign. We will all have to give an account of our discipleship and ministry to God, Paul reminds us in today’s epistle (2 Corinthians 5:10), but we will be judged on our faithfulness, not on results. In the final analysis, the outcomes of our mission and ministry are dependent on God.

Measuring life by a different set of criteria is as important and challenging today as it was to both Jesus and Paul. Jesus’ own ministry was hardly a glorious success! That may be a shocking and sobering thought, but it’s actually true. Jesus did indeed attract a huge following and a widespread reputation. He did well. He was certainly the centre of attention wherever he went, and whatever else he was, he was neither boring nor anonymous! You couldn’t be neutral about Jesus. Either you loved him, or you hated him. He didn’t allow disinterested neutrality: he forced his hearers to make decisions.

Yet for all that, his mission was a gigantic failure. This is Mark’s gospel we’re in, remember. The final verdict on his ministry is the cross. Even Jesus’ closest, most faithful and enthusiastic followers will desert him. His most voluble supporter will deny three times even knowing him. His central message of the kingdom – the context for all his notable “successes” in healing, exorcisms and miracles – will be utterly rejected. He is the Messiah – but people ultimately don’t want the kind of Messiah he is. He is the Son of God, and he will die screaming in bewilderment, “Why have you forsaken me?”

Paul didn’t fare much better. The church at Corinth was his church. Yet, in his absence, it had been infiltrated by other, more impressive and successful preachers and leaders who had won significant followings. They seemed far more “spiritual”. They were more credible than Paul. Their theology appeared deeper and wiser. Paul had become passé – “yesterday’s man”. He was criticised openly and vehemently by some, and regarded with amused tolerance by others as a madman (cf 2 Corinthians 5: 13). Here in the letter he has to defend both himself and his ministry. So much for the seed he had selflessly sown – and at such personal cost – in Corinth!

Doesn’t that ring bells with being the church today? Ministry is incredibly difficult. It is soul-destroying. I run ministers’ pre-retirement courses at the Windermere Centre, where, on several occasions, ministers have agonised over whether or not their ministries have been a total waste of time and life. That is tragic – but it is a realistic response to a life measured by achievable goals and measurable outcomes.

 

The parables of seeds growing: Good News for battered ministers!

Of course, by “ministers”, I don’t just mean ordained ministers of Word and Sacrament. Today’s parables are Good News for all of us who are engaged in God’s mission of the kingdom and who are discouraged by the devastatingly obvious lack of success that we experience. They ought to encourage us. Of course, we need to remember that these are parables, rather than explanations. When we dissect them (when we get bogged down in discussions about how a farmer does more than just sow, but prepares and fertilisers the ground etc; when we note, for example, that the mustard seed is not the smallest seed, and that mustard plants are shrubs rather than enormous trees), we miss the point. A parable is designed to effect a paradigm shift. It reconfigures a situation, so that we look at it from a different perspective. In doing so, the whole of reality becomes reconfigured. We no longer look at it with the same criteria (in this case, through the eyes of measured achievement). Parables aim for the “Aha!” moment – the gestalt switch. They’re meant to be “got”, rather than understood. Some people “get” them (as Mark reminds us in 4:33); others just don’t. So what are we supposed to “get” here?

1. Sowers, not growers
It is our task to sow seeds. Period. Thereafter, we cannot control what happens. We can do everything we can to ensure that we communicate the gospel as faithfully and effectively as possible. At the end of the day, though, we cannot legislate or control how it will be received. The gospel is a message; an invitation; a gift. What happens to the seed we sow depends in no small part on the hearers. There are no formulae that we can follow to ensure that it will produce the desired harvest, because the image here is of growing, not building. Jesus doesn’t say that we are engaged in placing one brick upon another, cementing them into place, ensuring that the angles are correct. He talks about a farmer scattering seed on the ground. That is all the framer can do. What happens next depends on the soil, the weather and the processes of nature. And the good news is that nature brings life and growth! Not always, it is tragically true, but it is essentially orientated towards life.

That is true also of God. God wills Life, not death. We are in the hands of a God whose passion for Life and the earth’s flourishing will not be deflected, crushed or thwarted. When things die – when you bury seeds in the ground – they spring to life! It’s miraculous, because it has nothing to do with us – but it’s also the way of things. There is real liberation in knowing that we are not in control, because we are not, therefore, finally responsible for those processes. It’s liberating because it stops the endless anxiety of searching for that elusive formula that will guarantee success; that endless, anxious self-examination that says, “There must be something wrong with me (or “us”)!” Like the farmer in the parable, we can sleep peacefully at night, because we can’t do anything further.

2. Sowers, not necessarily reapers
Growth takes time. That may be obvious, but we live in an age that expects and values instant results. We are endless “tinkerers”, trying to manipulate things to ensure that we see our desired outcomes as quickly as possible. The natural world is a wonderful counter to human hubris. We measure things in life-spans of 70-90 years: nature operates in aeons. Did the farmer who planted the olives in Gethsemane know – or care – that the same trees in whose shade Jesus wrestled with God would be yielding fruit in the 21^st century? This is God’s timescale. The promise of the parable is that we cannot possibly know what our seeds will yield over time. But we do know this: they have eternal significance.

3. Size doesn’t matter!
What we sow yields results out of all proportion to the size of the seed planted. That is enormously encouraging (no pun intended!). What is the difference between faith and fantasy; between realistic belief and blind optimism? This is an important question because the evidence for God, for the growth of the kingdom, for the fact that we are not just squandering our lives on some sort of utopia is ambiguous at best and generally pretty firmly against us. There is little evidence that we are making a real difference to the world. The state of the Church is hardly a source of hope! Even if it is going wonderfully well in our little section of the field, we know enough about the wider picture to realise that this will have at least as much to do with local factors, circumstances and coincidences as it does with the movement of the Spirit. Our faith is about God’s salvation for the world. It doesn’t do simply to say, “Well, at least it’s working here!” That’s a return to the notion of tribal gods, not faith in the God of the Universe. Unambiguous “hard evidence” would have to show that things are progressing generally and globally; that growth and harvest are the rule rather than the exception. And that is not the weight of the evidence.

But we do have reason to hope! Our faith is not “blind” or fantastical. There is evidence – not knock-down, unambiguous proof, to be sure, but then, we’re talking of faith here, not certainty! The “evidence”, if you like, is more akin to the microscope than the telescope. With a microscope, we could see the processes of life and growth in the seed. And when the seed germinates, we know that it will grow into something immensely bigger than what was sown.

That is the point of Jesus’ healings and exorcisms. They happen in small ways – to this individual and that. Yet they carry within them the promise of something much bigger. The healing of a leper carries the promise of the healing of the world. The deliverance of a demon-possessed man points to the liberation of the human race. The feeding of 5,000+ signals the end of starvation. The raising of a friend announces the final destruction of death’s reality.

That’s the same lesson that we learn from Samuel anointing David in today’s reading from 1 Samuel 15. Samuel is grieving over Saul. He had anointed Saul, and it had gone spectacularly pear-shaped. He had seen Saul for the last time. And now Yahweh sends him off to dome godforsaken, unimportant place (Bethlehem), to anoint a new king. It’s one of Jesse’s sons. Who’s Jesse, for goodness’ sake? Why not pick someone notable! Yet Samuel heads off as instructed. He’s looking for a big bloke. That’s the point about him looking at each of the “possibles” in turn. Yet it isn’t any of these – it’s the boy whom even Jesse didn’t think was worth mentioning! What small beginnings – a prophet anointing a young shepherd boy, privately, in an obscure village. And yet what incredible things are to come from this! Size and the spectacular don’t matter. Faithfulness does. Thank God for Samuel’s faithfulness!

We need to learn to “think small”; to read the very small signs of transformation, and then commit ourselves to the God whose vision is global in size.

4. Sowers of a new world
It often feels as though we’re engaged in “ambulance ministry” rather than wholesale transformation. Yet the isolated, individual things we do are part of nothing less than a new world.

The “birds of the air” who build their nests in the mustard tree are symbolic of the Gentile nations. Jesus is making a point about Jewish eschatology: the belief that Israel’s Messiah will make the nation the centre of God’s salvation that will extend over the whole earth. This is the “kingdom” that Jesus proclaims – the kingdom that is the subject of these parables. Biblical images of salvation are frequently about abundant plants – forests, harvests, bumper crops. There is a strong theological tradition of the effects of sin and fallenness that plays on the image of “frustrated fruitfulness”. We fins it in the narrative of the Fall and the curse in Genesis 3: 17-19. The earth is created intrinsically fruitful. The experience of having to wrest food from the ground is symbolic of the disorder of sin. Not only human beings, but the whole creation is “groaning in bondage to decay”. Salvation time is therefore portrayed in terms of release from famine and infertility.

What we are to take from this parable is the encouragement and assurance that what we are doing by visiting someone who is housebound, caring for the sick, fighting for someone’s rights, helping them to discover faith in Jesus Christ, nurturing them in their growth, is nothing other than sowing seeds of a new world.

That is what Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians 5:17: to be “in Christ” is to be part of the new creation. It began with the resurrection of Jesus. Ultimately, Jesus is the seed of the kingdom that died and was buried – and sprang to life. To be “in Christ” is, like Jesus and through Jesus, to have died to the old world, and to have been raised to new life. We are a new creation. Yet we must not interpret that individualistically. It is something that must become a personal reality, but its purpose is global. Note what Paul says in vv 14-15: he died for all so that all might live! We are not just individually new creations in Christ: we are individually new creations because we have become part of the New Creation in Christ – the new world of the kingdom, symbolised by the mustard tree in which the birds of the air are nesting.

Sowing with an eye to a future that we might not see, but believe in faith to be the ultimate goal of all we do. Sowing, believing that our contribution, however small, is a contribution to something much greater than we can possibly imagine. Sowing in the faith that this is in the hands of the God who raises the dead, brings the harvest and is delighted by our faithfulness: now there’s something to keep us going!

 

Amen.