© 2024 Evan D. Garner
Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.
The kingdom of God is like a preacher, who sets his alarm the night before Daylight Saving Time. He sleeps and wakes every hour or two, checking his phone to see if it has automatically sprung forward. Each time, he compares the display on his phone with the analog watch he put on his nightstand just to be sure. A little after 2:00 in the morning, he sees that his smart phone has done the same thing it has done every year for almost two decades, and he drifts off to sleep, still not sure how it works but grateful that Steve Jobs made it possible for him not to worry about oversleeping.
The reign of God is like a patron of the Fayetteville Public Library, who forgot about the book she checked out two weeks ago until she got a text message letting her know that it has automatically be renewed. She’s not sure why the library doesn’t go ahead and make it a four-week check-out period since she never returns her books until after the second two weeks are up, but she’s grateful that the library knows she wants to renew it even before she does.
The way God envisions the world to be is like an eight-year-old who puts a bag of popcorn into the microwave and presses the popcorn button. After two and a half minutes of watching the timer count down, she opens the door and pulls out a puffed-up bag of yummy, buttery goodness. She doesn’t know a thing about the vibrational frequencies of water molecules and the microwave radiation that excites them until they boil over, exploding each kernel like a miniature starch grenade, but she knows that, without fail, what started as a flat envelope of inedible seeds and salt will become a tasty snack.
There’s no such thing as a perfect parable because parables aren’t supposed to be perfect. They aren’t intended to convey the full, complete picture of what God’s reign looks like, but they do give us an important glimpse into what God sees among us. Parables can be simple comparisons—like the parable of the mustard seed—or they can be complex narratives—like the parable of the prodigal son. When we encounter a parable, we must resist the temptation to over-interpret it, forcing it to yield more than it was designed to convey. We must instead allow the parable to work on us, gradually and persistently, until a deeper knowledge of God and God’s kingdom has become clear, even if that insight isn’t as profound as we’d hoped.
When Jesus tells a parable, he always has a goal in mind—a truth or an insight he wishes to convey—but to try to unlock a parable as if it were a mystery or a riddle to be solved is to miss the richness of this teaching technique. Parables may have a central goal or purpose, but there’s always more to them than a simple, straightforward interpretation. To mine one of these similitudes for its true value is to stretch it beyond the point of logic or reasonableness before allowing it to snap back into its more familiar shape. Sometimes we learn best what Jesus is teaching us by straying off into the realm of the absurd before returning back to what really makes sense. And sometimes Jesus’ parables teach us something that Jesus himself would not have recognized when he spoke these words so long ago.
“The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how…With what can we compare the kingdom of God…? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs.” What is Jesus trying to teach us, and why does he need these parables to get his teaching across?
Jesus lived at a time when faithful people were eager for God to come and make all things right. They waited and watched and hoped for the day when God’s judgment would come and God’s vision for their lives would finally be fulfilled. Sound familiar? They had been taught all the same things about God that we have been taught—that God is powerful, that God is loving, that God is merciful, that God is just. They knew that God is faithful and that, because God is faithful, one day God would come and fulfill God’s promise to establish God’s perfect reign on the earth. And, as they waited and hoped and believed that that day would come, their prayers sounded a lot like ours: How long, O Lord? How long?
It’s hard to know where to look for God’s kingdom when so many people in the world experience so much pain. It’s hard to remember to watch for God’s reign every day when it feels like things are getting worse, not better. Surely that’s not what God envisions for our lives. We want to see signs that God is in charge and that all the things that stand in the way of God’s perfect, loving reign have been extricated from our lives. We want to look around and see clear evidence that God’s kingdom has come and that God’s will is being done here on the earth just as much as it is in heaven. And, when that evidence is hard to see—when God takes longer than we’d like—we’d just assume God step aside and let us take over. But do you know what God’s kingdom looks like? Do you know where we are supposed to look in order to see it?
It is like a farmer who scatters seeds on the ground and who sleeps and rises, night and day, beholding the miracle of those seeds sprouting and growing one day at a time. Jesus probably didn’t mean to imply that the farmer sits around and does nothing. Someone has to water, fertilize, and weed the crops in order to coax them into their full potential. But it’s kind of fun and informative to contrast in hyperbolic ways Jesus’ portrayal of the man with that of the earth, which Jesus tells us “produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.” The word Jesus used to describe how the earth produces the grain is “automate,” from which we get the word “automatically.” In other words, we might be called to tend God’s garden, but no matter how eager we are to see it bear fruit, we aren’t the ones who make it happen.
The sexton at St. John’s in Montgomery, Mike Jarrell, used to grow lots of tomatoes every summer. He would sell them to parishioners on Sunday mornings, using a scale in the church’s kitchen, and sometimes he would give the clergy a paper sack full for free. One spring, I asked Mike if he was growing any tomatoes, knowing that the answer would be yes, but he quickly snapped back, “I don’t grow tomatoes. I plant and water them. God is the one who grows them.” I guess he paid better attention to the parable than I did.
In these parables, Jesus teaches us that God has scattered the seeds of the kingdom all over the earth. As that kingdom grows among us, we may not understand any better than the farmer how God achieves that growth, but Jesus has taught us to trust that the seeds which have been scattered will grow and bear fruit for the harvest. And he teaches us to believe that, even though the growth comes more slowly than we’d like, God will bring all things to their perfection in God’s perfect time.
We may want God’s reign to be as strong and tall and majestic as a cedar of Lebanon, but Jesus teaches us to look for that reign not in battlements and fortresses but wherever a mustard seed has been planted. That’s because God’s kingdom shows up whenever something small and insignificant grows big enough to provide shelter for anyone who seeks it.
How else could we possibly understand the nature of God’s reign if it weren’t given to us in parables? How would we ever make sense of Jesus’ death if we hadn’t been taught to look for God’s triumph where the world fails to see?
Everything Jesus taught the crowds, Mark tells us, was in parables. Maybe Jesus used parables because it’s easier to get from this world into the kingdom of God through story, analogy, comparison, and play than through explanation, definition, interpretation, and direct instruction. Maybe the only way we can receive the reign of God is backwards and strange and full of surprise.
As Emily Dickinson wrote,
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind — [1]
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1. Dickinson, Emily, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Ralph W. Franklin, ed. Belknap Press; Harvard, MA: 1998. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56824/tell-all-the-truth-but-tell-it-slant-1263.
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