… and Branches
Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham
April 30, 2006

Jesus spoke about the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of heaven many times, most often in parables or in metaphors or similes.  He chose these ways of talking about this elusive kingdom because it is a paradoxical sort of kingdom–not the sort of kingdom his listeners were expecting or hoping for, but rather something radically new and different, something so different it couldn’t just be described, it had to be compared to other things—many other things—so that his listeners could grasp—if they had ears to hear—what this kingdom was about.  Jesus tells improbable stories clothed in everyday events, or sometimes completely familiar stories with a new twist of meaning, or perhaps just an off-the-cuff comparison or metaphor—the kingdom is like this, or like that.
The story and the two metaphors from the gospel reading this morning are indicative of his technique:  A sower went forth to sow; the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, or like yeast.  Part of the point of these stories and comparisons is to catch us off guard, to see something new in the familiar, to sense a possibility that isn’t obvious at first glance, to open our eyes anew.  This Kingdom of God is hard to describe, so the stories and comparisons are designed to arrest our attention and to puzzle us.
The Kingdom of God doesn’t work so well as a business plan.  Goal setting and management by objectives are foreign to it.  You can’t look it up on MapQuest.  Something unexpected, almost miraculous happens as part of its emergence, and yet there is clearly human agency involved as well.  Above the human action, though, there is something more, something we might call grace.  Here’s another story Jesus tells that brings out something of this elusive quality [Matt. 20:1-16].  A landlord goes out early in the morning to hire laborers to bring in the harvest from his vineyard.  He promises them the usual daily wage.  He goes to the market at again noon and finds other laborers standing around idle and hires them as well, promising he will pay them whatever is right.  He goes again at three and once more at five and does the same.  At the end of the day, he tells his manager to give the laborers their due, starting from the last hired, and each receives the usual daily wage.  Those who started in the morning and worked through the heat of the day start grumbling, saying that it isn’t fair they should get only as much as those who worked only a few hours.  The landlord reminds them that it is, after all, his money and he can do what he wants with it.  He goes on, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?” and then Jesus adds, “So the last will be first, and the first will be last." [Matt. 20:15-16] 
What are we to make of this?  It clearly violates our fair labor practice laws.  We all understand that the one who works more is rewarded more, and we certainly want to train up our children to understand that hard work has its rewards.  Perhaps the clue lies in the words “the usual daily wage,” or a denarius, or a penny, the amount necessary in those days for a day laborer to get food and shelter for the night.  Perhaps this is an echo of what we say in the Prayer of Jesus, “Give us this day our daily bread.”  Each was given what he needed; some received more than they had earned, but not more than what they needed.  So this is what the Kingdom of God would be like.
But the word Kingdom itself is troublesome for us.  In the time of Jesus, kings and lords and emperors ruled.  Today, there are a few kings and an emperor or two, but which of us would long for a kingdom?  The language is no longer compelling to us.  The image is off-putting, making God out to be a King, the kind of political leader we don’t particularly care for.  This nation was founded on kicking out the king.  How can we understand the Kingdom of God as something other than a specialized religious term which sounds odd in our ears because it’s no longer drawn from our daily living?  That’s one of the reasons that Martin Luther King, Jr., and others have chosen to speak of the Beloved Community rather than the Kingdom of God.  In a kingdom, someone must be king.  In a community, we’re all in it together.  Sometimes Martin put it harshly:  “Now the judgment of God is upon us, and we must learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.”   So the Beloved Community, or the kingdom, means living together as brothers and sisters, and the alternative is destruction.
The sower in the first story of the scripture reading sows the seeds broadcast; some goes to feed the birds, some seeds lack soil to nourish them and enable them to grow roots, some fall among thistles and are choked out by weeds, but some fall on good soil, put down deep roots, and return thirty, sixty or a hundredfold.  What does this parable tell us?  When I was growing up, I was taught that it was about spreading the gospel as our church understood it, a set of beliefs that people would accept or not.  I think there’s a much richer sense here, though.  We are all sowers, and we all sow seeds in our daily living.  We can’t always control the result of our labors, and sometimes our best efforts seem futile. Our kids don’t listen to what we say, we feel as though nothing we’re doing is bearing fruit, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, something takes and it all seems to turn around in an abundant harvest.  Some seeds grow more abundantly than others for all kinds of reasons, and we don’t supply all the ingredients that make them grow.  Some seeds grow great trees whose branches bear fruit and create a canopy over us.  We don’t supply the sun, or the germ of life in the seed, or the soil which provides nourishing food for the primal potential of the seed; instead, we give thanks for what is given us, for our very lives, for this earth which grows the seed, for our daily bread.
The mustard seed is proverbially the tiniest of seeds which nevertheless creates a plant of enormous size.  How is this like the Kingdom of God, or the Beloved Community?  Just how big the shrub grows is reported variously in the gospels of Matthew, Luke, and Thomas.  The first two accounts exaggerate the size well beyond our expectations—“it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree,” so large that the birds nest in its branches.  In the Gospel of Thomas, on the other hand, Jesus says:  “It's like a mustard seed. (It's) the smallest of all seeds, but when it falls on prepared soil, it produces a large plant and becomes a shelter for birds of the sky.”  [Gospel of Thomas, 20:2-4]  Perhaps the story was modified in the course of oral transmission and became shaped by other metaphors—of trees reaching to the heavens with their great branches, for example.  In Thomas, the birds shelter under, in the other gospels the birds rest on top of the branches, since they love the mustard seeds that grow on the shrub.  What is growing here?  The tiniest seed becomes a great plant, perhaps even a tree with sweeping branches.  What seeds are we sowing that are tiny but have great potential?  What little choices do we make that bend our character to greater strength?      What seeds of kindness do we sow to help plant the Beloved Community? 
A tale of the Buddha tells about mustard seed as well.  A certain woman has an only son who dies and in her grief she goes from person to person carrying her dead infant and demanding medicine to make him well.  Finally someone has pity for her and sends her to the Buddha.  When she asks him for a curative medicine, he says “I want a handful of mustard seed.” With great joy she turns to get it, for every house will surely have mustard seed.  “But,” the Buddha adds, "The mustard-seed must be taken from a house where no one has lost a child, husband, parent, or friend."  The grieving mother goes from house to house and people gladly offer her the mustard seed, but when she asks, “Did a son or daughter, a father or mother, die in your family?" they tell her the story of their deepest grief as she shares her bitter grief with them.  And there was no house but some beloved one had died in it.  Finally, as she watches the lights of the city flicker out one by one, she feels a deep compassion for all of her fellow villagers as well as for herself and her own grief.  
Jesus speaks of the mustard seed in another place, where he says, “If you have faith [as a grain of] mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you."  [Matt. 17:20]  Here Jesus is using the mustard seed as a unit of measure, and he means “the tiniest bit of faith,” but I remember hearing this verse when I was young and wondering what sort of faith a mustard seed could have, anyway?  Was this tiny seed somehow willing itself to become a great shrub, sort of like the little engine that could:  “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can”?  Let’s make our own metaphor out of that silly fantasy!  “The Beloved Community springs forth from faith like the faith a mustard seed has.”  The mustard seed simply is—itself.  It has the gift of a tiny germ of life inside it, and it gives the gift of what it has within it.  It doesn’t think, or weigh the odds of success, or come up with a 33-day plan to become a great shrub, try to figure out the bottom line, it just—is!  Imagine if we could live in such confidence that we have been given gifts to give to the world and that our gifts will grow a Beloved Community, a kingdom, a place of joy and fulfillment for everyone.  Wouldn’t that be satisfying?  Wouldn’t that be a worthy way to live our lives?  The faith of a mustard seed; I think I like our metaphor.  Can we imagine this church as being full of mustard seed faith?  As being a place where every one of us brought our gifts and found fulfillment as we grew in integrity, in compassion, in satisfaction with our ability to give and receive?  A place where our deep roots could bring forth great trees with fruit-filled branches?  Such a place would draw others who need such a Beloved Community, who want to be part of such a kingdom, who are hungry for a place where they, too, can grow into something far greater than they can even imagine. 
Or what about the yeast that causes the whole bread to rise?  The yeast as Jesus tells it is hidden inside the dough, invisible on the outside, but capable of a great transformation by working on the inside.  Consider a situation at your job or in a meeting where meanness has settled in and where, for the sake of argument, ethnic slurs or sexist jokes are being shared, or where one person is being attacked to make someone else feel good.  Could you provide the yeast to raise the level of that conversation?  Could you say something kind to stop cruelty?  Could you plant a seed of hope to counteract a mood of despair?  Do you have a gift to offer?
Gandhi speaks of this community, this kingdom, in these terms:
My experience tells me that the Kingdom of God is within us, and that we can realize it not by saying “Lord, Lord,” but by doing His will and His work.  If, therefore, we wait for the Kingdom to come as something coming from outside, we shall be sadly mistaken.
Such a community is the work of our own hands.  We must sow the seeds.  Not every seed bears fruit, and there are discouraging times when we need companions on our journey to help us keep on giving of our gifts despite discouragement.  We need to retain an attitude of ultimate optimism, remembering that while the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends toward justice.  Such a community is also a result of grace; we cannot control and guide every step of the way.  The seed is planted and tended and given the right conditions and then the miracle of growth happens and we come back to harvest the fruits.
My friends, what seeds are we sowing within ourselves, in the hearts and minds of our children, within this church?  What gifts do we bring to offer of ourselves that can help others to find their way and offer their own gifts?  We spoke with the children about Ping’s seed, which turned out not to be the seed of a flower but the seed of integrity and of character fitting him for a great work in his life.  The story about the Buddha is about the seed of compassion that is harvested precisely in the midst of sorrow and suffering.  Jesus speaks of the seeds of the Kingdom, of the Blessed Community.  All of these are parables, stories of paradox, of unexpected and wonderful outcomes, because we must sow our own seeds.  Life doesn’t come with an instruction manual but rather with many clues; we have to solve the puzzles of our own lives.  There’s what we are given by our parents and their parents to the dawn of time, by God, if you will—our gifts and potential, our very lives—added to what we do with it, and then there’s grace, which brings forth results far greater than we can imagine. 
That’s the work of this place—helping to nurture our gifts and those of our children, companioning one another on the journey, walking together in sorrow and in joy, and harvesting the results together.  May we prove worthy of the challenge and the opportunity laid before us.

Amen
Benediction
May the seeds we plant bear fruit;
May our deep roots support the great branches which may grow here;
May the children in our charge grow in wisdom and understanding;
May we have faith in the gifts we are given;
May we give as we have received;
May our lives together and apart be blessed to ourselves, to each other,
And to this broken world to which we are given as gifts.
Amen