“Kin(g)dom”
June 16, 2024
Rev. Rebecca Migliore
We always talk about the “messianic secret” in the gospel of Mark. How Jesus didn’t want the disciples to tell anyone what they had discovered, or been shown—that this One they followed was the Messiah, the Chosen One of God. But I don’t know that I’ve given much thought to why the writer of the gospel of Mark would have been so keen to present Jesus this way. After spending some time with our reading for today, I might hazard a guess—maybe Jesus was always talking about secrets—talking in secrets—talking in parables—talking in code—with the words you say up here, but the meaning, for anyone in the know, way down here.
We are now in the “after” part of the Christian year—after Advent and Christmas and Epiphanytide, after Lent and Easter and Eastertide, after Pentecost, back in the ordinary ebb and flow of everyday life, of ordinary time. Which, of course, means that we have gone back to the front part of the gospel, where Jesus shows up to be baptized, to preach “the kingdom of God has come near,” to call disciples to follow, to teach, to preach, and to heal.
Just before this reading, Jesus has told his famous parable of the sower, where we have portrayed for us the way we might respond to the seed God has so graciously strewn all around. And then Jesus moves on to tell two other parables of the kingdom: the parable of the growing seed and the parable of the mustard seed. I don’t remember preaching on the growing seed—this is the only gospel that contains that particular parable. And I am not going to spend too much time on it today, other than to say that it is a wonderful compliment to the parable of the sower—a parable that might allow us to pat ourselves on the back and say, “well, I’m good soil—so there will be a wonderful multiplication!” Yeah me!
The growing seed parable shoots this down in a minute. Here we become the sower, and we continue with our lives, sleep and rise, night and day, and through nothing that WE do, the seed sprouts and grows, and produces first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain. God produces the secret growth—we are just the worker, setting up and cleaning up.
I was glad to read Ezekiel (as I’m sure Jesus did) with his image of God taking a twig and making of it a noble cedar, so that birds, birds of all kinds, could build their nests in its branches. It reminds me of the upending call of John the Baptist, “prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” Or as Ezekiel has God saying: “I bring low the high tree; I make high the low tree; I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish. I the Lord have spoken; I will accomplish it.”
I can imagine Jesus with a glint in his eye as he talks not about the mighty cedars, the precious wood that Solomon procured to make the temple for God in Jerusalem, but the lowly mustard plant. The pesky weed that most farmers would have torn out of their soil. The kingdom like that? These aren’t kingdom parables, they are anti-kingdom parables. And isn’t that the secret? God isn’t about what the world is about. We may say kingdom, we may say realm, we may say reign. But not in the way the world uses those words. This is anti—that. This is a redefinition of that. And that is where my sermon title comes from: kingdom with the (g) in parenthesis. Parables of God in this world.
Everyone would have known about mustard. It grew wild in the area. In the spring the untended fields would have been full of its yellow flowers. And as most wild plants, it was wonderful at propagating itself—it had to be, because mustard is an annual crop. It doesn’t come back year after year like a perennial. It has to be seeded again and again and again. But what it does do is spread like wildfire once it starts—and it spreads, not like a vine on the top of the soil, but through the root structure, under the ground, in secret.
Are you beginning to see Jesus’ not so little joke? Jesus takes Ezekiel’s image of mighty cedars and says, God’s kingdom is like a mustard seed. Small enough that the world waves it away as nothing. But in the world of God, it can grow exponentially, spreading underground, and then popping up everywhere. And like the Ezekiel image, inviting birds, all types of birds, to come and see, to come and make nests, to come and be a part of its ecosystem.
If you were to hear this parable without the secret code, you might think Jesus was a little loopy. Mustard plants are not the greatest of all shrubs. They don’t put forth large branches. Not in the world as we see it. But that is the point. God’s kingdom isn’t the world as we see it. It is the world as God sees it. And that world is like a mustard plant. It takes what is low and makes it high; it takes what is dry and makes it flourish. It turns everything upside down and inside out.
This is a word we need to hear today. We need to see that Jesus doesn’t just make stuff up. He is steeped in his Scripture. And then he plays with those images, pulling at them, making commentary on them, using them so they can say the same old things in a new way. Israel was no longer the top dog, the thing of beautiful cedar wood, of tall trees and large branches. Israel was an occupied country. It has known defeat and exile. The tree may have become a bush, the beloved cedar a worthless weed, but the word of the Lord remains the same. God will make of us something from whatever is. And that something has such value to our world that all the birds will come near, just as Isaiah envisions all the peoples of the world coming to worship on the holy mountain.
So what do we take from this? I think we should be comforted. I know there are many who look in dismay at what the church has become. They may remember the heady days of the 1950s when churches were filled to the brim. They may look at our empty pews, at our shrinking membership lists, and shake their heads.
Maybe what we should be doing is not whining about not being cedars anymore, rather looking around at what kind of mustard plants we can be. For it isn’t about us. God will take a cedar or a mustard plant and do the same thing—grow it in a way that seems secret to us, and then make of it something that can provide for others.
How can we be like a mustard plant? We can recognize that we are an annual plant, needing to reseed, and replant, and rework the soil, and fertilize and water and celebrate the secret growth. We can believe that even if we can’t see it on the surface, our root structure spreads underground. We can be like the tree in Psalm 1 that is planted by the stream of water. We can continue to drink deep of God’s living water, a water that is meant to bring justice to our world like raging waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream (as the prophet Amos dreamed).
We can stop listening to all the voices who are trying to measure quantity instead of quality, who are taken with size instead of integrity, who have lost touch with the fundamental bedrocks that Jesus listed as the most important of commandments—Loving God, Loving neighbor, Loving self. Mustard plants find their own beauty, and shine like the sun in their yellow array. It isn’t where they start out (one of the smallest of seeds), it is their persistence, their staying true to themselves, their using their strengths to accomplish their purposes, to accomplish God’s own purpose.
The secret of the kingdom of God is that it has nothing to do with kings. The secret of the realm of God is that it has nothing to do with worldly realms. The secret of the reign of God is that it has nothing to do with power as we know it. The secret is that God will be who God will be, just as God is who God is, and has been since the beginning.
As Jesus said to his disciples: “Let anyone with ears to hear, listen!”
I’d like to end with an acknowledgement of those who helped spark this sermon. To the anonymous writers (dare I say secret writers) of SALT whose “The Power of a Seed” commentary kickstarted my thinking. And to the powerful poem by Denise Levertov called “On the Parables of the Mustard Seed.” I’d like to close with her words.
“Whoever saw the mustard-plant
wayside weed or tended crop,
grow tall as a shrub, let alone a tree, a treeful of shade and nests and songs?
Acres of yellow, not a bird of the air in sight.
No, He who knew the west wind brings the rain,
The south wind thunder,
Who walked the field-paths running His hand along wheatstems to glean those intimate milky kernels,
good to break on the tongue,
was talking of miracle, the seed within us, so small
we take it for worthless, a mustard-seed, dust, nothing.
Glib generations mistake the metaphor, not looking at fields and trees,
not noticing paradox. Mountains remain unmoved.
Faith is rare, He must have been saying,
prodigious, unique—one infinitesimal grain divided like loaves and fishes,
as if from a mustard-seed a great shade-tree grew. That rare, that strange: the kingdom
a tree. The soul a bird. A great concourse of birds at home there, wings among yellow flowers.
The waiting kingdom of faith, the seed waiting to be sown.”
May it be so, Alleluia, Amen.