A Sermon from the Episcopal Parish of
St. John the Evangelist in Hingham, Massachusetts
Preached by the Rev. Timothy E. Schenck on June 14, 2015 (Proper 6, Year B)
One of the great things about Google Earth is that it gives you a God’s-eye view of anywhere in the world. With just a few clicks, you can see satellite images of any place on the globe — well, not North Korea and Iran and several other places. But you can zoom in and see almost any other place in the entire world. Which can be fairly voyeuristic, as in “I had no idea our neighbor had a swimming pool tucked away in that hidden back yard!” Or you can check out the location of a hotel to make sure they’re as close to downtown as their website claims.
I used Google Earth to look at the church this week — which I’d never done before — and was amazed at just how thick those bushes were in front of the church and going up the front walkway. They update the images every so often and this one was from before we gave the front lawn its recent hard-to-miss haircut — in a few short days we basically went from radical hippie to Marine recruit. From the sky you could barely even tell there were front steps and when I clicked on “street view” I couldn’t see the church at all. That’s how obscured it was before we opened things up, which we were able to do thanks to the foresight and generous gifts of two parishioners.
Sometimes beautiful things are hidden in plain sight. Like locally quarried Weymouth stone on the outside of a church in Hingham. And sometimes through the initial obscurity of a parable.
Although he’s the one we most closely identify with parables, Jesus didn’t actually invent the form. Jewish teachers in the ancient world used these types of stories or analogies to explore all sorts of spiritual or ethical concepts; there are examples of parables sprinkled throughout the Old Testament. Of course, Jesus popularized the parable. I guess you could say that Jesus is to the parable what Aesop is to the fable.
The parables of Jesus used everyday images to shed light on the nature of God or to convey deep spiritual truths. And so he used examples that his hearers would have all been familiar with. We may have to dig a bit to understand the full context of his stories — we’re not an agrarian society and so we have to learn about mustard seeds and sheep and the economic and family dynamics of ancient Palestine. But his original hearers needed no translation; even if the full meaning wasn’t always clear, all of the examples Jesus used were immediately recognizable.
But even when we need a bit of background information, the messages themselves remain powerful, true, and as relevant today as they were in Jesus’ day. Because human nature and our relationship with the divine is unchanging, even if the trappings and outward appearances of everyday life differ.
Today we get two gardening parables including the well-known Parable of the Mustard Seed. Jesus tells us it is the smallest of all the seeds. Yet when fully mature, the mustard plant is a massive bush, large enough for birds to make their nests. And so Jesus gives us a parable about the potential abundance of the Kingdom of God. We start with something tiny and it grows into something great.
Parables often come with an an unexpected twist; they help us see beyond the obvious. If a parable seems clear right off the bat, chances are you’ve missed the point. Or more to the point, you’ve missed the points because there are always many layers of meaning embedded into even the simplest parable.
And this one is no different. What’s sneaky about this parable is that Jesus doesn’t compare the Kingdom of God to a giant tree but a big shrub. He tells us that the tiny mustard seed grows into the “greatest of shrubs.” Which is like referring to something as the “king of the ants!” I mean, it’s still a shrub and as mustard plants grew rampant they were basically considered weeds. Which seems a curious analogy to make, even if it is king of the weeds.
The paradox of parables is that while they use examples from everyday life to make a larger point, they weren’t meant to be purely prescriptive. Parables often open up more questions than they answer — and that’s precisely the point. Jesus doesn’t just give us all the answers, he invites us to ponder, to reflect, to chew on issues of life and faith. So the purpose of a parable isn’t to settle an issue once and for all but to encourage us to think more deeply about the issue at hand, whether that’s the nature of God, or forgiveness, or the ways we treat one another.
As we think about parables, you should know that there’s a modern, somewhat controversial Bible translation called The Message that tries to incorporate images that people today would be more familiar with. Instead of a mustard seed — which let’s be honest, few people have ever seen since we get our mustard out of a squeeze bottle — The Message translates these verses this way: “How can we picture God’s kingdom? What kind of story can we use? It’s like a pine nut. When it lands on the ground it is quite small as seeds go, yet once it is planted it grows into a huge pine tree with thick branches.”
Now I’ve never actually seen a mustard seed or a mustard plant. And, embarrassingly enough, I thought pine trees came from acorns. But most of us had pine nuts in our salad the last time we ate at the Square Cafe — they do that kind of frou frou stuff there. So we know what one looks like. It’s still an agricultural image that captures the nature of God’s abundance that Jesus was alluding to but using something we’d likely be more familiar with.
But the danger in putting words into Jesus’ mouth is that, as we’ve seen with the mustard seed, Jesus intentionally didn’t use the example of a mighty tree. If he wanted to do that, he could have just pointed to the great cedar trees we hear about in our lesson from the prophet Ezekiel — an intentional counterpoint to today’s gospel reading. So the pine tree analogy actually fails to convey Jesus’ more subtle, even subversive point. There’s a difference between what is considered mighty by human standards and what is considered mighty by God’s standards. Which is yet another layer of the parable.
As with overgrown bushes in front of a church that you fail to even notice because they’ve always been there, sometimes you have to dig a bit deeper to see the hidden gem and deep meaning of Jesus’ words. But when you take the time to strip away the layers, you encounter something life-giving that continues to inspire, day after day and year after year.
© The Rev. Tim Schenck
@FatherTim Sermon Vault 