Psalm 92, Ezekiel 31:1-6,10-14, 2 Corinthians 5:1-10, Mark 4:26-34
From a mustard seed
One things that grabs the attention of St. Athanasius parishioners today is the presence of all these men in our fellowship for the Lord’s worship on the Sunday morning. To those of you here this morning from that seminar, I thank you for your presence and participation with us. Seth N. is playing the organ for us today, and the lectors – Mike S. and Joel B. are elders in their home congregations. And, since the seminar we concluded last evening had for its topic “Men at Worship,” it is additionally pleasant that the men from that seminar are here with us this morning, to worship the Lord.
But, the conference has two purposes: first to equip men to deploy centuries-old patterns of worship that are particularly friendly to men’s souls. The things the men here today have practiced or begun to learn have been the bread and butter of godly and manly worship at least since the days of King David – in other words for the past 3,000 years. Though what we have introduced and practiced this weekend will seem novel to some of you men here, the efficient worship we have practiced over the past two days, and the worship we offer the Lord this morning – both of them reclaim something very good and very ancient. The patterns and forms of worship we embrace here are have brought great blessing and strength to men for thousands of years.
The second purpose of the conference has been to brainstorm how we might help other evangelical, Protestant men in America reclaim the things we have been reclaiming this past weekend. The American church – in all its forms – has lost something very precious, something of tremendous value and blessing for its men – and what is lost are the simplest habits of worship, particularly the habits of worshiping in the company of other men.
When Joel B…. arrived early on Friday morning, he showed me something amazing. It is a reference work of hymn tunes which his sister had found in an antique store. It was published sometime in the mid-1800s by the Boston Academy of Music, and it was used by a wide range of American Christian denominations. As well as melodies for a great number of metrical hymns, it also contains a large number of single and double chants, and Psalm texts and canticles pointed for those chants. They are identical in form and function to what we sing every Sunday here at St. Athanasius. And, yet, as I have discussed hymnody with a wide variety of Christian pastors, I find that this jewel – this very ancient jewel of worship – is essentially unknown in our land TODAY, and it has been unknown for about a hundred years now. Even the memory of singing the very words of Scripture, or singing directly from the Psalms of David it has faded away. “Men at Worship,” whatever else it seeks to do, seeks to restore this blessing to Christian men in American.
Does this sound quixotic, or what? I need to say again that the conference we are concluding here does NOT have as its purpose to transform you into Anglican Christians. The sons of the English Reformation are – as a group – in a very sad state today, and it will be at least another couple of generations before a truly vibrant communion of those sons will ever be visible in our land. But, the things we are striving to reclaim are not the exclusive property of Anglicans, or Lutherans, or Roman Catholics, or the Orthodox. ALL of these communions USED TO HAVE ways and means to nourish a man’s soul in the worship of Christ, and NONE of them retain it to any degree. For men to join with one another in the worship of their heavenly Father is a treasure worth reclaiming for the sake of the church that our children and grandchildren will inherit from us.
And that, finally, brings us to the gospel lesson for today. In it, we find two parables. These parables have direct bearing the outcome of the Men at Worship conference here this past weekend.
The parables are both drawn from agriculture, which all of Jesus’ listeners would have understood very well. First, he tells the parable of the man who sows seed, but who has little of consequence to do from the time he sows the seed until he puts in the sickle for harvest. The second parable is mostly known because of skeptics who insist that this shows that Jesus knows nothing about botany, because Jesus is supposedly claiming that the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds in the world, when in fact it is not.
Let’s look at these two parables in turn and see what light they shed on the enterprise that brings all these men into our congregation this Sunday.
Both parables are teaching us about the growth of God’s kingdom. Each parable points to the beginning of this process and the end of it, and we can also say that both parables are telling us about what happens between these two points. A few verses earlier in this chapter of Mark, Jesus has told the parable of the sower who sowed seed on different types of soil. Because Jesus interpreted this parable that that interpretation is preserved for us in the gospels, we also know that the seed in the parable is emblematic for the word of God, and that the soil reprsents the different types of people INTO which which this seed is sown.
Now, the two parables before us this morning follow immediately upon this parable of the sower. And so, we are justified in understanding the “seed” in these two parables ALSO represents the Word of God.
In that earlier parable, Jesus was illustrating the various ways in which the Word of God is RECEIVED by comparing it to seed sown on different types of soil. In the two parables before us, the KIND OF SOIL is NOT the point, and because the plants in both paralbles grow to full maturity, we can further suppose that the soil in each case is good soil.
So, what is the point of these two parables? What is Jesus teaching us about how the Kingdom of God grows?
Well, the first parable really focuses on those who are sowing the seed. Jesus sets before us a man who scatters seed on the ground, and then goes about his business. He sleeps by night and rises by day, and the seed sprouts and grows, but he himself does not know how is happening. Something is going on, for sure, but there is a very real sense in which the man who scatteres the seed is irrelevant for the results that issue forth. Jesus says, “… the earth yields crops by itself: first the blade, then the head, after that the full grain in the head.” The man who scatters seed enters the picture as a significant player at the end of this process. “But when the grain ripens,” Jesus says, “immediately he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”
Now, what light does this shed on the demonstration and development project we are calling “Men at Worship?” I’d suggest, at a minimum, that Jesus’ parable is telling us the same thing that Paul was speaking about when he wrote the the Corinthian Christians in 1 Cor. chapter 3. There Paul says, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. 7 So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase. … 9 For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, …”
Men at Worship, in this connection, is a band of hearty farmers, sowing the seed of God’s Word in the hearts of other men, and watering it through mutual fellowship and encouragement. We sow the seed of God’s words by listening to God’s Word, by singing God’s Word, by fashioning our prayers and thanksgiving to God IN TERMS of God’s Word. And as we do this, we commit that seed to the God who gives the increase.
What will happen from all this? Well, though we do not have it in our own power to make ANYTHING happen, we know from Jesus’ parable to expect certain stages of progress. Our contribution to the growth of God’s Kingdom will be detectable only at certain stages, as Jesus made clear. First the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear, the full stalk of wheat. Though we cannot see change in our lives from day to day, yet there are times when we can see that something has happened. When we take the backward look, when we compare what we have become with what we were a while ago, then we see change. This is exactly what a farmer does, is it not? He can look at his field any given day and not detect any change from the day before. But when he looks back two or three weeks, or two or three months, he can see remarkable change. Jesus says this is what happens in our lives as well.
It would seem to me that we are now seeing the blades poking up out of the soil. I look forward very much to how our labors will appear a year from now. God will give the increase, and we shall learn by looking back what kind of increase it is. If we are to take Jesus parable at face value, the end of all this – whether we see it in our own lifetimes or see it from heave – the results of what we have been doing these past two days will look very, very different from how it looks right now. A newly sown field looks empty, and when the blades first come out of the earth, they look very inconsequential. But, at the end of God’s working, the field is full, thick with strong sturdy plants, topped by heavy heads of grain.
The radical difference between how things look at the beginning and how they look at the end is the point of Jesus’ second parable, the parable of the mustard seed. The plant mentioned here is the black mustard plant, a standard crop in Palestine in those days. And it was, indeed, the smallest seed that Jesus’ agricultural audience would have planted in their ordinary agricultural economy. The black mustard seed produces a plant that can be shaped into a tree or left to grow as a giant brushy shurb reaching a height of 12 to 15 feet at maturity. Clearly, Jesus’ point is in this parable is the the vast difference between the beginning and the end – a tiny seed at the beginning, and at the end: a grand tree that houses all sorts of birds in its branches.
Honestly, men, it is this parable that gives me the greatest hope, the greatest encouragement, that Men at Worship is a contribution to the growth of God’s Kingdom that God is pleased to bless. Why? Because, everywhere you look in God’s Word you find that he is a God whose standard operating procedure is to take very tiny things and turn them into very grand and glorious things. At the beginning, he started with nothing and called the world into being. He did the same with each one of us – calling those were not in God’s Kingdom to come into God’s Kingdom.
As Paul wrote to the Corinthians in 1 Cor. 1:27: “27 But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; 28 and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, 29 that no flesh should glory in His presence.”
God chose Abraham and made him the father of many nations. God chose a teenage boy, despised by his brothers, and made him the Ruler of Egypt. God chose another teenaged boy while he was out in the sticks, watching over a flock of sheep, and God made him into Israel’s greatest King. When Jesus came to the earth, he chose the Apostles – as unlikely a group of guys as there ever was, and look what he produced from them.
And, so it has been in the Church for 2,000 years now. God continues to chose unknown men, groups of men the world ignores, men who are so small in number that it is ridiculous to suppose they can get much accomplished in God’s Kingdom. And, yet, that is what God likes to do, and what God has consistently done down through the centuries.
Nature teaches us that avalanches may begin by the movement of very small pebbles. Men at Worship, every time a chapter of it meets together to hear God’s Word, to sing God’s praises, to worship him in prayers and thanksgivings – at these amount to all got pebbles we can drop on the slopes around us. Let’s figure out which ones to drop, and where to drop them.
A mighty dam, if it springs a tiny leak, will eventually collapse if the leak will persevere. The world around us attempts to dam up the worship of the everlasting and living God. Every time you men meet to worship God, every time you recruit another man to join you, you are identifying leaks in the dam and poking at them with a stick. Let’s make those leaks bigger. Let’s look for cracks in the dam and turn them into leaks.
Why should we not look pray and work so that Christ’s parable of the mustard seed comes true for us? The truth we can sow is good seed, and we can count on the Lord of the harvest to bless us. It is His Word that we sow. He says it shall not return void.
So, why not us? Why not now? We worship a God whose ways generated the proverb which says "Do not despise the day of small things." Today we are small, and the Gospel’s despisers, inside and outside the Church, judge all we believe about men and their worship of God quaint, old-fashioned, out of date.
Well, in the light of the parables before us this morning, that is a powerful reason to go forward with confidence. Jesus tells us that pleases God to use what world thinks is weak to shame what the world thinks is powerful. God chooses what the world has consigned to the dustbin of history, and He brings out of that dustbin vessels to contain His glory.
Today is an exciting time to be alive in Christ’s church. May the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ strengthen each of us with His grace and with the wisdom of His spirit, so we may accomplish together all those good works which our Father has prepared for us that we should walk in them.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
