This is a wee article I wrote for our church newsletter - this coming Sunday's (24 July 2011) edition. I wrote one last week too which I may post later. I must say I felt a bit cheeky doing it. Normally Michael our vicar would have done this but he is now the vicar of Fred's Pass near Darwin in Australia's Northern Territories (an outreach to the crocodile population) and we have barely begun the process of finding a new vicar though our retiring Archdeacon will be our priest-in-charge in the meantime. I wrote as follows:
This Sunday we have another parable involving seeds and sowing, but instead of the image from the Gospel reading of two Sundays ago, an image of a sower striding across a large area of ground, distributing seeds handful after handful, we have an image single seed, perhaps more carefully and deliberately sown, that grows, not into a harvest of grain but into a single tree.
The mustard seed is the smallest of seeds still visible to the naked eye and from it grows a tree, a shrub, of some 2 to 2.5 metres in height. While there were bigger trees in Palestine for Jesus to make parables about, most commentators would draw our attention to the contrast he seems to be making between the size of the original seed with the fully grown tree. Jesus seems to be saying that his Kingdom would, from such seemingly insignificant beginnings grow into something of considerable substance. And indeed it has!
Tom Wright tells us that this parable and the companion parables throughout this passage are as much about waiting, and trusting as we wait, difficult as the waiting might prove to be – “trusting in the unfolding realm of our God, trusting that a small seed will grow, trusting that a small amount of leaven will do its work, trusting that you and I may indeed perceive the hidden worth of a small treasure, that we might take hold of the pearl of great price.” There was perhaps a sense in Jesus time that God’s return to reign was not coming fast enough, and certainly a there was a sense that the coming kingdom as Jesus envisaged and declared it was not the kind of kingdom the learned men of Israel were expecting. In their minds what Jesus was offering seemed to them to be about as significant as a mustard seed. They were impatient to see the Kingdom come on their terms and some at least were prepared to use violence against others (other Jews as well as Romans), or to sanction the use of violence by others, to speed its coming.
The image of the seed sown and the plant emerging can be further examined in the light of Jesus’ saying from John’s Gospel, “I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” My feeling is that a truer Kingdom of Heaven can only grow out of the death of our false expectations of the ‘what’, the ‘how’ and the ‘when’ of our own imagining of such a Kingdom. Are we prepared to die to our dreams and expectations, to the sense of our own significance in the process, and thereby become the seed that ‘falls into the earth and dies’, so that God’s dreamed-of mustard tree, can grow and be the place where even the ‘birds of the air’ (and we might understand them as those who come to us from outside the church, seeking sanctuary, salvation and healing) can nest in its branches. Can we be trusting enough of God, and patient enough, as we wait through the germination and growing processes?
There may be things we can apply from these sayings of Jesus to the situation in which we find ourselves since Michael and Anne’s departure? Is it only in our dying that we will see ‘much fruit’? Is it in our patient waiting and trusting that we will see the ‘realm of God’ rather than any realm of our own making, further unfold in Christ Church, Whangarei? And is it only by bringing the leaven from the dough and loaf of Michael and Anne’s ministry among us, that we will see our present, new loaf rising, ready for the oven and for the feeding of many?
Having my wife as editor and compiler of our little church newsletter and having a parade of local clergy doing 'one night stands' so to speak, with no-one to slap my wrists, has made it easy for me to sneak this and the previous article in.
I've tried to be conservative in my comments and reflect not so much my own thoughts but those of others, though the questions in the last paragraph especially are questions that I alone have framed.
So get baking friends - there are many who are hungry out there!
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