Keith Coker, Lay Minister

Central Presbyterian Church, Russellville, Arkansas

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Well today we have a very concentrated piece of scripture, five parables if you count them out, and a cryptic message toward the end, about scribes. If I try to preach on all this scripture at once, we could be here all day; and since I didn’t see anybody bringing in food so we could have lunch on the grounds, I guess I should tackle only a small portion of it. We’re going to stick with the first two parables today, the Parable of the Mustard Seed and the Parable of the Yeast or the Leaven.

The first is the Parable of the Mustard Seed. “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed.” Now the mustard plant of the Middle East is much bigger than the one we have here in the western hemisphere; it grows to tree size. My sources indicate it could be 10-12 feet high; but my ever-resourceful bride found on the Internet, a picture of the mustard plant from that region of the world, and it is very large. It looks like an oak tree. Now there’s nothing in the picture for scale so I can’t really tell exactly how tall it is, but suffice it to say, it’s a tree. And when you start with something as small as a seed and go to a tree, that’s certainly something.

Now the mustard seed itself is very very small. Some of you may have planted mustard before and some of you may have used it in cooking; and it’s very small, about the size of coarse sand. Sarah also found a picture of the seed for me. I went to Lowes to get some seed just to show you mustard seed, but not being a gardening person, I didn’t realize that Lowes had sent their seeds back a month and a half ago when the planting season ended. So, no seed. But it was very very small, so Jesus was drawing a huge contrast between how it started and how finished. The Jews of the time would use the phrase, mustard seed, as we would use, the head of a pin. Something as small as a mustard seed, something as small as the head of a pin. It’s the smallest thing that you can see with the unaided eye, given average uncorrected vision.

The parable tells us that this mustard seed, the smallest object we can see, grows to a huge plant that can shelter trees and small animals. The traditional meaning side of this is that it is symbolic of the growth of the Church, that will grow from a small inner circle of disciples into a world-wide phenomena, and it is with this meaning and purpose, if the disciples were hearing that, “We’re very small; we’re going to be very great”. Certainly, that was encouragement to them. But if we don’t look just at the growth of the plant, and we look at the contrast between a tiny seed, the symbol of smallness, and this tall full plant with leaves and branches, we take a slightly different meaning. What it points to is God’s almost but not quite imperceptible presence in our world, and the action that it takes in the world--the results, and how large those results can be, at the time of God’s choosing when God decides it will grow and become the great tree.

Now this contrast look gives us more than just the growth of the Church which we can see plainly; but we also can see that God is a work in the world in small ways, as when He decides to become great and become results which cannot being ignored.

The second parable is the Parable of the Leaven. “The Kingdom of Heaven is like the woman who mixes (or in some translations), hides the leaven in the dough and it rises, transforming the dough into something larger and very different that it was before. And by yeast or leaven we mean, according the King James version, a small part of the dough saved from the previous batch, what we call a starter, like if you’re making bread and you have a bread starter in your refrigerator like I used to a long time ago. You take that little bit and you add it to this dough, and it becomes something huge. Now there’s some disagreement about how much flour three measures is. Some say it’s enough for the baking of a feast. Others say it’s enough for a large family. Well that would be a large family indeed because 3 measures is generally considered to be enough for about five or six gallons of flour. Can you imagine the bread from five or six gallons of flour? That’s a lot of bread. It’s also the amount that Abraham told Sarah to bake for their heavenly visitors back in Genesis 18.

So we have this transforming action of God in the world in the form of the mustard seed that makes a huge tree, and in the form of the starter, the yeast, the leaven—whatever you want to call it—that turns the flour into the bread. Now you know the difference between bread with yeast and bread without yeast. One is dry and bland absolutely flavorless, and the other has a wonderful smell, it’s soft and kind of spongy, it tastes and looks good. The difference between the two is almost unbelievable.

And so it is with God and His transforming power in our world. God works in these dynamic ways, like a growing seed and like yeast that ferments. Jesus used a very strange example here. If you read in scripture where yeast is talked about, it comes off very badly; it’s a bad thing. Yeast is seen as corruption, as contamination. Before Passover, the householder was to eliminate all of the yeast or leaven from their household as preparation for Passover. It was thought to be rot or corruption, or something that had died, even though they knew it made the bread and made it good.

So Jesus has taken an everyday example and turned it around. He’s almost saying that this leaven, this yeast, which we normally would think of as bad, is going to enter into the bad world and corrupt the badness into goodness. It’s almost exactly backwards. The corruption will corrupt the corrupt into something wonderful. That was probably an attention getter for his crowd for sure. For examples of this, we can turn to Matthew 16:6 where he talks about the yeast of the Pharisees as something to avoid, and in I Corinthians 5, the yeast of malice or evil, in Galations 5:9, a little yeast leavens or ruins the whole thing. It invades everything, so for Jesus to use this example, he was very much getting their attention with something they would not normally associate with yeast—something good. So we’ve got the good corrupting the bad into the good. But we’re in danger of over analyzing; let’s go back a little bit.

God’s action in the world is often in the “small.” We can’t always see how something works, we can’t see how a seed germinates and grows in the ground; we don’t see that process on a microscopic scale. We can’t see how leaven works. It’s in the dough; it makes the dough rise. We see the result; we don’t necessarily see the bubbly action of it within the dough itself.

How does that relate to our lives when we’re just dealing with people? What results do small unseen actions have? Well, wonderful things. Is a handshake ever wasted, a smile? The small things that we do can have ripple effects like yeast and dough and tiny seeds that grow. Every time we do something nice or good or beneficial for somebody else, that is the action of God in our world.

But, believe it or not, that’s not our central message today. We can certainly see in the scripture, the idea of the small becoming the large, the small going through transformation, the contrast between small and large; those are things we can easily see. One thing that these two parables have in common, and which I want to draw your attention to, is about their smallness. God can and does make good things out of what seems to be insignificant. And God’s action in the world is something we can’t usually see—those are all true; but they’re really about being small. And what’s that got to do with Christian faith? What’s that got to do with our lives? We believe that God has acted, and continues to act in the world in ways that are sometimes not obvious, and our purpose is to make God known to women and men through these; that’s certainly a central part of our faith. But let’s get back to “small”. The mustard seed as we say, is small, leaven, a little bit of starter in five gallons of flour is small, but they certainly have a tremendous effect.

Smallness from a Christian perspective is not only about the absence of bigness, it’s about humility. We are the clay. We are the empty vessel to be filled with God. The last shall be first. The banquet shall be filled with guests off the street. Jesus repeatedly tells us about the importance of being the least of these, about being small instead of big. Being the least means a complete and utter lack of arrogance, a lack of self-importance, a lack of being full of ourselves or our position or our reputation or of saving face.

In some cultures, saving face is everything. In our own culture, saving face can be much more that it should be, more prevalent than we would like to admit, because we’re all about winning. Our culture is all about winning. We can get all too caught up in winning, and not just winning in sports, but winning the money race, or the race for the big house or for the best vacation, or for every battle that comes our way. We can’t back down. We can’t be perceived as weak. We can’t let the other party win, because if they’re winning, I’m losing, and I am not going to lose! Most situations with an “us” and a “them” involve negotiating.

All communication in some ways involves negotiating; and negotiating can be seen as a “zero sum” game. That means when one party gains or wins, the other party or parties must be losing. If they’re getting a bigger piece of the pie, then I must be getting a smaller piece of the pie. What the good negotiator does is find a way to make the pie bigger so that everybody gets enough pie. It’s called “Win-Win” negotiating, for those in the business world. And a big part of it is coming up with alternatives, new choices, new ways to win. That is how negotiation can help people save face so that a deal can be made and issues can be resolved. And as much as I subscribe to the idea of a Win-Win negotiation, I have to say that if we’re going to take seriously, the idea of smallness, if we’re going to approach humility and self emptying, we need to get a step further than Win-Win. We have to be willing to lose.

We have to be willing to accept the smaller piece of the pie. We must be willing, essentially, to not play the game by the rules. We have to corrupt the game, as the leaven corrupts the dough.

Whoa! Wait a minute. What is this? Christianity’s about being a doormat? Is that what Jesus really wants us to do? Well, it’s what He did. He took blame he did not deserve. He suffered indignity, torture and death, and all of it unfair. God’s love for us is undeserved. Deserve does not enter into it. It’s not about me, and what I deserve. Deserve is taken out of the equation. Deserve doesn’t matter. How I get treated doesn’t matter. It’s how I treat others. That’s what matters. Didn’t Jesus say three chapters ago in Matthew 10, to be as innocent as doves and as wily as serpents?

And what about the Parable of the Dishonest Steward? He wasn’t exactly giving things away, back to the person they were owed to. That certainly wasn’t honest. Which instruction are we supposed to follow….and when? It’s hard enough, choosing to follow Jesus, with His life and His instruction, much less to choose between different instructions. How do I know when to be wily and when to be innocent? When am I supposed to be strong, and when am I supposed to be small?

Frank Herbert was a science fiction writer; he wrote the Dune books; and he had a habit of injecting wisdom into the mouths of some of his characters. One of them once said, “Correct moral choices are easy to spot. They are when we abandon self interest.” There’s that word again, self. It really comes back to who and what you’re protecting. That’s what being big or strong or unyielding is really about. It’s about protecting. Are we protecting love, or truth, or some idol, our reputation, our image, our position on an issue, or an argument? If you’ve been watching the News the last few years, you know that even protecting the Church can be the wrong position. Our friends in the Catholic Church have been struggling with that for decades, and will continue to do so, and they have to do it under the public microscope. If you’re trying to be big instead of small, and strong instead of bending, who and what are you protecting? Whose interest are you looking out for? Have you abandoned self-interest? Have you emptied yourself to the will of God? Now that’s hard! Yet it is the very struggle we are called to each and every week, every day, every minute of our lives. The words and actions of Jesus of Nazareth are a beacon that shows us the Way, and the Way is not about being the biggest or the strongest in any confrontation with our fellow human beings.

When I was in High School, the question was, “How tall is your truck?” Big tires, sky jacks, bumpers—all about “big. We need to get back to “small”. How I treat you, or how I treat anybody in my every day situations should be like the mustard seed that grows into a tree. It is the leaven in every day life that turns it from something bland and hard, into something wonderful. It is my and your corruption of the system that works the wonders. It is this humility, this self-denial, this being small, that changes things. Don’t get caught up in the game of “Big”—I’m bigger than you, my car’s more expensive than yours, my house is in a better neighborhood, my job title’s bigger, my country club is more exclusive, I can conspicuously consume more than you to show that I can—I am BIG. But Jesus tells us, “Don’t get big, get small”. Get small, corrupt the dough, change the rules, don’t play the game of “Big”, the game that’s all about winning and making everyone else lose. Don’t play the game of “I win; you lose”, because you see, we don’t have to win. Thanks to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit we’ve already won all that we need to win. I don’t have to win. I can lose. I can lose everything, because I have won all that matters. Amen.

Now let us say together a portion of those things we believe, using the Apostle’s Creed:

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,

and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord,

who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary,

suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.

He descended into Hell. The third day He rose again from the dead

He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God, the Father Almighty,

from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints,

the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen