J

esus’ Parable of the Mustard Seed is one that that gets brought up a lot these days in certain discussions. If you ever get into an argument with people – either on the internet or anywhere else – about whether or not the Bible is true and trustworthy or not, chances are somebody will bring up the Parable of the Mustard Seed.

      The argument will go something like this: “If you really believe the Bible,” someone will say, “then what about what Jesus says about the mustard seed because Jesus says that the mustard seed ‘is the smallest of all the seeds on earth’ but that is actually not true. The smallest seed is actually a certain variety of orchid that is found growing in the tropical rainforest of Bora Bora or something like that.”

      So is this a scientific treatise? What would it look like if it was? We don’t have to wonder because we actually have an example of a scientific treatise on mustard written around the same time that the Gospel of Mark was written. It was by a Roman senator named Pliny (who also had a famous son so he is usually called “Pliny the Elder”) and it was an encyclopaedia of Natural History in which he included an entry about the mustard plant. In fact, this is what Pliny wrote for his entry on the mustard plant: “With its pungent taste and fiery effect, mustard is extremely beneficial for the health. It grows entirely wild, though it is improved by being transplanted: but on the other hand, when it has once been sown, it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once.”

      Pliny is saying that mustard doesn’t just grow well, it grows too well. It spreads so readily that it tends to take over the garden and squeeze out any of the other fruits, vegetables or grains you may have planted. This was, in fact, common knowledge about mustard, not just special scientific knowledge. Pliny is just reporting what everyone knew.

      So, did the people who were listening to Jesus know all of this about mustard? They almost certainly did. The crowd would have been full of farmers and agricultural workers who knew very well that you did not let a mustard plant take root anywhere you wanted anything else to grow. And I can well imagine that those farmers and agricultural workers and everyone else were scratching their heads and wondering why Jesus was saying that the kingdom of God was like the most notorious weed they had to deal with in their gardens and that Jesus was even putting emphasis on how extreme the plant’s spread and growth could be.

      So what on earth did Jesus mean by comparing the kingdom of God to such a dangerous and generally unwanted weed? Did he just not know what he was really saying – I mean, we are told that he was a carpenter, not a farmer, after all. Maybe he just didn’t know how destructive a mustard plant in a garden could be. No, I think that Jesus knew exactly what he was saying and exactly how shocked people would have been to hear him speak of God’s kingdom in this way.

      As I said, all of the parables of Jesus that are collected in this chapter of the Gospel of Mark seem to be saying the same key thing about the kingdom of God – that it is something that grows. Jesus is teaching that growth is as essential to the kingdom of God as water is essential to a fish. To apply that to the church, Jesus is teaching that, if the kingdom of God is present in a church, that church should exhibit growth in some significant ways. But Jesus is also saying that sometimes things can happen that get in the way of the growth that is natural to the kingdom. And so, in each of the parables in this chapter, he is telling us about the things that inhibit that growth.

      So what could he be teaching us about what we sometimes do that prevents growth by comparing the kingdom to a grain of mustard? I believe that he intends for people to bring everything that they know about mustard plants into this discussion of the kingdom of God. He is saying that the kingdom of God will grow in this world – will grow wild and out of control just like a mustard plant in a garden and will actually overpower other cultivated plants.

      So what, therefore could possibly prevent the growth of the kingdom? The only thing that could prevent it is the same thing that could prevent the growth of a mustard seed – if you never let it take root in the first place.

      And, friends, I think that sometimes we do exactly that. We do recognize the explosive growth potential of the kingdom of God in this world, and we’re afraid of it. We’re afraid that it might overtake our whole lives. We’re afraid it might make us make changes that we don’t even want to consider. We are afraid that it will disrupt this comfortable little garden that we have planted by introducing into it plants that are different from what we are used to and might just take over.

      First-century gardeners would have shuddered at the thought of introducing a mustard plant into their well-organized garden and Jesus was expecting exactly that reaction. He was saying that one of the things that would prevent the growth of the kingdom of God among us is our own fear of disruption and change within our well-organized lives and our well-organized churches.

      I believe that Jesus wants the church to grow – wants this church to grow – as a part of the growth of God’s kingdom in this world. He wants us, like the mustard bush in the parable, to put forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade. But, I wonder, will our resistance to change and our resistance to disruption be the very thing that prevents that growth? I believe that Jesus was worried about that very possibility.

Hespeler, 17 September, 2017

Mark 4:26-29, 2 Corinthians 9:6-15, Psalm 92:1-15

f you have paid any attention at all to the news that has come out of Texas in the past month (and there has been a lot of news to attend to) chances are that you heard the name of one Houston religious leader mentioned more than any other. His name is Joel Osteen and he is the lead pastor of Lakewood Church, one of the biggest churches in a city of very big churches.

      Osteen’s church caught a lot of flack immediately after the arrival of Hurricane Harvey and the devastating floods that it brought. People were upset with it for its failure to respond – specifically its failure to offer shelter in its large and well-appointed facilities. It seemed all the worse because the church’s excuses changed a number of times in the early days. At first they said they couldn’t offer shelter because the building was inaccessible because of flooding when it clearly was not. Then, once that lie was exposed, they went with the excuse that they hadn’t offered shelter because they hadn’t been asked when lots of other companies and religious organizations had throw n open their doors without needing to be asked.

      Now I am not particularly interested in piling on Lakewood Church for what they did or didn’t do after Harvey. It was a crisis situation and, while I hope that I might do better than they did in a similar situationout needinghad been ions had been biaculcome out of th, I recognise with all humility that I might not. But I do have one issue with something that lay behind their actions. I can understand their concerns about their building and about liability, even if I don’t think they dealt with those concerns in the right way. What I don’t get, and certainly don’t agree with, is some of the theology that may have influenced some f their decisions.

      Joel Osteen, you see, preaches a very particular kind of Christian message (if it is a Christian message at all) that is known as the prosperity gospel. The promise of this message is that God wants you to be rich – that it is God’s will for you that you should have lots and lots of stuff. That is what Osteen preaches week in and week out. He has also given an excellent example to his congregation of what this is supposed to look like by amassing a personal fortune in excess of forty million dollars.

      There are a lot of problems with this prosperity gospel. It certainly contradicts many things that Jesus said. Anyone remember the time when he said, “Blessed are you who are poor,” for example? The whole train of thought also has plenty of potential to lead to abuse as Christian believers are taught a very particular application of the passage we read this morning from the second letter to the Corinthians: “The point is this: the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.”

      This prosperity preaching teaches that the way you switch on the prosperity that God intends for you to have is by giving extravagantly to the church.nd up poorer and convinced that it is their own fault.eats again elng  But when the generous givers fail to see the promised millions materialize for themselves, they are made to believe that it must be their own fault – that they didn’t have enough faith or they didn’t show it by giving generously enough and the cycle repeats again and again until somebody gets forty million dollars but a lot of people end up poorer and convinced that it is really their own fault.

      I have trouble with this teaching for all kinds of reasons, therefore, but I must admit that I do understand why it has become so popular and why churches like Lakewood have grown so large. Who wouldn’t want to hear that God wants to give you a great deal of wealth? It is also a very pleasant when you are living in a place (such as the City of Houston a month ago) where people are rich or at least have a reasonable chance of becoming rich because the underlying assumption behind it is that, if you become rich, it must be because you have deserved it – you have earned it because of your extraordinary faith or righteousness. And who doesn’t love the feeling that good things happened to you because you deserved them?

      So this can be a very successful message when all is going well. But when things fall apart completely and it is looking like they may not get back to normal for a very long time – in the aftermath of a major hurricane, for example – the prosperity gospel might fall a little short and ring a little hollow. So it is not all that surprising that Joel Osteen went through a rough patch recently in Houston, though honestly I don’t worry about him too much. I’m pretty sure he’s going to be just fine.

      But there is a question about what we do with all of this. The world is a very frightening place, after all, a place where a whole lot can go very wrong. We have been reminded of that very forcefully in recent weeks – particularly by Harvey and Irma, by massive forest fires and a major earthquake thrown in for good measure. But it’s not just the natural disasters – maybe if it was just them we could deal with that – but the human ones seem more frightening in some ways. For example, the resurgence of white supremacy and even Nazism is more disturbing in many ways.

      When we are reminded so forcefully about what is going wrong in the world for so many people, it can seem supremely selfish and self-centred to be concerned with one’s own needs and especially with things like personal wealth and prosperity. I understand that we would all like to be wealthy – who hasn’t dreamed of it at least once or twice – but when people are losing homes and livelihoods and don’t even have a clue about how they might get their life back – how petty does it seem to be asking God for prosperity for ourselves and expecting that God should make it a priority.

      Even more important, what sort of message should we offer to the world in such times? One temptation is to be positively apocalyptic. I have certainly heard some of that recently – that these disasters are God’s payback for our sins. This message can come in many forms: hurricanes are brought on by our cavalier disregard for the environment which is directly tied to the rise in ocean temperatures that feeds extreme weather. Or others will position it as God’s punishment for our society’s immorality, assuming that God is outraged at whatever particular immorality the speaker is upset about. Racial unrest such as the resurgence of white supremacy is variously portrayed as judgement for our failure to right the wrongs of the past or for moving forward too quickly in the present.

      Now, I won’t say that there is absolutely nothing to these apocalyptic pronouncements.ely nothing to these or for  will tie it to ou There are lessons to be learned, I believe, in the midst of a string of disasters. If we, as a society, could actually learn that our actions (or failures to act) have consequences and that it is time to get past the short term selfish thinking that we are so famous for, it would only be a good thing. So, I get where all of this apocalyptic talk is coming from and am somewhat sympathetic to it, but I also think that it is problematic.

      For one thing, I have some issues with how we chalk all of this up to God and God’s judgement because the God I have come to know through Jesus Christ takes no delight or comfort from any of it. God feels nothing but sorrow at the sight of people losing their homes or their livelihoods. God does nothing but sow tears of sadness when people are lost in hopelessness or fear – separated from their loved ones and all that is comforting to them.

      I think that maybe one of Jesus’ simplest parables is a better way to approach the issue. “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground,” he said, “and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.”

      The kingdom of God, this concept that was so important to Jesus that he spoke about it all the time, was his way of talking about what God’s best intentions are for this world. (I know that some people often talk about the kingdom of God as if it was only about what happens to people after they die, but if you study everything that Jesus had to say on the topic it becomes quite clear that it was primarily about this world. It might continue on after death, of course, but the place where you were to encounter and enter the kingdom of God was here and now.)

      Jesus called it the kingdom of God precisely because he was holding it up as a counterexample to the kingdoms that you encounter in this world – kingdoms like the one that was ruled by King Herod in his day in Galilee. And the stories and parables of the kingdom of God that Jesus told make it quite clear that he believed that God’s intentions for this world are for good and not for fear and suffering.

      The kingdom was something that God would do. We could participate in it, but it was ultimately dependant on God’s action. That is what the parable of the growing seed is all about. Ultimately, Jesus is saying, our responsibility is not fix everything that goes wrong in this world. That, I think, is too heavy a burden for anyone to bear. No human can carry all the burdens of this world. But, Jesus says, what you can do is plant seeds.

      When you see racial injustice – when you see people who are treating other people as if they were less than human because of the colour of their skin or their faith or their background – you cannot and should not carry years of racial hatred, misunderstanding and evil on your own back. You cannot fix all of that at once, but you can stand up. You can denounce the wrong that you see. I know that is hard for any of us to do, it certainly is hard for me to do, but to do so is to plant a seed for a better world.

      When you see foolish thinking, the kind of thinking that just allows people to go on with their lives without thinking of the long-term impacts of their actions. When people are unwilling to make any changes in the carbon they produce, the pollution they leave in their wake because they cannot see anything beyond their next whim or desire, you cannot fix that. You cannot just make people willing to live thoughtfully or with a long view of what the impacts of their actions are. But you can plant a seed, by setting a better example yourself, by supporting government policies that help people to see the benefit in changing and that make it affordable for those with few resources.

      You don’t have to fix it, but you can and should sow seeds and I’ll tell you why. Because you never know what God can do with a seed. Someone “would sleep and rise night and day,” Jesus said, “and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” Of course, we today understand a whole lot more about how seeds grow than people did in Jesus’ day, but the point that Jesus was making still stands. You don’t have to know how the kingdom of God grows among us, you just have to plant the seeds and leave the growing to God because that is always how the kingdom of God always works.

      God doesn’t want you be wealthy. God doesn’t want you to be miserable either. God doesn’t want you to lose everything you have ever relied on either. God doesn’t ever want those who don’t follow in his path to suffer in great torment for it. Those ideas are all a perversion of the Christian gospel.

      What Jesus does want is for you to plant whatever seeds you can in this world – to stand up for what is right and just, to challenge evil, to engage in initiatives to make the world a better place. Most of all, Jesus wants to teach us to trust in God who can take whatever seeds we do manage to plant and make them grow in this world in ways that we could never even have imagined.

Hespeler, 10 September, 2017 © Scott McAndless

Mark 4:21-25, 2 Timothy 1:6-12, Psalm 78:1-8

M

any years ago, I spent a summer in the state of Kerala in South India where we spent a fair bit of time way out in the hill country far from any cities of any size. We stayed with some local people – members of a local Christian church – and it was a very eye opening experience. The region is relatively well-off compared to many areas in India, but it certainly seemed, to our western eyes, as if there were many people living in great poverty. Indoor plumbing was rare. The water was mostly unsafe to drink and, while there was electricity, it was very unreliable and would go off for long periods of time.

      For a while, we stayed in a simple farm on some rice fields. At night when the electricity was out, it got incredibly dark. We didn’t have flashlights (we hadn’t thought we would need them) so when we had to go anywhere at night (like, for example, to the bathroom which was in the field) we would generally take a candle with us. And I learned a few things on those nighttime walks that have very much stayed with me ever since.

      My first lesson might seem a little bit obvious, but I think that it needs to be said. The first thing that I learned while heading out over unknown and uneven fields in the pitch dark was that a lit candle was extremely valuable. The difference between going out there with a candle and going without one might mean getting completely lost, maybe falling and twisting an ankle or falling into an irrigation canal. At that moment, nothing was more important to me than being able to keep that candle lit.

      The second lesson was a bit of a surprise to me. When we went out into those fields, our first instinct was to do what you might do with a flashlight or like what you see in an old movie where someone carries a candle. You want to hold the candle up right in front of you like this. I learned very quickly that that did not work at all.

      The problem with doing that is obvious if you think about it. If you hold the candle in front of you, that means that all you can see is the flame. Everything else is completely dark and, in comparison, the flame is impossibly bright. Your night vision is completely ruined by the light in your eyes and you cannot see anything else. So you very quickly learn that you have to make sure that the candle shines anywhere but towards your eyes. One way to do that was to hold the candle up over your head or to the side so you were looking away from it.

      But my favourite solution was the one that was shown to me by the people who lived there. You would pick up a broken coconut shellad or to the side so you were looking away from it. But my favourite solution w (they were everywhere) and hold it over the candle between you and where you were going. The locals called it a “Kerala lamp.”Kerala lamp."nd where you were going. The locals called it a "ay from it. But my favourite solution w It worked really well and had the added advantage of blocking the wind somewhat from blowing out your candle.

      Now, if you had lived centuries ago – before electricity and at a time when candles and lamps were rare and expensive and difficult to light because there weren’t even any matches, you would probably know everything that I had to learn about walking with a candle at night. But you and I have lived all our lives in a very different world. We may have used candles and even oil lamps before, but because we have always lived in a world where you don’t usually have to depend on such things to actually find your way in the dark, there is a sense in which we don’t actually know how they work even though we may think we do.

      That means that, when we hear Jesus talk about lamps and what to do with them, it may not be quite as obvious to us what Jesus meant by what he said as it was to the people who first heard him say it and who never saw an electric light in their life.

      For example, when Jesus said, “Is a lamp brought in to be put under the bushel basket, or under the bed, and not on the lampstand?” They would have immediately understood how important a lamp could be. These were people who lived almost half their lives in the light and the other half almost completely in darkness. When the sun came up in the morning, they began to live and work. But when the sun went down their world went completely dark. Yes, they had lamps, but every moment they kept a lamp lit meant burning precious oil that represented many hours of labour growing, picking and pressing olives. It was also oil that, if it wasn’t burned up, represented an essential part of their diet. Every ounce of oil burned was oil that could not be eaten. So you can be sure that these people did not light their lamps lightly or without reason.

      Light in the darkness – something that we pretty much take for granted – was something extraordinarily precious and rare to them. And when Jesus started talking to them in a parable about lamps and what to do with them, they would have immediately assumed that he was talking about something very precious and rare.

      The thing that Jesus was comparing to a lamp, I think it is clear when you look at the whole context in the Gospel of Mark, was the good news message of the kingdom of God – the message of God’s grace and love and what we do in response to that message. So the people who heard him talk about this lamp would have understood that to receive the message of the gospel was a precious and rare gift.

      I wonder how much we recognize how very valuable the knowledge of that message is. We have been told certain things about God and how God deals with humanity. We have been shown, in the person of Jesus Christ, that the power of love is able to overcome the greatest and darkest powers in this world. Do you realize how many people in our society today have no access to such good news – who are simply living out their existence with no reason to hope that anything might ever change in this world?

      Now, I am not one to go around saying that we, as Presbyterian Christians, have exclusive access to these truths. I tend to believe that they are truths that God reveals to various people in various ways in our world and that people can perhaps even come to them by various paths and even through different faiths. But I would definitely agree with the sentiment of our reading this morning from the letter to Timothy: “Do not be ashamed, then, of the testimony about our Lord.” We have received a testimony about the God revealed by Jesus Christ that we should not hesitate to be proud of. It is a message that has the power to change lives for the good – even to transform the world. That is the light that we are talking about in this passage.

      So the question now becomes, if we have this light, what do we do with it. Jesus says, “Is a lamp brought in to be put under the bushel basket, or under the bed, and not on the lampstand?” Now the very idea of lighting a lamp and then hiding it underneath a basket or a bed is perfectly ridiculous and Jesus knows it. First of all, there is a practical problem that if you put your burning lamp underneath a woven basket you will probably catch the thing on fire and end up burning your house down. But, even more than that, what would be the point of lighting a lamp, burning up your precious oil, and then not even allowing it to shine on anything? It would be a stupid waste of resources.

      So what does Jesus mean when he says that you would never do such foolish things? What is he trying to say about the message of the good news about God? That brings me to the second lesson I learned wandering around the pitch black hills of Kerala in South India with nothing but a candle to guide me. I learned that a candle you hold out in front of you as you walk is as good as useless. In the blackness, if you can see the flame of your lamp, you cannot see anything else. In other words, the candle is only really helpful if it shines on other things and people, not directly on you.

      I believe that this was the truth Jesus was trying to get at by talking about hiding your lamp once you had lit it. He was pointing out the simple fact that the only reason you would light a lamp was if you were going to let it shine on something. It needed to shine on your book or on your path or on the thing that you were working on or there was simply no point in lighting it at all and it was merely a waste.

      What that means in terms of the church and that whole task of being the light of the world is that this incredible message that we have of God’s grace and love and renewal needs to shine on something other than us or we will be guilty of squandering and wasting it.

      But let me ask you, how do we usually let the light shine in the life of the church? Most often, I would suggest to you, we do it like I held up the candle the first time I went out walking in the rice fields at night. We hold it up right in front of us. We see this amazing light, we celebrate and worship God for it, and we revel in how God has loved us and saved us and given us reason to hope.

      All of that is well and good as far as it goes but there is a problem. So long as you are holding up that light before your own eyes, it is all that you can see. You blind yourself to everything but that light. You cannot see, for example, the struggles that other people are going through, you cannot see the injustices that they have to deal with. And that is precisely the problem that we seem to run into far too often in the church today – the suffering that people outside of the church go through becomes invisible to us. I think that that is what Jesus means when he talks about putting your light under a basket – it means shining the light in a way that it really only shines for your own sake.

      What does it mean for us to be the light of the world in the church? It means that we are not meant to keep this light – this message – to ourselves. Instead of shining it in our own eyes, we must hold it up above our heads so our eyes are not on the light but on the world that God so loved. And when we are tempted to keep it only for ourselves and use it only to serve ourselves, we must grab hold of a coconut shell, and set it between us and the light forcing ourselves to look elsewhere. The coconut shell is the example of Christ who came to live the message of life, not for his own sake but so clearly for the sake of everyone else that he laid his own life down in its service.

      As you go out into the world following the service today, therefore, I would invite you to take with you the light of the knowledge of Christ that you have obtained in this church and throughout your Christian life. But carry it like this – like a Kerala lamp – so that you may allow the love and grace, forgiveness and hope of Christ to shine on others before it shines on yourself. I’ll warn you, that may mean that you find yourself thinking about the needs of others before you think of your own needs, that you may spend more energy on compassion than you do on judgement and that you maean for us to be the light of the worldhat Jesus means when he talks about the ligng through, the y feel more deeply the struggles of others that you observe. In other words, you might just become more Christlike.

     

Hespeler, 3 September 2017 © Scott McAndless

Mark 4:1-9, Acts 2:37-42, Psalm 126:1-6

h, there you are. You’re the new sower that we hired, aren’t you? Glad to have you working with us. Let me just say I hope you work out better than that last guy. What a sloppy worker he was! I mean, you wouldn’t believe this guy. We gave him a bag with like a hundred seeds in it and sent him out into the field. And what does he do? He starts throwing the seeds all over the place willy-nilly. They’re all flying around and about twenty-five of them fall on the path. Yes, you heard me right: on a hard packed path where nothing can grow. And what happens: they just sit there, wasted, until eventually some birds come along and eat them all. Twenty-five seeds just wasted! Do you realize what seeds cost these days and yet apparently this guy thinks that they are for the birds.

      Oh but wait a minute because that was only the beginning. He’s still flinging the seed everywhere and another twenty-five seeds fall on the rocky ground. Now I know that might seem alright at first because these seeds sprout up almost immediately. The rocky ground turns green with life but just when you see them growing and you start dreaming of all the crops that you are going to be able to reap what happens: the sun rises and it burns hot. The crops that grew among the rocks didn’t take enough time to put down a decent root system and they can’t stand the heat. They all turn brown and die. More seeds are gone.

      Then, to cap it all off, this so-called expert sower just happens to fling the next twenty-five seeds right among the thorns. Right in the middle of them! Now even I know that you can’t grow any good crops in there and, even if you could, who is going to go in there to try and harvest them? Not me, I’ll tell you that! So those seeds were effectively wasted too.

      So, you look like a smart young person. I’m sure you can figure out what all of this means: this guy has just thrown away seventy-five of the precious one hundred seeds that we gave him. Do we look like we are made of seeds? No, I’ll tell you, we are not.

      And, of course, that also means that out of all the seeds we gave him, only twenty-five of them ended up in the good soil. And, sure, those seeds grew and produced – in fact, some of them thirty, some of them sixty and some of them even a hundred times as much in the way of crops. So, when we had harvested it all, we did end up with 1,580 grains, but that is hardly the point. Think of what was wasted on the way to that harvest!

      But now you’re here. I can see that you are the kind of worker who will be much more careful at what you’re doing. So here are your seeds. Off you go… What? Oh yes, I know that there aren’t very many seeds in your sack. In fact, I know exactly how many seeds you’ve got there. I gave you exactly twenty-five seeds. That is a much as actually grew with the last guy. The other seeds we gave him obviously didn’t matter. Just don’t be wasteful like him and I’m sure that we’ll all get along and it will all turn out just fine.

      I can’t shake the thought that that is exactly the lesson that we would take from Jesus’ famous parable of the sower today. Jesus told the story (as he told most of his stories) to illustrate what the kingdom of God is and how it works. In particular, he seems to have been trying to show people how, on earth, the kingdom of God grows. But when we hear it, being conditioned by modern society with ideals of production and constant growth, our attention jumps right to the end of the story.

      At the end we hear that the seeds that were planted multiplied and produced many more times the grain than was planted. That, we assume, was the whole point of the enterprise: producing explosive numerical growth. We usually want to apply that directly to the church, of course, and may even assume that what Jesus was trying to say was that the church should always be expanding in size – multiplying in size thirty, sixty and even a hundredfold.

      But if you look at the story that Jesus told, that couldn’t have been his only point. He is talking about seeds in this parable – seeds that are cast into the ground. Do you really think that punch line of a story about seeds would be, “the seeds grew”? That is like telling a story about a driver who drives someplace or a cook who makes a meal. The ending is just expected.

      No the interesting part of the story – the part that would have caught people’s attention – was the part that looks like failure to us. Jesus spends much more time describing how it happens that seeds don’t grow when they are sown than he does describing growth. And indeed, the way that he tells the story, three times as many of the seeds end up not growing than end up growing. So why did Jesus direct our attention where he did?

      Well, if Jesus was telling this as a parable of the kingdom of God (and I think he was) then I think he was trying to tell us something very important about the kingdom. It was, of course, a story about growth because the seeds that are planted in the good soil do experience some tremendous growth. So one of the applications of this parable would be to say that we ought to expect that growth – all kinds of growth – should be a sign that the kingdom of God is present.

      To apply that to the church, yes, we should expect that growth should be a regular dynamic of the church. The church should grow and should be a place where people grow. Now, that may not always mean numerical growth or growth in membership. That is certainly something that many churches in many places struggle with these days. But, over the long term, as long as the church is a place where people are experiencing personal growth and so long as the commitment to mission is growing, the church should naturally be a place that is drawing more people unto itself.

      But, as I say, Jesus spends a lot more time talking about the seeds that don’t grow so I suspect that he might also be trying to teach us about the things that get in the way of the growth of the kingdom of God. The sower in his story is wildly wasteful. As we have noticed already, he literally wastes three-quarters of his seeds by throwing them in places where they cannot grow and produce. I suspect that many of the listeners who heard Jesus tell this parable, most of whom would have had firsthand farming experience, would have remarked on this point. I mean, I know that no matter how careful you are at sowing (even with modern farming equipment) you cannot prevent having some of your seeds land in places where you don’t want them to be, but this guy truly is ridiculous.

      It is so exaggerated that I think it just might be Jesus’ point. I think he is saying that the kingdom of God cannot grow if we are not sufficiently wasteful in the ways that we share it. Unfortunately, that is precisely the lesson that we most often resist in the life of the church today.

      For example, it is not uncommon for the leadership of a church that is heavily involved in mission and outreach to the community to run into lots of criticism from the congregation for such an emphasis. This happens because church people notice that the people in the community who are served by that mission are unlikely to show up and add to the membership of the church. Statistically this seems to be how it works. Very few of the people who are given help by the church – food, clothing, counselling and so on – will ever show up and participate in the life of the church.

      I mean there are exceptions to that and it is wonderful to have such people in our churches, but it is true you are very unlikely to grow the church very much by adding the people who are the primary focus of the local mission. They are just not very likely to come. And so church people will complain: “Why are we spending so much time and effort and money supporting these people in the community who won’t ever come to church and who, if they did, likely wouldn’t be able to help support the church anyway?” It’s like casting seeds on the path, they’ll say, it is all wasted.

      I have also heard people talk about ministry to young people in much the same way. Youth ministry can be expensive after all. You may have to pay youth leaders. You usually need to make a fairly large investment in terms of money and space and energy to create programs that will attract young people. And that often creates a problem for the church folk because there is no guarantee that those young people will remain and become a long-term part of the congregation. In fact, it is kind of unlikely.

      After all, the younger generation today are more mobile than any previous generation in the history of our society. They will likely move as they pursue educational and employment opportunities and as other things change in their life. This is especially true for many of our churches that are located in places where there are no post-secondary education opportunities. It is also true (and this is something that is true in all denominations and all theological wings) that young people today are more likely to drop out of faith altogether than were any previous generation.

      So a lot of church folk today look at youth ministry and don’t see it as a very good investment – it seems highly unlikely to bring much return in the way of growth – and so they will not make it easy for those church leaders who want to make it a priority. They feel as if youth ministry is just throwing our seeds on the shallow ground where we might see some short-term growth but it will never last.

      In fact, generally speaking, if you put any energy and resources in the church into efforts to communicate and connect with people who do not come to church, you will likely get pushback from the people who do come. After all, the vast majority of people you reach out to in those ways will not come and will certainly never become regular attenders. They already have lives that are filled with so many other things. They are like seeds that fall onto ground where they are surrounded by weeds and thorns. Why would you spend anything to invest in that?

      Those are just a few examples but there are many more. People just seem to make this assumption that the key way for the church to grow is to put the most money and the most energy into taking care of the people who are there and, if there is going to be any attracting of new people, those people who are wanted are people who are just like the people who are already there. The assumption seems to be that you need to spend all your time taking care of those seeds that have already fallen on the good soil. After all, aren’t they the ones most likely to grow and produce good fruit?

      I believe that Jesus told this parable of the sower for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons was to counter those very kinds of complaints. His promise was that the kingdom of God will grow, but in order for that growth to occur, a certain wastefulness is actually necessary. You have to sow broadly. You have to share liberally and even extravagantly without thinking about what you’ll get back for your investment. And if you attempt to cut back on the sowing that seems wasteful – the seeds that fall on the path or on the shallow ground or among the thorns – you will actually impinge on the growth that God wants to make happen even on the good soil, the growth ofappen, the grown th grown the the growth ing that seems wasteful -- the mise ss eople who are not going to tment the kingdom of God among you.

Flat Jesus apparently loves to travel, explore and learn!

Wow, Flat Jesus has been spotted in a lot of places!  From viewing a rainbow, to looking at the pretty Cambridge views, to The Big Apple, camping & Quebec, he's been busy travelling this month.