Will Rice - Sermon #24 - Two Stories about Seeds and a Really Big Tree

Rev. Will Rice
Grace United Methodist Church
Corpus Christi, TX
pastorwillrice@gmail.com

Mark 4:26-34

“Two Stories about Seeds and a Really Big Tree”

Check out General Sherman. It is a tree, a giant sequoia, Sequoiadendron giganteum to be more exact. It is located in Sequoia National Park in California. Let me tell you a little bit about this tree. It is 275 feet high. For a little perspective, the tree is as tall as a 27 story building. A thirteen story building would barely touch its first huge branch. The total volume of the trunk of the General Sherman tree - 52,500 cubic feet - is equal to the lumberman’s measure of 630,000 board feet. Since a board foot is 12 inches of 1x12 lumber, the trunk of the General Sherman tree theoretically could be cut into 119.3 miles of 1x12 planking. That would reach from our front door to this end of the 410 loop outside of San Antonio.

Giant redwoods like this have seed cones. When a forest fire burns through the forest, the updraft causes the cones to open dropping hundreds of tiny seeds to the ground, seeds so tiny that it takes 91,000 of them to weigh one pound. These tiny seeds fall to the ground onto the fertile soil produced by the fire and from them come more trees, trees with the potential to be as big as the one we just looked at. Now this is all just part of how nature works, but it is fairly mind blowing. From that tiny seed, comes that gigantic tree.

²⁶He also said, "The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, ²⁷and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.

Jesus loves to talk in parables, starting with things that we do understand to help us figure out things we don’t understand. Except maybe, this time, using something we think we understand, but really don’t, to explain something beyond comprehension.

There are actually two parables here back to back:

²⁶He also said, "The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground,

³¹It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth;”

The kingdom of God is sort of like someone scattering seed on the ground, and sort of like a tiny little mustard seed. Let’s look at both of these.

²⁶He also said, "The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, ²⁷and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. ²⁸The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.”

Most of us have been through elementary school science. We know that if seed is scattered and the soil is fertile enough and there is enough moisture, it will sprout and turn into a plant.

However well I understand the science, it is no less miraculous. If you are a gardener or a farmer you toil in the dirt and work hard to make sure your seeds are in the right dirt and that they get plenty of water and the right amount of sun. However, there is a part you aren’t really in control of. That certain something that changes that seed from a seed to a living thing.

²⁸The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.

We can plant seeds, but we can’t make them grow. This is an interesting lesson in mystery and humility. All of our efforts aren’t much compared to what God can do. That is true with the seed, we can plant it and fertilize it, but only God can make it grow. That is true with our efforts as people of God. In our efforts to help initiate God’s kingdom in this world, to bring change, to follow God ourselves and help others find their way to God, we can do good things, but it is truly God who can take those seeds and make them grow.

There is great mystery in the spark of life that turns a seed into a living thing and there is great mystery in how God takes what we do and truly turns it into something that can build the kingdom of God.

³⁰He also said, "With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? ³¹It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; ³²yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade."

Back to the General Sherman tree~ Remember those seeds? It would take 91,000 of them to make a pound of seed. Yet from just one of them can become a tree 275 feet high! That is part of the mystery, part of God’s work.

From the tiniest beginning, God can create wonderful, enormous results. The coming of the kingdom of God is a wonderful, enormous result. But all we have is little seeds. But that is ok. Because this is a God thing.

What I love about parables is that sometime we can hear them differently when we are in different places.

Let me give a couple of examples.

Pride

Betty is a young pastor, just a couple of years out of seminary. For her first appointment, the Bishop sent her to a small church that was just about dead. After only two years under Betty’s leadership, worship attendance has doubled, membership has doubled, there are a number of new young families with children, and they have just begun planning an expansion of their sanctuary to provide for all the growth. Betty sits back one day and thinks to herself, look what I have done. Our parables say, “look what God has done!”

1 Corinthians 3:7 reads:

⁷So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.

²⁶He also said, "The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, 27and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.

I think that this parable reminds us who is doing the work. It tells us to not give ourselves so much credit and remember that God is doing the real work. That is a pretty good sermon right there, so I could stop… but I am not sure that pride is the biggest problem we face.

Pressure

Let’s look at another example, another set of ears through which to hear this parable. Matt is a lifelong Christian, but while in a group Bible study really hears God’s cry for the poor. If you spend any time at all reading the Bible, you will see that God is much more concerned with the poor than God is concerned with issues that we want to pass laws about. So Matt does some research and finds out that 20,000 people a day perish die to extreme poverty.[1] He looks a little deeper and finds out that 1.1 billion people worldwide are living in extreme poverty, meaning they earn less than the equivalent of one dollar a day.[2]

Matt reads that and then says, “what the heck am I supposed to do about that?” He could have two equally dangerous reactions. One is to take the entire burden of this problem on his shoulders. He could become convinced that he needs to fix this situation. He might accomplish quite a bit, he may actually make a difference in the lives of many hungry people, but eventually he is going to burn out. He is going to miss out on the opportunity to work in unison, to be a vehicle of the amazing transforming power of the one who created the universe.

Matt could be overwhelmed by the pressure he has put on himself.

Complacency

I said Matt could have two dangerous reactions to being overwhelmed, let’s look at the other one with another example. Back in Austin where I was last appointed we have a lot of pan handlers. I mean a whole lot. Every major intersection featured at least one man or woman with a sign asking for money. Laurie comes to me one day and says, “I don’t know what to do about these panhandlers. I feel like I should help them, but I am afraid if I give them money they will spend it on drugs.” My response, “Good point, so what are you doing to help?” Her response, “Nothing.”

That other dangerous and perhaps more dangerous reaction to being overwhelmed with the enormity of the task is that of complacency. Sometime when we look at a problem as big as homelessness or as big as world hunger, we just say, “I can’t possibly fix that, so I am not going to even try.”

Laurie’s feeling of being overwhelmed has led to complacency. “I can’t do it all, so I will do nothing!”

2 Corinthians 9:10

¹⁰He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness.

²⁶He also said, "The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, ²⁷and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.

³¹It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; ³²yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade."

These two parables remind us of our place in all of this kingdom building. We can’t take all the credit (avoid pride). We shouldn’t carry the whole weight on our shoulders (pressure) and we can’t just do nothing (complacency)

The Parable in Action

Now I have given you examples of how this parable corrects us. Now, let me talk about where I have seen this parable in action. I was in a class with a couple of people like Matt and Laurie, the ones I mentioned in the examples. They were both convicted of their need to be in ministry with the poor but overwhelmed with the task before them. One was facing pressure the other complacency. I found out one day that they were both volunteering in downtown Austin at the homeless shelter serving dinner Friday nights. They weren’t ending hunger, they weren’t solving the problem of every homeless person in Austin, but they were doing their part trusting that God is faithful doing God’s part.

A lot of people know that there are a lot of parts of Corpus Christi that aren’t as nice as some of the neighborhoods we live in. There are neighborhoods with frighteningly high crime rates, drug trafficking, and enough violence to keep most of us away. In some of these neighborhoods live people who are trying their best to raise families and retired people trying to get by on fixed incomes. It is so easy to look at these people in these neighborhoods and either be overwhelmed with the pressure of trying to fix the entire situation or more likely to say, “I can’t fix that, I am not going to even try.”

There is that option and then there is the idea that if you were to go into one of these neighborhoods and touch one life or one family that you would be planting the seeds of the kingdom. What if you went to one family whose house was broken down, perhaps even falling down and said, “we want to help.”

That is exactly what Sea City Work Camp does and just go finished doing last week. Just during the week hosted by Grace, 10 houses 100 youth at least 100 adults supporting the whole thing. The Sea City organization takes applications from people who need help and then people go out and help. And you know, in two or three weeks each summer, the whole city isn’t changed. But what is amazing is the sort of life God brings out of those seeds. In the communities where the work is done, you can sometimes notice a little chain reaction as neighbors decide it is time to clean up their lots, mow their lawns, maybe even put on a little paint. There is a little more pride in the neighborhood. More importantly seeds of the love of God have been planted. Who knows what God can do with what has been done in those neighborhoods?

And what about the seeds planted in the young people. Yeah so they work hard for a week in the sun helping someone. But God takes that week and brings transformation out of it. Young people leave Sea City Work Camp forever changed with a deeper understanding of the call of God in their lives, a deeper understanding of people who don’t have what they have.

Now, I could meander around on this topic all morning. I could give you other examples and tell you stories and reread the parable another way. But instead, let me go against all the conventions of good sermon writing and ask this question:

Where is God calling you to plant seeds?

Are you feeling called to share the good news of God, but overwhelmed with the task? Is there one place, one person, one thing that you can do and then trust in God?

Is hunger and homelessness something close to your heart, but you can’t even imagine where to start? You know all the money collected at the communion rails today goes toward restocking our food pantry so that when people come to Grace looking for help, we can give them groceries. That won’t end hunger overnight, but we can do our part and trusting in God to be faithful doing God’s part.

God is calling us all to look after God’s most precious little ones. Some of us have a special call to help children. But where do we start? There are children right here in our city, right here in Annaville/CalAllen without enough to eat, without proper healthcare, with unstable households that nearly guarantee for them an entire life of poverty, and children without homes at all stuck in the system just hoping for a family to love them.

Well that is too much to even begin to tackle. But we can all support Metro Ministries or the Wesley Community Center which provide basic necessities for people who have fallen through every other safety net. Almost any one of us can all take part in our mentor program and give one child a role model that can help them escape from the trap of poverty. Maybe some us can open our homes to foster children through Methodist Children’s Home. These are kids who don’t want a new X-Box for Christmas, they just want someone who will actually demonstrate that they are worth loving.

Perhaps you worry about the young people in our community, about the choices they will make or how they will navigate this complex world. But there are a lot of young people out there and only one of you. What if you start right here working with our youth. Some will say, “Oh I am not ready to actually work with youth” That’s ok, there are ways you can support the people who do work with you, providing meals or transportation or even money for scholarships. Do what you can, we can trust God to provide.

As Christians we have to fight the temptation to sit back and watch the television or read the paper and say, somebody ought to do something about that! We have to be out there planting seeds!

Where is God calling you to plant seeds? Those seeds might be your time, your skill, your money. Those seeds could include a small commitment or a total life change. The seeds you plant might create instant results or through them God might create something you will never see.

You know, I have dreams for Grace. I think that God can and will do amazing things here. I am not just talking about more members and better programs. I am talking about real kingdom of God stuff, transformation that actually affects the community around us, bringing positive change and a tangible sense of the love of God. I see that happening here, but as a pastor, I see the hurdles. We need more room, more parking, more bathrooms, more signs, more money. But, I only worry so much, because I know that if we all really do what God calls us to, if we do our part, God will be faithful. We will be able to overcome any obstacle that keeps us from truly reaching out and transforming the community that surrounds us in the name of Jesus Christ.

If God can create a tree 275 feet high from one, tiny little seeds, God can transform anything we can offer into things beyond our belief. We should be spreading as many seeds as we can. Amen?

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[1] Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty, (New York: Penguin Press, 2005) 1

[2] Ibid, p. 20

Will Rice - Sermon #23 - Of Particle Spin and Other Things Beyond Comprehension

Rev. Will Rice
Grace United Methodist Church
Corpus Christi, TX
pastorwillrice@gmail.com

Mark 1:9-11

I don’t want you to worry. In seminary, pastors are highly trained for all situations. Our professors know what challenges we will face in the local church. They know that once a year, on the church calendar, we will face the challenge of Trinity Sunday. They know that we will be faced with that day where we will have to explain how it is that God is three AND one and why that is important. When this subject comes up in seminary, it is one of the few times that the answer is very clear and non-nuanced. On Trinity Sunday, it is suggested by the giants of theological and pastoral wisdom at the seminary… you know, you might want to write this down in case you some day have a preacher in your family that doesn’t go to such a fine institution as the one I went to. On Trinity Sunday, you are to, without a doubt, without any fear or trepidation, find a guest preacher. It can be the Bishop, the District Superintendent, a friend from school, it doesn’t matter.

Most people have heard of the Trinity, but let me clarify what I am talking about. The Doctrine of the Trinity says, (this according to the Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church):

There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body or parts, of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the maker and preserver of all things, both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there are three persons, of one substance, power and eternity—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.[1]

That is a bit to swallow, let me spell it out a little more clearly.

1. God eternally exists as three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
2. Each person is fully God
3. There is one God

Clear as mud. I find that people tend to fall into about five camps about the Trinity.

Camp One – They just get it, no explanation necessary
Camp Two – They think they get it, but don’t really
Camp Three – They don’t get it and don’t care
Camp Four – They don’t get it and they really wish they did
Camp Five – They realize it is not really about getting it

I am sure a bunch of you have read it and a bunch more have it sitting around the house. A few years back, Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant minds of our times wrote a book, A Brief History of Time. In the book, he did a pretty wonderful job of explaining things like space time, black holes, wormholes and basic astrophysics to people with little brains like mine. There was one part, thought that drove me nuts. If any of you here this morning are astrophysicists, please excuse me for a moment while tromp all over your field.

Hawking says that “everything in the known universe, including light and gravity, can be described in terms of particles.”[2] All of these particles have a property called spin, something that tells us what they look like from different directions (if you could actually see them, they are pretty small.) A particle of spin 0 is like a dot; it looks the same no matter how you turn it. A particle of spin one is like the ace of spades playing card, it only looks the same if you turn in all the way around 360 degrees. A particle of spin 2 is like the queen of hearts, if you spin it just half way around, it looks the same. Now, all of that makes sense, at least at a theoretical level. However, there are particles said to a have a spin of ½. For them to look the same as when you started, you would have to turn them two complete revolutions.[3] Not just one time around like my ace of spades, but around again.

I don’t have a picture for that because that, to my tiny little brain doesn’t even make sense. I just can conceive of an object that wouldn’t look the same if you turned it completely around, that would take an entire extra revolution to look the same as when you started.

I love reading stuff like Stephen Hawkins’s work because it reminds me that there are limits to my own understanding. There are limits to the number of dimensions that I can think of. I don’t even understand the building blocks of matter and energy, how am I supposed to hold any sort of monopoly on understanding of the one that created everything?

It is easy to forget that everything that we use to try and understand God is simply a model. A model is not the thing itself, it is a theory or an object used to try and understand and study something far more complicated. God warned us all about how far to take models.

Exodus 20:4-6:

⁴You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. ⁵You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God.

The Reverend Charles Royden, the Vicar at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Bedford, England talks about the Trinity this way, “The Trinity is not an explanation of God, it is a description of what we know about God, albeit contradictory and contrary to logic as we know it.”

Think about today’s passage again for a moment:

⁹In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. ¹⁰And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. ¹¹And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Right in this passage you have Jesus, the Son, the Father speaking from heaven, and the Holy Spirit, the three persons of the Trinity in the same scene.

Back in my small high school, when we did musicals, occasionally someone would have to play two different parts, which worked fine, but the two characters could never be in the same scene.

Throughout the years, pastors and theologians have come up with a number of ways to help people understand the Trinity. Legend has it that Saint Patrick, who really is the Patron Saint of Ireland, not a Hallmark invention, used the shamrock, a type of clover. The clover seems to have three parts, but they are all really part of the same leaf. There are a number of limitations to this including the fact that a clover, can come apart. God is one.[4]

Another common explanation is water. There are three forms, ice, water and steam. There is a small problem with that, water can’t be all three things at once.

An explanation that I have always liked is that of a woman’s ability to be mother to her child, wife to her husband and sister to her brother. It is wonderful, except that this sort of thinking was condemned as the heresy of Modalism in the 3^rd century. The heresy of this view is that it contends that God just appears as three different persons and isn’t really three different persons while at the same time being one.

Studying the Trinity for a while is somewhat like looking at the work of M.C. Escher for too long.

With as perplexing as the Trinity is, you may wonder why we still talk about it. A lot of pastors and churches have lumped talk of the Trinity in with other “antiquated” “outdated” now irrelevant church stuff. Church growth experts tell us that we if want to reach a new generation of Christians we need to scrap all the stuff like this and preach sermons on relevant topics like “Lose Weight the Gospel Way” “40 Days and 40 Nights to Debt Free Living” or “Praying Your Way to a Promotion.”

I do not think we ought to toss out the doctrine of the Trinity. But, let me be clear, the point is not doctrinal correctness… the point is relationship! The point is transformation! In describing the Trinity, we are trying, in vain, to explain what we know about something greater than our knowing. We are faced with an impossible task, but one we must undertake.

Close you eyes for a moment – I want you to think about distance. It is about five miles from where you are sitting to my house is Wood River. From where you are sitting to edge of the visible universe is about a million million million million miles.[5] That’s just the known part. Picture that. You can open your eyes to see that number on the screen.

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Our God is so beyond comprehension, that our words fail us, but if we stop trying, we can miss out on the true blessing of a God so radically abundant that our frail little models fall very short.

Although the model of the Trinity is limited, without it, we also may limit our own understanding. Without some discussion of trinity, we risk, placing all of our “theological eggs in one basket.”[6]

In our God we have God the creator, who made all this, everything we can imagine and more, a God that is powerful, all-knowing, ever present.

Our God, is an awesome God,

he reigns from heaven above,

with wisdom power and love

our God is an awesome God.

or

God of wonders, beyond our galaxy
You are holy, holy
The universe declares Your majesty
You are holy, holy

But, if this is all we consider, our God seems distant, removed, completely shrouded in mystery. If we worship only God, the creator, we risk having a faith that is sterile, completely theoretical as we hurl praise at a distant world maker hoping that some amount of grace might be thrown back. Our God is one God, three in one who is very real to us in Jesus Christ and who lives and breathes in us in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Our God is Jesus Christ, a very human being who laughed and wept, who ate and slept, who was born and died. In Jesus God knows our pain, can relate to life on this Earth. In Jesus we can connect to God in a very personal way.

And he walks with me and he talks with me

and he tells me I am his own.

And the love we share as we tarry there,

none other has ever known.

Or

My Jesus, My Savior, Lord there is none like you!
All of my days, I long to praise, the wonders of your mighty love
My comfort, my shelter, tower of refuge and strength,
Let every breath, all that I am, never cease to worship you!

But if we take Jesus without God the creator, where is the power, where is the mystery? If we worship only Jesus the Son, we may have a faith that is just too human, too limited, too practical. Our God is also a God of power, the God with the power to create and the Holy Spirit, empowering us in ministry.

Our God is the Holy Spirit, a very real presence in our world, empowering us and the church to do the work of ministry and live as God’s people. Without it, our faith could be distant, in the skies with our creator or stuck in the past with the historical person of Jesus.

Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.
Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.
Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me.
Spirit of living God, fall afresh on me.

But if we consider only the Spirit, perhaps our faith could waver and change as fickle as the wind that blows.

We are the church of the Triune God! We are a church that invites people to experience the awe and wonder of a God that created and is creating billions of galaxies, stars of unimaginable brightness, planets of rock and planets of gas, great mountain peaks and deep lush valleys. Giant towering trees and beautiful fragile flowers of so many varieties that we could never see them all.

We are a church that knows the abundant love of that God through the very human Jesus Christ, God! who stepped from the throne to live among God’s beloved children, healing them and walking with them and telling them that they are loved. This same God in Jesus Christ said “I love you so much, there is nothing you can do to change that. You can even nail me to a cross!”

We are a church that doesn’t just see God in the heavens or of Jesus in our history but God alive and living and working in us, making us the church, sending us out to share the news that the God of all creation loves us and that in Jesus Christ that God overcame death itself, brought us into relationship with God and taught us to love our neighbor as our selves. In the one Triune God we have a God of transformation above us, around us, within us working to draw us into relationship with God and working to change the world!

We have a God so absolutely amazing all we can say is, “well it’s kind of like this: you know how water and ice and steam are really all just water?”

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Click here to return to Pastor Will's Weblog and post a comment.

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[1] “The Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church” ¶ 103. Section 3—Our Doctrinal Standards and General Rules, The United Methodist Book of Discipline, 2004 (Nashville, The United Methodist Publishing House, 2004) 59

[2] Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, The Updated and Expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition, (New York: Bantam Books, 1988, 1996) 68

[3] Ibid, 69

[4] Rev. Will Rice, “The Trinity, Who Really Cares Anyway?” Preached at The Rock United Methodist Church, Cedar Park, Texas, 26 May, 2002

[5] Bill Bryson, *A Short History of Nearly Everything, (Broadway Books, 2003) 18

[6] Mary W. Anderson, “So Explain It To Me”, The Christian Century, May 20-27, 1999, p. 523