Pasadena Presbyterian Church Sermon Text
January 22, 2006

"Mustard Seed"
Preached by The Rev. Dr. Jack Rogers

Dr. Jack Rogers is Professor of Theology Emeritus at San Francisco Theological Seminary.  He was Moderator of the 213th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Scripture:  Daniel 4: 19-22

Then Daniel who was called Belteshazzar, was severely distressed for a while.  His thoughts terrified him.  The king said, ‘Belteshazzar, do not let the dream or the interpretation terrify you.’  Belteshazzar answered, "My Lord, may the dream be for those who hate you, and its interpretation for your enemies!  The tree that you saw, which grew great and strong, so that its top reached to heaven, and was visible to the end of the whole earth, whose foliage was beautiful and its fruit abundant, and which provided food for all, under which animals of the field lived, and in whose branches the birds of the air had nests – it is you, O King! You have grown great and strong.  Your greatness has increased and reaches to heaven, and your sovereignty to the ends of the earth."

Matthew 13:31-32

He [Jesus] put before them another parable:  "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”

         This short and seemingly simple parable of the mustard seed is central to Jesus’ teaching about the reality of God come into our world.  A parable is a very short story that often has a double meaning.  That is certainly true in this case.[i] 

Jewish rabbis often used parables in interpreting the law.  Rabbi Jesus perfected the parable form and used it to draw people into the Kingdom of God.  His seemingly simple stories raised profound moral issues. His critics were often angered, realizing that Jesus had pointed a knowing finger at them.[ii] 

We can always learn something about how to interpret the Bible by observing how Jesus used Scripture.  In this case, we know that the mustard seed is not literally the smallest seed, but it was proverbially referred to as such.  Mustard is an annual herb.  It blooms on the hillsides here in Southern California in the springtime with beautiful yellow flowers.  It normally produces a shrub from two to six feet in height, but it would be unusual to call it a tree.  So, Jesus, the Son of God, is not trying to give us a lesson in botany.  He is speaking as anyone would in his society to make a different point.

Jesus is making a reference, obscure to us, that his original Middle Eastern, Jewish, hearers would have understood.  The reference is to Daniel, chapter 4:20-22. There, the King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar’s kingdom is likened to a great tree in which the birds come to roost.  Several places in the Old Testament, the image of a tree with birds roosting in its branches stands for a nation, a kingdom, a government.  Trees were the property of the wealthy and powerful who could cultivate them.  On the other hand, the mustard seed shrub grew spontaneously, didn’t need irrigation, and provided the poor folk, who composed most of Jesus’ audience, with spice for their food and some medicinal properties. 

In the Old Testament passage read, Daniel is interpreting King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream.  The dream had terrified the king.  It terrified Daniel to have to interpret it lest the King be angry with him.  All of this was because later in the dream a watcher cried aloud, “Cut down the tree and chop off its branches, strip off its foliage and scatter its fruit.  Let the animals flee from beneath it and the birds from its branches”  (Daniel 4:14).

Daniel interpreted that to mean that the king would be brought down because he boasted of his own power and did not trust in the sovereign God.  Daniel’s interpretation came true.  Nebuchadnezzar lost his mind and his monarchy.   Jesus, by juxtaposing the imperial tree image with the lowly mustard seed plant tells his hearers that, despite appearances, human kingdoms, with all of the resources that it takes to keep them in power, can fall, but that God’s Realm can arise and grow among those who have few resources, but trust in God’s sovereignty.[iii]  

The Christian church, as a human expression of God’s realm, certainly grew out of all proportion to its seemingly insignificant beginnings in a group of Jesus’ disciples.  In the first instance, this is a parable of encouragement.  By God’s power, great things can come from limited resources.[iv]   

          I saw multiple instances of that principle during my year as Moderator of the 213^th General Assembly in 2001-2002.  

Let me give you an example. I met a businessman, in the Raleigh/Durham area of North Carolina, who was moderator of his presbytery.  He developed a program that takes mentally challenged people out of state-funded institutions and trains them in skills needed for coping with life.  Then these same people are prepared for jobs by which they become self-supporting.  One of those jobs is in a cleaning business that churches utilize to clean their buildings.  Everyone benefits.  We drove past a large store, part of a national chain, and my host said: “Everyone of the cashiers in that store is one of our graduates.”

In May, 2002, I was near the end of my term as Moderator of the 213^th General Assembly. My wife, Sharon, and I responded to invitations from churches in Portugal, Spain, Egypt, and the Netherlands.  In each of these countries we visited, the Protestant Church represents a small minority with limited resources.  In Portugal, for example, the Evangelical Protestant Church of that country had only 1,117 members.  It was growing slowly.  

The President, Jose Leite, began his ministry as a pastor in a rural community.  He asked permission of the session to go away to a conference.  One of the elders said to him:  “You need to stay right here.  You don’t know the difference between a potato and a carrot.”  Jose took that comment to heart.  While serving as pastor he took a degree in agriculture at the nearby university.  He began to understand the kind of soil they had and what crops best suited it.  Now the church owns a number of large green houses where they grow flowers for wholesale to hotels and conference centers.  The green houses employ people and provide income to fund a wonderful school for the children of hard working fishermen in a nearby village.

Recently, I saw an even more striking example of how God can do great things with our meager resources.  Last November, 2005, Sharon and I again visited Egypt. It was a sentimental journey for me. In 1955, fifty years before, I had been one of eleven American young people that went to Egypt representing the United Presbyterian Church in North America. Our trip celebrated the 100^th anniversary of Presbyterian mission work in that country.  We eleven American young people participated in a work camp with forty Egyptian youth and some missionaries, including Jack Lorimer of this congregation.  The site was a strip of raw desert on the seashore about 10 miles from Alexandria.  We worked together for a month and built a concrete-block dining hall up to roof level.  We lived in tents, where in the morning, you reach down and shake the sand and the scorpions out of your shoes before you put them on.  We started early and worked late and took a nap in the middle of the day when the sun was hottest.  It was the Bible study and prayer in the evening that got us up and going the next day.

Last November, 2002, Sharon and I visited Egypt to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of that work camp.  Far from being in the midst of raw desert, it is now suburban Alexandria.  There in the midst of urban affluence our concrete-block dining hall has developed into a sophisticated conference center, called Beit el Salam (House of Peace).  There is now a chapel built atop our dining hall, and many other facilities, including a soccer field, a swimming pool, and a high-rise apartment building that rivals the finest hotel in Alexandria.  The staff are young, energetic, and highly competent.  

For me, the transformation of the original work camp at Agamy in 1955 into the conference center Beit El Salam in 2005 is one of the greatest examples of how God can bring great things out of meager resources. For me, most important of all was that in 1955 we tried something new.  Young men and women worked side by side which had not happened before in Egypt.  College educated people did hard manual labor and found they could do it and it was good.  Americans and Egyptians representing two languages, two cultures, many different personalities and personal preferences came together and became one community because of our common love for Jesus Christ which developed into a love for one another.  

Now 18,000 people a year come to Beit El Salam.  Thousands make fresh commitments to Christ and his cause.  Now not only have the buildings grown bigger, but the community has grown immensely with all of us, Egyptians and Americans, first year campers and fifty-year returnees, becoming partners in the one body of Christ. 

Let us return to our text.  It is the second part of the mustard seed parable makes me uncomfortable — with its comparison of imperial kingdoms to the kingdom of God.  One can argue that we live in a country that is one of the greatest empires that the world has ever known.  Our economic might and military power dominate the world in a way that has not been seen since ancient Rome.  

Some biblical scholars, are now telling us that terms like “Kingdom” of God and “gospel” were terms used by the Roman Empire before Jesus’ birth.  In 42 BC Roman law had declared that Julius Caesar was a god. Octavius (his adopted son and heir), took the name Caesar Augustus, and was referred to as, “son of God.”  In the Roman Empire, the “gospel” was the good news of Caesar’s having established peace and security for the world. [v] 

In its historical context, the Christian message is much more subversive than we may at first realize.  To proclaim Jesus as “Lord” and “the son of god” was directly to contradict the Roman Emperor.  Furthermore, to say that Jesus’ teachings were the “gospel” and that they, not Caesar’s imperial army, would bring peace to earth, was a radical departure from the conventional wisdom of the day.  For a scruffy band of Jews in a poorer part of the Roman Empire to declare such things was bold indeed.

Our text presents us with a choice:  Do we put our trust in Nebuchadnezzar’s, and America’s, imperial tree, or in Jesus lowly mustard seed shrub?  If we followed Jesus, what would that look like?  

Our present Moderator of the General Assembly, Rick Ufford-Chase spoke to this issue when he wrote in December, 2004:  “What if the church stood against all forms of violence: the war in Iraq, the Israeli Occupation,… or what we call terrorism?….Security, in Jesus’ world, comes not at the point of a gun that protects us from our enemies but from the peace that can only be achieved when we all feel secure.  What if we had spent $200 billion dollars on housing and clean water in the Middle East instead of on waging war there?” [vi]   

It’s not easy to be a Presbyterian.  The great decisions of life always involve a judgment call.  That’s why we study things so much.  Our religious commitments call for difficult moral decisions, and those decisions often call for us to stand against the conventional wisdom.  In Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah, we can find citizenship in the kingdom of heaven, and the strength to work at transforming this world more nearly into the Kingdom of God.

Let us, again, go back again to our text.  Jesus said:  “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed…; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches” (Matt. 13:31-32).  The spreading tree that was Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian empire is gone.  The spreading tree that was the Roman Empire is gone.  The tiny mustard seed that was the Christian Church has grown, and is growing, and covers the earth.  Jesus’ gospel of love has produced an enduring kingdom.

This is a difficult time for us as a church and a nation.  May we find two kinds of help in the innocent-appearing parable we have been exploring:  First, encouragement to do great things with small resources; and Second, courage to struggle with the difficult choices we must make as citizens of this world and as citizens of the Kingdom of God.

Amen.

---

[i] Harpers Bible Dictionary, ed. Paul Achtemeier.  (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), s.v. parables.

[ii] The Anchor Bible: Matthew. Introduction, translation, and notes by W.F. Albright and C.S. Mann.  (Garden City, New York:  Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971), Pg. CXXXII. 

[iii] The New Interpreter’s Bible. Vol. 8. General Articles on the New Testament; The Gospel of Matthew; The Gospel of Mark., Ed. Leander Keck (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), pg. 309. 

[iv] The Interpreter’s Bible: The Gospel According to Matthew, Vol. VII. Edited by George Arthur Buttrick. (New York: Abingdon/Cokesbury Press, 1951), pg. 416.

[v] Richard A. Horsley in Jesus and Empire.

[vi] Rick Ufford-Chase, “Is peace possible?” The Presbyterian Outlook (March 14, 2005), 14.

(c) Copyright 2005 by Jack Rogers.  All rights reserved.  Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution.