Mustard with that?

It's the parable of the mustard seed. And the parable of the mustard seed is all about small things growing into big things.  I made a point on Sunday that the biggest plant in the entire world, in case you didn't know, is a California Redwood named Hyperion. Hyperion is 380 feet tall, which is so big that I had to get a size comparative for it, and I was shocked to find out that Hyperion is taller than the tallest building in Regina.  This is an awfully big tree, you understand, a six hundred year old tree, and this tree was born from a seed that is exactly this big

The seeds of a California Redwood are the same size as a mustard seed - 3mm long.  That's not very big.  For a tree that gets to be so monumental, it sure starts out awfully small.  But that's the real trick behind the parable of the mustard seed, isn't it? The real trick of the parable is to know and understand that we're talking about something that starts off awfully small, and gets awfully big.  Jesus says that the kingdom of God is like this.  Like a mustard seed that is a teeny tiny seed that ends up growing into a massive plant. Now, of course, the mustard seed isn't the smallest seed in creation, that belongs to an orchid that has seeds smaller than a mm.  And the mustard plant isn't the biggest plant in the world, that would obviously be Hyperion.  But Jesus is going through this parable for the same reason that he goes through any of his parables - he is using the familiar to explain the foreign, the comfortable to explain the alien.  He is using what you know, what you can understand, to explain what you can't possibly conceive of (more on that next week).  He's talking about mustard seeds because, well, that was a seed that people actually used.  A parable doesn't work if it's about something you've never heard of as the referent, either.  The mustard seed is a seed that the people of the time of Christ planted, and also that they worked with in their kitchens. Just like using salt to describe the disciples, Jesus also uses mustard to describe the kingdom of Heaven.  They used mustard just like we use mustard, they were familiar with that awesome condiment just like we are.  And when Jesus brings up the mustard seed and the mustard plant, he's bringing up an immense disparity between the size of the seed, and the size of the plant.

 

That's a big old tree, isn't it?  And trees like this, every tree that there is grows from a seed much much smaller than itself. The California redwood and the mustard plant are just two examples of how that works, and we all know that this is how it works.  But here's what we might have forgotten about this parable.   Massive plants grow from tiny seeds, but they do this slowly.  Very very gradually.

For we are now in the throes of green stole time, and green stole time, common time, the time of the church, is when great growth happens.  We'd expect it to be in other times, which is why church attendance spikes at those times.  We'd expect growth to happen at Christmas, Easter, the Christmas Eve candlelit service, all that stuff, we don't expect growth to happen on the seventh Sunday after Pentecost, or whatever.  But on these weeks, these weeks that are in common time, those weeks that are just sort of there, not a festival, not a red stole, not a white stole, but a green one, those weeks are times in which great growth happens.  And you know this, because you've all seen plants grow.

Plants don't grow well if you only water them twice a year.  Plants don't prosper if you weed around them once, or if you fertilize them one time.  They don't mature and grow if they never get any moisture.  They have to be tended regularly, and if they are, then they grow growing slowly as they are tended.  You've seen this happen with plants, and you've seen this happen with people too.

It was also Father's day on Sunday, and on Sunday, it was time to think on all the work our earthly fathers have done, what they have done to make us, raise us, and turn us into the people that we are today, and the older you get, the more you understand that the work that your father does is heavily grounded in one vitally important factor - patience.  Patience is a hallmark of the work that fathers do, for they have to do the same things over and over again.  They have to go to the same job every day, they have to drive you to the same places every week, to buy the same groceries every week, to do the same things around the house all the time, they are vigilant, and they're patient.  And if you're a child of a father, you will know that you can't pinpoint the exact moment that you learned something, that you grew up, that you magically turned from a boy into a man.  Odds are your father didn't sit you down and tell you life lessons.  Odds are he lived them out day by day, minute by minute, by living out his values, by being the person that he needed to be for you, consistently and patiently.  And it's an accumulation of those tiny tiny moments, over dozens of days, a couple of decades, and it forms you and shapes you into a man, into a woman, who learned what it was to be a grown up over all that time through the presence of your father.

Which brings us back to the mustard seed.  Teeny tiny.  You look at that, and it doesn't amount to much.  You look at a baptism, and it doesn't look like too much.  You look at a Bible and it looks like a book, you look at communion and it looks like a tiny flat circle.  You look at a worship service and it looks like an hour, just by itself, isolated.  These things all look like nothing on their own, but live in them frequently enough, and boy oh boy, things start to happen.  The faith grows, the kingdom is revealed, God works through the means through which he promised to work, he is present in with and under the elements, he is in the waters of baptism with you, where there are two or three gathered there in his name, there he is in the midst of them.  None of this is magic, and it certainly doesn't work all in one shot Damascus style.  But if you allow that steady growth to happen, bit by bit, moment by moment, like a plant grows, first the blade, then the ear, you'll see that growth that you are looking for.

Don't see it yet? then echo those same words that we hear from the Scriptures 'Lord , I believe.  Help thou my unbelief.'  Then take your sins to Christ to have them forgiven.  Again.  Take holy communion.  Again.  Hear the word of God.  Again. Realize that this is just like watering a plant, tending to it, like teaching a child to walk, to read, to ride a bike or throw a baseball, or any of the other things our fathers taught us to do on the road to full grown adulthood.  Consistency.  Steady growth, until the result is a hundred thousand times bigger than the seed.