Something Isn’t Kosher

A Church article with View Comments posted 25 June 2009.
Tags: mustard, pentecost 2, sermon, year b

Occasion: Pentecost 2, Year B
Text: Ezekiel 17.22-24, Mark 4.26-34

This sermon was preached at Saint Andrew’s Lutheran Church, Columbia, MO on 13-14 June 2009.

For the last couple of years, Jennifer and I have been dreaming about having a house of our own. We dream about what it would be like to build our own house – sometimes we think big, more often we dream about a really tiny house that has everything built-in and packed in tightly. But no matter where we dream of being, no matter what kind of house or family we envision, one thing always stays the same – we’re going to have a garden. We’ll grow food and flowers, perhaps keeping a patch of the lawn for wild grasses – heck, with any luck, there won’t be much of a lawn to mow at all. I say that because, in all seriousness, as much as I want Jennifer to have the garden that she dreams of, I harbor a terrible secret in my heart: I hate yard work.

Pulling weeds might just be my least favorite outdoor activity. So far, I’ve gotten away with doing precious little weed pulling in my life, but I remain ever vigilant. Every month when we pay rent for our apartment at the seminary, I secretly rejoice that someone else is getting paid to mow the lawn and take care of the landscaping. And let’s be serious – what is a weed, anyway? I looked it up – weeds are just plants that someone decided are a nuisance. Sometimes that’s for a good reason, but sometimes it’s just because Better Homes and Gardens says so. It turns out that someone, years ago, decided that dandelions are weeds because they thought a pretty lawn doesn’t have little yellow flowers in it – and now everyone goes along with that.

We have a very solid idea of what is a weed and what belongs in your front lawn. If I buy a house in a subdivision in Columbia, Missouri and fill it with tomato plants – nothing but tomatoes as far as the eye can see, no grass, just tomatoes – you wouldn’t call it a lawn, you’d call it a farm. In fact, I’d probably get crosswise of someone’s neighborhood association. I’ve heard that there are now neighborhoods where the covenants are so strong that if you plant the wrong kinds of landscaping – not ugly plants, just the wrong kind of hosta – your neighbors can sue you.

Today, our readings bring us to the question of right and wrong kinds of plants. Jesus says that the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, which when sown upon the ground grows into a big, branching shrub. You and I listening to this parable today hear this like I hear that there are dandelions in my yard – we think, “oh, how nice!” or “so what?” and go on with our lives. Mustard seeds don’t mean much to us. But the average Israelite, hearing Jesus’ parable about the mustard seed, would be on the phone to the neighborhood association.

To find out why, we need to think about what we heard in the Ezekiel text. Ezekiel uses the image of a tall, strong cedar to talk about God’s faithfulness to the Israelites. Cedars are the trees of riches – King Solomon built his palace from cedars, and cedar trees are common symbols of the strength of the land and God’s blessings. Cedar trees, in short, are on the neighborhood association’s approved short-list of plants you can have in your front yard. They are respectable, powerful, and prosperous.

On top of that, our short reading from Ezekiel ends with a promise: that all the trees will know that the Lord is God. That the high trees will be brought low, and the low trees will be raised up. The trees here are the nations of the world – Ezekiel describes God’s promise to the people by saying that the mighty empires that are oppressing them will be brought low, and the humble, powerless Israelites will be raised up. This is great news for oppressed people – things are going to be stood on their heads, and finally they will get the prosperity they deserve. God is just!

So if cedars are the symbol of wealth, prosperity, abundance, and God’s fulfilled promises to Israel, why don’t we hear Jesus talking about a cedar seed planted on the ground? Instead, we hear about the mustard seed, not the greatest of all trees, but the greatest of all the shrubs. At a number of places in the explanation of the Old Testament laws called the Mishnah, the Jews were forbidden to plant mustard in their vegetable gardens. It gets pretty technical, but the point is that mixing mustard, which was considered a kind of seed, was not allowed with vegetable plants in a garden. So when Jesus starts talking about sowing mustard seeds, people are already scratching their heads. You just don’t go sowing mustard seeds. It’s like sowing the wrong variety of hosta in your flower bed – it just isn’t done. (You’ll have to forgive me – I’m on the hosta kick because I just found out that Dubuque, IA is the hosta center of the world.) If you’ll forgive the pun, something just isn’t kosher about this parable.

It was probably pretty offensive to its original hearers, too. For the grandeur of the splendid cedar, we’re substituting a shrub. A weed. Not garden material. This is intended to be something of a slap in the face – it’s a wake-up call. Hey folks, you have spent a lot of time dwelling on this promise that you’re going to be the mighty cedar in the face of all this oppression. This promise was given to people who were beaten down, oppressed, and overrun by empire. The hearers of the cedar-promise were humble, but now they are haughty. Call the neighborhood association – there’s nary a cedar tree in sight, but we’ve got a whole mess of mustard weeds.

You see, the problem here is not the promise of God that the humble people will be made mighty. It’s the other half of the promise – that, as Ezekiel says, “[God will] bring low the high tree,” or “[God will] dry up the green tree.” The problem for me, is, in short, that I worry that I’m not the low tree, and I’m not the dry tree. I am, as people go, pretty green, pretty high. I’m pretty well educated, pretty prosperous, pretty happy, pretty well-respected, and pretty darn good looking, if I do say so myself! I’ve even got a pretty nice lawn, and I’m pretty satisfied that I didn’t have to mow it. While things aren’t by any stretch of the imagination perfect or easy, but they are pretty good. And to that, God promises what? That the green tree will dry up? That the high tree will be brought low? For me, that just won’t do.

What about you? Are you a green tree, or are you dry? There’s not a right answer – everyone here is in a different place with God, and that’s okay. For some, there is tremendous promise in this idea of a great inversion in the priorities of the world. For others, it’s tremendously threatening. Who are you in Jesus’ parable? Are you a cedar tree, or are you a mustard shrub? I suspect that most of us are a little bit of both, all the time. For all of those good things I just mentioned, there are weeds in my life too. Weeds of personal sin and failure, weeds of loss and grief. Weeds of not spending enough time in prayer. Weeds of self-superiority. Just this last week we buried my grandmother – there’s another one.

The remarkable thing about this parable of Jesus is that the mustard seed is mentioned at all. Jesus here is talking about a mustard shrub that grows up and becomes a place that offers shade and a place for birds to nest – just like the cedars of Lebanon. The implications are clear – the promise of God’s blessing is not just for the Israelites. It’s not just for those chosen people. It’s for people who are cedar trees and people who are mustard shrubs alike. By recasting the strong image of the cedars of Lebanon as this ridiculous weed, Jesus shows us that God’s kingdom is for people who think they belong in the garden and people who think that they don’t belong at all. It’s for kosher people and for the rest of us sinners too. If your life’s garden doesn’t look like the cover of Better Homes and Gardens, if your beautiful TruGreen ChemLawn carpet of green grass has a big fat gross-looking six-foot-high mustard plant growing in the middle of it, God can still use you. The God whose power is made perfect in weakness can manifest his power in you – perhaps all the better for your weakness.

That’s the beautiful thing about the pairing of these two parables of Jesus today. The seeds you sow, you don’t have to understand how they grow to maturity, but you can harvest the rewards. The seeds that God sows in our lives we won’t necessarily see or understand, but God will harvest righteousness and justice from God’s kingdom. Our faith is such a very small thing, really. It is a gift from God, planted in the soil of our hearts. God’s kingdom doesn’t make much sense to us. The smallest seeds make the biggest changes. The weak become strong, and the strong become weak. The first are last and the last are first. The green tree dries up, and the dry tree flourishes. God is always turning the world upside-down, even if we don’t always have a grasp of the hows and whys of it. The last person you expect to belong in the kingdom of God is the first person God will surprise you with.

You of mustard seed faith (and I include myself among you), trust that even when you are certain that you don’t belong, that God planting you was a mistake, that you’re a weed, trust and know that you are God’s Beloved. You are one for whom Christ died. And consider this too: that the ultimate tiny, unassuming one, the humble man who was in his very being the uncontainable, infinite God of the Universe, the one who so loved the world that he became flesh and dwelt among us, that one Lord Jesus Christ was also planted in the ground as a seed, and rose again in new life, drawing all people to nest in his branches. Nest securely in him, knowing that in his life, death, and resurrection we who are small and insignificant will grow into mighty timbers of faith for his sake.