Mustard Tree

Summary

Here we are on June 17th, getting ready to have our church picnic.  Though on the calendar, summer does not start for another four days, already it seems that we have been experiencing summertime for months.  Does it not?

I am looking forward to our picnic today.  I like traditional picnic food.  Be it eating an American-style hamburger or a juicy German-style brautwurst, what I enjoy is the meat smothered in mustard, hot off the grill.  With that first big bite I know that summer has finally arrived.  It is picnic time again.

Brautwurst, hamburgers, polish sausage, potato salad all of these items that you can eat with  mustard are the important items needed for a picnic, at least for me, for I love mustard.  Be it plain yellow mustard, a dijon, or a coarse ground brown.  For me, mustard is the taste of summer.

That must be the reason that I have always been partial to the parable of the Kingdom of Heaven being like the mustard seed growing into a great bush.  I could just see with my mind’s eye the Jewish farmer of Jesus’ day planting the small seed in the corner of his garden with great anticipation of the day, when it would grow into a large bush from which he could harvest the makings for mustard.  I’ve never tried mustard on lamb or goat, but I am sure it would taste good.

And I figured that must have been how Jesus was trying to describe to his listeners the kingdom of Heaven, something that was starting with the smallest seed and would one day grow into a great entity in which his creation, his people could take shelter, like the birds in the parable.

The only thing is though, I was wrong about the farmer and his planting of the mustard seed.  The farmer wouldn’t have been kneeling in the dirt lovingly placing this mustard seed in the ground like I imagined.  No, the farmer rather would have been surveying his fields for any evidence of a mustard plant, with the same disgust that I used to look upon dandelions in the grass of my lawn back in America.

What you say?  Mustard the equal of a weed?  Yes.

For the farmer in Palestine mustard was a weed to be eradicated.

Darcey Fletcher writes, “In first century Palestine, the mustard weed would have been a well understood metaphor because “infestation” was a major problem for the agrarian society. Once mustard weeds are introduced, they spread like wild fire, draining nutrients from the soil and taking over the land. Pliny the elder described the mustard weed as beneficial to one’s health, but no one plants them, for once they have been planted one can’t rid the place of it.”

You see, mustard grows where it will and can take over whole fields if not controlled.  Mustard at the least was a nuisance, at worst a destroyer of crops.  Mustard was not a desirable plant for Jesus’ listeners.

So the question we must ask ourselves is, “Why did Jesus compare the kingdom of Heaven, the power of Heaven to such a pervasive weed?”

Some of the people listening to Jesus must have wondered if Jesus was speaking against the kingdom of Heaven in some way when he compared it to a mustard seed.  Yet others would have “got” what he was saying immediately.  Parables are a little like jokes, you either get them immediately and laugh, or by the time they’re explained they’re not funny anymore.

You see more than pointing out the growth of mustard from small seed to large bush I think Jesus was pointing out the mustard plant’s properties of infestation.

To quote Fletcher again,   “Just like the mustard weed, the kingdom of God has take-over properties and is aggressive.”

Jesus is telling his followers that the kingdom of Heaven will go and grow wherever it will, there is no way to control it.  Like mustard it can take over a land, and once it has taken root you can’t rid a place of it.  For its roots of love, peace and grace run deep.

In 2002 Emily and I were able to travel to the Karelian region of Russia to visit congregations of the Ingrian Lutheran Church.  On our third day we spent the morning at the Church’s seminary learning about that Lutheran church body’s history.  It had started four hundred years before and by the 1920’s it included over 30 parish areas, a hundred elementary schools and a high school in the region to the North of St. Petersburg, or as it was then known, Leningrad.  But in the twenties the church began to be persecuted.  Buildings and land were confiscated by the state, pastors were exiled and even executed and the people were forbidden to worship or even gather for prayer.  By the end of the thirties Josef Stalin and the Kremlin believed that they had wiped out the Lutheran Church in Karelia, forever.  Christianity they believed, was gone.

But Jesus knows better.  Like the mustard plant, Christianity once rooted cannot be wiped out.  In fact once it has bloomed the seeds may scatter to any corner of the land.

That morning at the seminary in Russia as we listened to the story of the church, we heard the Dean of the seminary say with a wry smile upon his face, “The Russians say that Josef Stalin was the great evangelizer, for he scattered Christians to every corner of the Soviet Union.  And now, the Ingrian Church headquarters again and again is being contacted by individual congregations from across Russia and even some of the new central Asian nations asking if they may join our Lutheran Church.”

Let me explain this further, Stalin in his efforts to make it impossible for a people group to rebel against him sent the leaders to the gulag camps in Siberia and the people he scattered across the USSR.  It did keep them from rebelling against him, but in fact when the Christian church is persecuted what it loses in numbers it gains in strength.

For what the people did, was live out their Christian faith at home and as small groups of believers.  To worship they would have a “birthday party.”  To pray they would go visit the graves of their loved ones in the cemetery.  Learning the Bible and the Small Catechism was done at your mother or father’s knee in the secrecy of your own home.  Stalin could not kill the kingdom or power of Heaven that had been rooted in the faithfuls’ hearts and lives.

No, like the seeds sown in the first parable this morning, God’s kingdom grows in ways that we do not understand, but we see the results come harvest time.  And that is what Emily and I saw and experienced on that trip.  We visited eleven congregations and worshiped in seven.  In each, we met young and old believers, speakers of Finnish and Russian, all whose lives were changed and made new by the power of Jesus’ love and forgiveness.

In each place we experienced the freedom that comes through faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.  The church was alive and well, because it had never ceased to exist.  Like the stubborn and pervasive mustard weed, it could not be eradicated.  The Kingdom of Heaven was  alive and well, growing and giving shelter to God’s people.

We must think of the Holy Spirit as a wild mustard seed, which takes root and brings life where it will, which means in the heart and lives of God’s people. We cannot control God or God’s kingdom.  No we can only grow along, and go along where God would have us go. For it has been proven that oppression cannot kill the Kingdom, nor the lust for power, nor the greedy pursuit of money or wealth, not even apathy, though that might be the most dangerous of all!

No, we need to look beyond these earthly desires, and instead live in the awesome mystery of Jesus’ gift of life through grace, given to us.  Let us be moved, and flourish where we are, as God’s children, that the people of the world, like birds, may rest in the branches of God’s Kingdom.  We need to allow ourselves to be moved by the Holy Spirit, whom will scatter us like seed, mustard seed, upon the wind of God’s will, that the Kingdom may grow and flourish!

Amen.

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