A KINGDOM OF WEEDS
Mark 4:26-34
Jeff VamosIn the early 1990's, sales of the classic model Hush Puppy shoes averaged about 65,000 pairs. The company that makes Hush Puppies, which were standard fashion fare in the 60s and 70s (I owned a couple pairs), was about ready to phase them out. Then, something strange happened in the mid-nineties. In 1994, shoe executives saw a strange spike in the sales of those classic shoes--they shot up from 65,000 to 430,000 that year. And in the following year, sales rose to 1.6 million. The change baffled the executives, who neither initiated nor planned for it.
It turns out that the sudden popularity of Hush Puppies in the mid-nineties could be traced to a few teenagers living in the East Village of New York City. They started getting old pairs from thrift shops. They thought they were cool. And because these kids were cool, other kids thought the shoes were cool. Somehow, the trend took on a life of its own. Soon, Isaac Mizrahi was wearing Hush Puppies; major fashion designers were buying them for their models, to accessorize their spring fashions. All because of a few teenagers in the East Village.
Those of you who have read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point will readily recognize that story--the signature story of his book, which is all about how social epidemics get started. How small human acts can have huge, and even epidemic consequences.
When I read that book several months ago, it reminded me so much of this text from Mark that we read today--about how the tiniest of seeds can grow into something great; a very small cause can have a very great impact. Jesus says that the Kingdom of God is like that--like a tiny mustard seed, which grows into "the greatest of all shrubs." Jesus is speaking to the idea that even the tiniest actions, or the tiniest idea that creates an action, can have huge consequences.
Let's look at that idea for a moment--the idea that our actions have consequences. It's a very simple idea--so simple and obvious, we might not spend much time thinking about it. But it's an idea that has been around a long time and has been extremely important in all forms of religions thought. In the Hindu and Buddhist tradition, it is known as the law of Karma. The word Karma itself means, literally translated, "action." Karma is the simple law that states: what we do has effects we cannot see, according to powers we cannot know--but we do know that actions bear fruit related to the kind of action that created it. Of course, the most familiar metaphor for how this works is when we throw a rock into a pond, and we see a ripple emanating out from that one central point, but its effect becomes invisible to us after a certain point.
What some people have called "the new science" (for example, "Chaos Theory" 1) also illustrates this same principle--that seemingly small phenomena, such as a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil, can have an enormous effect, like a tornado in Buffalo. It's called the butterfly effect.
In Medieval and traditional forms of Christian theology, as well as in Buddhist and Eastern thought, we also find the idea that actions can have in fact eternal consequences--they have consequences that go well beyond the scope of our lifetime, even though they have a bearing on how we live now. Medieval theology especially was captivated by ideas and images of heaven and hell. One way we might think of heaven and hell is to say that they are a means of projecting the results of our actions beyond the horizon of our lifetime--they show us the fruit those actions bear in some eternal sense.
During a sabbatical I took several years ago, I fell in love with the study of Dante, and of Dante Alighieri's poem The Divine Comedy. If you ever have a chance to study Dante in your lifetime, I would advise you to take it. It's endlessly fascinating. And we think of Dante's poem, and we usually think of the first part of it, Dante's Inferno and those grotesque images of hell. But what Dante has done with this poem is basically take any given action, any mode of being that a human can practice--based on greed, or lust, or compassion or love--and then follow the trajectory of that action out past the horizon of our lives and into the eternal, where we then can imagine what those actions look like. We then get images of hell, or heaven, or purgatory. Dante simply gives us in that poem an X-ray of human consciousness, a picture of the ultimate fruit of any given action or way of being.
So what does all this add up to? I find I often get to this point in my sermons: so, what does that mean to us? What does that mean for you and for me and the way we live our lives, as you go to work, as you encounter the guy behind the Wawa counter? I guess I don't need to be too obvious about it. It is a very simple idea I want to convey this morning: what we do matters. Even the smallest act can have huge consequences. What you do, in this life, in your everyday actions, can have eternal consequences.
When I was living in California, I remember reading newspaper stories about how someone--I don't know if they ever found the person--thought it might be fun to release a few Northern Pike, native to the Great Lakes of the Midwest, into one of the freshwater lakes near where I was living. They are wonderful in the Great Lakes, but as predator fish, they quickly took over the whole ecosystem of the lake, and the authorities had to poison the whole thing to get rid of them. All it took was a couple Northern Pike to kill the lake.
All it takes is one cigarette butt, one uncontrolled spark to start a raging forest fire.
On the other hand, think of all those individuals, acting out of their own courage and conscience, all those people who by their small acts of commitment have changed the world. I believe in those words, attributed to Margaret Mead, which I quoted for you on the front of today's bulletin: "Never underestimate the power of a few committed individuals to change the world." I believe that is true.
Think of the lone student who stood in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, the power captured (on film) and betokened by that one individual act of defiance.
Think of Cindy Sheehan--whatever your politics--and how one individual whose grief over her son's death has, through her protests, tweaked the conscience of our whole nation over the war in Iraq. Just by setting up a lawn chair, and sitting down outside the Presidential compound. An ordinary person like you or me.
Think of our own Tom Baker, part of this congregation, who, acting out of his grief over his wife Carole's death, decided his individual act of courage would be to ride his bike as far as he could for 24 hours, and raise money for cancer research
This trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories that our congregation is planning--it is a completely naive attempt for a few individuals to try to create peace in the most troubled region of the world. That is, in fact, what we're trying to do. A few committed individuals, aware that small actions can have huge consequences.
We need to know this, and believe it: that "small acts done with great love," as Mother Teresa suggests, can have huge consequences. Even the simplest act of kindness can change someone's life.
A few weeks ago, Catherine and I saw the movie Memoirs of a Geisha. It's a move about how one act of kindness--one tiny, everyday act of kindness, the buying of an ice-cream cone--done to a young woman, in the midst of all the greed and oppressiveness of the culture in which she was living--became the seed that gave these characters' life a true and loving purpose.
What we do is incredibly important. You have more power than you think, through the tiniest of actions, the smallest of seeds. What you do today--your actions, created out of love, or out of its opposite--can change the world.
A scary thought when you consider it, isn't it?
But, there's another aspect of this parable that's important to reflect on a moment.
There's more to say here. If we follow this reasoning too far we might find ourselves under the illusion that all this stuff depends on us. It does not. That is not what we believe. This parable--these two agricultural parables, actually--are not just about the seed, our actions. The kingdom of God is about a process by which the seed grows. This set of "seed" parables speaks to the mysterious process by which growth happens--a process we can't control or really discern; it is in fact the way in which God works. That's what Jesus is talking about. All we can do is plant the seed, and trust in the process. We focus on actions that are compassionate and loving; we cannot know what fruit they will bear. We cannot know their effect. That is God's business.
And moreover, Jesus seems to be saying that this process, this divine process called the Kingdom of God--it's a process that can't be stopped.
Consider for a moment: why didn't Jesus say in this parable that the Kingdom of God is like a mighty oak? That too grows from a tiny little acorn; and it obviously becomes the greatest of all trees, trees that are powerful, and stand tall, and last hundreds of years. That too would have been a familiar metaphor to Jesus' audience--with all the biblical references to oak trees and so on. There's something ironic about this parable that we'll miss if we don't look closely. Jesus doesn't use the example of an oak tree, but instead a mustard seed. I remember growing up that every time I heard this parable, I heard the word "tree" in the parable: "...it grows into the mightiest of trees." That was the picture in my mind. Not so. Listen to the NRSV translation we read today. "...it grows into the mightiest of all...shrubs." Other translations say, "herbs."
A weed. That's what it is--mustard plants are in fact, weeds.
If you ever do go to California, you will see wild mustard everywhere, especially in the early spring--it grows wild along the highways. And it is not a native plant. It was planted by some of the early Franciscans. They planted them along roads so people could see the way more easily. They planted just a few seeds. Now, you can't go anywhere in California where there's not wild mustard growing.
The Kingdom of God is like that: it consists of seeds that sprout weeds. The people who populate this Kingdom are not mighty oaks. They do not have to be mighty and powerful. Grow only under certain "right" conditions. They are called to be weeds. I like that idea better--it's sort of a lower bar to aspire to; it's a more accurate rendering of the real condition of human beings. Let's face it: we're weeds. We're not mighty oaks.
And, the thing about weeds is this: you can't stop them. They grow in the most inhospitable, desolate places. Ever get your garden weed free? I've been able to do that maybe for a day--get rid of every single weed. Practically the next day, they're all back.
This parable is about the fact that it's easy to be a weed, and to share yourself. We should know that this mustard seed is like the love that is already planted in us--in you; in your heart. Just by hearing these words of the gospel, that seed is planted in your heart. And what God has planted there is inexorable, it is unstoppable. It travels in us. It can't ever be destroyed. Us? You and me? We won't last that long. Weeds have a habit of reproducing, but it's pretty easy to pull up an individual mustard plant. Each individual one lasts but a short while.
The gospel will survive us all, this generation, the next. Me--I'll be making fertilizer in about 40 or so years if I'm lucky; I'll be lucky if I get my name on that obelisk out there, as a marker to show that I've been here for this brief time. The Kingdom of God will be around in the next millennium, just like mustard plants. Mustard is perhaps the oldest spice known to humans--it's been around for thousands of years. And I trust it'll be around for thousands more, assuming we can take care of the earth it grows in. Just like the Kingdom of God, the gospel of Jesus Christ. It'll be around then too. It travels through us; and all we've got to do is be a weed.
That's how inexorable is God's love for us, for the world. It is a love that cannot be stopped.
That's how powerful God's love is for you--God's concern and care for you. It's there--growing in you, and ready to blossom and bloom and spread its seeds out into a wanting and waiting world. All we need to do is this: go out, and be a weed.
Amen.
1 Some of my scientist friends tell me this "new science" is not so new in the mid 2000's, and chaos theory is less influential. Nonetheless, the theory speaks well to the general point.
June 18, 2006
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