"Big Things in Small Packages"
7-27-14 (Ordinary 17A/Proper 12A)
Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
Big Things in Small Packages
Jesus’ parables have many things in common with each other - they used imagery that would have been familiar to the people heard Jesus tell the story. The images that Jesus used were used intentionally - they evoked certain very specific thoughts, assumptions, and ideas in their audience. But most importantly, those images which Christ uses in the parables are also full of surprises - the moment Jesus’ audience thinks they know exactly where Jesus is going with a story, Jesus pulls the rug out from under their feet and teaches something entirely different from what they expected. Poor beggars covered in sores are taken to heaven while rich men suffer in hunger and heat. Weeds are allowed to grow alongside wheat. Women celebrate over lost coins and shepherds forsake entire flocks to chase after one lost lamb.
But as we look at this whole string of parables, there doesn’t seem to be anything all that surprising in them - they make sense to us. We’ve heard them told time and time again. We know the image of the mustard seed, the small speck that grows into a large tree. We know the way that just a little bit of yeast can cause flour to rise and become bread. And so we take these simple images and we boil them down to what we’ve determined is the real “moral of the story” - something simple, something easy to remember, something that we can walk out of church on Sunday and say “this was the message for today.” It’s easy enough to do, especially in these parables - we all know that the moral of the story here is quite simply that “big things come in small packages.” It’s probably something like this that we all remember from our childhood Sunday School classes as we watched the teacher stick pictures of trees, birds, pearls, and bread onto the felt board before we sang “Jesus Loves Me” together and got ready to go to church.
But the thing is, as with just about everything Jesus does in the Gospels - especially the parables, there’s a lot more going on than just a simple lesson. If these tales were meant to be condensed into one simple proverb, Jesus wouldn’t have told parables in the first place. Every time we look at the parables, in fact, it’s entirely possible for us to come away with something completely different, even when it’s the 129th time we’ve heard the parable and the felt board has been replaced with a powerpoint presentation. And this is the same thing that happened, even when Jesus told the parables in the first place - people walked away talking about them, dissecting them and trying to work them out for themselves. And quite frequently, we find the disciples asking Jesus later to help them understand the parables for themselves.
It’s no different with these particular parables - and when we stop to think about it, when we move away from the “Sunday School Proverbs” we have for so long associated with these parables… we realize that there’s more under the surface here than we tend to see at first. Think about this first parable, for example, as if this were your own field - let’s say that you’d meticulously planted all of your rows of corn, that you’d gotten your irrigators fired up and spraying so that each stalk can get the most water and fertilizer possible… and then just as you’re getting into the beginning of July and watching your stalks get taller, you notice a weed in the middle of the rows - it’s not just the little purple flowers that covered the field before you planted and risked choking out your seeds in the first place. It’s not patches of ragweed or bunches of thistles growing out at the edges of your rows and just easily mowed out of the way. It’s a tree - a big’ole tree whose roots have already dug in deep under your crops, now competing for all the same fertilizer and nutrients that you’ve been feeding your corn. It’s not toward the end of the field, so it doesn’t even help as a windbreak. And to add insult to injury, it’s also provided a wonderful nesting area for a lot of the neighborhood crows, who’ve already been eyeing your corn with plans for dinner in the near future. You’ve gone from a nice little plant that you can turn into a tasty condiment to a noxious weed that gives shelter to animals that can be detrimental to your yield.
Or let’s say you’re a baker and you’ve got about 50 pounds of flour laid up to make bread each week for your family, even through the winter - that’s about three measures of flour. If you were to use all of that for one dinner, you could make bread for about 100 people. But in Jesus’ time, it wasn’t so simple as going to the cupboard, taking out one of those little, individually wrapped yeast packets, and adding it to your dough mixture to rise. Leaven is a bit messier than yeast - it would have been more like a rotting, moldy lump of bread that had fermented and had been set aside to be used as a starter for baking. So when you go to take some flour for the next day’s bread and discover that someone has hidden chunks of this starter bread in your entire store of flour… that small chunk of moldy bread has effectively ruined the entire mass of flour - you either have to bake enough bread to feed 100 people tonight, or you’re going to be throwing out a lot of flour. It’s no wonder that leaven shows up elsewhere in the Bible as an image of corruption!
So, then… what’s the deal with these parables now? What’s the moral, here? And what are we supposed to do with this new and updated information? Sure, we can still walk away with the idea that “big things come in small packages” - they do. After all, time and time again in the history of the church, we’ve seen some big transformations come out of very humble beginnings - the Church in its earliest form, the church that came from the Reformation, and even the newer models that are coming out of the “emerging church” - like the 1001 New Worshipping Communities - all have small starts, but have turned into something much bigger than they ever anticipated. But there’s something more now, too. These images aren’t just of something small becoming something bigger - if Jesus had simply meant that, he could have used friendlier symbols in the parables than those of noxious weeds and moldy dough. He could have talked about an olive tree or delicious seasonings.
Instead, Jesus employs these images of things that are subversive, that break into the world into which they are introduced and completely change it from what it was into something different, something that demands action in some way or other - we either let the tree stay in the midst of our crop and consider the shelter it provides, or we cut it down. We either scrap the flour that we had set aside as lost, or we bake a lot of bread and find some use for it. This is where the images of the treasure in the field and the pearl of value come into play, as well. The reality of the kingdom, the change that it inspires in us and in our world is so phenomenal, so awesome, that it should move us into action - when we are faced with the knowledge now that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Jesus Christ - that not even death itself can separate us from God’s love… we should be moved to do anything to live into that knowledge, to honor it, and to keep it close to our hearts.
And this is the same opportunity that we are given as the church. We are planted in this world to be leaven, to be that subversive weed that spreads out into our surrounding world and gives opportunities for shelter and nourishment. We are to be that element that inspires action and change - after all, we were once flour before we were leavened, ourselves. We can’t afford as the church to be content to simply be in the field, or to know that we are leavened - we need to be the ones talking to the bakers, telling them to use that leavened dough to make bread for hundreds, because we are also the ones who see the hundreds who are hungry. We need to be the tree that intentionally spreads out its branches to the crows and birds because we see their need for shelter more than our own need for a more bountiful crop. And as we spread out our branches, as we leaven the world with the leaven of the Gospel, we can become living parables, servants of the word and instruments used to change the world. To God be the Glory. Amen.
Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
Big Things in Small Packages
Jesus’ parables have many things in common with each other - they used imagery that would have been familiar to the people heard Jesus tell the story. The images that Jesus used were used intentionally - they evoked certain very specific thoughts, assumptions, and ideas in their audience. But most importantly, those images which Christ uses in the parables are also full of surprises - the moment Jesus’ audience thinks they know exactly where Jesus is going with a story, Jesus pulls the rug out from under their feet and teaches something entirely different from what they expected. Poor beggars covered in sores are taken to heaven while rich men suffer in hunger and heat. Weeds are allowed to grow alongside wheat. Women celebrate over lost coins and shepherds forsake entire flocks to chase after one lost lamb.
But as we look at this whole string of parables, there doesn’t seem to be anything all that surprising in them - they make sense to us. We’ve heard them told time and time again. We know the image of the mustard seed, the small speck that grows into a large tree. We know the way that just a little bit of yeast can cause flour to rise and become bread. And so we take these simple images and we boil them down to what we’ve determined is the real “moral of the story” - something simple, something easy to remember, something that we can walk out of church on Sunday and say “this was the message for today.” It’s easy enough to do, especially in these parables - we all know that the moral of the story here is quite simply that “big things come in small packages.” It’s probably something like this that we all remember from our childhood Sunday School classes as we watched the teacher stick pictures of trees, birds, pearls, and bread onto the felt board before we sang “Jesus Loves Me” together and got ready to go to church.
But the thing is, as with just about everything Jesus does in the Gospels - especially the parables, there’s a lot more going on than just a simple lesson. If these tales were meant to be condensed into one simple proverb, Jesus wouldn’t have told parables in the first place. Every time we look at the parables, in fact, it’s entirely possible for us to come away with something completely different, even when it’s the 129th time we’ve heard the parable and the felt board has been replaced with a powerpoint presentation. And this is the same thing that happened, even when Jesus told the parables in the first place - people walked away talking about them, dissecting them and trying to work them out for themselves. And quite frequently, we find the disciples asking Jesus later to help them understand the parables for themselves.
It’s no different with these particular parables - and when we stop to think about it, when we move away from the “Sunday School Proverbs” we have for so long associated with these parables… we realize that there’s more under the surface here than we tend to see at first. Think about this first parable, for example, as if this were your own field - let’s say that you’d meticulously planted all of your rows of corn, that you’d gotten your irrigators fired up and spraying so that each stalk can get the most water and fertilizer possible… and then just as you’re getting into the beginning of July and watching your stalks get taller, you notice a weed in the middle of the rows - it’s not just the little purple flowers that covered the field before you planted and risked choking out your seeds in the first place. It’s not patches of ragweed or bunches of thistles growing out at the edges of your rows and just easily mowed out of the way. It’s a tree - a big’ole tree whose roots have already dug in deep under your crops, now competing for all the same fertilizer and nutrients that you’ve been feeding your corn. It’s not toward the end of the field, so it doesn’t even help as a windbreak. And to add insult to injury, it’s also provided a wonderful nesting area for a lot of the neighborhood crows, who’ve already been eyeing your corn with plans for dinner in the near future. You’ve gone from a nice little plant that you can turn into a tasty condiment to a noxious weed that gives shelter to animals that can be detrimental to your yield.
Or let’s say you’re a baker and you’ve got about 50 pounds of flour laid up to make bread each week for your family, even through the winter - that’s about three measures of flour. If you were to use all of that for one dinner, you could make bread for about 100 people. But in Jesus’ time, it wasn’t so simple as going to the cupboard, taking out one of those little, individually wrapped yeast packets, and adding it to your dough mixture to rise. Leaven is a bit messier than yeast - it would have been more like a rotting, moldy lump of bread that had fermented and had been set aside to be used as a starter for baking. So when you go to take some flour for the next day’s bread and discover that someone has hidden chunks of this starter bread in your entire store of flour… that small chunk of moldy bread has effectively ruined the entire mass of flour - you either have to bake enough bread to feed 100 people tonight, or you’re going to be throwing out a lot of flour. It’s no wonder that leaven shows up elsewhere in the Bible as an image of corruption!
So, then… what’s the deal with these parables now? What’s the moral, here? And what are we supposed to do with this new and updated information? Sure, we can still walk away with the idea that “big things come in small packages” - they do. After all, time and time again in the history of the church, we’ve seen some big transformations come out of very humble beginnings - the Church in its earliest form, the church that came from the Reformation, and even the newer models that are coming out of the “emerging church” - like the 1001 New Worshipping Communities - all have small starts, but have turned into something much bigger than they ever anticipated. But there’s something more now, too. These images aren’t just of something small becoming something bigger - if Jesus had simply meant that, he could have used friendlier symbols in the parables than those of noxious weeds and moldy dough. He could have talked about an olive tree or delicious seasonings.
Instead, Jesus employs these images of things that are subversive, that break into the world into which they are introduced and completely change it from what it was into something different, something that demands action in some way or other - we either let the tree stay in the midst of our crop and consider the shelter it provides, or we cut it down. We either scrap the flour that we had set aside as lost, or we bake a lot of bread and find some use for it. This is where the images of the treasure in the field and the pearl of value come into play, as well. The reality of the kingdom, the change that it inspires in us and in our world is so phenomenal, so awesome, that it should move us into action - when we are faced with the knowledge now that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Jesus Christ - that not even death itself can separate us from God’s love… we should be moved to do anything to live into that knowledge, to honor it, and to keep it close to our hearts.
And this is the same opportunity that we are given as the church. We are planted in this world to be leaven, to be that subversive weed that spreads out into our surrounding world and gives opportunities for shelter and nourishment. We are to be that element that inspires action and change - after all, we were once flour before we were leavened, ourselves. We can’t afford as the church to be content to simply be in the field, or to know that we are leavened - we need to be the ones talking to the bakers, telling them to use that leavened dough to make bread for hundreds, because we are also the ones who see the hundreds who are hungry. We need to be the tree that intentionally spreads out its branches to the crows and birds because we see their need for shelter more than our own need for a more bountiful crop. And as we spread out our branches, as we leaven the world with the leaven of the Gospel, we can become living parables, servants of the word and instruments used to change the world. To God be the Glory. Amen.
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