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The Limit Does Not Exist

When Joel and I were deciding who would preach on which Sundays during this series on the parables, he told me that the parables chosen for the later half of the series each had their own trouble spots and might require a bit of speaking “against the text.”  So, since the reading ends at a bit of a cringe-worthy point and that’s probably freshest in your minds, let me start off by saying that it’s important to keep in mind the difference between a parable and an allegory.  

Parables are NOT meant to be a word-by-word, character-by-character parallel where each piece of the story directly reveals or represents something else.  The King may indeed be meant to represent God, but we do not need to treat every action of the character as if it reveals an undeniable truth about the nature of God.  

So while the King gets a little…torture-y at the end of the story, I do not believe we need to assume a direct parallel about Divine torture is meant when Jesus finishes by saying, “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”  I’ll fully admit that might be a pretty weak way to excuse a text that seems to speak about an almighty torturing God, but if nothing else, we also have to consider this last line in light of the rest of the parable and the wider context of Matthew’s gospel.  

So where does this parable come from?  And what does it reveal about the nature of God and the beloved community we are called to build?

We get a hint of why Jesus tells this parable with the question from Peter that sets…

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The tallest trees in the world, the California redwoods, have tiny seeds.  Each seed is about 1/8” wide.  The tallest of these living trees currently measures about 377 feet tall.  That’s longer than a vertical football field, including the end zones, one goal post hovering 360 feet above the other on the ground, and still more tree above that.  That’s a very tall tree.  Once one of those tiny seeds takes root, the tree can live for possibly 2000 years.

Which means the oldest of these trees could have been sprouting right around the time Jesus was telling these parables about the kingdom of heaven, including the parable of the mustard seed.

It’s an enticing thought to think of Jesus, the Middle Eastern Jew, blowing the minds of his listeners by saying that the kingdom of heaven is like a tiny seed on the other side of the world, now just a sprout, that will one day, millennia from now, grow to be the largest tree in the world. 

Jesus did have the famous cedars of Lebanon as next door neighbors.  The prophet Ezekiel had used these trees to illustrate how Israel would regrow after being uprooted by the Babylonians.  Ezekiel spoke of the Lord God taking a sprig from a lofty cedar, planting it on a high mountain, and that tree growing to provide shade and refuge for birds of all kinds.

When choosing a small seeded woody plant for a parable about the kingdom of heaven Jesus does keep this imagery from Ezekiel about it being a place for birds to nest, but he doesn’t talk about the mighty cedars.  And, not surprisingly, he doesn’t mention the coastal redwood of North America.  Instead, he talks about a shrub, a mustard plant.  Once its tiny seed sprouts it can grow to be…

Sermon Text: Wheat and weeds 

OK, so let’s get this out of the way, right away.  For the second week in a row, the second parable in a row, we have a parable, followed by the disciples coming to Jesus, asking for an explanation, to which Jesus gives a precise decoding of the symbolism within the parable.  For all the reasons Mark mentioned last week with the Parable of the Sower and its explanation, this is bothersome.  Parables are supposed to provoke our spiritual imagination, right?  Not serve as a formula where each part equals something else.  Couldn’t this have been one of those times Jesus responded to their question with something like: “I don’t know, what do you think it means?”

What’s doubly bothersome about this Parable of the weeds among the wheat is that the explanation seems to give a clear division of the world into two kinds of people.  The good seed, sown by the Divine Representative, the Human One, the wheat; and bad seed, sown by the evil one, the weeds.  The bad seed, the children of the evil one, are harvested by the angels and destined for the fire.  And the good seed are destined, as it says, to “shine like the sun in the kin-dom of their Father/Mother God.

It reminds me of that saying: There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people and those who don’t.  If you’re like me, the kind of person who doesn’t think there are two kinds of people, unlike those other people who do, then this explanation of the parable is problematic.  Not to mention it being problematic that I seem to have fallen for the trick of agreeing that there actually are two kinds of people.  Darn.

If it’s any consolation, scholars…

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Tending the Soil

I’m fairly certain that I am on record somewhere that this is not one of my favorite passages of scripture.  Let me explain why:

Last week Joel began our worship series on the parables by talking about how Jesus’ use of parables as a teaching method was perhaps meant to help people understand just how much they didn’t understand.  He told us that parables help us move from hearing to truly listening.  They invite us to see our lives and our world reflected–or perhaps more accurately, refracted–in the world of the parable.  One day we catch a glimpse of ourselves in the older son, the next we recognize our own longing in the father character.  Some days we might even feel like the unnamed mother, the thorny weed, the upset laborer, or the sheep who has wandered away.  

Parables leave us scratching our heads a little bit as they resist being nailed down into conclusions that are too tidy or meanings that let us walk away feeling like we’ve adequately digested the story.  

There’s a lot of overlap between parables and poetry in this way.  I recently finished a book called The Poet, The Warrior, The Prophet in which the author, Rubem Alves, describes the way poetry blossoms in unclarity and invites readers to find meaning and beauty in the empty, silent spaces between the words.  He writes, “Don’t you know that a clear idea brings the conversation to a halt, whereas one unclear idea gives wings to the words and the conversation never ends?”  

[As an aside: If these parables leave you longing for conversation that never ends, we hope you might consider joining us for the Parable discussion groups we’ll be hosting at 11am on Sundays throughout this series.  Conversations about parables and…

Sermon | Speaking in parables | Joel Miller 

Text: Matthew 13:10-17

My memories of what happened in the college classroom are fuzzy at best, but here’s something I haven’t forgotten.   

During my first year at Hesston College – that’s a little Mennonite liberal arts college in Kansas – During my first year, I was in a New Testament class with some second career folks who were training to be pastors.  One of their assignments was to write their own parable, and then share it with the class.  And, after all these years, I still remember one of them. 

Here it is, more or less:

Some city dwellers wanted to know what it was like to be a farmer, so they decided to visit three different farmers to see what they could learn.  “What’s the secret to good farming?” they asked.  The first farmer took them out to the fields where people were picking.  “The secret to farming,” said farmer #1, “is good old fashioned hard work.”  The second farmer took them into her office where there were stacks of paper and multiple computer screens.  “This is the secret to farming,” said farmer #2. “Keeping good records, communications, and management.” 

The third farmer led them out behind the barns by the manure pit.  They stood there a while seeing and smelling the manure.  Then the farmer said, “The secret to farming is knowing what to do with all the crap.  If you know what to do with this, you’ll know what to do with everything else.”

I’m not sure why I still remember that.  It could be because I was fresh off the farm myself, intrigued with these familiar images that evoked my world in distant Ohio.  It could be that it’s just a really good parable, complete with the set up and the climax that leaves…