The Greatness of the Small

a modern-day parable of the mustard seed... cosmic-style

Happy Friday, Blue Roomies!

Something new this week! I’ve been wanting to play around with audio here on Substack, the platform that hosts the Blue Room. I thought I’d give it a go, using the audio from last Sunday’s sermon. The text of the sermon is below.

This week, I started the next round of book writing, which will be a major focus this summer. If you’d like to have a front row seat in that process, I’m sharing book-related content with supporting subscribers, including our next book talk this Monday, June 24, at noon EDT. Zoom link is at the bottom of this post, which also has some writing from the archives, called A God Beyond Certainty. Members and friends of Trinity Presbyterian, Herndon are eligible for complimentary gift subscriptions—just ask.

And now, here’s the sermon:

Mark 4:26-34

Jesus also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”

He also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.

Awhile back, the science program Radiolab explored an unusual question. We know that our universe is full of really really big things—stars and galaxies—and really really small things—quarks and leptons. The question they investigated was: what is the midpoint between the largest thing and the smallest thing that we know about? Or as one of their listeners put it, what is the most average size a thing can be in the universe?

Any ideas? They offered some guesses from their audience: An apple? A toaster? The planet Jupiter? I’ll share the answer later in the sermon!

You may be wondering what that cosmic question on Radiolab has to do with today’s passage… after all, these two parables are just so earthy. If we really try, we can practically smell the rich soil, we can feel the dirt under our fingernails, we can taste the bread made from the grain, we can see and hear the riot of birds nesting in the branches of the mustard tree. What does all that have to do with the size of stuff in the universe? Well, it seems that Jesus is wanting to make a point about what we see, and what God sees, and what we judge as significant, and what God does. Jesus is asking us to consider the spiritual size of things.

“The realm of God is like a mustard seed.” In the pastor’s Bible study this week, someone recalled those necklaces people would get at Christian bookstores, with a mustard seed inside a little glass bead—I think I used to have one, and I recall that the glass had some magnification, otherwise it would be really difficult to see. That tiny seed grows into a tree that had a multitude of uses in biblical times. Its oil could be used in cooking. Its leaves could be cooked for food. It was an important cover crop and helped prevent erosion; and as we heard here, the branches provided shelter and shade for birds, and presumably for humans. All from something barely larger than a grain of sand. Elsewhere Jesus says that if we have faith that’s even as small as that seed, we can move mountains. Pretty good bang for your buck, I’d say.

Last weekend, a group of young adults and younger adults, 40ish and younger, got together in our church parlor for lunch and conversation, the first of what we hope will be many such get-togethers. A few of us—they let me hang out with them despite having aged out of any group that could call itself “young”—got to talking about our various attempts at gardening. One of the people spoke with what I can only describe as great awe of the whole process of planting something in the ground, tending it, waiting, and then pulling something out of the ground that can be eaten. In Jesus’ time, this would have been a workaday thing. But in our modern world of grocery stores and food delivery, when we don’t have to think much about the origins of our food, it’s one of life’s everyday miracles, accessible to anyone with a plot of land or a pot of soil.

“The reign of God is like someone scattering seed on the ground.” We do a lot of seed scattering here at Trinity. Just recently, I sat with the Service and Mission team, as they wrestled with how to provide relief and further the cause of justice and peace in Israel and Gaza. I met with the Discipleship team as they discussed how to nurture the faith formation of our youngest members even better in the coming year. Stephen and I talked with Trinity residents at Ashby Ponds about a potential study and friendship group for the folks there. And that was just in the last week! What I saw was a lot of smart and dedicated farmers, tending the seeds that God is growing. And we need to be ready to reap when God says it’s time, but make no mistake—this is God’s harvest, not ours. Maybe the saying in the Black church says it best: “When we show up, God shows off.”

I’m a new gardener, and one of the hardest things for me to do is to let the plants be. To not dig around those newly planted seeds to see what they’re doing down there in the ground. Anything happening yet? Anything yet? How about now?

Thankfully, that impatient fretting is not an issue for God. God, who can do what we cannot. Jesus makes clear that the earth produces of itself the stalk, the head of the grain, and then the rest of the plant.

Some recent bounty. Bibb lettuce, beets, crookneck squash. Not pictured: my first zucchini. First of what will be many, I’m told.

It occurs to me that the first part of this passage reminds us that God is outside of time: that our Gardening God is abundant but unhurried; that the harvest comes exactly when God means it to. And the second part of the passage reminds us that God is outside of physical space. As Yoda would say, size matters not. A tiny seed is plenty for God to work with.

We, of course, are not outside time and space. In the economy of this world, we want things now, and we want things big and grand. But Jesus calls us to a different citizenship—what some have come to call the kin-dom of God, which measures things differently. And that distance between what we want—what we think we need—and what God provides… well that’s what grace is. A gift to us.

It’s pretty impressive that a mustard seed can produce something several thousand times its size, but the arborists among us know that the mustard tree is a relatively modest plant—really just a bush. A shrub, usually 8-10 feet in height. In fact, one scholar suggests that Jesus is being a bit satirical when he invokes the mustard tree. The people of ancient Israel might prefer to be a cedar of Lebanon, which we referenced in the Call to Worship—cedars can be 120 feet in height. Israel’s future, our future, is the way of the shrub. The lowly way, modest in the eyes of the world.  The realm of God “is not a towering empire, but an unpretentious venture of faith.” The way of the mustard seed.

Last week we confirmed four young women as they professed their faith and joined the church. Each created beautiful statements of faith. All of them have echoed in my mind as I’ve considered this week’s parables, especially the mustard seed. Often our faith can seem so small and full of doubt, yet it’s more than enough for God to work with. Consider these words written by one of the students¹:

On the days when I believe, I look out in nature and see the beauty of God's creation. On the days when I believe, I see people living by Jesus’ example, healing the sick, eating with outcasts, forgiving people, and loving and accepting everyone. On the days when I believe, I feel the Holy Spirit pushing me in the right direction and helping me to do the right thing. On the days when I believe, the world feels full of joy and love. 

And then there are the other days. 

But even on those other days, I believe in this church. I believe in the things Trinity does for the community. I feel that this church is somewhere I can fully be who I am without being judged and I know that I will always have a home in this church.

Which brings me back to Radiolab, and that question of the middlest thing that exists. What the hosts ended up doing, with help from a mathematician at Cornell, is estimating the size of the entire universe, which came to about 9x10²⁶ meters—that’s 9 with 26 zeroes after it.

And the smallest known thing is something called the Planck length, or the “size of space at which space is thought to lose its integrity.” I have no idea what that means, but it’s small: a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a meter: 10^-35. If an atom were the size of the Earth, then the Planck length would be the size of an atom on that Earth. Whew! We talk so casually about the God of the universe, but we can’t even begin to understand what that means.

Anyway, the middle of things: with the whole universe on one side and the Planck length on the other, it was just a simple case of taking the average.

It isn’Jt upiter. Or a toaster, or an apple.

It’s a eukaryotic cell, which is simply a cell with a nucleus.

The middle-est thing is the most fundamental unit of life.

The averagest thing is the thing that we’re made of:
you and me,
and Jesus of Nazareth,
and for that matter, the mustard seed, and the mustard tree.

That’s the stuff, the modest stuff, the unassuming stuff, that God uses to work God’s purposes out, in God’s own time and stuffed full of God’s grace.

The realm of God is like the harvest that comes slowly and slowly and slowly and then all at once, right on time.

The realm of God is like a seed—so very small—but containing untold potential.

And the realm of God is present in us—each of us, all of us… with all our faults and foibles, we are the instruments through which God builds God’s realm. Thanks be to God. And how amazing it is.

~

Sources: Radiolab https://radiolab.org/podcast/middle-everything-ever/transcript

With thanks to colleague Andrew Connors for his insights, especially his research into the work of Robert Funk about mustard trees.

1. The format of this student’s faith statement was borrowed from a chapter in Wholehearted Faith by Rachel Held Evans.