South Presbyterian Church

Founded 1723

150 West Church Street
Bergenfield, NJ 07621

Sunday, March 3, 2002

Old Testament Lesson: Ezekiel 17:22-24
New Testament Lesson: Matthew 13:31-32

SEEDS OF HOPE

Sports fans are beginning to think about the new baseball season. Spring training is underway in Florida for the Mets and Yankees, and opening day is a little more than a month away. The amazing thing about a new season is that everyone gets to start over. The standings at the end of last year are forgotten. Every team starts now with a clean slate, every player begins with a new opportunity. A new season — and what a wonderful metaphor for hope.

At the beginning of every new season, you can hear Mets and Yankee fans saying, "Maybe this will be the year." It can happen, you know, for any team. Even the team that was absolutely terrible last year, by grace, is given another chance. So, "this may be the year."

According to Jesus only God knows the future. Understanding that the future is in God's hands, leads people of faith, to an appropriate humility and recognition, that we are dependent on a power greater than ourselves, who will see to it that there will be anew season, and everyone will have a chance, if not now, then some day.

When the Apostle Paul says, "We see through a glass darkly," he is describing our inability to see the future. The metaphor asserts that we don't see very well at all. All we have with which to see, Paul says, is faith, hope and love. And according to Paul, the greatest of these is love. According to the parable of the mustard seed, the greatest is hope.

When Jesus told that parable, the audience got the punch line immediately. Like all punch lines, it comes at the end, the last line. "Birds of the air come and make their nests in its branches." They would have associated that phrase with stories about giant cedars, which were stories about the world's great kingdoms. The cedar was a symbol of political power, so when you heard the phrase, "giant cedars in whose branches birds come and make their nests," you thought of empires.

Jesus’ audience would have thought of Rome, under whose occupation they then lived. Rome was a giant cedar, one of the great kingdoms of all time. In comparison you had the Kingdom of God, with just a handful of believers. It was like a mustard seed, tiny and insignificant, and hidden, buried somewhere in this giant empire, and something nobody pays much attention. Everyone pays attention to giant cedars, towering over all other life, like the redwoods of California. But no one pays any attention to a bush, or especially a seed of a bush, when it is the smallest seed there is.

Now birds don't nest in bushes. Everyone knows that. A tree is a tree, and a bush is a bush, and it will never be any different. That's the way it is. It's fate.

But it is hope that makes the outrageous claim that someday the mustard bush is going to be a tree, even a tree like the Cedars of Lebanon. Hope allows us to understand that the kingdoms of this world will become the Kingdom of our Lord, and the birds will make their nests in its branches.

In the Book of Ezekiel it is predicted that one day Israel would be a great cedar, like all the other nations around her. One day, Ezekiel said, "God will take a sprig from the tallest cedar and plant it on the mountain", presumably in Jerusalem. Someday Israel will be like the great nations of the world. (Ezek.17:22-24).

But Jesus doesn't talk about taking a sprig from a cedar. In fact, when he talks about the kingdom of God, he doesn't talk about a cedar at all, he talks about an unimpressive, lackluster bush, sort of a weed. If you have ever seen a mustard plant, you know that it is unimpressive, and hardly noticeable, which is the way the Kingdom of God looks right now compared to the great empires and institutions of the world. But Jesus says, just wait and see. You never know.

Christians live in hope — a hope that is patient, persistent and perspicuous. It is a hope that has envisioning power. It is a hope is built upon a discriminating vision that enables us to see without being fooled by appearances, (It’s not always the biggest that is best), or attracted to what everybody else notices, (the most popular of fads or beliefs), but are able to see what others can't see. That is, we can pick out a mustard seed as clearly as a giant cedar.

People with that kind of hope, rarely use absolutes, such as, "This is the worst thing that could ever happen." They never say, "I don't think I'll ever get over this." or "This is the end. We'll never recover from this." or, "I'll never be happy again," or "He'll always be the same. He'll never change."

Those kind of categorical statements about human life, or history, are the sign of the lack of hope. To believe in God means there will always be possibility. There are few things in life that can be predicted with absolute certainty, so there is always hope. People who live with that kind of hope can see mustard seeds, that is, they see possibility even in the smallest of things, when everybody else can only see cedars. .

In the midst of a drought in California the scientists, using their instruments to measure the weather, said, It's not going to rain again this year. The mayor of San Diego, defying the experts, said, "It's going to rain." They said, "How do you know that?" I have this feeling," she replied, most unscientifically. They laughed. Everybody laughed. And then it rained. It continued to rain. It rained for a whole month. That's the kind of hope that is not taken in by predictions, because it knows who controls the future, and therefore there will always be a new season.

Another characteristic of hope is patience. Be patient. But that is not a message to do nothing. We are always expected to do something. We are supposed to improve ourselves. We are expected to love our neighbors and be actively involved in doing so, even to the point of intervening to help them when appropriate. We are expected to make this world a better place, to be active in organizations seeking to do that, and never give up. But again, Jesus counsels patients. There is only so much we can do. We're like the farmer sowing a seed. We can't save the world. That's God's business.

At an ecumenical conference, the question of creation came up. Several nuns asked how some fundamentalist Christians could believe in a literal six-day creation. Someone tried to explain their line of reasoning. When he finished, one of the nuns threw up her hands in exasperation and said, "Don't these people realize the God likes to do things slowly?" The truth is that God acts not on our time, but on God's time. Which is why we need to be patient with each other and our world. But it is also why we need to be persistent.

We must be persistent in doing good, because we never know when God will use what we do in a mighty way. Small deeds become big events when the timing is right. So we don't give up.

Hope produces persistence. You don't stop after seven innings if you' re behind, even if your opponent looks like a giant cedar and you feel like a small mustard seed. You don't give up. You keep going clear to the end of the game, because anything can happen. Sometimes it looks like the church isn't accomplishing what it could — budgets are tight, volunteers are few, we wonder if we are making a difference, but we don't give up and we don't stop the work of our ministry. That's the perspective of hope. If God is in charge, anything can happen.

To those who believe, the world is a field in which a seed is planted. It is the smallest of seeds, so it's hard to see. Most people don't even know its there. They just walk right over it. Isn't that the story of the church in our time? But it's there. Jesus planted it, and it’s growing, slowly, according to God's time.

This is a parable that makes us think. How will you live in a world in which the kingdom is hidden? How will you live in a world in which most people don't believe it's even here? How will you live in a world for which you pray, "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven"?