Creekside Church Sermon of July 25, 1999 "The Mustard Seed Kingdom" Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52	Rev. David Bibbee
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This planet we call our own is the ground upon which we build our kingdoms. These kingdoms all have something in common...they won't last. They will have their day and cease to be. As Revelation's final gaze into the closing chapters of history says it, "The kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of our Lord and his Christ." God's kingdom alone will continue.

Take a look around at the sorry state of things and you will understand why Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world." But it has already infiltrated this one, and is so available, so accessible, and so close that if we were any closer it would bite us on the nose, as my father was often fond of saying when I was looking hard for something and couldn't see it, though it was within my grasp.

We have all had the experience of driving the same route to work or wherever, over and over, when our eye catches something we had never seen before, though it had been there all along...like it was hidden in plain sight. The same is so with the kingdom of heaven. Jesus told an inquiring man, "You are not far from the kingdom of heaven." And we are not far from the kingdom, and yet we may as well be a million miles away because we drive on by and miss the signs and showings and our text tells us why.

This section of scripture is familiar, therefore we skim over it, and therefore we miss what it's saying. In the 13th chapter of Matthew, Jesus is a parable factory. Matthew takes the parables which Jesus probably told on different occasions and clumps them all together. "The kingdom of heaven," Jesus said, "is like a mustard seed. The kingdom is like leaven hidden in flour. It is like treasure hidden in a field. It is like a pearl of great value. It's like a net thrown into the sea." Just think of it. Jesus inaugurates a kingdom which will supercede every earthly kingdom, and it won't come about through political power, or bigger battalions, or media blitzes, or a partnership between the public and private sector. David Redding put it like this:

When the prince Jesus presented the top secrets of the Universe, it was not in impressive marked documents proudly locked with the imperial seal, but in simple parables any child could open.

The kingdom is not a mighty, majestic eagle with wings spread and a cluster of arrows in its talons. It is like a mustard seed...the smallest of seeds which becomes the greatest of shrubs. When the rabbis compared anything to a mustard seed, it was a way of saying it was the minimal minimum, the smallest of the small, infinitesimal.

When Jesus said the kingdom of heaven was like a mustard seed, I imagine some of the disciples saying, "You're joking, aren't you?" Remember...the disciples were a little, often discouraged lot. It was hard to see how the world was going to come under new management as long as they were under the thumb of imperial Rome. It was hard to see how something as small as a mustard seed and as leaven in a loaf could do diddly against the twin killers of religion and government. The numbers who rejected Jesus far outnumbered those who enlisted in the kingdom crusade. From all appearances, the disciples felt their backs were against the wall.

But Jesus said, "The kingdom is among you." The final say doesn't rest with Washington or the European union; not with NATO or the NRA or the IRS, but with God, and God does it with little packets of seeds...seeds of faith, hope and love and is sustained in prayer, and fed with the bread and the cup.

God's kingdom won't come through numbers or force. The kingdom won't come when we've won the world to Jesus' side. I hear Jesus saying that his followers will always be a minority. I hear him saying that God's great deeds spring from very small starts.

I read that many years ago a physicist conducted an experiment to observe the impact of little forces on large objects. From a cable he suspended a one ton weight. At regular intervals little paper pellets would strike the great weight with no apparent impact, but after a while slight vibrations were detected, followed by tremors, then a gentle swaying until eventually the weight was swinging across the room like the pendulum of a clock.

The day little Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus, a series of actions were set in motion which changed our country. But someone pointed out how her act influenced much more. Her response inspired Martin Luther King, Jr. to become the head of a nonviolent social challenge. Martin Luther King inspired Lech Walensa's victory over the dictatorship in Poland, and Walensa inspired Mikhail Gorbachev's reform which led to the nonviolent downfall of the Soviet Union.

The kingdom of heaven reveals itself in small increments. God didn't come into the world as Caesar, but as a baby. The kingdom is small. Quiet. Hidden. Unnoticed.

It's been said that the kingdom of heaven is not and address; it's an attitude. It is a condition in which we take Jesus at his word when he said, "The kingdom of heaven is within you." It's a state where we are deeply aware that the best things in life aren't things; it's when we are aware of his presence and care, deeply desiring of living in a way pleasing to him and deeply committed to radiating the light of his love to those around us.

Frederick Buechner writes, "The kingdom of heaven is what we are starving to death for. We glimpse it at those moments when we first find ourselves being better and wiser than we know. We see it in a moment of crisis when strength comes to us that is greater than our own. The kingdom is where we belong. It's home. And whether we know it or not we are all homesick for it."

I'm reading a book called Traveling Mercies by Ann Lamott. It is the story of the long, hard road on which she came to faith. Her father was a college professor, her mother a lawyer. Religion, and especially Jesus, was never discussed. Their education and enlightenment put them above it. But a seed was planted by grandparents who took Ann to church when they could when she was young.

Through her teens into her forties, she was addicted to drugs and alcohol, and one unsatisfactory, unsavory relationship after another. Then one morning as she was coming off a cocaine high she walked past a little, run-down Presbyterian church in San Francisco. It was a predominately black congregation of just 30 people. Through the open door she heard beautiful voices singing hymns she remember as a girl. She returned there several times-never going in further than the front door. She always left before the sermon. She loved to sing, but didn't want to be preached to about Jesus who made about as much sense to her as scientology or dousing.

But there was something about that tiny church that kept her returning. She wrote, "The church smelled wonderful like the air had nourishment in it, full of warmth and faith and peace." She kept coming, and now she sat in the back row. Much of the time she was hung over, shaky and sick. But the people didn't judge her...they took care of her, "tricking her into coming back to life," as she put it.

Then in the middle of a terrible drunken night she was aware of someone in the room with her. Beyond a doubt she knew it was Jesus. She then thought of what her brilliant progressive friends would think if she became a Christian. "It could not happen." "I would rather die."

The next Sunday she was back to church, so hung over she couldn't stand to sing. But this time she stayed for the sermon. The sermon seemed about as absurd as someone trying to convince her of the existence of extraterrestrials, but then came the last hymn and a feeling washed over her like someone holding her when she was a scared little kid. She began to cry, ran back to her houseboat, went in, hung her head and said, "I quit." She then took a long breath and said, "All right. You can come in." It was her moment of conversion.

After this there was a verse from the poet George Herbert which kept appearing in the works of other authors she read. It would become the verse that described her beginning with Christ:

And here in dust and dirt, oh here,
The lilies of his love appear.

The kingdom of heaven is among you. The kingdom is within you. It starts small-like a mustard seed. It is hidden-like leaven in the loaf.

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