The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
Of the advances in scientific discovery and manipulation of the 20th century, one stands supreme among all of them: it’s the splitting of the atom. The Greek philosopher Democritus, in 460 BC thereabouts, came up with a theory that all of matter is made up of very, very small bodies, which he called atomos. It’s the word, of course, we get the word “atom” from, and it means to be unsplittable or unbreakable. The idea here is that the smallest element that exists can’t be reduced any smaller than it is by splitting or breaking it or doing anything else to it. It’s simply the smallest element possible. Therefore it’s unbreakable and unsplittable. But in 1942, the first atom was split, which unleashed power that had never before been seen in human history. The atom is no longer believed to be the smallest physical element. It’s thought that the quark and the electron is probably, or maybe likely, the actual unsplittable elements in the universe. Still, within that tiny atom, there’s a tremendous power. And Mark 4 speaks the same way about the seed.
Mark 4 contains three parables about seeds. One: the sower of the seeds. Two: the mystery of the growing seed. And three: the smallness and power of the mustard seed. The first parable, which the reading this morning did not cover — that is, the sower of the seeds — teaches us that God’s Word is to be spread about, thrown about, almost carelessly, upon all kinds of soil. A sower went out to sow, and some seed fell on good ground, and some on rocky ground. Some fell by the road. Some was eaten by the birds. Some took root and then was choked out by weeds later. The point of the parable is that we are to be about the business of spreading the Word, and let God and His Word do what it’s going to do. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Let it fall where it may, and it will produce faith where and when it wants. Faith, the faith that is created, will grow to maturity, if in fact it is tended properly.
The second parable is where our reading picks up this morning. It’s called the mystery of the growing seed. In a time when they didn’t understand things like photosynthesis and the like, this parable illustrates the mysterious process by which the Word gives spiritual life and growth inside the heart of the believer. We are to spread the seed of the Gospel wherever we are to be found, trusting in God as to how and whether it will grow, if it does at all. The third parable, of the mustard seed: the mustard seed was the smallest seed of the garden, yet within that tiny seed is the power to produce one of the largest garden plants. It’s a clarification on there in the garden, and it will give rest and hold to all the birds of the air. All three parables have the underlying truth in common: the Word of God is like a seed. It contains everything it needs to bring about the growth, to create it, to sustain it, and to grow the kingdom, that is, the church, here on earth, and to create faith and a new nature in you by the hearing of that seed.
As for the first parable, we read: “And He” — Jesus — “was saying, ‘The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.'” The parable teaches us two things that still many Christians have trouble learning about the kingdom of God. First, it calls us to trust that everything that is needed for salvation is contained in the Word of the Gospel, the seed, Jesus Christ, the seed of God the Father. We have all kinds of people trying to help that seed out. We’ve been doing it especially since the 1970s, in the evangelical and church-growth movement, where we have to add something to the preaching and teaching and proper worship of the seed. We have to somehow make it more entertaining. It has to meet, quote, felt needs. It has to be all kinds of things to all kinds of people, and it has to come in different forms and in different ways. We’ve been trying to grow the church through our own manipulation for more than three decades now, and the church is smaller than it’s been in the West since its very beginning. That’s Romans 1:16: “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel” — why? — “for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.” All those people out there that keep adding things to the seed, it’s because they’re fundamentally ashamed of the Gospel. They don’t believe it can do what God has sent it to do, or that it will accomplish the purpose for which it’s sent. In Jesus’ day, and I suppose still today, there’s a certain mystery involved in the cycle of planting, growing, and harvesting. The farmer plants and depends on the seed to do what seeds do: sprout and grow. He doesn’t know how it grew, necessarily. It just did. Back in Jesus’ day, trusting that that which God provided in the seed, and for the seed, would be programmatic — that is, the normal process by which the seed would grow to maturity, be harvested, and be replanted again. When it comes to the Gospel, the Bible assures us that the seed goes out and affects the cause for which Christ sent it. Isaiah 55:11: it — that is, the seed, the Word of God, the Gospel — “shall not return to Me empty,” the Lord says, “but it shall accomplish that which I purpose.” Again, we are assured that our labor is not in vain, in 1 Corinthians 15:58. One Lutheran commentator wrote it this way: “At a moment designated by God, out of the pressure of its own self-contained life, the Word of God would inevitably come to the full realization of its meaning in everyday life and experience of the people for whom it was spoken.” Thus God’s Word does not return to Him void. His words are never wasted. They never bounce off people or situations or fade into thin air. The Word accomplishes the purpose for which it was delivered. It’s a living Word, a Word that acts. We’ve been teaching for centuries this truth, and the meanings to the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. Luther was painfully aware of what the Word of God did. When asked about the Reformation, he himself said: “When I slept, or drank beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such a loss on the office of papacy. I did nothing. The Word did everything. I did nothing. I let the Word do its work,” namely on the church. Luther underscored the programmatic nature of the Word and the will of God in his explanation to the second and third petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. “Thy kingdom come.” And the answer: The kingdom of God comes indeed without our prayer, of itself. We didn’t do anything to make the Word of God come. But we pray in this petition that it would come unto us. Or the third petition: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” What does this mean? The good and gracious will of God is done even without our prayer. But we pray in this petition that it would be done among us also.
Now, the growth of the seed is gradual. It’s boring. And the parable reinforces that truth when it says: first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come. When it comes to quick results, things happening quickly and fast, germination and growth of a seed to maturity is not a good example of speediness. Spend a day in the field watching a seed grow, and come back and tell me how exciting it was. Most exciting is when the deer come into the field. That’s when it’s exciting. Other than that, it’s entirely boring. Seeds start off slow, especially at first. But give them time, they will eventually grow to maturity. This gradual process is difficult for people like us to accept, in a day of instant gratification, when everything’s supposed to be done quickly and to our satisfaction. The gradual growth of the kingdom is also seen in the life of the individual Christian. It takes a long time to develop good habits. That 21-day thing? Don’t believe it. It’s a lifelong process of developing good habits. It’s a lifelong process of developing and forming a more mature and wise self. It doesn’t come easy, but it does come to all of us eventually, in the Word and Sacrament ministry. It comes through the learning of the Word of God, theology, through the ordinary hardships of life, through continual exposure to the Word of God, to His love, to His forgiveness of sins, to biblically based and proper worship services, to our participation in the Lord’s Supper, our fellowship with the older and wiser groups within the church, wiser than ourselves, and the like. Growing in Christ is, in fact, a difficult thing and a lifelong venture.
Jesus said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” The most often used phrase in Jesus’ preaching and teaching in the Gospels is the phrase “the kingdom of God.” Everything He does is likened to the kingdom of God. It’s a phrase that has a very specific meaning to it. The phrase “the kingdom of God” meant that the era of the Old Testament prophets had finally come. The old was gone, the new had come. And the saints now anticipated what that kingdom was. The kingdom of God had come with the advent of Christ, because He brought the kingdom with Him. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit brought the kingdom in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. When Jesus sends out the 70 and the 72, He tells them to go out and heal the sick and say to them, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.” What does that mean? The kingdom has come near. When Jesus instructed the disciples to tell the people the kingdom had come near to them, He meant that the kingdom Himself, He and His words, had come near to them. In Matthew, Jesus told the people, “If it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.” It’s His work that is the kingdom. There used to be a fad — it’s still, by the way, around, just not as popular or well known. It got replaced by other silly slogans. And it’s called “kingdom building.” For a while, there were all kinds of evangelical, and even Lutheran, churches that were all about kingdom building. We use it all over the place. Church growth and the like use the phrase to draw attention to the work of adding numerical numbers, increasing the size of the kingdom. Others turned it into building projects for the poor and the like. There’s a national organization to this day called the New Kingdom Builders Association. But not only is the phrase itself unbiblical, it also has the unfortunate connotation that man, not God, establishes and builds, quote unquote, the kingdom, and adds to its numbers daily. A better metaphor about what it is we are to do is found in the parable of the sower. We aren’t to be worried about the results. We’re only to be worried about the seed, scattering it. God gives the growth. God gives the numbers. He brings about the harvest. He does it all. We do nothing. Paul wrote about this in 1 Corinthians 3:6 and 7: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.”
Life and growth are in the smallest of God’s seed. It is found, excuse me, in Christ, and with Christ His entire person and His entire work, both His humility and His glory. There, in the seed, in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, there is the forgiveness of sins. There is your new nature. There is the promise of victory over sin, death, and the power of the devil. There is the promise and gift of eternal life, a heavenly home, Gospel freedom, peace with God and with neighbor, and much more. In that moment when a person hears the Gospel and is baptized, a saint is created, and the seed has taken root. Jesus told His disciples that the seed had fallen to the ground and died, that it must do, if in fact the kingdom of God is going to come. The seed, the ground, the fruit are all in His work. And that brings us to that Old Testament lesson: “Thus says the Lord God: ‘I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of the cedar and will set it out. I will break off from the topmost of its young twigs a tender one, and I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain. On the mountain height of Israel will I plant it, that it may bear branches and produce fruit and become a noble cedar. And under it will dwell every kind of bird; in the shade of its branches they will nest. And all the trees of the field shall know that I am the Lord; I bring low the high tree, and make high the low tree, dry up the green tree, and make the dry tree flourish. I am the Lord; I have spoken, and I will do it.'” Jesus is the twig that was cut down and set upon a high hill, the one who withered away and died, only to rise again to take His place. He is the seed that became the tree which caused God to flourish. He told His disciples, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to Myself.” He began with a simple, small group, the numbers only to reflect the number of tribes in Israel: twelve. The Lord, from that twelve, grew a new tree, the New Testament church. If a small seed can produce a giant California redwood tree, one of the largest trees in the world, then know this: that little seed that has been planted in you, in the waters of your Holy Baptism, and the gift of hearing the Word of God — it’s all in there for you. The person and the work of Christ, the Gospel, the forgiveness of sins, the new nature, eternal life — all that’s part of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is given there in the spoken Word, the seed, in the baptismal Word, the seed with the water, and in the Word consecrated to you: “This is My body, this is My blood.” It’s all there. Your sins are forgiven in the seed which is in you. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.