“Growing Up ... Increasing...”

A sermon based upon Mark 4: 1-20

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin.

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership, 

Sunday August, 30^th, 2020 (Growing In Grace)

    Back in 1977, the Movie ‘Oh God’ debuted on Television.  The film stars John Denver as Jerry Landers, the assistant manager of a grocery store who is chosen by God to spread the Word to the rest of the world.   

When the film Debuted, I was a huge John Denver fan, as so was the rest of America.  If you didn’t see it, the film was similar to the later film starring Jim Carrey and Morgan Freeman.  But Oh God, was better, more thoughtful film, I think.  It gets better reviews too.

Not surprisingly, the main plot of the film is that the grocery clerk who’s heard from God is labelled a basket case: even his loving wife Bobbie doubts her husband's sanity.  But there's enough evidence on Jerry's side for a panel of prominent clerics to demand that he bring his case to court to prove in court that he's the agent of God. 

In once scene in the very clever film, the characters were about to conclude that their mission to the world was a failure.  Jerry said, “Well, I guess we blew it!”  But God, caricatured and played by the imperishable George Burns, quickly responded with one of the great, unassuming lines in the movie, “Oh, I don’t think so.  You never know; a seed here, a seed there, something will catch hold and grow.”

LISTEN, A SOWER WENT OUT TO SOW...    

The essence of Jesus’ message in today’s text compares the growth of God’s kingdom, (God’s spiritual rule in this world) to seeds being scattered in a field.   Whereas some of the seeds being sown fall on unproductive soil, (hard, rocky, or thorn laden, weedy ground)  much of the soil is favorable and the seeds are productive; some even replicating themselves up to 100 times.

 In this great parable, appearing also both in Matthew and Luke, Jesus makes some optimistic assumptions about God’s kingdom growing in the world and in people’s lives too.  Like George Burn’s unforgettable portrayal of God, Jesus assumes that many seeds will ‘catch hold and grow’.  Jesus also assumes that we live in vibrate, dynamic, and creative world; a world that is always changing; where growth is always happening all around us.  Can you see it? 

Let me ask you a very direct question: Are you open to God’s spiritual kingdom growing within yourself and within your own world?   And are you not only open to it, are you willing to make sacrifices, preparation and do the groundwork that will allow it to happen?

Near the end of Luke’s gospel, when religious leaders came to Jesus and asked ‘when’ the kingdom was coming, Jesus’ answer, if you recall, was that you can’t observe the coming of God’s kingdom.   The kingdom of God is within you?  “Don’t look there, nor say it is here” “The kingdom” Jesus said, is either within (KJV), or among you (NASB, NRSV).   What’s most interesting is that Jesus spoke this word on his way to Jerusalem to die, just before he made his great speech about the coming end of Jerusalem (which did happen in 70 AD, see Luke 21).

Can you see this kingdom growing within yourself?  If not, aren’t you missing out on what only God can do?   Aren’t you missing the moral and spiritual growth of the kingdom that Jesus has promised?   Aren’t you missing the potential for growth that is always here; always within us and always among us too?    

Last February, when the legendary Kirk Douglas passed away at 103, David Muir, the ABC news anchor, replayed an old interview he’d had with the actor a few years back after the actor had recovered from a stroke.  Walking through his massive flower garden, Douglas pointed toward his roses and told David Muir in broken, rehabilitated speech, “Aren’t these roses beautiful?  They are my favorite part of the garden.  These beautiful roses growing here have helped me come to believe in God.”  I thought it quite amazing that Douglas just volunteered that right out of the blue.  The newsman hadn’t even about his faith at all, but it sounded like something Douglas was proud of and he just had to get out what was going on ‘within’ him.  This was his ‘spiritual growth’.  The was the kingdom growing ‘within him’, and he was just as proud of this as he was one of his great old movies.

Isn’t this the kind of spiritual growth Jesus is promising today’s text from Mark?   For Just like God gives growth through the power of nature which the living God sustains, God also brings spiritual, kingdom growth into our lives too, no matter what is happening out there in the world.  And isn’t this optimistic view of growth significantly different from the gloom and doom we constantly hear from our culture?   For just like it was in Jesus’ own day, even when it looks like the world is falling apart, God’s kingdom still comes to us and God’s still enables people to grow, both morally, spiritually in the way and will of God’s kingdom.  And it’s not only physically that we can grow, but even when we are living very physical lives, we are also made to grow spiritually.  This spiritual growth, if we are open to it, can continue within us on and on, even as our physical abilities fade and we are facing our mortality.    Like it was with Kirk Douglas, when we realize that our days are numbered, or even better, when we learn as Scripture says, to ‘number our days’, this is when we can grow and bear spiritual fruit.  

What Jesus is reminding us here isn’t that we not only have the opportunity to grow spiritually when we are facing our mortality, or some serious illness, but we can also grow spiritually anytime, anywhere, and almost any place, if the conditions are right ‘within’ or ‘among’ us.   For when you are traveling with Jesus, following Jesus, and abiding in Jesus, it’s always springtime of the soul.   It’s always the time of plowing, cultivating, sowing, planting, nurturing, harvesting, gathering, and reaping.  Even in nature, this is going on all the time somewhere in the world.  It’s also going on inside of us, if we are open to it.   And this is exactly what today’s text is about.   If we will receive the ‘seed’ the sower broadcasts among and within us, and if we will nurture these seeds the Spirit sows, the kingdom will grow within us.

But all this ‘growth’ begins with a very important word in this text.  Do you see it?  It all starts with the word “Listen!”   Can you do this?  Can you really do this?   There’s are an awful lot of distractions, disruptions and interruptions out there, aren’t there?    There’s always a job to do, an email to check, a text to answer, or an app to open.   All the Gadgets to help us have more time to reflect and grow spiritually have stolen even more time from us.  So, while the potential for spiritual, inward, and moral growth is still there, there are many continually newly invented things to occupy our minds, hearts, and souls.  But your life is still ticking away.  Your days are still numbered.  You only have so much time to connect with what is right and what matters most.  Can you ‘listen?’  Can you really ‘hear’ what’s happening?  You only have this chance.

During World War II the city of Palermo, Sicily, a military objective of the Allied Powers, was to be bombed by the American Air Force.  To warn the Sicilians, telling them to flee, thousands of pamphlets were dropped on the city beforehand, but the citizens simply did not believe the warning.  They read, or heard, but they did not ‘listen’!  Unfortunately, when the American planes came and dropped their bombs, hundreds of Sicilians were killed; in fact, in some cold, dead hands were found the very pages urging them to leave the city.

Hearing and listening is what Jesus means as he shared this parable about the Sower and the Soils.   At the time, people were still flocking to Jesus in great numbers.   His message about the growth in God’s kingdom was taught where the crowds were growing larger and pressing upon him greatly, so that sometimes he had to speak from a boat on the water.  

If Jesus had been an opportunist, he might have said something to the effect: "Look, how good we are able to communicate!”, “See, how we’re getting through to the people!”   “Imagine our approval ratings!”  But no, Jesus wasn’t a politician.   He said nothing like this.  Instead Jesus told stories; parables that invited people to participate in what God was doing.   And it all starts with “He that has the ears to hear, listen’!  

Can you listen?  By making the obvious and imperative, Jesus knew that not everybody is listening.    They are present, but not really listening.   They aren’t listening because their hearts aren’t open.   As his parable suggests:  Like hard ground much walked upon, some hearts have hardened and the seed can’t get in, allowing enemies to snatch it away.   Like rocky ground where there isn’t much good soil, other people are too lazy, won’t go deep enough or spend time enough, because they continue to live such shallow, short-sighted ways.  Like weedy ground, other’s lives are filled with so much stuff, that the harvest gets ‘strangled’ out.   In this way, God’s given opportunity for growth is not merely stopped, but its stolen by an unwillingness to pay attention to what’s being said.   Jesus even names these ‘growth’ thieves as ‘cares of the world’, ‘the lure of wealth’, or simple ‘desires for other things’ (v. 19).   All these things are not bad, but they can prevent the kind of spiritual growth you need to get to see, realize, and grow in the ways that matter most.   So, which is it for you?  Are you able to listen?  Do you have ears to hear what the Spirit is saying?

DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?

Having ears to listen and hear means understanding.  In this passage, this is where Mark is going with Jesus’ storytelling.   As is evident in this passage, even with Jesus’ own disciples understanding isn’t automatic.   Jesus speaks in parables to reveal to them God’s ‘secrets’.   Now, this doesn’t mean that God is trying to keep secrets, but it means God is trying to reveal the mysteries of life that aren’t always so easily understood.    This is the way growth in God’s kingdom works.   As Charles Leary has said:  ‘Growth is never forced upon anyone.’  And just like you can’t grow anything in your garden by yourself, you must cooperate with God’s truth to grow in it.     You also have to put some ‘trust’ and faith into the hope that growth will happen.  Only then can you celebrate  the growth and the harvest that comes.  

In fact, you actually don’t even ‘make’ a harvest happen, but the wisest gardener realizes that you can only cooperate and celebrate when harvest when it comes.   We used to call that ‘Thanksgiving’.  Remember that Thanksgiving Hymn: 

“Come, Ye Thankful People Come,  Raise the Song of Harvest Home. 

All is safely gathered in, Ere the Winter storms begin. 

God our maker will provide For our wants to be supplied. 

Come to God’s own temple come.  Raise the Song of Harvest Home!”

  Growing something that is plentiful and productive is not always as simple as it looks.  When I used to work the garden with my mother growing up, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to details, but I did learn a few things.   I learned how to use a tiller, which mama couldn’t do.   I used to help carry the water for the plants, which mama also needed help doing.   I used to set a few tomato plants, sow a few seeds, and sometimes apply a little fertilize.   But the things she grew, like what most people in the south would grow, were staples; things easy to plant, easy to grow and fairly easy to care for in the hard, red clay we had to use.  

But later, when I started gardening myself, I wanted to grow some other things, simply because I wanted to grow them.   I could buy them cheaper, but I wanted to experiment some.   One thing I loved so much, but we never grew was carrots.   I loved carrots; raw, cooked, alone, in other dishes.   So, I planted seeds, but I only got little tiny worms.   The ground was too hard.   So I raised it up a little, and I got bigger worms and a few better size carrots.   The tops were much better, but the carrot still wasn’t what it should have been.   Then finally, in recent years, I built ‘raised beds’ and made the soil richer, softer, and deeper.   And guess what.   Great big carrots.  And tastier too.   And you know what made the biggest difference.   I still had to water.  I still had to add rich dirt.  But the biggest difference was the receptivity of the soil.   The soil was what allowed the carrots to be, just like me and ‘bugs bunny’ like, ‘CARROTS!

What Jesus implies in this parable overall, is that the most important part of growth has to do with the soil.   This is really a parable about soils, not about the sower.   And here, Jesus explains clearly that ‘good soil’ is the kind of person who wants to listen, wants to look,  wants to perceive, who wants to understand, and in turn, who wants to be forgiven (v.12).  

In other words, where growth begins is in your heart (your desire), not with your head (you intellect).   Your head always follows your heart.   Most everything that means something and makes a difference for your life and for the life of the world can begin as something hard to understand, at least at first.  If you want to catch or hit a baseball, you’ve got to practice.  If you want to shoot hoops, or make steals on the court, you’ve got to practice.   If you want to make a key tackle or score, make or catch a touchdown pass, you’ll have to show up for practice.   Nothing ‘big’ comes automatically.  

Even in academics too, spelling takes practice, mathematics will take a lot of ciphering, chemistry means you’d better learn your formulas, and even in theology especially, when you are talking about ‘invisible’, ‘eternal’ and ‘divine’ things, truth can be slow, gradual, and demands patience and participation with God.  

The reason for this because God is not after facts, ideas, nor figuring out the reason behind everything.   No, God wants you.   God wants you to be you, not God.   You can’t be God.  This is why nothing is automatic, why you have to show up, and why you have to open up, being honest with yourself and with God.   For you see, God already knows you better than you know yourself, and you can’t never fully know God.  The person God wants is you.  He wants you to participate and to grow in your life and you can only do with when you participate and cooperate with master gardener.    

 James A. Garfield, prior to serving as President of the United States, was president of Hiram College in Ohio.  One day a father asked Garfield if there were a short-cut whereby his son could get through college in less than the usual four years.  He wanted his Son to get on with making money. The college president gave this reply, “Of course there is a way; it all depends on what you want your boy to do. When God wants to grow an oak tree, he takes 100 years. When he wants to make a squash, he only takes two months.”   (As quoted in Emphasis, June, 1982, The C.S.S. Publishing company, Inc., Lima, Ohio, page 27).

When you want to maintain your health, you cooperate with your physician. When you want to be a good student, you cooperate with your instructor. When you want to be a Christian, you cooperate with God in the church community of your choice.  And all this learning, growing and developing takes time, but if you don’t have a heart for it, your head will never get it.  You’ll simply remain blind to it.   You won’t be able to get a hold of the growth and maturity you need that God’s wants, nor will you ever be able to understand what you need to understand.    

I hear people say sometimes that I should always ‘keep it simple’ when I preach or teach.  Well, I do try to.   I try to aim for the ear, for the heart, and then, as my professor used to say, ‘keep it about 15 to 20 minutes’.   I do try to keep it simple, but if we always make everything too simple, when we remain too simple.   If I only aim low, toward the person who can’t understand and doesn’t try to understand, how we understand the ‘deep things of God’ (Job 11:7)   If I only, as the saying goes, ‘keep it simple stupid’, we can remain both too simple and stupid too.   No, life can be complicated.   People can be complicated.  God and Faith, if it is real and worthwhile and helps us grow, does not always give simple, easy answers.   A good gardener and farmer knows, that the most complicated part of growing anything is getting the ‘fertilizer’ right.  Water is water, the sun is sun, but knowing what kind and how much Fertilizer can be very complex.  

It’s the same way with faith.  While biblical faith always invites us to have a childlike faith, to have a growing, developing, and strengthening faith means we will have to have more than a childish faith.   We have to learn and we have to want to understand.   ‘When I became an adult…Paul said, I put away childish things.”

HEAR THE WORD AND ACCEPT

    What Paul did when he became an adult is the million dollar question that Jesus’ parable is pointing to resolve, isn’t it?   After we listen, and after we understand, will we accept?   This is what Paul meant when he said that he “put away the childish things’: He accepted the fact that he was needed to be about heavier matters.   This is also what Jesus implies when he says the people who are ‘good soil’ will ‘hear the word and accept it and bear fruit’ (v.20).    

But what does it mean to both ‘accept’ the word and then to ‘bear’ it’s fruit’?    We might imagine that in Jesus’ day, this mean agreeing with Jesus, following Jesus, and doing what Jesus commanded.   But in our time, since Jesus isn’t among us in the flesh, but by Spirit that resides in receptive people, these ‘spiritual’ matters that can get tricky and complicated very fast.   For example, in the news last February, a search was being carried out by authorities looking for two children, who were believed to have been kidnapped by their mother who was taking part in a ‘doomsday’ cult. 

Today, because religion nastier and more complicated by people in our world, many people just don’t trust in anything that is religious or spiritual.   People not only don’t ‘trust’ the spiritual growth process, they lose the ability to celebrate what faith and how we must grow our faith, until it’s too late.    When we lose ‘trust’ we are like the little boy who kept pulling up the plant to see how it was doing.   Without some ‘trust’ spiritual growth just doesn’t happen.    So, somewhere, we have to have accept the challenge to listen, to understand, and to accept what the ‘word’ of truth is saying to us.  

Tony Campolo explained what this ‘acceptance’ means in a story about a very successful successful couple was invited to meet the high-school principal in his office. He advised them to let their son drop out of school. How would they ever celebrate being parents after a blow like that? The father was a successful lawyer, the mother an active club woman in the city. For years they had been despairing over their son’s poor report cards. They were not surprised, but they despaired, thinking their son would never amount to anything.

Nineteen years later, they sat in the gymnasium of a large university watching the same son receive an honorary degree. At age forty-two his income was in excess of $75,000. He worked for many years as a gas-station attendant.  One day he came home and announced that he was going to finish high school and go to college.   Here is how that young man explained such a complete turnabout in attitude and accomplishment: “Somehow, while I was washing a blue two-door, all the bits and pieces fell into place, and I was grown up.”    (In Tony Campolo’s ‘Who Switched the Price Tags).  

Again, as we said earlier, paraphrasing Charles Leary again, “You cannot force growing spiritually”, but you must “cooperate with God’s in growing”, and when it comes to growing spiritually, you must first ‘trust God’ an accept His ‘truth’ before you can grow in it.    Isn’t this what Jesus was getting at, many many years ago.   As God’s good soil you must cooperate with God in growing up spiritually.   But you can’t even get started until you first ‘accept’ what God is saying to you and asking you to do right now.   Will you accept?   Amen.