Giving Christians the Pip.

Sermon preached at St Peter and St Paul’s Church, Swanscombe on the first Sunday after Trinity 2006, based on St Mark iv.26-34.

Joe watches enthralled
as his teacher,
Mrs Holden,
shows him how to put the broad bean
into the jam jar
between the blotting paper
and the glass.

She adds a little water
and tells the class to do the same.
“Now,” she says, “we can watch them grow.

It will take a long time.”

So for the next week or so,
Joe watches his broad bean grow.

First the root, then the green shoot.

Each day he carefully examines it,
enthralled by how much bigger
it seems to get.

One day, Mummy says,
“it’s too big for the jam jar, Joe.

Can I plant it in the garden now?

We can grow some
lovely broad beans for our dinner.”

A few weeks later,
Mummy serves the first harvest
of broad beans
from a remarkably successful plant.

Joe looks thoughtfully
at the beans on his dinner-plate,
and, as is typical of seven year olds,
says “I don’t like them”
despite the fact
that he has been eating them
since he had teeth.

So, why doesn’t Joe like his broad beans?

[PAUSE]

You’d have thought
that they would taste better
having been grown
without pesticides or special treatment,
and unless Joe likes
the taste of farm chemicals,
you know that it
isn’t anything like that.

Let’s ask him.

Joe tells us quite simply
“I don’t want to eat them,
because they might grow in my tummy
and come out of my ears.”

Obviously, Mummy ought to keep
a careful eye on the cartoons
that Joe seems to be watching.

But it is not that much
of an irrational fear
at the age of seven
to fear something that grows inside of us.

Without the knowledge
that boiling beans stops them from growing,
the thought that
they could germinate inside us
seems normal and a quite reasonable fear.

But do we have fears and worries
like this now,
inside us?

[PAUSE]

Well, there are lots of emotions and feelings
that can grow inside us
from very small beginnings.
Fear itself is a prime example
of how something so tiny
can grow to change our lives.

A small money spider
can just drop on your hand when you are a baby,
and by the time you are 45,
the sight of anything
large and dark scuttling on the carpet
can send you clinging
to the light fittings
with both hands and feet.

It’s only when your spouse comes in
and picks up a little bit of fluff
that has blown across the floor
that you realise how affected you are
by a fear that has such
tiny beginnings.

Are there other things
that can grow from being so tiny,
yet affect our lives in a big way?

What examples of this can you see in your own life?

Is it a fear, or is it something else?

[PAUSE]

Jesus tells us the parable
of growing wheat or mustard seed.

Just where are you in this parable?

Are you the man
who does the planting of the seed,
are you the seed that’s sown, or what?

Well actually,
we are not represented by any of these.

Jesus is of course being very clever,
as is not uncommon for Him.

God made us from the dust of the earth,
thus in Jesus’ parables
we are often represented
by the earth itself.

It is the seed that is sown in us
that Jesus is talking about.

When we are born
we are like a fertile field
waiting to have seed sown in us.

The seed comes thick and fast:
think of walking through a grassy field
and see all the dandelion fairies,
and sycamore seeds
floating and twisting through the air.

Our lives are filled with the seed
which is sown in us.

Of course it can thus bare fruit,
but who wants a field of weeds
rather than a field of wheat?

[PAUSE]

Like a field,
we can only sustain so many plants.

The plant which grows quickest
usually takes up all the goodness from the soil
so that other plants can’t grow.

This is how weeds survive:
you sow seed one minute,
blink, and behold!
a garden of dandelions!

So we have to look carefully
at what’s growing in us.

[PAUSE]

Jesus says the Kingdom of God
is like a tiny mustard seed growing.

He doesn’t tell us how quickly it grows,
just how large it gets.

For us in England,
He might use the image
of the acorn and the oak.

The acorn will take hundreds of years
to reach the status of a mighty oak.

The Kingdom of God is like that.

If we want the Kingdom of God to grow within us,
then we have to be prepared
to wait for it to grow and make sure
that we stop anything else growing.

If we accept the first thing that grows
rather than that which takes time
to grow in our lives,
then we could be choosing
the weeds over the good crop.

[PAUSE]

However, we could be like Joe,
and be frightened by the Kingdom of God
growing within us,
taking us over,
so that we lose ourselves in it.

If you are like this,
then hear what Jesus has to say to you:
“he who loses his life for my sake
will find it.”

If we allow the Kingdom of God to take us over,
then we actually become whom God created us to be,
that’s God’s promise.

[PAUSE]

There is something growing
and bearing fruit in all of us:
fear,
joy,
hatred,
faith,
greed,
love.

We have to be responsible
for growing only that which God wants,
for whatever it is that does grow,
will grow to enormous proportions
in our lives,
like a mighty oak tree,
or the mustard.

We must make sure it is the Kingdom of God.

Just what crop are you growing right now?