Mark 4:35-41

On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side. And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him.

A great gale arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’ He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.

He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’ And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’

We all have a storm story. Here’s mine. Several years ago, Katelyn and I went camping in upstate New York. We were most excited about renting a boat and fishing on this small lake. And here’s us in our boat, just as we began fishing. Now it wasn’t big, just a simple row boat. Which means I rowed and Katelyn fished. And Katelyn is a really good fisherman but not so good at taking the fish off. So by the time I got us to a good spot, she would have already caught multiple fish, which I had to remove.

I rarely had a chance to toss out my own line before moving to another spot. Finally we got to a spot on the far side of the lake where we had our anchor down, bait on the hooks, lines out, and ready to reel 'em in. Then, the wind kicks up and dark clouds start moving in. We hear thunder and its pretty close. So we both agree we should make our way back across the lake to the docks. We reeled in our lines and I started rowing. I rowed for maybe 15 minutes, but I wasn’t getting very far.

The wind is really picking up now and those clouds were nearly on top of us. So I rowed harder and harder, but with each stroke forward, I felt like the wind picked up just a little bit faster, pushing us backward. At this point we are only half way across the lake and the heavens could rip open at any moment.

Both of us are scared, I’m tired from rowing as fast as I can, and rain is starting to collect in our boat. I started rowing like a mad man against the wind, cursing at the paddles and this boat for not going faster, when Katelyn said to me “just take a break for a second and catch you breath.

So, I said to her “okay, put the anchor down so we don’t drift backward”... and then it dawned on us: the anchor was down the whole time. I had drug this cement filled coffee can clear across this whole lake. When I pulled it up, 10 pounds of seaweed covered the can. I was outraged at the situation: the rain, the boat, the anchor! Katelyn, though, was beside herself in laughter, nearly in tears at how funny it all was. I rowed us to the dock and we made it to the car just as the hail began.

Katelyn has always been good humored, able to laugh at herself and situations outside her control. I get frustrated, impatient with the wind and waves that arise in life. Our literal storm experience mirrored our lived experience. There’s nothing like a storm to teach you about the people who are in your boat, yourself included.

At first, Jesus doesn’t seem to be the person you want in your boat when the storm hits. He’s been preaching and teaching all day, using the same boat as a pulpit. So I’m not surprised at all that he’s sleeping on a cushion at the front of the boat.When the wind kicks up and the waves start crashing, the disciples seem more than a little frustrated that Jesus isn’t acting like a concerned friend, let alone a messiah.

But I don’t blame them for being scared and perhaps angry. It must have been a pretty bad storm if at least four, maybe more, professional fishermen who had spent a lifetime fishing and sailing on that lake were scared to death. They knew the dangers of the sea of galilee, especially at night. I imagine they warned Jesus of such things before they left the shore. No wonder they yelled at Jesus, do you not care that we are perishing?

Do you not care that we are perishing? Is there anyone who hasn’t yelled that question at Jesus? If there was ever a shared sentiment between us and the disciples, it's that question.

It’s a sense of abandonment. It’s feeling like you are drowning and God is nowhere to be found, panicking that your boat of life is taking on water and Jesus is asleep at the stern and for whatever reason you can’t rouse him no matter how hard you cry or pray. You are not alone in feeling that way.

We all have a storm story: the doctor giving a diagnosis you never wanted to hear, the day after a beloved’s funeral, your child telling you her marriage is over, the accident you never saw coming. Like the fishermen, we know the damage they can do. So don’t feel bad for yelling at Jesus. So much in the Hebrew Bible is the Psalmist or a prophet lamenting over the same thing.

As Nadia Bolz Weber puts it, it’s no sin to hold God’s feet to the fire and ask, “Why have you abandoned me?”

To the disciple’s great relief, Jesus wakes from his nap and, with three words, he makes the wind stop and a great calm come over the waters. He turns to the disciples and has the audacity to ask, “why are you afraid?” As if taking on water in a shambly first century boat wasn’t reason enough. But then Jesus asks a harder question, “Have you still no faith…”

In other words, don’t you trust me yet? I think the fear Jesus can get over. It’s human, innate to fear. But to show no measure of trust, that’s what Jesus seems disappointed at. Because by this time in Mark’s story, the disciples have spent some good time with Jesus. They have witnessed him doing some pretty miraculous things: casting out unclean spirits, restoring a withered hand, healing a leper, and mending the health of one of their own mothers. They’ve heard his teaching; heard others call him the Son of God, yet how quickly they seem to forget all of that.

In the Psalms, the psalmist writes about how God commands the sea to storm and to cease.

The disciples, or at least the first hearers of Mark’s gospel, would have known that only God has power over the waters. In controlling the winds and the waves, Jesus shows them once again who he is, he is the Son of God, the savior, fully divine living among them.

It took a storm for them to see again who Jesus was. And really the disciples still don’t see it or really get it. All throughout Mark, they constantly get it wrong about who Jesus is and what he’s there to do. But could we not say the same thing about ourselves? Have we not been witnesses to some pretty miraculous things? Have we not been in a boat taking on water and yet somehow arrived safely to the other side?

Faith is having trust in the savior who is right there, in the boat with you. We will be fearful of the storms that come up in life, but faith is choosing to trust Jesus in the moment in spite of the storm.

Notice that disciples didn’t have glass waters to sail across. Even though Jesus was in the boat with them, the storm still came. Bad, hard, even terrible things happen in this life. And people will try to say that if you just prayed enough, or had enough faith, or had the right kind of faith, then these things wouldn’t happen. That, friends, is a lie. Having faith is no guarantee or promise that storms won’t arise. The promise is that Jesus is in there with you.

And look I get that there are still all sorts of questions: why doesn’t Jesus stop the storms from happening in the first place? Why are some storms just so bad? And if God controls the waters, who's responsible for the storm? We could try to answer all these, and many have, but that gives no comfort or relief to someone who feels like they're perishing. Instead, sit beside them when the wind kicks up and the waves crash and let Jesus show you who he is once again.

Because there’s nothing like a storm to teach you about the people who are in your boat, Jesus included.

Amen.

Mark 4:26-34

[Jesus] also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”

He also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.

Instead of passing out mustard seeds to everyone, like I’ve done before – in classes and worship where this parable is concerned – I thought I’d do a little searching online for pictures and images of mustard plants to remind us more of what Jesus is talking about in this morning’s Gospel.

But I will start with a picture of a mustard seed.

They’re small, just like Jesus says they are. Not the smallest seed you and I might ever see, but maybe they were the smallest seeds known to Jesus, and his people, and to the region where he was living back in the day. And I found some pictures of the plants these seeds turn into, too, since that’s much of the point of Jesus’ parables this morning.

And what I found may or may not be as interesting or as surprising to some of you farming, gardening, green-thumbing types as it was to me.

When Jesus talks about this mustard seed becoming something worthy of a nest, I was expecting something more like a tree. But mostly what I found were pictures like this:

… and this:

… and this:

This is why it’s funny that Jesus ever even talked about the mustard seed at all. See, we’re used to hearing agricultural illustrations and farming metaphors in the Bible and from Jesus, but when we hear about trees, we’re used to hearing about something much more substantial. And so were the people listening to Jesus way back when.

Like in the book of Daniel, there’s talk of a tree, “great and strong” whose “top reached to heaven and was visible to the end of the whole earth.” This tree was used to describe a kingdom that ruled all the peoples of the world. In Ezekiel, which we heard this morning, too, and in the Psalms, there’s talk of the “mighty cedar of Lebanon” that symbolized the power of the kingdom of Assyria. And there is talk about “oaks of righteousness,” too. And, of course, there are those images of the “Tree of Life” and the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” from way back in Genesis and the Garden of Eden.

So in all of this, I picture trees – big, strong, tall, hefty kinds of trees. Something like this, maybe:

…or like this:

a giant redwood you could drive a car through.

or even just this:

a big old oak tree, strong enough to hold your favorite porch swing.

But no. Jesus talks about mustard – the smallest of all seeds that grows up to become something great. But not really the greatest of trees, though. I don’t think he’s talking about a sequoia, or a redwood; a high and lofty cedar or a giant oak of righteousness, either.

In the Gospels of Matthew of Luke, Jesus talks of a tree when he tells the parable of the mustard seed. But this morning – in Mark’s Gospel – he doesn’t go that far. This was a bush (SLIDE 8). A sizeable shrub. A flowering hedge of a thing. And so, just like so much else in God’s way of being in the world, Jesus shows us the kingdom in a way that’s surprising and unexpected and not at all the way the rest of the world might think it should be.

And I think that’s his point when he compares the kingdom of God – and our part in it – with a mustard seed and the bush that it becomes.

We sleep and rise, night and day and the seeds we’ve planted will grow – like they did for the guy in this morning’s first parable – by the grace of God, nothing more and nothing less. We don’t have as much to do with it as we’d like to pretend a lot of the time. And this is good, gracious, liberating news, if you ask me.

We’re just people – lowly, broken, sinful, sizeable shrubs of a people – planting our seeds in the world wherever we live and watching God do with them what God will do, and being amazed more often than not at what God can grow and produce and harvest with whatever worship, learning, and service; whatever forgiveness, grace and joy we’ve been able to scatter around us as we go – measly little bushes though we may be.

And there’s evidence of this everywhere:

Last weekend, in Louisville, the Indiana-Kentucky Synod of the ELCA, elected our first Black Bishop, Pastor Tim Graham, who told us that the very next day following his election, he’d be celebrating something like 24 years of sobriety. The serendipity of that makes me wonder about – and marvel at – all of the seeds of grace he has planted – and that were planted in him – up until to that moment, over the course of those 24 years. And all of the seeds yet to be scattered and bushes and branches yet to grow and bloom because of it.

I hope you saw or heard about Cross of Grace’s presence at our first ever PRIDE parade and celebration downtown last weekend, too. Amanda and Angi did a lot to organize and plan for the day, but simply showing up, simply being there, simply representing a congregation of Christians for the sake of the LGBTQ+ community that has more reason to fear than to welcome us, was the Kingdom of God alive and well in the world. Simply passing out stickers and suckers and “Mom Hugs,” was nothing more and nothing less than the scattering of seeds for those who received them – and in at least one case, I heard – were brought to tears because of it all. And from those seeds, I have to believe that some kind of shelter continues to grow.

And our annual SonRise Vacation Bible School did it again, too, last week … planted more seeds and grew more grace for me and those who joined the fun, I mean. We simply eat and sing and tell stories and share communion and try to come up with – sometimes silly – ways to tell of God’s love. And our friends – with different, limited physical and intellectual abilities – receive it with such faith – to the degree that one of them asked to be baptized at the end of it all. It’s a lot of work for the likes of Sharon and the other leaders, but from those simple seeds of story, song, and silliness, the Kingdom lives and moves and blooms in beautiful ways.

That’s why it’s so amazing that God uses us – shrubs and bushes like you and me – when there seem to be so many bigger, better trees out there in the world. You know what I mean? And, unfortunately, too many of us Christians do know what I mean.

See, I’ve come to know that what keeps too many of us from living out our faith most fully as followers of Jesus, is a lack of esteem and understanding about how qualified or capable or gifted we are to do whatever it is God hopes for us to accomplish.

We tell ourselves and pretend that we don’t know enough… that we aren’t talented enough… that we aren’t sure enough… We aren’t sober enough… We don’t have enough time… We aren’t wealthy enough… We aren’t leaders enough to lead… Or teachers enough to show someone else the way… We have too many questions of our own to even try to offer answers for somebody else…

To ourselves, we’re just “seeds” or “bushes” or “shrubs” too much of the time and we keep ourselves so small in our own eyes that we forget just how worthy we are in the eyes of God.

We keep waiting to become “trees” – mighty enough, strong enough, smart enough, faithful enough, wealthy enough, whatever enough – to do something more, to be something more, to offer something more – we forget that God used a “tree” to accomplish the greatest grace of all time, for the sake of the whole wide world.

If God can turn a mustard seed into a shrub… If God would dare turn a tree into a cross… If God can turn suffering and death into resurrection and new life… What can’t God do with the welcome and hospitality; with the love and forgiveness; with the good news and grace each of us has to scatter, to plant, and to grow in the world wherever we live?

Amen

Storm Stories

Seeds, Shrubs, and the Kingdom of God