The Kingdom of God is Small, Slow and Weak (Ezekiel 31; Mark 4:26-34; 2 Corinthians 5:1-10) Doug Floyd

Old North Abbey June 17, 2012 How can we live significant lives? How can we fulfill our purpose? Is it as simple as setting and achieving goals? Will this give us the sense, the feeling that we have accomplished something important? We live in an age where we're surrounded by human achievements from all around the globe. From the comfort of our homes, we can literally watch story after story after story about people with great talent, amazing skills, and heroic pursuits. Think how the talent shows have exploded around the globe. Last year, I watched a YouTube video of a young man appearing on Korea's Got Talent. He grew up in an orphanage, but had been living on his own since five years old. From five to fifteen he slept in stairwells and public bathrooms to survive. In spite of his harsh beginnings, he burned with a passion to make music. Singing songs gave him comfort on streets. This drive for music eventually led him to perform on Korea's Got Talent. His voice brought tears to the eyes of the judges, and one of them committed to helping him. Now he's sung for the President of Korea and is building a career in music. I look at him and how he overcame such hardships to pursue his dream, and I feel like I was given much and have accomplished so little. Then I think of people who offered their lives in heroic ways for the sake of others. Consider Sophie Scholl, the young college student in Berlin, Germany who joined her brother and five other young men in writing and distributing leaflets that exposed the horror of Nazi activity on the Eastern front. She was arrested, convicted and executed for her act. In her last words she said, "How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?"1 When I read stories of such heroic people, I tempted to think, "What have I've done?" Even as we honor great heroes, we might sometimes wonder about our own significance. How can we do important things? How can we change the world? The longing to be significant and do something important has driven many people to create, to build, to resist, to survive, and to leave lasting legacies behind. Of course, that same drive has led other people to form cults, abandon friends and family, achieve great power at the expense of others, become totalitarian dictators and even start world wars.
1 Margie Burns. "Sophie School and the White Rose." The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation <http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/holocaust/articles-20/sophie-scholl-white-rose/> 1

In the Gospel According to Mark, Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of God in ways that might challenge our ideas about significance:
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And He said, The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground, 27 and should sleep by night and rise by day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he himself does not know how. 28 For the earth yields crops by itself: first the blade, then the head, after that the full grain in the head. 29 But when the grain ripens, immediately he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come. 30 Then He said, To what shall we liken the kingdom of God? Or with what parable shall we picture it? 31 It is like a mustard seed which, when it is sown on the ground, is smaller than all the seeds on earth; 32 but when it is sown, it grows up and becomes greater than all herbs, and shoots out large branches, so that the birds of the air may nest under its shade. 2 As I read this passage, I am struck by the insignificance of the life of faith. Or at least the apparent insignificance. Jesus suggests that the kingdom is a lot like planting a garden. After scattering seeds and watching the seed sprout, grow and come to harvest, we don't know how it happens. We look at the kingdom as puzzled bystanders. Then He says the kingdom is like a tiny mustard seed. Though it's tiny, if you plant it, it will eventually grow into a great shrub. That's right, the mustard seed grows into a towering shrub. It's odd shaped and can grow pretty big...for a shrub. If left untrimmed it could grow to about 20 feet. Wow! 20 whole feet. If I set this shrub beside a Cedar Tree that towers 130 feet, it doesn't really seem that significant. In Jesus' own words, the kingdom of God is small, grows slowly, and we don't even understand it. Then I read the passage 2 Corinthians: For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven, 3 if indeed, having been clothed, we shall not be found naked. 4 For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life. 5 Now He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who also has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. 6 So we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord. 7 For we walk by faith, not by sight. 8 We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord. 9 Therefore we make it our aim, whether present or absent, to be well pleasing to Him. 10 For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. 3

2 The New King James Version. 1982 (Mk 4:2632). Nashville: Thomas Nelson. 3 The New King James Version. 1982 (2 Co 5:110). Nashville: Thomas Nelson.
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The body is wasting away. It's a tent that will be replaced one day by a heavenly building. Yet it is in this frail body that I must serve the kingdom. 2 Corinthians is not a favorite among commentators. There are fewer commentaries for this book that any book in the NT. There are some passages that seem downright depressing. In 2 Corinthians, Paul confesses that he despaired almost unto death. In fact, the whole book is focused upon our weakness. Even as God is doing a glorious work in us, we are growing weaker. As we mediate on these readings, we might say the Kingdom of God is slow, small and weak. And we could add, we don't really understand how it works. Somehow this does not seem to be the kind of slogan we want on a church banner. "Join us as we pursue the kingdom of God. It's small, slow in coming and we're getting weaker by the day." It appears that the kingdom of God is at odds with our longing to live significant lives. As we contemplate our own insignificance, let's take a moment and consider the life of Richard Wurmbrand. Gifted intellectually, Wurmbrand was fluent in nine languages. In the 1930s, he worked as a stockbroker in Bucharest, Romania.4 He was a wealthy atheist Jew working in high finance, participating in leftist politics and attending all the important parties. He was doing something significant, helping usher in the cause of Communism. Yet he and his wife Sabina also knew an emptiness, a loneliness, and longing. After meeting a German carpenter, Christian Wolfkes, Richard and Sabina converted to Christianity in 1938. He became a minister, rescuing Jewish children in the ghettos and preaching the gospel in bomb shelters. Both he and Sabina were arrested, beaten and nearly executed by the Nazis. Her whole Jewish family was killed in Nazi Concentration Camps. After the war, the communist seized power. Richard publicly resisted and declared in the middle of a nationally broadcast meeting that the loyalty of Christians should be to glorify God and serve Christ alone. The act of resistance eventually led to his arrest. In 1948, Richard was taken away. He spent 14 years total in prison. Three of those years he was held in solitary confinement, deep in the basement of a prison. For three years, he saw no natural light. The guards put felt on their shoes and he was even denied the sound of walking. Think of this place of abasement. The man who was important, brilliant, wealthy, now languished in a prison. Abandoned. Forgotten. Think of the struggle of the soul in the place of forsakenness. We may never be held in an underground prison in solitary confinement, but in some small way we may know the place of forsakenness. We may ask, "God have you forgotten about me?" Let me highlight another story. William Cowper was a great and gifted poet. He wrote songs that continue to stir our faith and give us voice to praise the goodness and grace of God. One of his well loved hymns begins, There is a fountain fill'd with blood Drawn from EMMANUEL's veins;
4 See "About our Founders." Voice of the Martyrs <http://www.persecution.com/public/ourfounders.aspx> 3

And sinners, plung'd beneath that flood, Lose all their guilty stains. Olney Hymns (1779)--'Praise for the Fountain Opened' Though we find comfort in Cowper's exaltation of God's cleansing grace, he struggled to find that same comfort. Again and again, he faced seasons of doubt where he feared God's damnation. The agony was so great that he attempted to kill himself more than once.5 Though his writing inspires and encourages countless people across the ages, Cowper continued to suffer from times of acute depression throughout his life. Cowper's interior struggle finds a common correspondence in the story of Job. In this tale of woe, Job's kingdom falls under attack, his family is killed, his land is uproar, his body is broken and his mind is anguished. In Job, we face human isolation and brokenness in a way that extends beyond anything we can comprehend. Job cannot grasp why he has become the object of God's wrath. All his understanding of God and the religious life are turned upside down. His friends cannot comfort him and only condemn. His wife cannot stand beside him in the midst of this unexplainable suffering. He is completely alone. I pray we never know the depths of Job's anguish. But we may have known times of feeling forgotten by God and others. We may know the pain of humiliation in our souls. We may know the dejectedness of being overlooked. We may have watched as others around us were exalted, honored and given preference, while we were forgotten. This can be deeply painful. And confusing. God did you speak to me? God what did you forget me? The dreams we thought God gave us may come to nothing. It is not just dreams about our calling. It could be dreams of marriage. Of children. Of work. Of anything. We may look at other people and wonder why is that they seem get everything they want, but then we feel guilty for our jealousy. So now guilt is added to our already deep sense of failure. In spite of our longing to doing something of value, of lasting important, we feel so very small, so insignificant. We are stripped of glory. Throughout the story of Job, he cries for an audience with the Lord. He wants to know why. Finally the Lord appears as YHWH, the God of Covenant. Job encounters the voice in the whirlwind. Hans Urs Von Balthasar writes, In Ezekiel, Gods glory had appeared in a stormy wind out of the north, blazing in lightning-flashes in the dense cloud that accompanied this wind (Ezek 1:4), and already in the later Isaiah Gods visitation could take this form of tempest and the flame of a devouring fire (Is 29:6). But in Job, all that is left of Gods glory is the tempest (se ara);6
5 See William Cowper biography at Poemhunter.com <http://www.poemhunter.com/williamcowper/biography/>

6 von Balthasar, H. U. (1991). The Glory of the Lord, a Theological Aesthetics VI: Theology: The Old
Covenant (B. McNeil & E. Leiva-Merikakis, Trans.) (281). San Francisco; New York: Ignatius Press; Cross4

God appears to Job without glory. No Isaiah story. No wheel within a wheel. Just a voice. Who never defends. Who simply talks about His creation. He points to the incomparable glories that surround Job. From the stars in the heaven to the water in the deep to the creatures on the earth, the Lord points to the wonder of His world, His cosmos. This speech brings Job to his knees in worship. Only from this place of worship, can Job regain perspective and behold the absolute faithfulness of His Father. This perspective of worship, of submission to our Father above can help us see the world anew. In light of the Lord, human achievements and accomplishments may be exposed as simply a fading glory. In Ezekiel 31, we hear about the significance of Egypt. The glory of Egypt is compared to Assyria. Now it came to pass in the eleventh year, in the third month, on the first day of the month, that the word of the Lord came to me, saying, 2 Son of man, say to Pharaoh king of Egypt and to his multitude: Whom are you like in your greatness? 3 Indeed Assyria was a cedar in Lebanon, With fine branches that shaded the forest, And of high stature; And its top was among the thick boughs. 4 The waters made it grow; Underground waters gave it height, With their rivers running around the place where it was planted, And sent out rivulets to all the trees of the field. 5 Therefore its height was exalted above all the trees of the field; Its boughs were multiplied, And its branches became long because of the abundance of water, As it sent them out. 6 All the birds of the heavens made their nests in its boughs; Under its branches all the beasts of the field brought forth their young; And in its shadow all great nations made their home. 7 Thus it was beautiful in greatness and in the length of its branches, Because its roots reached to abundant waters. 8 The cedars in the garden of God could not hide it; The fir trees were not like its boughs, And the chestnut trees were not like its branches; No tree in the garden of God was like it in beauty. 9 I made it beautiful with a multitude of branches, So that all the trees of Eden envied it, That were in the garden of God. 7 Ezekiel is writing to a people hidden in exile. Forgotten. Insignificant. For some in Judah, Egypt represented refuge from the invading Babylon. It was glorious. Powerful. Egypt is a grand and gloroads Publications.

7 The New King James Version. 1982 (Eze 31:19). Nashville: Thomas Nelson.
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rious cedar tree, offering refuge to the birds of the heavens, to the nations of the world. Egypt is significant. Yet, this glory is not lasting. Egypt is falling. In the end of Ezekiel's prophecy, the giant cedar is cut down. He writes, To which of the trees in Eden will you then be likened in glory and greatness? Yet you shall be brought down with the trees of Eden to the depths of the earth; you shall lie in the midst of the uncircumcised, with those slain by the sword. This is Pharaoh and all his multitude, says the Lord God. 8 What looks permanent today is fading. What is grand and powerful and has achieved great goals today, maybe not even exist tomorrow. In the 1950s Richard Wurmbrand languished in a Communist prison in Romania. But that empire fell. Ceased to exist. And one day many years later, Richard bought that prison and turned it into a school. The Lord did not forsake Richard. He remembered. Our Father is faithful. Completely trustworthy. Though we may feel insignificant at times and wonder if we've been forgotten, we can rest in the faithfulness of our God. Like the Good Father that He is, he will complete the work He has begun in us. We must trust that though work appears small, though we may question, He is leading, guiding and working in our midst. So we can rest in a season or even a life of hiddenness and humiliation. We may work simple jobs and often go unnoticed. But no matter what we do, we serve in worship of our Lord. Through us, He is working and will continue to work. In one of my favorite novels, George Eliot writes, For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. (Middlemarch) Once we can rest in God's faithfulness, we are free to let go of our own significance, and turn our hearts to those around us. We can learn how to encourage and celebrate one another. The ancient Celtic Christians celebrated the people in their communities by telling their stories, singing their songs. They multiplied saint story upon saint story. In the Stowe Missal,9 a Eucharistic worship service from the eighth century, there is an extended litany of prayers to multiple saints. Thomas O'Loughlin suggests that the litany of saints includes members of the community that have died. Since the ancient Celts view the Eucharist as a meal Christ served to his community, they enjoyed the meal alongside all members of the community living and dead.10

8 The New King James Version. 1982 (Eze 31:18). Nashville: Thomas Nelson.
9 For more information on the Stowe Missal, see Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stowe_Missal> 10 Thomas O'Loughlin. "The Stowe Missal: Eucharist as Refreshment." From Celtic Theology: Humanity, World, and God in Early Irish Writings, Continuum: New York, 2000, pp. 128-146. 6

We could learn from them. We could look around us and celebrate the people in this community. We could tell the people around us about how their gifts minister grace to us. Instead focusing on our own significance, we could celebrate the significance of those around us, telling their saint stories. This act of honoring one another could be an act of doxology, celebrating the grace of God that has appeared among us. As we look outward, we look upward in thanksgiving to our God, trusting that He is turning this little mustard seed of a community into a shrub that is providing refuge and healing and love to the world around us.