121 Planting a Kingdom

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Planting a Kingdom”, originally shared on June 10, 2021. It was the 121st video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Did you grow up on a farm? Did your parents or grandparents grow up on a farm?

   Do you grow any of your own food? Did your parents? Or your grandparents?

   Where do radishes come from?

   The Kingdom of God grows like something starting from seeds. Today we’re going learn how to plant a Kingdom.

   We have a fig tree in our backyard that was here when we came. One fig tree. Now, though, we have “volunteer” fig trees all over the place. The seeds from the fruit of that tree have found their way into our bushes, along the sidewalk, and through our privet hedge.

   One of our basil plants has gone to seed. Yes, “gone to seed” isn’t just an expression for “past its prime and falling apart”. It’s actually a description for a plant that has gone to a growth stage where it is growing seeds in order to reproduce itself. The seeds are dispersed naturally, or they can be harvested and used to grow more plants.

   I’ve been growing and harvesting radishes this year. I’ve been planting the radical vegetables from a packet of seeds. As I harvest the wonderful radishes, I plant the tiny seeds from the packet and grow more radishes.

   Jesus said this, from *Mark 4:26-34

He 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.

   What is the Kingdom of God?

   The Kingdom of God is where God reigns. It has already come, but it has not yet come in its fullness. Jesus announced it at the beginning of his public ministry with the words in *Mark 1:15, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

   The Kingdom of God started with 12 disciples and grew from there.

   How does it grow? It’s like sowing seeds.

   In Jesus day, seeds weren’t planted. They were broadcast.

   The field would be minimally prepared, and sowers would lift a big open bag of seeds onto their shoulder. As they walked through the field, they would reach into the bag, take a handful of seeds, and cast them onto the ground as they walked. Their hand came out of the bag in a sweeping motion, so that the seeds would be cast broadly, or “broadcast”.

   Then the rain would come, the sun would shine, the seeds would germinate, and grow with no further action from the sower until it was time for the harvest.

   The Reign of God comes in the same way, through no action of our own, but through the providence of God. All we do is plant the seed. We are like salt, or light, or leaven. We are small, but all we have to be is true to who we are in the transformational power of the Holy Spirit. We only live in the character and integrity of what God has made us to be: a new Creation, God’s own people.

   We don’t decide to accept Jesus, we don’t make a decision for God. We are sinners, cut off from God by our sin. God decides for us. God opens our hearts. Then we repent and believe. We experience the forgiveness from God and the total restoration of the living relationship with God, or “faith”, for which we were intended from the beginning of Creation, a relationship that we messed up. We become a new Creation. We are born again.

   We grow and we reproduce by God’s agency within us. That’s how the Kingdom of God is planted and grows. Seed by seed.

   The guiding principle of a church-development program called “Natural Church Development” is that all healthy living things grow and reproduce. If a living thing is not growing and reproducing, we examine what is preventing those things from happening and correct or heal them. NCD, as it was called, had its weaknesses, and is not widely practiced today, but I think that this general principle is at least a place to start.

   God gives the increase, but we can reject God’s call to do the work of evangelists. The Kingdom grows when God works through the new Creation we have become by God’s gift of new life.

   In *John 15:16-17, Jesus says to his disciples, “You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.

   To ask in someone’s name is to ask in accord with the living reality of that person. That’s what it means to live in the Kingdom of God. We do what God blesses through us, God’s people. The seeds are sown. They grow and bear fruit. They reproduce. The Kingdom of God grows. It’s not about us. That is the Christian life while we wait for God’s time of harvest.

   The apostle Paul wrote in *1 Corinthians 3:1-9,

And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready, for you are still of the flesh. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations? For when one says, “I belong to Paul,” and another, “I belong to Apollos,” are you not merely human?

What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labor of each. For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building.

   How does the Reign of God grow in human hearts?

   It’s like a mustard seed. I bought a big bag of mustard seeds for a quarter in Israel when I was a student there, and I brought them home. They’re pretty small, about the size of a sesame seed.

   Sally and I visited the Armstrong Garden Center in Claremont the other day. It has a wall of seeds that you can use to grow food and flowers. It’s a little late in the season, but there are still seeds to be planted. The mustard seeds were for salad greens.

   Mustard plants grow wild around here.

   Some varieties in Israel, a place with a climate a lot like ours, can grow to 6-feet tall, taller than me. Birds, as Jesus said, can make nests in them.

   The smallest of seeds grows to the largest of shrubs.

   Armstrong’s, like every other garden center, is filled with things that started as a small seed and grew large.

   We went by the California Botanic Garden (formerly the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden) in Claremont on our trip to Armstrong’s. It is filled with things that started small and got big. There are native plants, wildflowers, bushes, trees, and a section that sells native plants to the public. There are succulents and massively tall trees, all things that once grew from a tiny seed.

   Jesus’ parable of the mustard seed was very encouraging to the Church in its early days. It was small, it was vulnerable, it was under attack, but Jesus said that it would grow and reproduce, all by God’s action. It would grow and be a place of refuge and strength.

   We are a part of that parable. We are the heirs of all those who have gone before us, for nearly two thousand years now, who have been sent and equipped by God with everything we need to plant the seeds of faith. All we have to do is open our hearts, receive the gift, and be faithful to God’s call, to live by faith and in that living relationship with the one true living God, to be genuine with other, be transparent to what God is doing within and among us, to be at peace with one another and be genuine with regard to the spiritual gifts that God has given to each of us for the building up of the Church, the Body of Christ, all of which come as gifts of God.

   It’s always been a mystery to me why its so hard to keep a healthy lawn in the back yard. I prepare the soil, I plant grass seed, I water, and the results are often mixed. Yet, I can’t keep the stuff from growing through the concrete in the driveway and the asphalt patches on the sidewalk.

   That’s the way the Kingdom of God is. The Church is not growing in the Global West and in the Northern Hemisphere, where there are plenty of resources, but it is booming in the Global East and in the southern hemisphere in places where the resources are few and the people struggle for necessities, are persecuted for their faith, and where they have no power.

   We do better when we have little opportunity to not turn to our own power but must turn to God because there is nowhere else to turn.

   The important thing about the parables of sowing seeds and the mustard bush is that they remind us what humans contribute is their faith, and that is itself a gift from God. That is the area in which we need to concentrate, not our money or our status or our power. Faith, not a Pollyannaish optimism, but a living relationship with the one true living God, is the only thing we need to grow. And it comes only as a gift from God. We contribute nothing.

   We work, but it is God working through us or it is nothing.

   We center our lives on the cross, God’s gift of God’s self, to reconcile us to God and to give us everlasting life by faith, through grace. Jesus gave his life and then took it back again in the resurrection, so that the power of the Holy Spirit might be present and at work within us that we may grow and reproduce other Christians.

   How does that work?

   Our credible witness is often the means through which God plants the seeds from which the Kingdom of God grows. The gift of faith transforms us. The Holy Spirit shapes us from within, like a pair of work gloves. The more we express the gift of faith, in work for the sake of the world, the more God shapes us.  God transforms us for evangelism while we await the harvest at the end of time.

   The reading from Mark with which we began ends with a statement about parables.

   Why parables? Why be unclear? I think that they are a reminder that the Kingdom of God doesn’t come by our doing, but by the power of the Holy Spirit at work within us.

   The Kingdom of God arrives like The Holy Spirit planting a seed that grows into living faith and, in response, grows into transformed lives and a credible witness. There’s nothing to do but to accept the gift and, if we like, to pray for its increase.

   Faith is like a beard. Let is grow, and it becomes the first thing people notice about you.

   Open your heart and listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit today.