The Mysterious Faith (Mark 4:26-27)

The Mysterious Faith

Visit the parsonage sometime, and you will find that Kerry and I own just a small handful of books. (Now that the roar of laughter has subsided….) On one of the bookshelves are several hardback books with identical yellow dust jackets. These books take up nearly half of one long bookshelf. These books are all of the Church Dogmatics, written by 20^th-century Protestant theologian Karl Barth. The influence of these books on 20^th-century theology is significant, and when the opportunity presented itself to purchase the entire set from a retired scholar, I jumped at the chance. The Church Dogmatics originally published in German from the early 1930s up until Barth’s death in 1968. While I have the English translation, some purists seek out the German set with its white dust jackets, affectionately known as “the White Elephant”. One estimate (admittedly from Wikipedia) claims these thirteen volumes of books contain around six million words. Whew!

I grew up hearing Barth’s name mentioned in occasional sermons and then in my religious studies course work in college. By the time I got to seminary, I had formed somewhat of a misinformed opinion about Barth: his theology was too stodgy or aloof for its own good. Reading Barth, however, I find his writings indispensable if you wish to understand the shaping of 20th-century theology. While not a “Barthian”, I can express gratitude for the questions he asked of Christian theology and the influence his writings continue to exert over the questions we wrestle with today.

One of Barth’s observations continues to engage my mind. Barth said, “There has never been anywhere an instinctively sacred sociology” of the Church. In plain English, Barth claims the Church cannot be easily defined or beholden to only “one right way” of being Church. The Church is always rooted in Christ. Of this, Barth is most insistent. Nonetheless, the ways the Church can flourish are many, not few.

As for himself, Jesus said it a bit differently:

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. (Mark 4:26-27)

The best way to read a text is to read it and then let the words hang around in your mind for a spell. When I read this passage, I found myself a bit unsettled the longer I let the parable simmer and play in my mind. On one hand, we have the image of the Kingdom, the very crowning glory of Jesus’ vision of God made known in the world, tossed around willy-nilly. Jesus gives an image messy and unpredictable, far removed from the “cut and dried” understandings about following Jesus we often presume. Worse, contrary to our churchly habits and sensibilities, Jesus presents us with the image of a farmer who goes out, plants the seed liberally, and then saunters off until harvest time.

At this point, I hear my father’s voice call out clear from Kansas, “Son, what sort of fool does that?”

I have never met a non-anxious farmer, including my father. Something is always to be frittered with in the back of your mind: grain prices falling and rising (well, mostly falling), pests and pesticides, drought, deer treating your crop like a free buffet, freak storms, too much rain, too little rain, flooding, hail, the bills coming in and not enough money to cover everything this month, and the list goes on. You stand there in your dusty overalls, the seed company freebie baseball cap on your head, looking to the outside world as if you are a serene old timer in a Norman Rockwell painting. Internally, your stomach is in knots, trying to figure out how to keep the Farmer’s Bank from making your land “the banker’s farm”. Every farmer goes through this, having that moment when you laugh at yourself. That foolish dream you had, thinking you could plant a crop and turn a profit. Sigh!

So here we have two images that make most of us (if we are honest) a bit queasy: the Church that Jesus seeks to sow in the world is not uniform and micromanaged. The gospel will be planted where you least expect it, and trying to guess how it will flourish and yield a goodly harvest is at best guesswork and at worst a bit presumptuous on our part. Where the Kingdom of God grows, there shall be a harvest. As for ourselves, we have to learn how to live with the mysterious ways of God.

In the splendid Oscar-winning film Shakespeare in Love; the playwright is a young man seeking money, not literary awards. He writes plays for the theatres with their raucous crowds. Theatre was very much a rough and tumble experience in Elizabethan England. There is a new play needed, and the theatre manager insists that writer’s block is not an excuse. He demands a script readied for the production of “Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter”, a comedy about love and a bit with a dog doing tricks.

The film follows several characters as they rush around, trying to stage a play with a financial backer and his thugs threatening them with pain if there is no profit, a young woman who disguises herself as a man so she can tread the boards, and a young playwright named Will who seems too flaky to be the great Shakespeare. The Australian actor Geoffrey Rush plays Phillip Henslowe, the theatre manager, who tries to keep everything from flying apart, including the really rotten sounding idea of transforming the comedic play about Ethel into a tragedy about Romeo and Juliet, who is not a pirate’s daughter.

Throughout the film, people ask Henslowe what the play is about and when the play will be ready, and he bluffs to buy Shakespeare and the company more time. Confronted with his angry financial backer, Henslowe claims the theatre business is one whose “natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster”. The financial backer asks, “So what do we do?” Henslowe replies, “Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.” “ How?” the backer demands. Henslowe replies, “I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

If we let them be, the parables confound and unsettle us, defying a quick or complete interpretation alike. In these seed parables, we get a cautionary tale about thinking we know the ways of God and how we should be God’s people. We build our houses of worship, our traditions, our creeds, and still we have sacred texts that stick their tongues out at us and remind us of a faith more comfortable with welcoming children gladly, considering the lilies of the field, and scattering seed and letting things be.

For the Church’s defense, let me say that I have seen the wonder of this parable at work. Visiting the little Italian town of Assisi, I experienced the peaceful serenity of a village shaped by the legacy its most famous son, Saint Francis of Assisi. Before his calling to a simpler life, Francis would have been the guy you hoped your daughter did not bring home for the holidays. Francis enjoyed his life as the son of a rich family, known for his charm and singing as well as his foolish ways. Perhaps village idiot would have been his lasting title, not town saint. Yet, something happened in Francis’ life as God called him to leave the life of privilege for a simple brown robe and a way of life that transformed the Church, whether the Church liked it or not.

Ironically, the one who said he wanted no great fame has a basilica named in his honor. The counter-witness, though, is when you enter the room with Francis’ robe purportedly on display. Likely a wishful substitute for the undoubtedly lost original, the robe still exudes a simplicity that the Church, in all its desire for pomp and circumstance, continues to find. Why was this man with such a vainglorious youth revered as saint? Why does a robe exude more holiness than the fineries of the liturgical space around it? “It’s a mystery”, or as Jesus 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.

I suppose the Markan parable would ask to keep things loose and try not to tame the Spirit’s movement. We certainly need to talk with one other. We need to pray and listen for God in the midst of our ministry and missional work. We need to work with purpose and hope, but at the same time, we are in God’s hands, not our own. The future holds much possibility. So much Kingdom/Reign work is yet to come. God scatters seed abundantly. The harvest shall be abundant. Rather than pondering the future or undercutting its potential by our reticence to embrace it, we enter into the mystery that is God at work in the world.

As I prepared assignments for the Summer Collegium, I found myself musing about this Markan parable as it relates to First Baptist. One assignment asked for 1-2 pages about one change that has happened during my pastoral time here. I wrote three pages. (Like Karl Barth, I like writing more than less.) I wrote about the changes that have happened about the congregation and its relationship with this physical plant. If you stop and think about it, we use our building more creatively than a few years ago, and our “build use” revenue is in six months well ahead of what used to be our annual budget’s wishful thinking. We have solidified our community presence in ways unanticipated. Who really thought we would have a health clinic operating here that saw eleven uninsured persons this past Thursday evening? We did not fathom such things, nor did we frankly dream of our old nursery and half of our playroom becoming something different. I suspicion if Jesus read my little paper (and I am sure there are many other things on his divine mind), he might write in the margins:

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.