Year B
Mark 4:26-34
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
The Heart of God’s Kingdom
At the beginning of the movie, The Lion King, of which I have watched many times with my grandchildren, after the king’s son, Simba, is born, all the animals gather at Pride Rock. Rafiki, the baboon who serves in a sort of priestly role, anoints with oil the baby lion’s forehead then, lifts him up for all the animals to see. It’s a grand moment. The elephants trumpet. The music swells. All the animals of the jungle bow down before the new crown prince. Then, Rafiki enters a cave and draws a picture of Simba on the wall making sure to place the mark of anointing on his forehead. This sign of Simba’s royal identity is bestowed on him at birth but this was not the case with the anointing of David—although God surely knew from this shepherd lad’s birth, the runt of the litter, that he was the one.
Woven throughout today’s texts are all kinds of unexpected treasures. Great things can come in unexpected packages or in the unlikeliest of circumstances—like a tiny mustard seed or the young shepherd boy David. Yet, we often do not see the possibilities before us as clearly as God does. Even the most faithful servants can look for the wrong qualities or in the wrong places—as God tells Samuel, “the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” Thank goodness God does not judge by what we look like; but by our hearts. God’s kingdom doesn’t look like human ideas of beauty, strength and success. Instead, God is nimble and extravagant like a weed, turning up in unexpected places, enriching our lives, and sometimes turning them upside down.
Our challenge as Christians is to make our best attempt to see the world as God sees it and to do what we can to bring that vision into reality. Thankfully, as part of God’s new creation in Christ’s love we are formed for just that kind of work. We must learn to look with our hearts, expect the unexpected, and trust God to be faithful if we want to catch the vision and be a part of its unfolding. This may mean we have to reorient the way we move through God’s world and interact with God’s people. We can just imagine God telling the grieving and disheartened Samuel the last of the Judges to “keep up” as God nudges him toward the next unexpected move God is making.
We will spend this summer skipping through the stories of Saul, David, and Solomon and their reigns in 1 and 2 books of Samuel. We began last Sunday when we heard how the people of Israel demanded a king, despite the costs and loss of freedom kingship would entail for the people. Since last Sunday’s reading, Saul has come to power as king, erred in his ways, and been rejected by God, and the prophet Samuel, who anointed Saul as the first King of Israel. God commands Samuel to go anoint another king, and today we hear the story of Samuel’s anointing of Jesse’s youngest son, David, God’s surprising choice for king. Yet, David’s path to the throne will be full of trials and sorrow. Today’s story is about the private anointing that gives David the strength and call he needs to persevere through many difficult years to come. In the lectionary readings, David will be publicly anointed as king of Israel after Saul’s death many years later.
Like David’s journey to the throne, we sometimes find that God’s promises are not fulfilled according to any timeline that we would choose and Paul, in writing today to an overconfident Corinthian community, certainly is familiar with the fact that God often works in ways that appear surprising. Therefore, Paul urges the people to “walk by faith and not by sight” when they are tempted to follow super-apostles who preach a gospel of glory instead of Christ crucified. From now on Paul says, “Worldly standards have ceased to count in how we see ourselves and the world and challenges the Corinthians to see everyone, himself included, not by the standards of their prevailing culture but in the light of the Messiah in whom all things had become new.
Biblical scholar James Dunn observes in Paul’s theology, “Being in Christ is not any kind of mystical removal from the real, everyday world. On the contrary, it becomes the starting point and base camp for a quite differently motivated and directed life.” “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” The love of Christ changes us and helps us to see the world from God’s perspective. If we see ourselves, our foes, and this old world with our hearts, Paul tells us all be transfigured by the death of Christ and we will live and deal differently with each.
This new perspective or new creation, a new way of looking at the world, Jesus speaks to in the gospel of Mark today when he talks about the kingdom of God, the time when God’s reign will be manifest upon the earth. Mark tells us in these parables that the kingdom of God is one of mystery and surprise, a gift offered to us by God and all we have to do is accept it and apply it to our lives. In the first of today’s very familiar parables, the harvest has been growing quietly and mysteriously during the routines of daily life, but when it is ready immediate action is demanded. The time is fulfilled. The grain has matured and must be gathered in. So too the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God that Jesus preached required giving one’s all to the work of the kingdom.
In keeping with Mark’s urgency for action when the time becomes ripe, is the parable of the smallest seed, a mustard seed that becomes the greatest of all the shrubs, with large branches to give shade. The mustard plant, an annual plant, grows quickly from a tiny seed to a 9-foot ugly shrub. The seed is small, but the result is massive, even if untidy and difficult to manage. The scraggly mustard shrub is like God’s kingdom, Jesus says, it does not look like human kingdoms. It is not about might and strength and grandeur, like a stately tree; it is about quick and fast growth. God does the work: plants, tends and harvests and our task is not to impede God’s kingdom vision but allow God to use us.
Thankfully, we are a part of that kingdom vision that God is offering. We have been anointed like Simba in our baptism with God’s oil and given a royal identity in Christ. That means that God is already at work in us, urging us on in love and teaching us to see from Christ’s generous and unexpected point of view that we are already the new creation, and we are invited to see how everything has and is becoming new each surprising moment. God’s vision unfolding in and around us invites us to see differently, live differently, love differently and promises that we don’t have to do all the heavy lifting. We just have to live as though we believe and look with faith and hope, and then participate, by scattering the seed, and trusting that the harvest will come in unexpected places and people. This is the heart of God’s Kingdom and what it looks like…new, surprising and extravagant.