Down to Earth A Sermon on Mark 4:26-32 by Rich Holmes Delivered on June 24, 2018 at Northminster Presbyterian Church in North Canton, Ohio You came from heaven to earth to show the way. So says a popular Christian song, a song that is talking about Jesus of course, and it is expressing an idea that we confess as Christians. The idea, that as we will later say in the Apostle s Creed today, that Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary or as we say in the Nicene Creed that Christ came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human. Or to say it yet a third way, the word became flesh and dwelt among us. However you say it, the idea that Christ came from heaven to earth is the idea in the person of Jesus Christ, God became incarnate. But when we think about God coming from heaven to earth, I doubt we ever give much thought to the idea that heaven somehow belongs among the dirt and mud and soil. We don t think much of the earth in that sense. The philosopher Plato believed in heaven as much as anyone, but he said there was no dirt and mud in heaven, and we would probably agree that there is no heaven in dirt and mud. After all, when we describe something as dirty, we don t mean that it is holy or sacred, we usually mean it is immoral, or even sexually perverted. And to describe something as holy or sacred is to describe it as clean, or pure, as if free from dirt and other contaminants. What strikes me as interesting though, is just how much people who get their hands in the dirt and mud of the earth have faith in the things of heaven. For all of our association of dirt and mud with the profane, I have found more faith among farmers and gardeners in my lifetime than I have among anyone else. Why? I don t know. But I guess it is because every time you grow something out of the ground, it is a miracle. When you plant a daffodil bulb in the ground 1
in the fall, everything around you looks dead. The trees are shedding their leaves, and the bulb that you drop in a hole is the most lifeless looking thing you think you ve ever seen. A lifeless looking thing that will soon be buried not just by the earth but a foot of snow. And in January when it is covered by a foot of snow, I don t care how many springs you ve seen in your lifetime, you could have seen a hundred of them, but it is still impossible to believe that anything could ever come out of that dead looking bulb. But when April comes, what could look more alive than a daffodil with its gorgeous white and yellow petals. If you ever have any doubt that God can work miracles maybe a good piece of advice is that the first person you should talk to is not someone like me or some theology professor, or even the pope. Maybe the first person you should talk to should be someone whose hands work the soil and the dirt every year. They know. Jesus talked a lot about planting and harvesting and growing when he told his disciples about the kingdom of God, and he did that, you might remind me because there was little else he could do. He was living in an agrarian society. He was living among people who were all too familiar with gardening and farming. He couldn t have very well talked about igloo construction, or ice fishing no one would have known what he was talking about. So what else could he talk about except gardening and farming. But while that is true, I still say that in him, God didn t just come down to earth, he came down to the mud and the dirt. And today I think we see this when Jesus gives us these parables. The kingdom of God he says is like a mustard seed. It starts off as the smallest of seeds but then it grows into a bush that is so large that the birds of the air can come and make nests in its shade. Mustard bushes can grow thirty feet high, but you wouldn t imagine that by looking at a mustard seed as tiny as 2
it is. And you wouldn t imagine a lot of things that you see in the kingdom of God. You wouldn t imagine that someone who never led an army or never sat on a throne or lived in a palace would become the king of kings and the lord of lords. You wouldn t imagine that a ragtag bunch of twelve disciples would begin a movement that would become the faith of half the people in the world. You wouldn t imagine these things, but you also wouldn t be all that surprised if you were a planter of mustard seeds and you worked with mustard seeds. Or think about Jesus words when he says the kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seeds on the ground. The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the grain, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come. And if you can understand that there is a harvest every year in the fields, then you can understand how one day we too will be harvested when the trumpet sounds and the judgment comes, even if the world has never seen anything like that harvest and people laugh at you for looking for it. There are some well-meaning preachers out there, who tend to think there is some hidden meaning within all of these parables that Jesus tells, and in order to get at the hidden meaning they have to spend a half an hour every Sunday explaining these parables. Well, I tend to think that explaining the Lord s parables is sort of like explaining a joke. I ve never known anyone to laugh at a joke after someone explained it to them. They either got the joke or they didn t. I think it s the same way with Jesus parables. You either get them or you don t. They either grab you or they don t. And I suspect they grab people who know what it means to plant and to harvest and to grow season after season and year after year. And I suspect they grab anybody 3
whose lives revolve around the ordinary and the mundane, anyone who is the last person in the world whom you would think could tell you something about the holy and the divine. I had a job one time where I had to work with my hands and I can remember that my hands were always dirty. I would scrub them and soak them in hot water, but I could never get my hands completely clean. There was always a black stain of dirt on my hands no matter how many times I scrubbed them. And I remember that whenever I would go somewhere where I knew I d be around educated people and professional people, I would try and hide my hands, because I was afraid that people would look at me differently if they saw my hands. I was afraid they would look at me as dirt. I had probably never thought about that before I had that job. I had probably never thought about how I looked at people with dirt on their hands and under their nails until I had that job. It was such a little thing, but it s something I always think about whenever I think about our Lord s parables about the soil and dirt of the earth. I don t think any of us are fully aware of how far down into the depths of our lives God has come in the person of Jesus Christ. We are happy to proclaim that in Christ God has come to earth, but not to real earth. Not to the dirt and the mud of earth, not to the squalor and the mire of earth. And why that is, I m not sure that I know. But until we see God as really being in the dirt and the mud of earth, I doubt we will see people whose lives are way down in the dirt and mud as having much to do with God, or having being created in the image of God and with the same dignity that all of us have. The earth that Jesus came to was not just a place to walk around. It is a place to dig holes in, to plant things in, to plow. It is real earth. And it is from real earth that we learn who God is. It is from mustard seeds, it is from harvests. It is from the lives 4
of those who sow, and reap and who know the soil better than they know themselves, or from the lives of those who know the ordinary and the mundane better than they know themselves. Well, today, of course, I don t just want to talk about the parables of Jesus. Today is a day in which we also honor our high school graduates here at Northminster, Derek East, Brett Jacobsen, Kenzie McKelvey, Abby Spies and Ben Verble. As high school graduates, you should all be proud of yourselves because you have accomplished something that many people never accomplish. So I hope the five of you give yourselves a well-deserved pat on the back. And Derek, Brett, Kenzie, Abby and Ben, as you set off into the future, I hope you don t mind if I use this occasion to give all of you two pieces of advice that I have learned from my own education, because even though I am not smart, I do have some education. First, remember that your education never ends, you are always a student, because if there is anything I have learned from all my reading and studying it is that the more I think I know, the more I realize I don t know. And the second thing is this, while books are valuable, and while education is valuable, I have found more wisdom about God in the ordinary people of this world who do ordinary things, than I ever have in all the books I have ever read. And that is what I believe you will also find in the God who has come to earth, who has really come to earth, who has come to real earth. 5