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Like all story tellers Jesus must have had a great sense of humor. But recapturing his humor today is an all but impossible task. Yet for some of his stories, if we aren’t laughing, we may not really understand him. For example, let me try retelling the familiar parable of the mustard seed. Now imagine Jesus before a little crowd of people. He says something like this:

You wanna know what the realm of God is really, really like? Look. Think of it this way. Think of this teeny, tiny, seed – a mustard seed, the littlest of all seeds. What happens? You throw it on the ground, and it takes root and it grows and grows, up and up and up, and eventually, at long last, it grows into the biggest, greatest, hugest, most humungous  SHRUB! And this SHRUB extends its branches every which way, and all the birds of the air of every variety come and build nests in it and luxuriate in the great shade it provides!

Interesting. You know what a mustard plant is? I’m told it is a mangy, stinky, decidedly unattractive garden bush. God’s realm is a smelly shrub? What is Jesus up to here? Think for a moment that without Jesus’ unexpected twist to this story, the parable seems to be saying that the realm of God is like when you plant a little seed and a great tree grows from it; that is, from humble, unimpressive beginnings, great things can come. A tiny acorn yields a mighty oak. This, of course, makes perfect sense. But, frankly, it is a pretty conventional bit of wisdom. In fact, Jesus and his listeners, all of whom knew the Hebrew scriptures, likely had in mind the words of the old Hebrew prophet Ezekiel, who said, hundreds of years before:

Thus says the LORD GOD:
I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of a cedar;
I will set it out. I will break off a tender one from the topmost of its young twigs;
I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain.
On the mountain height of Israel I will plant it,
In order that it may produce boughs and bear fruit,
And become a noble cedar.
Under it every kind of bird will live;
In the shade of its branches will nest winged creatures of every kind.

Same message as Jesus, right? Actually, not quite. I’m guessing that as Jesus started his story, his listeners thought to themselves, “Yeah, we know where he’s going. We’ve heard this one. The realm of God is like one of those grand and impressive cedars of Lebanon, like Solomon used to the build the Temple. They started from little seeds. The Realm of God is going to be big just like that. It will get mighty and powerful, and soon, we, members of that kingdom are going to take on Caesar himself and crush him!” So they thought that’s where Jesus was going. Instead – he says, “You will be the mighty empire of God’s malodorous shrubbery!” Now that must have caught their attention.

So now that Jesus has our attention, what do we hear him saying about the Kingdom of God? Though it is obviously about starting out modestly, the story is about what form God’s realm takes on earth. Let me offer some suggestions.

First, God’s realm is not an imitation of Caesar’s empire. Our temptation is to see God’s realm as a kind of mighty and powerful counter-part to the form the current earthly powers are taking. In Jesus’ day, it was Caesar’s Imperial realm. Ironically, when Christians came out of the catacombs and the Church became the official Roman religion under the Emperor Constantine, they adopted the organizational model of the Roman Empire. To this day the Pope sits on a throne in a palace. Today mega-church pastors sit in imitation corporate board rooms, mimicking Sprint or Donald Trump. Today “purpose driven” churches venerate proven management principles. If Coca-Cola has a clear and compelling mission statement, why can’t we? I am frequently amused that even in the United Church of Christ, I hear our leaders talk about the “deployment” of staff (like surface-to-air missiles), to various regions and demographic groups that have been “targeted.” I think that somehow Jesus is saying that the Realm of God will not be a mirror image of principalities and powers, but will be an easily overlooked, yet omnipresent realm. Not like the mighty redwoods, but more like the underbrush.

Second, this realm will have a quality of intrusiveness, even unwelcomeness. This should not surprise us. The world in any age co-opts religion by making it orderly, predictable, and inoffensive. One of the speakers at our Central Atlantic Conference meeting last weekend, talked about leadership in the church. He talked about the difference between a leader (whether lay or clergy) and a manager. He said the role of a manager in any organization is to keep people happy, keep things running smoothly, and, in the end, to resist change. A leader’s role is to facilitate change in an organization – and change means that people may become unhappy and things may run less smoothly. But unless organizations change, they die. Incidentally, that is why it is so important to extend an extravagant welcome to newcomers. It is the newcomers that are a real source of new ideas and healthy change. The most helpful newcomers are those who deviate most from our norms.

Third, Jesus is saying not only don’t imitate empire; he is saying don’t collude with empire. He is saying that the Realm of God is, as St. Paul would later say, the realm of transformed non-conformists whose goal is to overturn and upend society. But it is a transformation not wrought by power, force, or coercion of any kind. The means are compassion, justice, and inclusion. It is a realm of truth, not spin. In this sense the church exists to point out the madness of society, especially those who wield power. Last week, in the aftermath of three suicides by detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo, a military spokesman referred to those deaths as “asymmetrical warfare,” a statement not only worthy of ridicule on the face of it, but another example of our leaders’ desire to keep us befuddled and distracted from the fact that, in the words of the late Rev. William Sloan Coffin, Iraq is simply the worst war in American history. And the war is itself, like most militaristic enterprises, a perverse distraction from a plethora of social ills at home.

The prophetic word of God, in the Old Testament, in Jesus’ words, is always about the mighty being overthrown, and the poor and oppressed uplifted. It is always about revealing how the rich and powerful twist and deceive to get what they want, and what they want is always at the expense of the poor. Why would some of the richest people in America spend millions lobbying for the repeal of the estate tax, if not to gain billions more for their highly deserving offspring? Is this the ultimate meaning of “family values?” Where, I ask, are the rich men of old, like Andrew Carnegie, who once said, “I would as soon leave my son a curse as the almighty dollar.” Where society’s structures involve great gaps between the rich and the poor, the realm of God always includes and empowers the least among us. In this sense the realm of God is always subversive of the status quo. And God’s spotlight of truth will always shine where they principalities and powers don’t want people to look.

What are we as individual Christians and we as the church to do? I believe Jesus is saying even as you are passionate in your yearning for justice, be careful. Do not adopt the tactics of Empire. Be careful in your use of power. Do not measure your success in numbers and dollars, or air time, or fame, or organizational sophistication, or the height of your steeple. Instead, trust. Be faithful. Be obedient. Don’t try to be a mighty cedar of Lebanon. Bloom where you are planted, and be yourself, even if you are a stinky mustard bush.

My Dad was, like all fathers, more complex than I could understand growing up. In the real estate business, he focused on big commercial properties. He was always “swinging for the fence”, hoping for the big deal that would put bread on the table for the year. Sometimes he hit, and sometimes not. Some years he was driving a baby-blue Cadillac, sometimes a beat-up Chevy convertible with a torn roof. He had big dreams. He once confided in me one of his greatest personal disappointments. His dream was that Columbus, Ohio should have a big, bright, wonderful new hospital.  So he set out with great energy to make it happen – he talked to business pals and bankers and politicians he knew. Everywhere he met a profound lack of interest. He bitterly reported the scorn and bemusement he received. After months of efforts, he gave up on his great dream. Columbus would not have its hospital. In retrospect, I can see that his dream was quixotic, to say the least. Clearly, Dad had never looked very carefully at the question of whether Columbus, Ohio really needed another hospital. Actually, Columbus was teeming with more hospitals than many urban centers. And he never quite realized that he was a kind of loner with very little organizational skill. In truth his great dream was naïve and misguided, though he regarded it as another of humankind’s lost opportunities.

In his final years, dying of cancer, he returned to his birthplace, the farm town of Greenfield, Ohio. I see Greenfield as a kind of Ohio Lake Wobegon. The town was celebrating its centennial. The town hall, with its drab, pigeon-infested clock-tower caught Dad’s attention. The big hands of the four clock faces had not moved in eighty years. The town fathers had calculated that it would take hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore the clock and get the big cast-iron bell to sound again. Of course there was no money. But Dad set to work and designed a Rube-Goldberg set-up involving individual battery-powered motors for each set of hands, and an amplifier and microphone to boost the sound of a little chiming mantle-piece clock that would sit on the desk of the police chief. Loudspeakers in the tower would emit a sound that all would think was the bell ringing. All this would cost a grand total of $900. With the blessings of the town council and their gracious permission to let him raise the money, he set to work. He found the funds, collected the materials, built replacements for the clock hands, and enlisted the help of many townspeople, including the Fire Department’s hook and ladder crew for the installation. By the day of the celebration it was all in place. And it worked – brilliantly! For a season, he was the town hero. He was proud of his achievement. He died soon afterwards. In  a few months the whole apparatus ceased to function. No one knew how to replace the batteries powering the clock hands. The mantelpiece clock broke and couldn’t be repaired. No one could be found to take responsibility for maintaining the project. Everything returned to the way it was before. Except that, on an outside wall of the building, to this day there is a plaque, honoring Robert H. Todhunter, the restorer of the Greenfield Town Hall clock. Not the great hospital he dreamed of. A much more modest achievement - and not even one that lasted. But, still something my Dad did. And, in his own way, he changed the world.

AMEN

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