Out Our Way: The Gospel According to Goliath: Good seed

Mark 4:26-29

Out our way, agriculture is a primary business.  I am grateful I am neither a farmer nor a rancher as I haven't a clue how to raise crops of stock - and would very likely make a mess of it. Goliath knows the cattle business so I just go along for the ride on the round ups and such. I get the basics, but until they come out with Farming and Ranching for Dummies, I just do what I'm told and try to stay out of the way. 

 Even so, I must confess I am fascinated by botany and agriculture - and I recall taking a course in college that, while very basic, taught me a great deal about the mystery of organic life. Even now I still find myself amazed to think that this tiny seed I plant in my garden encases within itself an entire plant, shrub or tree. How is that possible? I am gratified that when talking with some of the folk at the coffee hour after church even they who have been born and raised on the land are as impressed and amazed at the miracle of nature as I am.

A few years ago, I went on a journey into the Bob Marshall Wilderness with a group of pastors on horseback. We didn't travel that far but where we went there had been a terrible forest fire a few years before.  You could still smell the smoke and the dead trees were everywhere. Yet the land was not dead for even in the midst of the fire zone were green shrubs and tiny trees pushing their way up through the ashes. One of the guides noted that fire is a part of the natural cycle and that some types of trees only release their seeds in a fire. Today, while you still see blackened trunks of burned trees, you also see new life springing up all around. It is the nature of things.

 Jesus used the parables of nature to help us better understand the Kingdom of God that has been planted and is growing to fill the earth. Just as from a few small seeds a good harvest is gathered.  And from that harvest  even more seed is gathered and sown, each year the size of the crop can increase so that in a few generations it has spread out across the land as far as the eye can see.

Look then to the mystery of the church - begun with a few disorganized and dismayed disciples, yet within a generation, the Gospel had spread all across the Middle East into Africa, Asia Minor and Europe.  By the third century, even the Emperor of Rome had become a follower of Christ and eventually the faith spread throughout the whole Empire. 

It has never stopped spreading and even in areas where it has been or presently is brutally persecuted, it continues to grow. Stalin couldn't get rid of it in Russia. Mao Tze Tung couldn't eliminate it in China. ISIS, even now, keeps finding the church alive and growing in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria despite the beheadings, crucifixions, and what Secretary of State John Kerry denounced as modern "genocide" in the Middle East.

For 2,000 years the story has been the same - the seed is planted, the devil tries to root it out, but despite all his efforts and those of his helpers, the Kingdom of God continues to grow.  Enemies of the faith here and abroad cannot understand how the seed continues to grow and flourish, but it does.

Ask a farmer why despite all the hardships - the droughts, the floods, the late frosts and the hail, they still keep planting seed year after year.  Maybe they know something the tyrants don't. Maybe they understand the imagery of the seed Jesus used and get the point.

John Bruington

First Presbyterian Church

Havre