THE MIRACULOUS MUSTARD TREE
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Jack Skiles

July 27, 2008

I Kings 3:5-12

Romans 8:26-39

Matthew 113:31-33, 44-52

(This story had its original form in a work by Larry Lange.  I have adapted it significantly without the author's permission.)

Once upon a time in land not very far away from us the Queen was informed by the Head of Parliament that her position as Queen was being outsourced.  The government had discovered that it would be much less expensive to hire a queen and a king along with two handsome young princes, a coach and four horses, servants and eight ladies in waiting all for the annual cost of the real Queen's hair products.  Out of respect for her family's centuries-long service the government did provide the Queen with a quaint cottage in the country, two servants and several acres of tillable farmland.  Without much ceremony, several employees from the maintenance engineering department of parliament dropped her off at the cottage the very next day.

The now ex-Queen was crushed and disoriented by this sudden turn of events in her life, and she collapsed weeping on the porch of the cottage.  Having no one to defend her, she turned to God in prayer.  First, she thought, “I'll pray that my enemies will be crushed to death for masterminding this plan.”  She would have liked to see the tables turned, revenge is sweet.  She imagined her enemies imprisoned with no hope of receiving due process from the law.  But as she thought about it, she knew there was no end to revenge. 

Everyone that she threw into prison would  have family and friends who would become angry with her and who would launch plots against her for the rest of her and their lives and she would end up throwing even more people into prison, and soon all her citizens would resent her unrelenting surveillance of their lives.

So the ex-Queen decided not to pray for the life of her enemies.  Nor did she pray for a long life.  The more she thought about living for a long time, the more she realized that her family had some genetic markers that might cause her to have a long life filled with suffering from one of several diseases that you wish would kill you but they don't.

Finally the Queen pondered in her new-found state of simplicity and decided not to pray for great wealth, either.  As she meditated she realized that what she most missed from being Queen was the work, not the perks.

So she prayed a prayer something like the prayer King Solomon prayed in today's reading from the Hebrew Scripture:  “O God, please give me an understanding mind able to discern between good and evil, between what's a good plan for my life and what's not.”  (I Kings 3:9)

As the Queen prayed, the Holy Spirit happened to be walking by.  The Spirit blew around her as she prayed, listening intently to the ex-monarch.  When the prayer was finished the Holy Spirit sighed and said, “God hears your excellent prayer and grants you a wise and discerning mind like no one who has served before you” (I Kings 3:11-12).

Suddenly, the ex-Queen felt it was silly sitting around on her porch doing nothing but crying, so she got up and went out and sowed her fields with wheat, while her two servants stood by and watched and grinned and said, “I bet she'll even let the weeds grow along with the wheat!”

When the ex-Queen announced to the servants her plan to plant a mustard seed in the middle of the field, one of the servants said, “Oh no!  You can't do that.  It is against the ancient law and basic common sense of good farming to plant a weed in your field…; mustard plants will take over your wheat and infest your neighbor's crops as well.”

The Queen thanked the servant for his sound advice but replied by stating that “mustard is well known for its healing properties, and healing,” she said, “is what I need.  The mustard will not ruin my field,” continued the Queen, “but will, I believe, become a great and grand tree so the birds of the air will come and make nests in its branches and sing sweet songs to comfort me in my grieving.”

“A tree?” laughed the servant incredulously.  “A mustard seed does not become a tree, it is never anything more than a big weed even if it grew for a century!”

“We'll see,” said the ex-Queen.  “We'll just have to wait and see.  In the meantime, let's make some bread!”  The two servants followed the woman into the cottage and found she'd already shoveled out three piles of flour, and again the servants objected, “Oh. has-been-Queen, three shovels full of flour makes enough bread for 150 people!  There's only the three of us!  We can't possibly eat it all before it goes to waste!  Don't you Queens have any common sense?”

But the ex-Queen continued in her labors and hid the yeast in the midst of all the dough, added water, mixed it together, let it rise until it filled the entire cottage, pushing the kitchen table and chairs out the door.  All night she kneaded dough, formed it into loaves, and baked bread until the light of the new day.

The next day the mustard seed had amazingly become a tree, just as the Queen had believed it would, and by midday, people from miles around began gathering simply to rest in its shade and to smell the marvelous fragrance of the Mustard Tree and to enjoy the sweet singing of the birds in its branches and to ask for a bit of mustard for healing for themselves or for those they knew who had no access to health care insurance—requests which the ex-Queen granted immediately and gladly.

Soon the day came when one of the thousands pulled the ex-Queen aside and said to her, “We'd all thought that you'd be out here raising an army of terrorists to battle your way back into the capital and restore yourself to power or that we'd find you pining away, but miracle upon miracle we see you've discerned a wise and wonderful new thing to do. But, be warned, Oh ex-Queen, the new rent-a-King and Queen are not pleased.  What you've done in your field is against the law and acceptable agricultural practices.  The new rent-a-rulers are jealous that their citizens have begun again to look to you for help.  Rumor has it they are coming tomorrow to cut down the Miraculous Mustard Tree.”

The next day, indeed, the new rent-a-king and queen, their army and a horde of wood-cutters with chain saws showed up at the door of the quaint cottage.  A person with a big voice read a lengthy legal proclamation that stated that the wannabe-Queen had no deed to the cottage or to the land which she was farming and that planting a weed seed in the midst of good food-bearing seed was in violation of the law and acceptable agricultural practices and that henceforth and forever she was no longer a citizen of the kingdom nor was she entitled to live any longer in the cottage or farm the fields.

God's Holy Spirit was still blowing around and brought forward one of God's most favorite children who said, “Hey, The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in a field.  It is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes like a tree so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.  The kingdom is also like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was raising dough. 

God's  spokesperson said,  “You can't take the kingdom from this woman, because she is doing the kingdom:  the shade, the comfort and the healing of the tree, the feeding of the hungry—this is the real thing, not the silly rent-a-kingdom over which you pretend to preside” (sort of Matthew 13:31-33).

God's special child said to the rent-a-king and queen, “Here is a legal deed for the cottage and the farm and the Miraculous Mustard Tree:  I'm going to cover the cost of all it, myself.  It's on me.”

The Rent-a-King and Queen were not in the mood to step aside for this pretender to authority who even wanted to redefine what country, what a kingdom looks like and does for its citizens.  They had God's specially chosen envoy captured and with great fury they ripped apart the deed that was offered to them, had God's envoy imprisoned, water boarded to extract confessions of who was really behind this kingdom of which the envoy spoke, and they had the envoy killed. 

The Mustard Tree was cut down with a loud flurry of chain saw noises, the cottage torn down and the powerful acting soldiers scattered the remaining crowd and warned them to never gather again under the guise of this false pretender of a kingdom.

And then it was silent and the ex-Queen was alone in the rubble of what had once been a beautiful spot in God's creation.

But, a funny thing happened to the people who were sent packing by the rent-a-King and Queen, the powers of this world.  The people went home recognizing that they had finally found the field of great value, the pearl of phenomenal beauty, the lost coin which they had been hunting.  So, they went home as they had been told and they sold everything they had and arranged to buy that field.

They then violated the Rent-a-King and Queen's orders and they returned to where the ex-Queen sat alone and bewildered and presented her with a new deed, planted a new mustard seed and they built a new home there in which all were welcomed.  As an act of outright defiance of the Rent-a-King and Queen's command, they posted right on the door of their house that those who called this new house home, were loyal to none but God alone. 

A new spirit came into this new house where bread was always baked fresh, the aroma was intoxicating for miles around, too much bread was baked every day and all was shared and none was hoarded, and they believed that “neither death, nor life, nor angles, nor rent-a-kings, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God…..” (Romans 8:38-39).

One of the things they discovered in this new house was that despite what they had always been told before, “God Is Speaking Still.”   And God's spirit flowed over them and reminded them: “Beware.  The onslaught of the Rent-A-King and Queen is not over.  They will invent a thousand distractions to lure you away from the commitment you have made to be loyal to God alone.  They'll teach you to fear and to desire the destruction of your enemies.  They'll teach you to want a long life filled with riches that come at the expense of the poorest among us.  But remember what you discovered here in this place, in this house made in the shade of the Miraculous Mustard Tree, healing, joy, generosity, peace, food and a water that refreshes eternally that has convinced you to sell all that you have and invest the whole of our lives in this kingdom in which we are one with God who cannot be duplicated or rented.”

Amen.