bleeding out loud

Excerpt from Kingdom of Heaven curriculum at Mars Hill.

The Mustard Seed & The Leaven | Matthew 13

In Jesus’ day, it was dangerous to talk about kingdoms. It was dangerous because there was really only one kingdom: Caesar’s. The Roman Empire dominated the world, and it dominated the world through brute force. History books talk about the Pax Romana, or Roman peace. It was a period of relative peace in the world during the 1^st and 2^nd and Centuries when Rome was at the height of its power. But if you look into the lives of 1^st Century Jews, you get the sense that Roman peace came at the tip of a sword. It was Rome’s way or it was no way. In fact, the Romans specifically designed something for people who got in their way: crucifixion. Rome crushed people. It slowly squeezed everything people had out of them with its endless taxes. It was a kingdom of power, a kingdom of the sword.

That’s the setting in which Jesus was telling stories about a different kind of kingdom, a kingdom not of the sword but of the seed. Both of these kingdoms hold power in their growth, but one uses death to accomplish growth while the other uses life

One of the central ideas Jesus communicates with these parables of the mustard seed and the leaven is that the kingdom of heaven is growing. By its very nature, the mustard seed is invasive. The plant was and is known for it’s resilience and it’s tendency to keep on growing even when it is unwanted. Farmers fear the mustard seed because the plants can get into everything. It invades every nook and cranny, like weeds growing up in concrete cracks. In fact, there are modern day accounts of mustard plants growing in the cracks of boulders and splitting them in half. The seed itself is less than a centimeter long, yet is has the potential to split a massive boulder through it’s growth.

The same is true for the leaven that the woman hides in the dough. Most Bible translations refer to it as yeast, but the leaven is actually a fungus that expands when given moisture, heat, and sugar. Like the mustard seed, the leaven is alive. It moves. It bobs. It weaves. Even though it’s small, it is constantly expanding.

Most of the people Jesus spoke with were poor and powerless. They were tiny in the face of massive Roman Empire. Wealth and power were the dominant values of the day. The people who possessed them were the ones who shaped and changed the world. If you didn’t have them, you were nothing. You didn’t matter. You’d never change the world.

Yet Jesus challenges this assumption. He looks into the faces of the poor and powerless and tells them that they have resources of a different sort. They are still capable of changing the world. He speaks to them of a kingdom whose strength is in its smallness. It’s interesting that the kingdom Jesus spent so much time talking about started with just a bunch of poor people in Israel, but within a hundred years it had spread like wildfire throughout the Roman Empire. Now, thousands of years later, all that’s left of Rome are piles of broken rocks. Not so with the kingdom. The kingdom is still humming with life, finding its way into cracks and crevices and darkness, reminding the weak, the small, the hurting, the powerless that they have vast resources within them, and that they can shape and change the world in profound ways.

But Jesus doesn’t say that the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed. He says it is like a mustard seed that has been planted. A seed sitting on the sidewalk is nothing more than potential unmet, but when that seed is planted and cared for Jesus says, “it will grow into a plant upon which others may rest”. Because this kingdom is alive, it must be planted, it must be cared for, tended to and nurtured or it won’t grow.

There are seeds just sitting inside of us-seeds we’ve neglected or assumed would grow on their own. We don’t get to be neutral in it all. We don’t get to sit this one out. We each will have an impact on the world around us through our actions or inactions. When we nurture the seeds that have been planted inside of us, the kingdom of heaven has a field day. When we fail to nurture those seeds, our inaction creates a world where Roman Empires flourish.

For centuries people have been caring for their seeds. Standing up for the rights of the oppressed, feeding those who are hungry, caring for those in need, and bringing praise to God. The seed is like a legacy that is passed on through the generations, one that we each get to care for in our own way. The seed is growing and therefore always changing. It looks different to different people.  It never looks exactly the same. But the one thing that Jesus says always remains the same is that it will grow and it will provide rest for others.

The mustard plant grows up into a tree with branches, and the birds of the air come to rest on it. The leaven expands to create a massive batch of bread to nurture people. When the seeds grow inside of us, there are always implications for others.

Some friends of mine recently lost their eighteen-month old daughter. Her death has been excruciating for everyone. So a handful of us got together a few nights ago to love and support them. We cried, we prayed, we hugged, we sat silently, and we looked at pictures. At the end of the evening our friends said to us, “we just want to thank you for sharing this weight with us.” Somehow our presence had actually lifted a little weight off their shoulders. They were able to stop for a moment and simply rest on our branches, to feed on the loving presence of those seated around them. Every corner of that living room was filled with the kingdom. It was a tangled mess of branches and bread, and it gave them rest.

This is the kingdom of heaven. It is within you. It is not far from you or beyond your reach.

These are excerpts from the writing I’ve been doing recently for Mars Hill.

The Workers in the Vineyard | Matthew 20

Parables, like stories, function less like reports and more like mirrors. They don’t give facts about what happened as much as they reflect back to us who we are. We find ourselves in them. This is why ten people can watch the same movie or read the same book and come away with ten different perspectives on what it was about. We’re all involved and our involvement will shape how we experience the story. As you read, be mindful of where you find yourself in the story.

Most of us are immediately drawn to the fact that what happens in the story isn’t fair. Some workers put in a twelve-hour day and then get paid the same as others who work only one measly hour. The parable triggers the intuitive desire for fairness embedded deep inside us. It’s there from very early on. Get a group of kids together and they expect portions to be equal. They expect turns to be taken. Any unfair advantage experienced by one and not the others is met with the cry, “That’s not fair!” Children eventually grow up and learn that, for the most part, life isn’t fair. But knowing that doesn’t seem to make the desire for fairness go away. But would Jesus really tell a parable to point out something people already know? Surely the poor Jewish people he spent most of his time talking to didn’t need to be reminded that life wasn’t fair. He must be up to something else.

Notice the last line of the story. The landowner asks, “Are you envious because I am generous?” In Greek, the question is even more direct. It asks, “Is your eye evil because I am good?” In the ancient world, the evil eye was a reference to envy. Envy terrified ancient people. An envious person was believed to have the power to cause negative effects on anything that they looked at, almost like casting a spell. So in order to protect against envy, people would wear charms or use certain kinds of decorations to ward off the evil eye.

There’s an old Russian story that captures the essence of envy. One day God comes to see a peasant and promises to give him anything he asks for. There’s only one catch, God says, “Whatever you choose, I’ll give twice as much to your neighbor.” After thinking about it for a while, the peasant makes his wish. He asks for God to gouge out one of his eyes, and therefore to gouge out both of his neighbor’s eyes. Envy has a spiteful edge. It’s wanting something but only so far as you can have more of it than the people around you.

Envy kills people, slowly choking the joy out of their lives and the lives of everyone around them. The book of Job says simply, “Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple.”

One of the crippling ways it does this is by shutting us off to other people. We become incapable of celebrating with others.

Several years ago, my sister was married. The night before her wedding was chaotic. Things weren’t even close to being ready. The church and reception hall still needed to be decorated. The programs weren’t finished. So a group of about twenty family and friends came together and worked until two in the morning folding programs, hanging lights and painstakingly tying bows out of tiny ribbons. But in the midst of all this selfless love, what I couldn’t help but notice was that my sister was nowhere to be found. This was her wedding. Things weren’t ready. Where was she? Did she even know that all of these people were giving so much to make sure that her wedding was everything she hoped it would be? The longer I thought about it, the angrier I got. I didn’t think she deserved it, and as shameful as it is to say, that’s the attitude I went to the reception with.

Driving home from the wedding, a nagging presence kept bringing me back to what I had seen the night before. It suddenly occurred to me that I had witnessed twenty or more people perform an act of selfless love, and rather than being inspired to join in, that act of love triggered fury inside me. They had just shown me a picture of heaven on earth and I was livid. An envious heart isn’t capable of seeing the act of selfless love. It only sees that so and so got something they didn’t deserve. An envious person can’t celebrate what generosity must mean to someone else because all they can think about is what it doesn’t mean for them.

That’s because envy, by definition, is competitive. It’s possible that this is why Jesus tells the parable in the first place. Immediately before this parable Jesus has an encounter with a rich young ruler. When the ruler refuses to sell everything he has and follow Jesus, Peter speaks up and says, “We’ve left everything to follow you! What will our reward be? (Matthew 19:27)” Then, just a few verses after the parable, the mother of James and John, two of Jesus’ closest disciples, comes to Jesus and asks for a place of privilege for one of her boys in the kingdom (Matthew 21:21). In the gospels, the disciples regularly argue about which of them is the greatest. They were constantly jockeying for position, holding themselves up against one another to see who was more deserving of blessing or reward.

Think of all of the ways we do this. We instinctively analyze and rate everyone around us, holding ourselves up against them to see how we measure up. Who is the smartest? Who is the most attractive? Who has the most influence? Who has the most money? Who has the most power? Who has the most talent? We fall into the trap of wishing we had her hair, or his way with words, or that person’s bank account, or that person’s house. We fall into the trap of wishing we had that person’s life. From there, it’s a short jump to the spitefulness of envy. Not only do we want their life. We want them to know how bad it feels to stand next to someone who has the life you want.

But there is another angle to this story-one that isn’t perhaps as apparent as envy. Notice that the landowner agrees to pay the first workers a day’s wage, then agrees to pay the others whatever is right. In fact, he doesn’t even discuss payment with the group he hires last. At the end of the day, the landowner determines that what is right is a day’s wage for everyone. He pays a generous wage to a bunch of people who didn’t put in the time. They didn’t earn it. It was a gift.

This upsets the first workers. Having worked all day, they feel they are entitled to more. Entitlement, of course, is the belief that you have a right to something; that something is owed to you. Many people have referred to our culture as a culture of entitlement. Recently, in the news, a young woman graduated from college and wasn’t able to find a job. So she sued the university claiming that it owed her employment. In the early 90’s a man sued Anheuser-Busch for false advertising. He sought damages for emotional stress because he had been purchasing their product for two years and was still not dating a beautiful woman as their commercials promised. It’s easy to spot entitlement in absurd stories like this, but our culture has plenty of images of entitlement that hit closer to home.

Tiger Woods recently held a press conference to apologize to his family and fans when news of multiple affairs began to surface. During his apology, he said, “I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled.” Tiger is an incredible golfer, and no one doubts that he has worked extremely hard over the years to possess the kind of skill he has. This isn’t an absurd case of someone claiming they are owed something they haven’t really worked for. This is a case of someone who has worked incredibly hard, and somehow in the midst of all of that effort there was a sense of entitlement. People can work really hard and still suffer from entitlement.

Often times, the fact that we’ve worked so hard makes the giving and receiving of gifts hard to stomach. Gifts are things freely given with no connection whatsoever to what you deserve, what you are owed, or what you have a right to. A gift simply is. But someone who feels a sense of entitlement can’t receive a gift. They want a wage. They believe they’ve worked hard. They earned it. They deserve it. It’s an expectation. They are incapable of receiving a gift, and they boil with anger when they see someone get something they don’t deserve. A life of entitlement is like a clenched fist. You can’t put anything in a hand that’s closed. And because people who feel entitled can’t be given gifts, neither are they capable of gratitude.

Grace and entitlement cannot co-exist.

It’s interesting that the gifts that matter most in life tend to be the ones that can’t be earned or deserved but only received, things like love, forgiveness and grace.

God only knows how to give the same gift to each of us. It’s the gift of your breath, the gift of your life, and the gift of his life in you. God holds that gift out to every single one of us regardless of who we are, or what we’ve done or where we’ve been. That person doesn’t get more of this gift than you, and you don’t get more of this gift than them. God gives the same gift to each of us, because he can’t give anything less. You can’t divide grace up, because the minute you give one person more because of what they deserve, it’s not grace anymore. Grace is given fully and wholly.

My wife and I had dinner a few nights ago with some friends who have survived cancer. One of them said to us, “Our lives have seemed more full. We’re far more grateful now than we ever were before cancer.” That seemed odd to me so I asked, “Why do you think that is?” She said she thought that maybe it had something to do with the fact that before, they simply expected that tomorrow would follow yesterday just like it had the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that. But now, having survived cancer, they were realizing that every new day is an undeserved gift.

The good news is that no matter where you find yourself in this story-full of envy, exhausted from the endless and un-winnable game of comparing your life with everyone else, or riddled with entitlement-grace makes it all irrelevant. The question is whether or not you have a heart capable of receiving the gift?

Back in September, we started going through Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount at Mars Hill, exploring the counter-intuitive way of Jesus. Alongside the messages, I’ve been writing weekly readers focusing on the different passages for that week. You can check all of them out here.