Rev. Capt. Dr. John Niles
Sermon Preached at Stouffville United Church
Sermon Series: Sometimes you Win,
Sometimes you Learn
Parables of Jesus
Psalm 126
Matthew 13: 31-33
The Parables of the Mustard Seed and the Yeast 31 He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. 32 Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.” 33 He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds[a] of flour until it worked all through the dough.”
Gandalf the Gray said from the Hobbit, “Saroman believes that it is only great power that can keep evil in check. That is not what I have found. I have found that it is the small things; the everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.
It is the small things, the little things, the everyday deeds of ordinary people that keep the darkness at bay.
Edmund Burke said, “the only thing that allows evil to flourish is that good people do nothing.”
I thought of this again, when I heard how, after Putin had the Russian military invade Ukraine, and a few 18 year old soldiers were captured by the Ukrainian military; rather than kill them, they let the 18 year old’s soldiers have a cell phone to call home to speak to their mothers.
That is what this parable is about. Jesus tells us that the Kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed. The kingdom He is talking about is not just out there somewhere but in the here and now, and that kingdom that we pray will come in the Lord’s prayer when we say, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth…” arrives or doesn’t depending on whether we do something or nothing.
But like Saroman in the Hobbit, we are lulled into complacency because we have been convinced that it is “only great power that can keep evil in check…”
I
However, the powerful often overlook little things; the insignificant, the seemingly unimportant, what the powerful would view as irrelevant until sometime later – like the mustard seed – when they aren’t anymore. The mustard seed was considered a pesky weed with health benefits. The problem was that it could grow into a strong shrub as tall as 9 feet. It was impossible to eradicate once it infested a field – so much so that Jewish law forbade it to be planted in a garden only in fields. The mustard seed was so unimportant and insignificant at its beginnings. Some people think that the little things don’t matter. But they do. Let me show with this little saying.
For want of a nail a shoe was lost
For want of a shoe a horse was lost
For want of a horse a rider was lost
For want of rider a message was lost
For want of a message a battle was lost
For want of a battle a kingdom was lost
And all for want of horse-shoe nail.
Some people think that the little things don’t matter. But they do. Little things can make a big difference.
“In a famous study by Victor and Mildred Goertzel, entitled Cradles of Eminence, the home backgrounds of 300 highly successful people were investigated. These 300 subjects had made it to the top. They were men and women whose names everyone would recognize as brilliant in their fields, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Helen Keller, Winston Churchill, Albert Schweitzer, Clara Barton, Gandhi, Einstein, and Freud. The intensive investigation into their early home lives yielded some surprising findings: all of them were overlooked and disregarded as unimportant and insignificant at their beginnings * Three fourths of the children were troubled either by poverty, by a broken home, or by rejection, over-possessive, or dominating parents. * Seventy-four of 85 writers of fiction or drama and 16 of the 20 poets came from homes where, as children, they saw tense psychological drama played out by their parents.
* Physical handicaps such as blindness, deafness, or crippled limbs characterized over one-fourth of the sample. And yet from such circumstances, came such great results. Results that changed not only their lives, but in some cases the course of history. Roosevelt spent his life in a wheel chair, but from there he became the US President and helped to end WWII and also to and end the depression. Churchill had a speech impediment and was considered for a time in his childhood unable to learn. Yet, he marshaled the English language and sent it off to war. Helen Keller was blind and deaf and became an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Maya Angelou, became a poet laurate and civil rights activist; yet she grew up in a time of segregation, she was abused, was once involved in sex work, and became a performer on Broadway before becoming a freelance writer and author. She would take a bible, and note pads and pens and pencils to a hotel and just write words that later inspired a nation.
All viewed insignificant and unimportant to those around them – until they weren’t.
Emerson said it this way.
“To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people, and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to leave this world a little better than you found it, whether by a loving child, a garden patch, a redeemed social condition. To know that even one life breathe easier, because you have lived. This is to have succeed.”
II
The powerful often overlook the little things, and the Lord uses little things. Both a mustard seed and yeast are tiny agents. but if they are planted in the ground or placed in bread dough, they can both have amazing results.
There is a song that became well known as a result of the Gaither Vocal Band called “Little is much when God is in it,” The song was written by Kitty Suffield in 1924. One of the verses asks this question:
“Does the place you’re called to labor,
Seem so small and little known?
It is great if God is in it, And He’ll not forget His own.”
The chorus goes,
“Little is much when God is in it!
Labor not for wealth or fame.
There’s a crown—and you can win it,
If you go in Jesus’ Name.”
The story behind the music is that Kitty was the pianist at a small church in Winchester Ontario near Ottawa, The pastor had a teenage son who sometimes sang in church, but he was shy and was reluctant to sing. Kitty encouraged him to use his gift for the Lord. That teenager’s name was George Beverly Shea- who grew up to sing to millions at the Billy Graham Crusades. Kitty really believed that little is much when God is in it!
GBS was a shy young boy, from a small country church in a country village but because one person believed in him, millions of lives were touched by the depth of his faith and the beauty of his voice.
God uses the little things to keep the darkness at bay – the songs we sing, words of encouragement given, the hand reached out in comfort – just little things really.
III The powerful often overlook little things, but the Lord uses little things, and finally, little things make a big difference. In the parable the mustard shrub gave rest and shelter to the birds – other little things. And if the Kingdom of God is like the mustard seed that grows to make a difference – so should we. There’s a story about a student from MIT who spent an entire summer going to the Harvard football field every day wearing a black and white striped shirt walking up and down the field for ten or fifteen minutes throwing birdseed and blowing a whistle. Then he would walk off the field. At the end of the summer, it came time for the first Harvard home football game. As the game was about to begin, the referee walked onto the field and blew the whistle…
The game had to be delayed for a half hour to wait for the birds to get off of the field. The student from MIT wrote his thesis on this, and graduated.
No one understood what he was doing, but once football season began, his purpose would been very, very clear.
Cpl Bying and 18 year old soldier with my regiment was working with the Red Cross in disaster relief in…and during that time he helped many people but the first 18 he encounter he could do nothing for – even though he was trained as a field medic. All of them died. He came to me completely overwhelmed unable to work or train or sleep, couldn’t hold down a job because he believed he failed them. After hearing his story I said, “you told me that each one of the 18 died in front of you and you stayed with, holding them until they died. “Yes”, he said, “I still remember their faces and their eyes looking into mine, some resolved, some angry, some reaching, I failed them”. “Did you leave them before they died?” I said. He said, “No”. then I said, “You did do something. You didn’t let them died alone.
When the Space shuttle challenger exploded a few years ago and everyone died. There was some controversy over what were the last words said on board. In the flight recorder, the official statement said, all they heard was the statement, “OH OH”. However, since then, it has said, that the was one voice on the recorder. And it was of the female astronaut saying, “Please, hold my hand.”
A little thing, but it made a big difference to her. Life can be hard. We need to hold one another. Little things can make a big difference.
Mother Teresa said, “We can’t all do great things. But we can all do little things with great love.” You think about that. Amen.