Sunday message: The seed and the leaven (part one)

I have a feeling that this is going to become another two-parter, so bear with me.  We have a lot of places to go here.


The story starts at work, end of day Wednesday.  I was first to the time clock, and a group of co-workers were joking and laughing behind me.  The topic of the day was apparently, "Why I don't go to church."  One person brought out the old classic line, "The church is full of hypocrites."  The others agreed, and one of them added the incongruous statement, "I don't go because I don't believe there is a heaven or a hell.  I think when you're dead that's it.  I'm not an atheist, but..."


A million thoughts formed in my head, the loudest- and actually as we will see, the most correct- being, this is not the time to preach back against this.  In the end, the only thing I responded to was that last statement, by saying, "And if you're wrong, you're in a LOT of trouble."


I was unprepared for something I should have by now MADE myself prepared for.  So I prayed about it- quite a bit, but secondary to the thought, what should I have said?

And these are the answers I came up with.  All of them wrong, with a shadow of rightness.

First, I thought about saying, then you must be going to the wrong church.  True in some cases, but way off the point.  And requiring a judgment I wasn't fit to make.

Second, you all think of church as someplace you go where you hang with a bunch of perfect people to have God rub off on you.  And if people aren't perfect, then church don't work.  Better.  Because church isn't about God rubbing off.  It is about YOU having the one-on-one relationship with God, and sharing IN that relationship with others who are at varying stations of their own relationships with Him.  Going to church to compare righteousnesses is not what it's about.

But, that wasn't the right answer either.

Third, your thinking about God is superficial and incorrect.  The very concept of God makes no sense, no matter WHAT god you worship, if it doesn't entail an afterlife.  To say what my co-worker did was kind of like the old car slogan, "It's not a car, it's a Volkswagen."  It's not a car, but it looks like one, has all the parts of one, is used like one- the only difference is semantic.

A very good specific answer.  But missing the general question.

And like I said, I prayed about it- mainly asking to prepared for the "next opportunity" that I could share MY reasonings.  But God had a different idea.  Thursday night, I decided to work out to Bible teaching, and tuned in to the late Pastor James Boyce.  And the first words out of his mouth told me that I had my thought angles all wrong.


"If someone tells you that the church is full of hypocrites... they're probably RIGHT."

While you insert your record scratch here, let me explain.  His story involved Matthew 13 and three parables therein.  The first was pretty clear- the wheat and the tares.  Thumbnail for those not familiar: a farmer sows good seed during the day, but his enemy sowed weeds (tares) in the field at night.  The servants, on seeing the weeds growing, asked if they should rip them out.  The farmer says, no, let them grow, we'll gather all at the harvest, and separate them then, lest we pull out good with the bad.  And after a bit, Jesus explains the parable as God being the farmer, Satan the enemy, and the harvest as the last judgment.  So to simplify, God just doesn't do away with evil because many who have a chance at salvation would be lost that way.

But in between parable and explanations are two other, less clear cut parables about the Kingdom of God.  One is the one about the mustard seed, which though being the smallest of seeds becomes a tree that is big enough for birds to nest there; the other is the one where the Kingdom is likened to a woman who kneads yeast into three measures of flour and all three rise as a result.

Now, me, I was like Boyce explained "most people" as seeing these- that a little bit of faith grows a great big church.  But I- and apparently Boyce- had two problems with this.  First, who ever saw a mustard plant get THAT big?  Second, hasn't leaven been consistently used in the Bible for a symbol of EVIL?  And this is where Boyce said we might be taking these stories the wrong way.  Think about how they are surrounded by a very clear parable about evil being mixed in with the good.  It stands to reason that all three tie together.  Next, consider that the mustard plant growing into this mighty tree is an ABNORMAL condition- if Jesus was referencing normal growth, why not use an acorn?

Boyce theorized that the two parables in question, like the first, were warning about elements being added to what the church SHOULD be, like bureaucracy, entertainment, donut shops and gift shops, etc, by which Satan pulls the church, distracts it from its true mission.  He referenced the Catholic church's use of the "Church Fathers" to build up a mythos in addition to the Scripture, but also pointed out that the Protestant and evangelical churches were guilty of the same thing.  And let me connect it to two other parts of Jesus' teaching.  Think of the other famous thing He said about a mustard seed- that if we had faith the size of one, we could move mountains.  I think it is pertinent that He didn't say, "That seed shall become a mighty tree that can move mountains"- no, all you really need is THE SEED.  And, it is not long after Jesus tells these parables that He tells the gang, "Beware the leaven of the Pharisees."  That is the leaven of bureaucracy, of legalism, of following all the rules and missing the FAITH.  The tree growing, the bread rising, these are warnings about the church becoming something it was never meant to be AND NOT EVEN REALIZING IT.

And that is how I should have been thinking when the subject came up.  But then that led me to the pregnant question, the elephant in the room on all my posts- why are YOU, Chris, not attending a regular church?  And that is what I will deal with next time.