The Parable of the Mustard Seed, a sermon based on Matthew 17: 14-21 and Luke 13: 18-19, preached on July 21, 2024

Since it’s my birthday, I hope you’ll tolerate me telling you my favorite joke about Presbyterians again. My favorite Presbyterian joke is, “What do you get when you mix a Presbyterian and a Jehovah’s Witness?” “Someone who knocks on your door but doesn’t know what to say.” I’ve told that one a few times before, and I keep telling it because I think it’s funny, and I think it’s funny because there’s some truth in it. Presbyterians have been called the “frozen chosen” because when we worship God, we aren’t like our brothers and sisters in the non-denominational praise service. We keep our hands down during the hymns. We don’t dance in the aisles like they do it in the Pentecostal churches. We remain seated until we’re told to stand, and if the preacher isn’t clear on whether to stand or remain seated, a wave of anxiety crashes over the congregation because nobody knows what to do. But what’s worse is when somebody claps. Presbyterians want to clap. Some people feel like clapping; however, we’re nervous about whether or not to do it. It’s a disputed practice. Is it appropriate to clap? Is it decent? Is orderly? In some Presbyterian churches, the same goes with laughing. Someone told a joke in a Presbyterian church and said, “The joke was so funny that the congregation smiled just as loud as they could.” As a denomination, we can be a little reserved, so you won’t see many Presbyterians preaching out on the street, yet when Presbyterians finally do open their mouths, it can be so profound a display of deep and abiding faith that it will move you to tears. You all know that Marilyn Barton died last week. She died on Monday, July 15th, which is meaningful. In 1995 on July 14th, her son Scott died in a car accident just after he graduated from Marietta High School. I was in the youth group with him, and I remember where I was when I heard that news. Terry and Marilyn have honored his legacy. They have remembered him well, so the last words I heard Terry whisper in his dying wife’s ears were, “When you get to heaven and you see our son Scott, tell him I love him.” That’s a powerful faith. It’s a deep and powerful expression of faith to trust that, in the time of death, our goodbyes are not forever, and that death will not have the final word. This morning, my hope is that we all would be able to face death with such a profound and abiding faith, so this morning I want to talk about where and how such a faith begins. I want to preach about tiny faith. Miniscule faith. I want to speak openly and honestly about the kind of faith that is just the size of a mustard seed, for while Jesus said, “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move,” many think of tiny faith as a failure. I knew a man who was engaged to a wonderful Roman Catholic woman who asked him to convert. When he told me that, I was interested because I might have been in the same situation had I not been on my way to becoming a Presbyterian minister when Sara and I got married. My wife, Sara, and her sister were raised Roman Catholic, but she married me, a Presbyterian minister, and her sister married a United Methodist minister. There was not much talk of my brother-in-law or me converting. The protestants invaded the family, and my father-in-law will sometimes say, “One son-in-law is a Presbyterian minister, the other a Methodist minister, which makes me the Pope.” Conversely, this man I knew was engaged to the wonderful Roman Catholic woman who asked him to convert. He wasn’t too tied to the Presbyterian faith he had been raised in, so he relented, and with his fiancée, he began going to the classes that the Roman Catholic Church requires of converts. As a young man raised Presbyterian, so much of what he was learning in the class was new and, to him, seemed strange. Raised a Presbyterian, he’d been taught that communion was mostly symbolic. We don’t think of the bread as literal flesh or the juice as blood, yet he was hearing that Roman Catholics believe the bread becomes His body and the wine His blood, not symbolically, but literally. While that new understanding of the Sacrament stretched his mind, he said to himself “OK, I can handle that”. Then he got to the celibacy of the priests and the veneration of Mary. That was going to a different level. Still, he was OK going along with it. However, somewhere in learning about the saints, all the feast days or the angels, he hit a certain limit, and against his better judgement, he impulsively asked the teacher of this class a plain-spoken question: “Just how much of this stuff do I actually have to believe?” “All of it,” his teacher said. Now, I’ve told this story to several Roman Catholics, including my father-in-law, and each one of them disagrees with the teacher. You don’t have to believe in all the saints and all the angels to become a member of a Roman Catholic Church. Yet, some people think that you do. Some people think that joining our church requires believing all kinds of things, too, while in reality, the only qualification to become a member of this church and many other Christian churches is a willingness to say publicly, “Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior.” People outside the church will say things like: “I don’t think I can be a Christian because I don’t believe the earth was created in seven days,” or “I can’t go to church. I don’t believe in angels, or miracles, or that the Moses really wrote the first five books of the Bible.” I’ve heard people go through a long list of things they don’t believe in, all while assuming that I’d sign off on each and every one. That’s not necessarily true. In fact, there’s a famous preacher who used to say to the atheists who would come and talk with him about their issues with the church and faith, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in. Chances are, I don’t believe in that God either.” My friends, before we squabble over orthodoxy and right belief, let us remember that faith, in its beginning, is simply a seed, a relationship with Jesus who knows what it’s like to be pushed out on the margins because He was born in a small town called Bethlehem, on a night when there was no room at the inn. He was raised as a carpenter in a small town called Nazareth, so He knows what it’s like to work hard, and to feel sweat on His brow and splinters in His fingers. As a man, He ate with sinners and tax collectors. He walked the earth in sandals and felt the sun on His back. He loved us so much that He died on the cross, choosing a relationship with us over His own survival. The shortest verse in Scripture is also among the most important: John 11: 35: “Jesus wept.” He wept because He feels our pain and knows our sorrow. He came to earth to live among us. That’s the meaning of His name “Emmanuel,” God with us, so when I hear Him saying, “The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed,” I hear Him saying that a faith just the size of a mustard seed may not appear to be very much, and yet it will grow to become a tree, large enough for “the birds of the air to make nests in its branches.” You don’t have to sign off on all the standards of the Westminster Confession of Faith to be a Christian. You won’t be disqualified from this church if you can’t recite the Apostle’s Creed by memory. “Lord, I want to be a Christian,” the hymn goes, for that’s enough. Maybe it’s more than enough, for Christianity is a relationship. It’s a relationship with Jesus, whom Christians believe is the Son of God, and even those who don’t believe agree that we need to place more emphasis on relationships. Lately, I’ve become interested in an author and researcher named Jonathan Haidt. I was introduced to him as he was being interviewed about his recent book called, “The Anxious Generation,” which is all about the negative impact of cellphones on our kids. In the introduction and the first chapter, he lays out his argument through painfully clear statistics that show that kids raised in the last twenty years are far more likely to be depressed, harm themselves, and suffer from mental health issues like anxiety than generations before them because these kids, whose brains are being rewired during adolescence, are spending less time during those delicate and difficult years with people and friends who might build them up and support them and more time with their phones, where they’re constantly comparing themselves to others, and where, should they be bullied, their phones make it possible for bullies to bully them constantly. There’s a lot of data out there telling us that smart phones are hard on our kids. The negative trends are getting worse, and adolescence is getting harder; however, the exception to the rule of these alarming trends are teenagers in that same generation who are a part of a religious community. Kids who are surrounded by a church that grounds them, builds them up, and loves them well are far less likely to suffer than their classmates and friends who are not a part of a family of faith like this one. Hearing Dr. Haidt say all that made me so thankful because on national TV, he was saying all the things that I wanted to say, but listen to this: Dr. Haidt isn’t a Christian. He doesn’t go to church. He calls himself an atheist, and he claims that he doesn’t really want to believe what his findings illustrate because he has some issues with organized religion, and yet he can’t argue with the trend he is seeing. I want to say to him that this trend he is seeing, let it be enough to walk through our doors because faith the size of a mustard seed is enough. Faith the size of a mustard seed is enough to get started. Faith the size of a mustard seed is enough to move mountains and to reverse a dangerous trend that we’re seeing all through our nation. Don’t worry about your questions. Trust that a relationship with Jesus and His people will change your life. Last Friday, I met a couple in our parking lot. They were lost and were looking for the Square. I hated to tell them that they had already found it. If you made it to our church, you’ve arrived at the Square. Then, I invited them to go to our church, and they pretty much ran away. My friends, how many are lost? How many are running away because they see us and think that we are offering a set of dusty rules and dogmas, when in fact, what we have to offer is a relationship with the Living God? When what we have is a family of faith? It makes me think that, should we open our doors just a little bit wider, should we open our arms just a little bit wider, should we welcome all God’s people in with a little more hospitality to even and especially those who wrestle with their faith, and should we tell them that faith just the size of a mustard seed is enough, we will move some mountains, we will change the lives of some children, we will be like a tree where birds can make their nests. May it be so. Amen.