Small Is How the Kingdom Works

Creator God, I thank you that you are here. That you are here with us on all the mornings of our lives. The rainy ones, the sunny ones, the ones that are a bit cloudy but we think maybe the sun is going to come out. The ones that make us uncomfortable and the ones that are deeply pleasant. You are here. With us. Every morning and this morning.

I pray, Lord, that we would be grounded in your presence and come to know your love even more this morning. Please illuminate our specific experiences as we gather. Make yourself known.

And may we know ourselves. Lord, you are good. In the name of Jesus.

Amen. All right. So, as Heidi mentioned, as Deb has mentioned, today is All Together Sunday.

Thank you for cheering, even if you're not sure what that is. So, All Together Sunday is basically a day when we, we usually do it on fifth Sundays. We pushed it back for a couple of reasons to this Sunday.

But it's a day when we want to gather all of the folks in our congregation together, the little ones and the big ones. So, it is a day to lean into, and Lord help me, I need this for myself, to lean into the squeals of the little ones and the running around and the joyous worship, however it comes out in all of our community. So, this is All Together Sunday.

Welcome to it, y'all. And the first thing I want to do is ask if you are a kid in the room. You can also be a kid at heart.

That's fine. We'll take that. We'll take that.

I need you to put up your hand if you have ever imagined anything before it has existed. Anybody? Oh, I see.

Oh, yeah. Praise the Lord. Hallelujah.

Maybe it was a game you made up. Maybe it was a fort that you built in your living room or a world that you invented where you were the hero and things were fair. Things were different from this world.

Maybe you've built something out of cardboard or drawn a picture of something that doesn't yet exist or you made up a song or a dance or a story. I'm one of those people that's always making up stories. I'm making up stories in my car.

I'm making up stories in the shower. My wife will turn to me sometimes, like, when I'm laying at night far away, and it's like, what are you thinking? And I'm like, oh, God, I can't tell her.

I'm thinking about something so random and far-fetched inside of a story. Now, let's remember together that everything in this room, everything that you see, the chair that you're sitting in, the building that we're inside of, the music that we sang this morning, it all started from imagination.

It all started because someone had to see it before it was real. And that's where we're starting today. That's, in fact, where we're going to spend time this entire summer.

Today, we're starting this new sermon series called Dangerous Imaginations, The Parables of Jesus and Afrofuturism. And for the next 10 weeks, we're going to look at the stories that Jesus told, these small, wild, surprising stories called parables. And we're going to look at them alongside some of the most imaginative Black thinkers and artists in the world.

And the big question underneath all that we'll be talking about this summer is, what do you dare to imagine? After you survived the disorienting Saturdays of your life, allowed your heart of stone to become a heart of flesh, experience the resurrection of Sunday morning, and then open your hands to faithfully steward all that God has given you. After all of that, you still need a dream.

A tender heart still needs a vision, and an open hand ready to steward still needs to know what to actually reach out for. And because of that reality, imagination can never just be a hobby. It can't be just like a side thing we do occasionally.

Especially when it comes to creating the world that we want to see, that we want to live in. Imagination is not just for children, even though they are probably the best at it. We could learn a lot from them.

Imagination is a spiritual practice. And it's how we grow closer to God. It's how the kingdom of heaven actually moves.

See, Jesus lived in a world that made imagination hard.

His people were living under the Roman Empire. And empire, any empire, has a particular trick. It doesn't just control your body.

It tries to control your imagination. It tries to make you believe that the world as it is, is the world that has to be. That nothing can ever really change.

That the people at the top will always be at the top. And the people at the bottom will always be at the bottom. And when you hear that long enough, when you live in that world long enough, you start to believe it.

And you stop really being able to see any other possibilities. But Jesus refused. Jesus kept telling these strange, short, disruptive little stories.

And the stories were designed to do one thing, to crack open the imagination. To make people see a different world, that God's kingdom was already moving, already growing, already here. And they just needed to recognize it.

The short stories, we usually call them parables. But a parable is basically, if you boil it down, when you put one thing besides something else that's somewhat dissimilar to it. And a parable is about the surprise that you get when you sit them beside each other.

The surprise that you learn and can't learn any other way. A good example of this is when we say the slow and steady wins the race. Slow and steady wins the race.

Which comes from Aesop's fables. A turtle and a rabbit, they don't seem like equals. But if you put them in a race, suddenly you're able to learn something about pride and persistence that a lecture can't teach you.

My daughter, Lola, loves a book. My son also knows this book. It's called, This Is a Ball.

Y'all had to squirrel this book away. I was like, she is not going to let me take this book to church. And basically, the book just keeps telling you the wrong name of things.

So, for example, the first thing it says is, this is a ball. Yeah, it's a ball. I think you need to look closer.

Of course, it's a ball. And then the next page, it says, this is a dog. When it's actually an elephant.

And your brain goes, and whenever the kids see this, they're just like, what? What are you talking about? Your brain just kind of goes wild.

And it's this whole series of naming. This is this. And you're looking at it, you're like, it's not actually that.

It's that stuttering. And that's what a parable does. It tells you something unexpected and that your imagination has to wake up to and figure out what's going on.

So, one of the first things that Jesus says, one of the very first parables that Jesus tells is in the Gospel of Matthew. And he says this. It's Matthew 13, 31 through 33.

He put unto them another parable. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all the seeds.

But when it has grown, it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree. So the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches. He told them another parable.

The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leaven. That's it. These two tiny stories, both of them about the same thing.

Something small, ordinary, almost invisible that changes everything. So I brought something with me today. If anybody is interested, you can come up and see this.

These are mustard seeds. I want to jump off the stage, y'all, but I don't know what's going to happen if I do that. So these are mustard seeds.

And if you look at... Oh, I dropped one. Okay.

If anybody wants to see these, you're welcome to. You can pass them around and see how small they are. You can take one.

They're mustard seeds. Those are black mustard seeds, which is probably what the parable is describing, something very similar to that. They weren't actually the literal smallest things, but they're some of the smallest.

So if you see that, take one, hold it in your hand, take a moment to like feel it, how little it is, roll it around in your palm. And just ask yourself, can you imagine that tiny little thing becoming a large shrub? And something that even birds can take shelter in.

Again, that's what Jesus is asking. Can you imagine it? Now, here is why that idea is so surprising.

In a world, in the world where Jesus was teaching, when people talked about kingdoms, powerful, great, magnificent kingdoms, they use the image of huge trees, towering, impressive. But Jesus says the kingdom of God is not like that. It's like this.

Not a huge tree, but a mustard seed. Something you could lose in the carpet, just like a tiny Lego. Yeah, some of y'all know about that.

It's not something dramatic. It's not about an army. It's not top down, but it's small.

It's small and stubborn and working. And you cannot stop it. It's the beauty of the seed.

A writer named adrienne maree brown borrows the scientific language of fractals to talk about this surprising reality of how the small relates to the large. She says that small is good. Small is all.

The large is a reflection of the small. And she also says that how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. Now, I'm going to attempt something to show you something.

We're going to do this collectively in the room, so we'll see how it goes. So, I want us to watch together a video and a warning here that I do not speak math. So, this is for all of you who do speak math.

If math was a country, I would need an interpreter for sure. But this is for all of you that do speak math. And it offers something beautiful to, I think, everybody.

So, what I'm going to ask you to do, because we had a little glitch with the TV, is take out your phone. You're going to mute it. Praise the Lord.

Mute it. Hallelujah. And the name of the video is, it's a three-minute video.

It's called How Fractals Can Help You Understand the Universe. What do galaxies, cloud formations, your nervous system, mountain ranges, and coastlines all have in common? They all contain never-ending patterns known as fractals.

A classic example of a fractal in nature is broccoli, in that the whole stalk is a similar version of one of its branches. So, cut off one piece, and you're left with a smaller version of the entire broccoli. Snowflakes are another example.

It's often said that no two snowflakes are ever the same. And fractals offer a fascinating explanation as to why nature works in this way. Why nature continuously creates new, self-replicating, yet unique structures.

And how the smallest things in existence are necessary components of the greater whole. The term fractal was coined by Benoit Mandelbrot. Who was working at computer giant IBM in 1980.

Mandelbrot had been fascinated by discoveries of mathematicians from the early 19th century. Who were attempting to define their understanding of what a curve is. Experiments such as Georg Cantor's discovery that a single line could be divided forever.

And Helge von Koch's triangle, a shape that has an infinite perimeter but a finite area, resulted in the term monsters. Mandelbrot used the modern computing powers developed by IBM to run these monster equations millions of times over. This process led him to a breakthrough equation combining the patterns found in previous monsters, resulting in his own set of numbers.

This would become known as the Mandelbrot set. An infinite geometrical visualization of a fractal. One of the most amazing things about the Mandelbrot set is that theoretically, if left by itself, would continue to create infinitely new patterns from the original structure, proving that something could be magnified forever.

Fractal geometry is currently applied in many fields. For example, research into climate change, and the trajectory of dangerous meteorites, helping with cancer research by helping to identify the growth of mutated cells. It's even believed by some that the universe itself may be a fractal.

And as you zoomed in, discover it made up of billions of galaxies. Inside of those galaxies, you would find trillions of stars, and billions of solar systems and planets. And on one of those planets, you would find Earth.

On Earth, you would find continents, cities, and a human. And inside of that human, you would find a brain, made of millions of cells, in which you would find trillions of synapses firing away. And inside of those, you would find DNA.

Inside DNA, you would find atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons. Deeper still, you would find quarks, neutrinos, and so on. And then, just maybe, continuously deeper into infinity.

Some believe that due to their highly complex and mysterious nature, the greatest use of fractals is yet to be discovered. Hopefully, that helped you understand a little bit more about fractals. I knew I couldn't explain that well, so I said, I'm going to leave it to the BBC.

Hallelujah. But here's the point. The same pattern that you see in the snowflake, in broccoli, in the fern, in the spiral galaxy, you see the same thing over and over again.

The small thing and the large thing share the same underlying shape. And that's exactly what Jesus is saying. The mustard seed and the tree are not opposites.

They are the same thing at different stages. What you practice in the small moments of your life, how you treat people, whether you tell the truth, that's the tree that you are becoming. The small is not less than.

The small is how it works. And then Jesus tells the second story, and this one is even stranger. The kingdom of heaven, he says, is like yeast.

Now, how many of you are bread makers? Oh, more of you than I, oh, yes, there's a lot of gifted in this room. Okay.

I'm going to let y'all know when the next potluck is soon. So this is yeast. I wanted to open one of these, but I thought that would be a bad idea, y'all.

So this is yeast, your regular yeast you buy in the store. You can also think about this as leaven. And it's one of the smallest, most ordinary things in any kitchen.

When I went to buy this this morning, I'm going to be honest, I couldn't even find it in the store. It was so little compared to all the flour and stuff around it. And what makes this parable so wild is that Jesus says this woman takes the yeast and mixes it in with three measures of flour.

Three measures is about, it's about 50 pounds of flour. And that's enough to feed about 100 to 150 people. Maybe more.

And it's enough for a feast, which is part of actually the point of this parable. The yeast makes all of it possible. It's tiny.

It's invisible, just like the seed. You can't see it working and you can't stop it. And then there's this other thing about yeast that makes this parable really shocking.

And it's that in Jesus' day, yeast was never a positive image. Think about those phrases where Jesus says things like, beware the yeast of the Pharisees. Like, it's not a positive image.

Yeast was a thing that contaminated other things, like a virus, like an invasive species, like something that spreads before you can stop it. And Jesus says that's the kingdom, an invasive species of love and justice and welcome that you cannot stop from spreading. And notice this woman in the story, and this is a word for many of us today, is not struggling.

She isn't exhausted. She's just doing something ordinary in her kitchen. She's in on the secret of how the kingdom works.

She knows that the yeast will do what yeast does. And that she just has to mix it in. Now, here's what I love about these two stories.

The mustard seed has its own power already packed inside of it. You don't have to make it perform. It already knows what to do.

It knows what it's becoming. The yeast, too, it's irresistible. Once it's in the dough, you cannot talk it into not rising.

And Jesus says that's what the kingdom of God is like. You don't have to force it. You don't have to manufacture it.

You just have to be the seed and to be the yeast to show up and be in on the secret.

What you practice matters. How you treat your little sister. And that's a word for adults and kids.

How you treat your little sister or your little brother. When nobody's watching you matters. Whether you tell the truth on your everyday average Tuesday matters.

How your community treats the person who has the least matters. How you practice love of enemies matters. How you allow yourself to experience rage or grief after you've seen the latest manifestation of American hubris matters.

How you don't let that grief and rage shut off your ability to experience joy matters. How you practice hope just by singing a song or inviting somebody to dance matters. These are not small things that will stay small.

These are the mustard seeds. That's the promise of the kingdom of heaven. That's the good news of the gospel of grace.

The kingdom of God is one of joyful surprise. Joyful surprise. That will in the end become this feast of abundance for all creation.

Things are happening that are bigger than you. From the small. Things that make you say, I did not know this would become that.

That is the logic of the kingdom of God. Not straight lines. Not predictable progress.

But cycles and convergences. And sometimes explosions of something good. As adrienne maree brown puts it.

So I want to ask you something. And I want you to think about it. Both kids and adults.

What's the small thing that you are carrying right now that might be a mustard seed? It feels tiny and insignificant in your hands. A small act of kindness.

A conversation. Maybe a prayer you've prayed. Or a choice that you've made.

That you can't quite imagine becoming anything at all. Maybe the question isn't will it grow. Maybe the question is can you trust that it will.

Jesus told stories about people and things that most thought were impossible. And the scandalous promise of the gospel is that all of them will come true. I invite you to just actually, before we end, I do want to do this.

I want you to maybe close your eyes. And I want you to think about one thing you think is impossible that you wish were real. One thing you think is impossible that you wish were real.

Now, I'm just going to invite you to shout out a few of those responses. Now, if it's like you want to marry the person in the aisle behind you, maybe don't yell that out. Okay.

You know, I just. But if there's something you can share maybe about the world. Okay.

I invite you to just shout that out. Something that feels impossible that you wish for. Stable housing market.

Stable housing market. Oh, hallelujah. Yes.

All right. Yeah. And to homelessness.

World peace. Okay. What'd you say?

Fixing climate change. Financial freedom. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Oh, student loan forgiveness. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yes. When we read the.

Thank y'all for that. Thank y'all for that. I wanted to end with a little more.

Yeah. So, yeah. The point of these parables of the yeast.

The point of the parable of the mustard seed. Is that the small and the large are not that different. That the impossible becomes possible because of the kingdom of God.

The impossible is not foolish. The impossible is not silly. Your imagination is a spiritual gift.

And all summer long, we're going to be working through the works of Afrofuturists who are very intent on saying so many things in the world, even things like me sitting at a restaurant beside a white person. They were science fiction.

They were impossible. And yet, I am living that reality and so are we all. Your imagination is a spiritual gift.

The kingdom of heaven is a mustard seed. The kingdom of heaven is like yeast. And all you have to do is be in on the secret.

Amen.