First Friends Meeting
Mark 4:2-20
‘Seeds’
Doug Gwyn

Mark Twain had a great gift for saying a lot in a few words. One of my favorites is one you probably know too. He remarked that when he was 16 he couldn’t believe how stupid his father was. By time he was 18 he was astonished how much wiser his father had grown in just two years. It’s an ironic remark because there's some distance between what he says and what he really means. It leaves us some figuring out to do.

Jesus had a similar way of making quips and telling little stories that left something for his hearers to do. Down to this day, we still have to decide, just what did he mean by that? Of course, it can be dangerous to leave others to decide you mean. Some people didn’t like what they thought (rightly or wrongly) Jesus was getting at. Over time, it got him into more and more trouble. We have just finished the season of remembering just how seriously people were finally offended by these parables of Jesus, these little tales of the kingdom of heaven on earth.

After Jesus’ death, his closest friends and disciples began to realize that he was among them again by his Spirit. And the Spirit of Jesus helped them remember those parables he had told. Some of those stories hadn’t made much sense at the time he told them. But in light of the way his life had ended and the way they experienced him by the Spirit, those parables began ring true. So the Spirit helped them start putting the various sayings and stories of Jesus into a story of his life. We have four of those stories collected in the New Testament – the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And just as Jesus in the flesh had let his hearers interpret his parables for themselves, so Jesus in the Spirit gave the different gospel writers a similar freedom. They tell the stories in different ways. They organize them into different kinds of groupings. They connect them with different circumstances in Jesus life. And they come to different conclusions. We moderns are sometimes scandalized by the differences and outright contradictions in the four gospel stories.

So it seems Jesus keeps scandalizing us today. The differences and contradictions in the four gospels cause some to shrug and decide that these are outright fabrications. Why take any of this seriously? Others get caught up in searching for the ‘real’ Jesus, the ‘historical’ Jesus under all the layers of gospel fiction. But after 200 years of the quest for the historical Jesus, we now realize that we always find the Jesus we were looking for. Meanwhile, others insist that everything happened just as the four gospel report it. The contradictions are only apparent. But in the end, we all tend to pick and choose. We supply the explanations we find most satisfying, that produce the Jesus we’re looking for.

When I was pastoring a number of years ago, there was an elderly member of my Meeting who had been a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union almost all her life. When someone mentioned that Jesus apparently drank wine, she sweetly replied, “Well, of course, that was unfermented wine.” Now “unfermented wine” seemed like a contradiction of terms to me. I wasn’t convinced by her explanation. But dear old Linda Townsend exuded an all-embracing spirit of love and had lived a life of great personal integrity. I could not scoff or scorn her faith.

The parable Mary has read for us is the centerpiece parable of Mark’s gospel. It’s not only one of the major parables of Jesus. It also serves as a parable for the drama of Mark’s gospel overall. The life and ministry of Jesus was about sowing seeds, seeds of the kingdom, seeds of faith, of people discovering God at work in their lives. Mark’s gospel is a series of episodes where we see some seeds fail immediately, others wither and die, others remain spindly, and others become fruitful. The parable begins with the seeds that immediately fail as they are plucked away by birds and eaten. It moves on to others that live only briefly, but are scorched by the sun, then on to those that grow, but are choked by weeds, and finally to those that grow to bear fruit. So the time-frame keeps extending in each case. Someone like Mark, who kept telling the stories of Jesus after his death, knew how long it had taken the seed to mature and bear fruit in his life.. It took him years finally to understand these stories, to tell them well, and to help others begin to grow in faith.

In fact, Mark’s story of Jesus telling this story becomes a parable in itself. Mark reports the very simple way Jesus spoke the parable. Later, most people eventually wandered off. Many of them must have heard that story and thought, “What was that about?” Some seeds sprout and grow, and some don’t – what’s the point? They were like the seed that fell along the path and was immediately snatched up by the birds. They barely noticed that they had missed anything. How many times does that happen to us? Someone says something, and only later (if at all) do you realize, it was a call for help. Or years later, you remember a conversation that was the beginning of the end of a friendship. You didn’t catch what was happening. You were too distracted, too upset, perhaps too indignant to recognize what was happening between you and your friend, you and your co-worker, you and your spouse. Ouch! In this mundane little story, Jesus is hinting at the most decisive moments of our lives.

But not everyone wandered away unfazed. A few people hung around, with the twelve disciples. They sensed something important here. So they asked what the parable meant. Jesus responded mysteriously: “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables: in order that ‘they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand…” (4:11-12). There’s this conspiratorial tone here – you’re the insiders. I like you – I’m going to let you in on the secret. Those others? No way! I think Jesus is a bit tongue-in-cheek here. Yes, maybe the disciples are insiders, hand-picked by Jesus. But these other people – they have made insiders of themselves by sticking around and asking questions. That’s how faith takes root and starts to grow in all of us. We notice something going on. We don’t know quite what it is, but we don’t just shrug and drift away. We linger, we ask some questions, we wait for some answers. They may be questions another person can answer. They may be questions only God can answer, after a lot of praying a lot of asking, a lot of waiting.

There are many kinds of seeds and seasons. One incident in our lives can be a seed of possibility, that either withers and dies or grows and bears fruit. And each life is itself a seed. Each of us has seasons of growth and fruitfulness, and seasons of stunting and struggle. And there is a seed that is First Friends, with many season of growth and decline, fruitfulness and fallowness over the course of nearly 200 years now. As I’ve been preparing this message, I’ve been praying and meditating -- where do I see this parable in the events of this week? A number of conversations and incidents seemed significant. But one sticks in my mind.

Wednesday evening was Commissions Night. Ministry & Oversight and Stewardship & Finance spent an hour together, talking about the financial future of the Meeting. As Stewardship & Finance pointed out to us last fall, we are seeing a consistent and slowly growing gap between giving and other income on the one hand, and expenditures on the other. We’ve been filling that gap by taking money from our reserves, but is that good stewardship in the long term? It’s not a financial crisis by any means. But we do see a generation of faithful members and contributors slowly passing away. A younger generation is coming along and contributing well, but is going to school, raising families, and not yet able to make up the difference. Can our giving be increased? Are there other ways we can increase our Meeting’s income, such as renting space in the building during the week? Or do we need to make cuts in expenses, which probably means cuts in staff expenses? It was a conversation with some fairly plain speaking. Some urging that we need to be decisive and take action. Others urging that we have faith and wait for answers.

I guess it’s one of those glass-half-empty vs. glass-half-full questions. Or rather, is the glass emptying faster than it’s filling? I think there was important truth spoken on both sides of the conversation. And the conversation will continue. Similar conversations continue on other vital questions throughout our Meeting’s commissions and committees. These are the dynamics of growth and change. Like farmers, we struggle with uncertainties and misgivings, because there are so many factors we can’t control. But the seed that is First Friends is in a good season of growth and bearing some good fruits. Let’s continue asking the tough questions, but let us also be confident. God isn’t finished with us yet.