David Bussau, founder of Opportunity International, was in Brisbane a few years ago and spoke at a function that I attended. In his address, David made reference to the fact that he owned 67 slaves, and he told us this story.
He was on a visit to Pakistan on one occasion and was taken to a brick kiln. There he found a number of desperately poor families, all of them in bondage to the owners of the kiln, bound by generations of debt that they would never be able to repay. Every child born to those families began its life already enslaved by that same debt.
The bricks were made in the same way they were in the time of Moses. Mud was mixed with straw and dried in the sun. Parents and children together worked in the mud to make the bricks under a broiling sun. There was no shelter to give them shade as they worked. David saw one father, who was very ill, lying on a stretcher and propped up in such a way that he could still reach out and mix the mud and straw. Then, before his own eyes, David saw a baby die. The mother took the little body to one side, dug a shallow grave, buried her baby, and returned to work. She knew that she would have to produce another child as soon as she could in order to mortgage it to the owner of the kiln as further collateral for the debt they could never hope to repay.
David went away from the kiln deeply troubled and prayed for a way forward. And this is what he did. He bought some land, enough to develop a brick kiln and build a number of houses. When everything was ready he went back to the original kiln and bought the 67 slaves, paying off their debt for the equivalent of a few hundred Australian dollars. He then employed them at the new kiln and paid them wages.
The families built houses for themselves on the land provided. Shade cloth was erected to protect the workers from the hot sun. A Child Care Centre was established to look after the younger children and the older children began to attend school.
Free of debt and able to earn an income, those families embraced a whole new way of life. Once they were well established, David set about redeeming another group of slaves and starting the whole process again just for them.
I think this story helps us to understand what Jesus meant when he said:
If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you. (Luke 17:6)
There are various references to mustard seeds in the Gospels.
Firstly, as in our text for today, the mustard seed is used as an illustration of the exercise of faith.
If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.
Matthew offers a slightly different version (17: 20-21):
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; and nothing will be impossible for you.’
The fact that Matthew refers to moving mountains, and Luke to planting trees in oceans, makes no difference to the meaning that Jesus intended. He wanted to emphasis the difference that faith makes in our lives, not by literally moving mountains and planting trees in oceans, but by encouraging us to believe in the possibility of doing and achieving more than we ever thought humanly possibly!
George Müller (1805-1898) was a Prussian-born English evangelist and philanthropist. A man of faith and prayer, he established orphanages in Bristol and founded the Scriptural Knowledge Institution for Home and Abroad. He once said: “Faith does not operate in the realm of the possible. There is no glory for God in that which is humanly possible. Faith begins where human power ends.”
Regarding these verses, Bruce Prewer, Uniting Church minister, writes:
“Planting trees in the sea sounds a clownish exercise. It appears ludicrous! I reckon that is exactly how Jesus meant it to sound. We miss the point of this mini-parable if we look at it with solemn eyes. It is cartoon he is creating. Think of it in cartoon terms: imagine a bloke standing up to his waist in the sea at Southport, or Coolangatta, or Mermaid Beach, trying to plant a tree. Like any clever cartoon, behind the picture there is a serious point.
In this cartoon Jesus is challenging those who would follow him to start attempting the hard and clownish things. The teaching of Christ is for many, impractical nonsense. But not for the disciple; for the disciple it is the way to go.”
Secondly, the mustard seed is identified as a symbol of the Kingdom of God. Its enormous potential for growth from tiny seed to large tree, points us to the dynamic nature of what God does in the world through the power of the Holy Spirit.
(Matthew 13:31, Luke 13:9, Mark 4:31)
I saw an interview in “Enough Rope” on Monday night between Andrew Denton and Juan Mann. Let me tell you his story in his own words:
“I'd been living in London when my world turned upside down and I'd had to come home (June 2004). By the time my plane landed back in Sydney, all I had left was a carry on bag full of clothes and a world of troubles: no one to welcome me back, no place to call home. I was a tourist in my hometown. Standing there in the arrivals terminal, watching other passengers meeting their waiting friends and family, with open arms and smiling faces, hugging and laughing together, I wanted someone out there to be waiting for me: to be happy to see me, to smile at me, to hug me.
So I got some cardboard and a marker and made a sign. I found the busiest pedestrian intersection in the city (Sydney) and held that sign aloft, with the words "Free Hugs" on both sides. And for 15 minutes, people just stared right through me. The first person who stopped, tapped me on the shoulder and told me how her dog had just died that morning. How that morning had been the one year anniversary of her only daughter dying in a car accident.
How what she needed now, when she felt most alone in the world, was a hug. I got down on one knee, we put our arms around each other and when we parted, she was smiling.”
Juan estimates that since then he has hugged about a million people. Initially the City Council and the Police tried to ban him, but public opinion supporting him was so strong he has been allowed to continue. The “Free Hugs” campaign is now a reality in many countries around the world.
Jesus is trying to teach us through these images of moving mountains and planting trees in oceans that faith encourages and motivates us to leap from the safe, sure, familiar ground into places and situations we wouldn’t normally choose to go.
Faith does not mean abandoning our capacity to think rationally and decide wisely.
But it does mean that we put our trust in a God who takes us beyond the limits of our own human resources and into the realm of the Spirit.
It means we are called to risk for the sake of the Kingdom.
It means we are open to the new challenges and opportunities for mission and ministry into which Christ is constantly calling us.
It means that we tackle tasks that are the equivalent of moving mountains and planting trees in oceans!
The story of the feeding of the 5000 is one that we know very well. Out in the countryside, a long way from the nearest supermarket, Jesus is surrounded by a crowd of hungry people. The disciples have no idea what to do. The need to feed the crowd represents a logistical problem far beyond their capacity to cope. Taken at face value, this is yet another miracle story. Jesus accepts the bread and fish brought by a child and proceeds to feed everyone who is there.
But if we stop there, we miss the main point of the story. Our human tendency, when faced by a problem that seems to be too big and too hard, is to give up or look for an easier alternative. But Jesus wants the disciples to understand the nature of God and how God’s way of thinking and acting goes far beyond the limits of their understanding and imagination.
Many aspects of Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of God emphasise the way in which small and insignificant things become truly significant and influential. Five barley loaves and two fish, enough to feed one hungry boy, become a feast for 5000 people, and enough left over to fill twelve baskets.
This year we celebrate 30 years of being the Uniting Church. Of course, before we were one church we were three churches, with a history dating back three centuries. We should never forget that. However, the idea of the Uniting Church began as a “mustard seed”, a possibility in the faith and imagination of a few courageous and visionary people.
In an environment of prayer and respectful conversation the seed germinated and began to grow, nurtured by scholarly papers, formal dialogue and detailed planning. From that process the Basis of Union emerged, the members of the three denominations voted, and the Uniting Church was born!
When you think about all the issues that had to be addressed during that process, all the barriers that had to be broken down, all the formal steps that had to be undertaken, it’s not unreasonable to compare the formation of the Uniting Church with planting trees in the ocean or moving mountains!
The Uniting Church is our reality. But it is more than that. It is also a tangible reminder to the whole Christian church of that greater unity into which Christ continues to call us.
How big is big? How big is God?
When, by faith, we embrace the bigness of God, He can take the little we bring and do extraordinary things with it!
We often hear people these days describing something as a “mind-blowing experience!”
It means that they have been taken in their thinking way beyond where they previously were. The feeding of the crowd was a “mind-blowing experience” for those who were there. But what about us?
How big is big? How big is God for us?
Jesus saw beyond the bread and fish a vision of the Kingdom of God and he wanted to help people take that leap of faith that would liberate their thinking and their imagination to embrace and celebrate the bigness of God, and the bigness of the Kingdom of God, and the bigness of the ways of God.
How big is big? How big is God?
Bigger than we will ever be able to understand!
Did you know that if the sun were hollow we could put 1 million earths and 4 million moons into that space and still have a little bit left over. The sun is 865,000 miles in diameter and 93 million miles from earth. Pluto, still in our solar system, but in the opposite direction, is 2.7 billion miles away. And there are countless solar systems like ours.
The God who brought this vast universe into being, is also the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who came into our world, and beginning with 12 relatively insignificant disciples, changed the course of human history.
Mustard seed faith is not small faith! It is faith that believes in the power of God to do more than we have considered possible in the past. It is faith that recognises the dynamic nature of the Kingdom of God. It is faith that propels us from the past and the present into the future God has prepared for us.
If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.
This is the crucial issue! The more we limit God in our thinking, the more we limit what God can do in and for us. And the opposite is also true.
The more we are able to believe and celebrate the bigness of God, the more God can do in and through us! If we come as we are to God and bring what we have, and offer ourselves and our lives to God, He will do extraordinary things with us also.
Are you willing, in faith, hope and love, to plant trees in the sea for God?
