Multiplication

Genesis 25:19-34; Romans 8:1-11; Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

After God creates humans, God says, “Be fruitful and multiply.” After the flood, God says the same thing, so the earth can be repopulated. “Be fruitful and multiply.” Jesus takes 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish and feeds a multitude. When we read today’s stories from Genesis and Matthew, we find a common denominator: God is into multiplication.

Have you ever read this from Genesis 25? “Then again Abraham took a wife, and her name was Keturah. And she bare him Zimran, and Jokshan, and Medan, and Midian, and Ishbak, and Shuah.” Or have you read that Ishmael, Abraham’s son by Hagar, had 12 sons? And that all these sons of Abraham had children, generations of children!

Yet, all this multiplication doesn’t matter, unless it’s a fulfilment of the promise God made to Sarah and Abraham. In today’s story, the focus shifts from Abraham to the next generation on your chart in the bulletin. Isaac and his wife Rebekah have twin sons. It seems the boys were always conflicted. By the time they were adults, they were survivalist Bear Grylls and chef Guy Fieri, both gifted, but with quite different skillsets and interests.

Crafty Jacob gets the advantage over impulsive Esau, and acquires the birthright – which gives him the major portion of the inheritance and the power as the more important son. We will see more of Jacob’s ability to fix his situation with crafty solutions in the future. But it will take one more generation for the serious multiplication of Abraham and Sarah’s family to happen through Jacob and his wives.

… As we’ve been learning on Wednesday evenings, while all sorts of religious and political power struggles were happening in Judea and Jerusalem, Jesus was collecting disciples in Galilee, a rural, poor region. It make sense, then, that the stories he tells are about farming and not often about marketing and selling.

Lots of pastors, including me, have talked about this parable about sowing seeds as referring to the soil. What kind of soil are you? In truth, we are all kinds of soil, depending on our context at the moment. The soil is important, but it’s part of the process of farming.

More important for any farmer is the end result. How many bushels of grain will one bushel of seed yield? It’s about multiplication! In this case, Jesus could be referring to the number of followers that will result from the disciples’ ministry. Note that in the text, there is no reward for greater numbers. Any increase in the number of followers is important and welcome news.

… The message to the Jews about Jesus the Messiah made sense. The Jews understood what Jesus was saying about God, about the interpretation of the Torah. Love God, love your neighbor, respect and care for each other.

But once the news of Jesus’ resurrection went beyond Jewish territory, beyond the Jewish communities around the Mediterranean, the message needed to be transformed into something non-Jews could understand. Paul was key to the multiplication of the faith to Roman and Greek believers.

Paul’s focus is to define the “so what” of Jesus’ death and resurrection. He corrects the Gentile view that the body was bad, evil, and the spirit was good. It’s a duality – something is either good or bad, with no in-between. Paul writes instead of the flesh, sarx in Greek, saying, the body itself is not sinful, but the responses we have to our desires may be sinful.

When our lives are shaped by God’s Spirit, we seek to live according to the Spirit. Our lives are good simply because they flow from God. Our sins, on the other hand, have received katakrima, condemnation, a death sentence.

The news that God was more powerful than death, and that God loves all people, spread quickly. Churches popped up in many places, multiplying membership and believers with the Spirit’s help.

History has shown that the multiplication was rapid. Even if we consider that the numbers in the Bible may be exaggerated, within 300 years Christianity was such a popular religion, Emperor Constantine legalized it, so he could use it to unite the various provinces of the Empire.

… A friend whose husband died recently shared that she felt comforted by knowing her husband knew he was a child of God right to the last day. She meant that he frequently asserted his belief in Jesus, so he was assured of a place in heaven. This troubled me, because it’s not up to us to keep saying, “I believe.” It’s up to God to keep assuring us that God knows who we are and that we are God’s beloved.

It is up to us to help with the multiplication by telling our stories of how that love and forgiveness draws us closer to God and to each other. Each time we tell the stories of our relationship with God, and with each other through God’s Holy Spirit, we are planting seeds. We may never know when our planted seed bears fruit. It may be months or even years after we plant the seed that it finally takes root and grows. It may take a long time for the heart the seed is planted in to recognize that God was there all along.

The early church grew quickly because new believers told other new believers about the good news. This sharing multiplied the believers. It bore fruit.

Dare I suggest this week that you find someone to talk with, and tell the story of why you believe in Jesus, or why you are a member of University Lutheran Church? You can tell the story to someone in your family, or to a good friend, or to a stranger. You can plan your story ahead if it helps. And, of course, tell me the story of how it went. Amen