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
