Matthew
13:31-33
“He put before 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 that the birds of the air come
and make nests in its branches.’”
I feel sorry for people who don’t
have a place they think of as “the old neighborhood”. You know what I mean, I hope. It’s a place that probably never existed the
way it does in your head, but when you get together with other people who were
there at the same time, you find out you all have the same general landscape in
mind, peopled with the same unusual characters, unaware that you are probably
also a character in somebody else’s version of the place.
For my friends and me, one of the
people who will always live in the old neighborhood, even though he has gone to
be with the Lord many years ago now, is a man named Samuel B. Patchell
III. He was one of those loud,
unabashed, intensely social men who thrived by the connections he made. I am not making this up: he wore a cheap
toupee and chomped on an unlit cigar everywhere he went. He sold insurance for a living and handed out
these pocket calendars left and right.
They had bright, shiny gold covers and you saw people pull them out of
their pockets all over town. He made
sure that his son and daughter’s friends all had Patchell planners before they
got their drivers’ licenses so that when that time came they would suddenly
think of him. This story has to do with
kids and cars, too, and will eventually get around to the mustard seed turning
into a tree, but bear with me.
I was home from college one
summer. It must have been 1987 or ’88,
but the date was definitely July 3. That
night I went to the movies with a girl from the old MYF group, who was also a
friend of Mr. Patchell’s kids, and she drove.
After the movie, we were getting close to my house and one of her tires
began making that sound that tells you it’s flat. We pulled into the driveway and I got ready
to change the tire. I pulled out her
spare and then looked for the jack.
There was none. It was an old car
and who knows where it had gone. That’s okay,
though. I knew we had a jack in the shed
and I went up to get it. While there, I
also noticed a whole, big bundle of flags that had accumulated there and
realized that it was now after midnight.
It was the Fourth of July, and I had an idea that would turn a dismal
end of the evening around.
After changing the tire, we took the
flags – and there were a lot of them – and we went around the block to decorate
the Patchells’ house while they slept.
We left flags around the flower beds and along the street on both sides
(it was a corner property). We put them
along the driveway and up the sidewalk.
We stuck them all over the place.
Then we started laughing, because we could picture what we knew would
happen and (as it turned out) did happen in a few hours. That would be when Mr. Patchell would get up
to let the dog out, open the door, and turn around and scream up the stairs, “Vi! Vi!
Wake up! Ya gotta see this! Vi!
Look out front!”
That morning, Fourth of July, I told
my parents about the stunt and they had to go see it right after
breakfast. It was surprising we hadn’t
heard Mr. Patchell shouting, since we were only about a hundred yards away, and
I have no doubt the other neighbors heard.
I was surprised, though, that I didn’t hear from his daughter, Joy, who
was also home from school, but I would see her later when the whole bunch of us
went to watch the fireworks down by the Art Museum. It was her turn to drive.
So that night there were about seven
of us in the car and I hadn’t said anything.
Joy brought up what had happened.
She had been asleep when she heard her father shouting to her
mother. “Vi! Vi!
Wake up! Ya gotta see this! Vi!
Look out front!” She was used to
her father going off and ignored it until her mother shrieked. Then Joy got up and looked.
Mr. Patchell’s old friend Joe had
died not long before that, and Joe had always decorated his house in a big way
for Fourth of July, so Mr. Patchell became convinced that someone had done this
in memory of Joe, and the first thing he did when he stopped shouting was to
get on the phone with Joe’s widow and thank her for doing this. Only, she hadn’t done it. Then he started calling through his rolodex
to find out if any of his fellow Masons or Rotarians had done it. Nope.
Then he decided it had to have been arranged by his son, who was in the
Army in Korea at the time, so he started calling all of Greg’s friends and they
all said they knew nothing. Next, he
placed a call to Greg himself. He called
him in Korea, on the other side of the world, to ask how he had pulled it off. Greg knew nothing. By 4:00 that afternoon, he had convinced
himself that Joe had somehow reached out from beyond the grave to put those
flags around the house. That was the
only possible explanation, and Joy was very glad to be out of the house for the
night, because she was tired of trying to convince him that they were not being
haunted by a patriotic ghost.
One of the hardest things I have
ever had to do was to tell her what had happened, and then to walk into the Patchells’
house after the fireworks, where everybody was still all wound up, and
interrupt her father’s endless retelling of his morning (and it was hard to get
a word in with him even when he was calm), to tell him that I was the ghost. By the way, the next day he made a chart of
where each flag had been as he took them down, so that he could put them up in
the same spot the following year.
So, what does this have to do with
the mustard seed parable?
If one small act of attempted humor
can get so out of hand, and one excited person (admittedly over-extroverted to
begin with) could stir up so many other people, not just from one end of town
to the other, but also as far as Asia, within a matter of hours – all of this
before social media spread our instantaneous reach – just think what it means
when someone gets excited about something that really matters, something like
what God has done for them, something like what happens when it’s not a bunch
of flags that shows up along a driveway but the love of Jesus that shows up in
their heart.
I love that story in the gospel of John
about Jesus meeting a Samaritan woman at a village well when it was only the
two of them around. He sees all the
troubles and baggage that’s in her heart, talks with her about the rough spots
she’s been through and probably was still experiencing, and offers her hope for
something better and the assurance that he was there for her, even though
nobody else in her old neighborhood probably saw her as anyone except a woman
who was trouble. Her response was not to
pretend they didn’t know her, but to ignore the story they told her about who
she was and to adopt Jesus’ version. She
ran to get people from the village that had rejected her and to tell them,
“Come and see a man who told me everything I
have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?’” [John 4:29]
They
went to see what was happening. Jesus
spent a couple of days with them, and at the end of it
“They said to the woman, ‘It is no longer
because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and
we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.’” [John 4:42]
The
kingdom of heaven surprises us with its intense, sudden, and unstoppable growth
that doesn’t come about because of gimmicks and programs (pocket calendars and
pens with church names or Bible verses printed on them, visitation plans,
advertisements on billboards, and so forth) but when those who have faith like
a mustard seed let it grow and do its work.
It happens when people speak up plainly and honestly, not with any self-interest
or desire to build up their own ego or sense of achievement, but just to say
that they’ve met someone who could understand them through-and-through, who can
say with the authority of God himself that they are forgiven and made whole and
there is a place in God’s kingdom that is there just for them, a spot in God’s
neighborhood where people can see themselves and those around them as part of
this great, wonderful, worldwide, unending story of God’s love, and maybe (at
least sometimes) all laugh about themselves together and discover there’s a
place in their hearts for each other, too.
“Vi! Vi!
Wake up! Ya gotta see this! Vi!”
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