TEACHINGS FROM “THE CHAPTER OF PARABLES”
A Sermon by Kennith W. Phifer, Delivered at First UU Church of Ann 
Arbor, Feb. 15, 2004

The message of Jesus was a simple one: repent, for the Kingdom of God is 
at hand. 

The Kingdom of God was an ancient yearning of the Jewish people. It would 
be a time when God would rule the earth. Peace and justice would prevail; 
love and harmony would be in the hearts of all people.

This Kingdom or Reign of God was imagined in many forms, but in all of 
them the ancient hopes were to be realized: war would cease, widows and 
orphans would be cared for and strangers would be welcomed. Injustice 
would be no more.

The early followers of Jesus and later Christians came to feel that Jesus was 
the means by which the Reign of God would be ushered in. In time, 
Christians came to hold the view that Jesus was God Himself. The teachings 
of the Gospels became divine because Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah, and 
God.

This is not my view of Jesus or his teachings, nor is it the view of most 
Unitarian Universalists. For most of us, Jesus was no more than a great 
teacher from whom we can learn much about the meaning of justice and 
peace. 

The message of Jesus about the Kingdom—which in the 21st century we 
would be more comfortable calling a Community—is found in theological 
pronouncements, moral maxims, and especially in the parables. 

Parables were a widely used form of teaching in Judea in Jesus’s day. There 
are more than 2,000 extant rabbinic parables. Of the ones found in the 
Gospels, scholars disagree on how many are authentic, the number ranging 
from 20-36.

Parables are short stories, usually with a pointed meaning. Sometimes they 
are easy to understand. Sometimes they are quite puzzling. 

John Haughey has identified three functions of the parables that Jesus told.

One of these is orientation. The parable is used as a way of luring us in to a 
message.  Usually such parables use familiar characters and situations.

An example of such an orienting parable is that of the Prodigal Son. (Luke 
15: 11-32) It is a family story, and we all know about families even if we 
had a bad one or were deprived of one.  This is a story of a son grown weary 
of what he feels is second-class status in his family, of his taking his 
inheritance and leaving the home. He squanders the inheritance and reaches 
the depths of groveling with pigs for food. He decides to go home, where he 
is welcomed with open arms by his father. 

The message is the power of family love, the need for families not to stifle 
individuals, the endless possibility of coming home.

Disorientation is a second function of the parables. The Parable of the 
Talents illustrates this. (Matthew 25: 14-30) Three servants are given 
differing amounts of money to take care of when the master is to be gone for 
a while. Two of them double the money while the third saves his. The 
master rewards the first two and chastises the third.

The message is different from what we might expect. The two who doubled 
their money in effect gambled with it. They could have lost it all! The third 
at least returned what he had been given to take care of. But Jesus’s message 
is disorienting: playing it safe is the wrong way to do things. Or, said 
another way, use it or lose it.

The parables are also intended to re-orient us to the deep truths of life. In 
Matthew 25: 31-46, Jesus tells his disciples about a King who honors those 
who have honored him and turns on those who have dishonored him. The 
standard used to determine who has honored the king is a very simple one: 
whoever has fed the hungry, given drink to the thirsty, welcomed the 
stranger, clothed the naked, visited the sick, and gone to those in prison. 

We see in this parable how to re-orient our lives in worthy ways. The simple 
message is that all we need do in life is care for one another.

Many of the parables weave orientation, disorientation, and reorientation 
together. The parables, of which I shall speak, found in the fourth chapter of 
Mark, are of that kind. 

The Gospel of Mark shows us a Jesus more given to action than to teaching. 
There are few parables in the Gospel for that reason, five by one reckoning, 
and four by another. Three of these are found in the fourth chapter, the so-
called “chapter of parables.” 

The messages they present us are orienting—they speak of a well-known 
aspect of life to first century Jews, seeds and their growth.

The messages are disorienting because they point beyond the agricultural 
dimension to truths about our lives that can be disquieting.

The messages are reorienting because if we heed them we will find ways of 
living with more confidence in a universe that is sometimes quite harsh and 
difficult.

The first parable (Mark 4:3-9) tells of a sower sowing seed. Some of the 
seed “fell on the path and the birds came and ate it. Some fell on rocky 
ground where there was little soil, and it sprouted quickly—for there was 
little depth of earth. But when the sun came up, the young wheat was 
scorched, and as it had no root it withered away. Some of the wheat fell 
among thistles, which grew up and choked the wheat and it did not bear 
grain. But some of the seed fell on good ground, where it came up and grew 
and produced grain—and the yield was…(manifold).” And then Jesus 
challenges them by asking if they have understood him.

The central message of the first parable is that we should pay attention. 

That is what the sower did, though Jesus implies that he knew full well that 
some of the seed he scattered would be wasted—eaten by birds, fall on 
rocky ground, choked by thistles.

Anyone who teaches or tries to communicate by whatever means recognizes 
the truth of this tale. However good the seed we are scattering—however 
splendid our message or clear our presentation of it—some of it will be 
wasted. 

Preachers and teachers and politicians and performers know that some will 
sleep through their presentations, some will daydream, and others will plan 
their shopping lists. Albert Shanker once commented that the best of us only 
get the first ten minutes of an audience’s attention to what we are saying. 
The next ten minutes most folks are dozing, he said, and the last ten minutes 
they are having sexual fantasies. 

We who are professional communicators must pay attention to scattering the 
seed—communicating the message--anyway. Even if we know that few will 
receive it or understand it, we still should deliver the message, sow the seed. 
That is our task.

Some years ago I recall hearing of Senator Ted Kennedy lecturing at Jerry 
Falwell’s Liberty College in Lynchburg, Virginia. He came not so much as a 
United States Senator but as a Roman Catholic. His hope was to encourage 
tolerance among these very deeply fundamentalist Protestant Christians.

Ted Kennedy is not an idiot. He knew that few in that audience agreed with 
anything he would say. Religious liberty, tolerance, and related values were 
not part of the Moral Majority’s principles. But he went anyway because he 
wanted to spread the seeds of liberty and mutual respect. That was his 
responsibility as a sower of seeds, and he carried it out.

Jesus was also addressing those who receive the messages, telling them they 
must learn to receive messages with heart and mind. It is not enough to hear 
the words or to see the shapes. We must understand the meaning of the 
language, the truth that is there, the justice it calls us to carry out, the actions 
that we must undertake if we are to do good in this world.

It is not enough to talk the talk; we must also walk the walk. 

The people of this congregation do that. That is why tens of people help the 
homeless through our Interfaith Hospitality Network program, and help 
build homes through the Habitat For Humanity projects and struggle with 
the complex issues of peace and war, violence and non-violence. 

That is why so many people visit and call and send cards and e-mails to 
people having a difficult time in home or hospital. That is why meals are 
prepared for those who find that temporarily hard to do, and rides are given 
and hugs and warm smiles and hard-working hands when needed. 

This is a congregation that enables the seeds of social justice and pastoral 
caring to bear very rich fruit.
 
To pay attention is a tenet of every major religion. The heart of all Jewish 
prayer is the Shema, one translation of which is “Pay attention, Israel!”
Five times a day a Muslim is required to pay attention to the central teaching 
of Islam, Allahu Akbar, God is Most Great. The essence of Buddhism is 
mindfulness, paying attention. Humanists talk of paying attention to this life 
and to those who are in need.

The first parable calls on us to pay attention to spreading the message of 
justice and hope and to pay attention to that message when others present it 
to us.

The second parable in this chapter (4:26-29) tells us that  “The Reign of God 
is like a man who scatters seed on the land. He goes to bed, and gets up, 
night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows—how, he does not know. The 
ground produces a crop by itself; first the slender stalk, then the ear, and 
then the grain on the ear; but as soon as the crop is ready he begins working 
with the sickle because harvest time has arrived.”

Most commentators on this parable make the point that Jesus and those with 
whom he lived likely had no idea at all of plant biology. To them, it was 
almost literally a miracle that a seed could produce flowers and plants and 
edible food. 

We do know many of the details of how seeds do their work, but the 
message in this parable is no less potent for us than it was for those who 
learned it from Jesus.

One part of that message is that once we have planted the seeds, hovering 
over the area we have seeded will usually not help those seeds to sprout.  We 
can choose good soil, water it, give it some nutrients, and till it from time to 
time, but mostly the process of growth is out of our sight and beyond out 
control.      

There are many aspects of life like that. Parenthood is one. The sooner 
parents understand that, beyond a certain point, we must leave it to our 
children to act for themselves, the happier and more mentally and spiritually 
healthy those children are likely to be. We must trust that what we have 
taught them by word and example will have been wise and will have been 
absorbed by them. 

Most of the growing takes place out of sight and beyond our control.

We sometimes do not learn whether the growth has occurred for a long time. 
Many of us can recall the loud protests when we imposed on our teenagers 
curfew limits or driving restrictions or study requirements or other rules 
perceived by them at the time as personal assaults and by us as the minimum 
necessary for their welfare. 

Some of us have been fortunate enough to have those same children tell us 
in later years--when they were no longer children—how important to them 
those restrictions really were. They could then blame their parents for not 
being able to do things that they really did not want to do but did not know 
how to resist peer pressure on their own to say no to doing. They avoided a 
foolish act but also maintained the friendship of their peers, thanks to their 
parents.

Or they learned about responsibility by our insisting upon it even over their 
loud objections to being enslaved by mom and dad when all other children 
were not made to study so hard or do so many chores. 

This parable tells us to trust the process or, as the Taoists put it, “Don’t push 
the river.”

There is a splendid essay by Wendell Berry called “Two Minds.” He 
describes the Rational Mind as being objective, analytical, and empirical. He 
describes the Sympathetic Mind as being about wholeness, about affection 
for people and places, about caring about beauty and love. 

Both, says Berry, are needed. The problem in our times is that the Rational 
Mind has overwhelmed the Sympathetic Mind when what is needed is a 
dynamic tension and balancing between the two.

The danger of the Rational Mind being dominant is that by its nature it tries 
to control everything. The Sympathetic Mind accepts that some things 
cannot be controlled. 

The Rational Mind seeks to dominate nature. The Sympathetic Mind tries to 
understand how we fit into nature rather than how we can bend nature to our 
will.

Jesus was a Sympathetic Mind man. Those who distribute their seeds and let 
nature do its work are also Sympathetic Mind people. Perhaps we need more 
such people who really know how to trust nature, trust the process, trust life. 

Perhaps the reason we build so many destructive weapons and spend such 
gargantuan sums on violent projects is that we do not have enough trust in 
either nature or humanity in all the wild variety in which they both appear.

This parable is encouraging us to live in trust, to live not by guarantees—
because there really are none—but to live by faith in one another and in the 
way that nature works. 

Seeds point to the larger truth of the natural world, evolution. Elizabeth 
Johnson writes of this astonishing truth we discovered only a century and a 
half ago, “We find ourselves in the midst of a work in progress, whose 
dynamism to date has yielded increased complexity and beauty. This 
narrative of immense cosmic unfolding characterized by contingency, law, 
and deep cosmic time contains deep wells of surprise.  Nature is seeded with 
promise. Its evolutionary story bears a raw openness to the future. This 
makes human hope the most realistic of outlooks.”

Evolution is a process we did not invent. We do not control it. We cannot 
predict its outcome. Like the sower in the parable, we can turn the soil and 
even add some nutrients and do some watering. Ultimately and essentially 
we must trust the process, in the sure knowledge that “nature is seeded with 
promise.”

The Sympathetic Mind, informed by the rational Mind, will enable us to do 
that intelligently, even creatively. 

Trust is the message of the second parable of Mark’s fourth chapter.

The third parable follows immediately on the second and is probably most 
familiar to us (4:30-32). “How shall we describe the Reign of God?” Jesus 
asked, “or by what parable shall we describe it? It is like a mustard seed, 
which when it is sown is smallest of all seeds on the earth, yet when it is 
sown it grows and becomes taller than the other shrubs, with such large 
branches that birds can make their nests in its shade.”

The Parable of the Mustard Seed has a simple message: little things can 
grow into big things. 

Among the ancients there was a saying: “Parvis e glandibus quercus.” (Tall 
oaks from little acorns grow.)

In 1791, David Everett wrote a poem for a seven year old to declaim at 
school and used these same words in English translation:
“You’d scarce expect one of my age
To speak in public on the stage;
And if I chance to fall below
Demosthenes or Cicero,
Don’t view me with a critic’s eye,
But pass my imperfections by.
Large streams from little fountains flow,
Tall oaks from little acorns grow.”

Bill Gates made the same point about not overlooking people who appear to 
be insignificant. In a commencement address he gave at a California high 
school a few years ago, he offered ten pieces of wisdom to the graduates. 
The final one was that we should always be nice to nerds; you never know 
when you will end up working for one!

America in particular needs to learn the lesson of the value of small things. 
We have placed too much of our faith as a people in big things. We celebrate 
the biggest, the fastest, the wealthiest, the strongest, the noisiest, the most 
opulent. 

The recent Super Bowl illustrates this well. There was a mountain of print 
and endless hours of television and radio coverage of every aspect of the 
players and the teams and the history of the event. There was a near infinite 
number of commercials to be shown and staggering sums of money paid for 
them. Commercials consumed far more time than the game itself there was  
a half-time show that literally left those who saw it breathless. 

It was all loud, vulgar, and beside the point. It was just a football game, for 
heaven’s sake! That it was a wonderful game too almost got lost in all the 
hoopla. The game itself has been less written about in the past two weeks  
than the juvenile act of a couple of performers right before the start of the 
second half.

Big is not always, maybe not even often, good.

Sometimes the smallest can be the best. Sometimes the smallest is all there 
is. Sometimes the smallest, like that mustard seed, can grow into something 
quite remarkable.

In THE GRAPES OF WRATH, John Steinback has one of his characters 
remark that “one person, with their mind made up, can shove a lot of folks 
around.”

One or several can grow from a single or small number to become a force to 
contend with.

Christians can rightly point to the growth of their faith from a tiny handful of 
men and women who found something extraordinary in the man Jesus to one 
of the world’s great religions, literally touching every continent and culture.

Universalism in America began in 1770 with a single man, John Murray, 
and his equally talented wife, Judith Sargent Murray. At first they were only 
joined by a few others. Then still more entered the ranks of those who risked 
stoning and being tarred and feathered for preaching such heresy. In time, 
this little mustard seed of a faith became the sixth largest religious 
movement in America.

The right of a woman to consult with a physician and choose abortion was 
won because a few women and men were angered at the denial to women of 
a personal choice in such an intimate matter. The few became more as 
stories were told of botched attempts at self-aborting, of families 
overwhelmed by the birth of an unplanned child, of young girls raped and 
forced to become mothers long before they were ready. Just a few at the 
beginning launched a movement that now embraces a majority of 
Americans.

No more potent little mustard seed exists than a child. Dependent and 
vulnerable at first, the child grows until she is able to chart the course of her 
own life and sometimes the course of other lives. The miracle of the union of 
sperm and egg in time becomes a Mary Sue Coleman, an Itzhak Perlman, a 
Stephen Hawking, a Jennifer Granholm, a J.K. Rowling, your wife or 
husband or partner, your brother or sister, yourself.

Of course, it is also true that sometimes such unions produce monsters: child 
molesters, con artists, power-hungry politicians, greedy business people. 
Wisdom would encourage us to nurture the growth of people in the former 
category and to learn how we can redirect the energies and abilities of those 
in the latter.

The mustard seed parable teaches us to respect little things, the beginnings 
of things, and things that seem insignificant.

Unitarian Universalists care about the coming of the community of justice 
and peace, of love and hope—what Christians call the Kingdom or the Reign 
of God. The teachings of the fourth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, the so-
called “chapter of parables,” are good reminders to us of what we need to do 
to make that community real.

We need to pay attention, continuing to sow good seeds wherever we can, 
learning how to understand the seeds that we receive from others.

We need to spread our seeds and then trust to the processes of nature that 
they will grow. We need to develop more of a Sympathetic Mind to go with 
the Rational Mind that controls so much of our living in the 21st century.

We need to respect small, supposedly inconsequential things.

When we despair of ever seeing a world at peace or a society that honors all 
its people, perhaps these tales of seeds can serve as an inspiration to us. 
Continuing to plant the seeds of goodness and harmony, continuing to trust 
life, continuing to see the possibilities in the small things of life are ways we 
can keep going in the long struggle to build a peaceable and just community.

Copyright 2004, Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved








 
 
 
 


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