The story of Don Quixote seems, on the surface, to be simply a fantasy meant to delight, a story about a man who has lost his mind and come to believe that he is a knight, windmills are giants, and his peasant neighbor is a squire. But it contains a profound truth, one that I know well, since I had the privilege of playing that peasant neighbor, Sancho Panza, in the musical version of the story, my freshman year of college.
Spoiler alert: At the end of the play, Don Quixote dies. As his friends look on, each of them reacts differently. Sancho is a simple man with simple ideas in his head, and for him, the death of his master means the end of his adventure and a return to his old, miserable life. But Aldonza, the prostitute whom Quixote had taken for a noblewoman, is wiser. She sees the beauty in her mad knight’s foolish belief that even the least of people in this world hold a spark of not just human dignity, but true greatness. I can remember the two of us standing off to stage right, as the character playing the priest intoned Psalm 130 over Quixote’s deathbed. She looked at me with pained eyes and implored. “Believe, Sancho. Believe.”
And there, at the climax of the story, the moment of most profound emotion, I burst into laughter. I should be clear: Laughter was not in the script. It was entirely inappropriate. But I could not hold it back. Night after night of rehearsals, we would get to that line and out it would come. It was uncontrollable, a compulsion. At one rehearsal early on, something small struck me funny, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. After two months of this, our director really became quite angry. “If you can’t fix this soon, I’m going to have to find someone else.” Eventually, the problem solved itself, and the show, as they say, went on.
It was a hard time in my life. It was freshman year of college, and so I was living on my own for the first time, and not doing a great job of taking care of myself. The courses, and the amount of homework that went with them, were impossible to keep up with. And with a lead part in the theater department, instead of doing that homework at night and practicing good self-care, I spent three hours in rehearsals, six days a week. I had difficult relationships to deal with, too. And on top of it all, I was fighting with an emerging chronic mental illness that was slowly destroying me from the inside—and of course, had no idea what it was. It makes sense that all that stress and pain was manifesting at a moment that, in the play, was intentionally designed to produce powerful emotion.
What makes less sense is that it manifested itself in laughter. And different kinds of laughter from one night to the next. Sometimes I would be doubled over in hysterics. Sometimes it would just be a single guffaw. Sometimes it would be a high-pitched, nervous thing, but other times it would be a real belly laugh. I wanted badly to stop it. I tried everything. But it came anyway, and I was powerless. Amidst everything else that was going on, my body desperately needed joy. And so it got it, by force.
And that is what the kingdom of God is like. It is like a seed that is planted—or actually, Jesus says, not even planted, but simply scattered on the ground. Jesus has in mind a first-century context, with first-century agricultural technology. Today we have machines, large farming equipment, that actually—I researched this, it’s incredible—inserts a thin metal shaft, like a needle, into the earth at just the right depth, and then jets the seed through it on a puff of air calculated to just the right pressure, planting for optimal production. It sounds insanely over-complicated to me, but it’s a lot more effective than going out into the fields and just tossing handfuls of seeds onto the ground like Jesus is talking about. And then, nobody does anything to it—no plowing, no tilling, no watering, no tying it to frames to ensure it grows straight, no pesticides, not even putting up fences to keep out the rabbits. But it grows anyway. First the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. It takes care of itself, it grows whether you want it to or not, there is really nothing you can do to stop it. But suddenly the harvest is full and ripe, and the grain is collected and milled and baked, and thousands eat loaves of bread and are filled to fullness with baskets leftover.
I have heard this preached beautifully with the image of a weed growing up between the cracks in a sidewalk. Go ahead, spray it with weed killer, and in a month it will be back, like it or not. It’s a good image, but it’s not good enough. Which is why Jesus follows it up with this story of the mustard seed. And to be clear about it, this isn’t Jesus talking about faith like a mustard seed being able to do great things; that’s a different teaching of his. Here, Jesus is talking about the whole Kingdom of God, and what that really looks like; not just the seed of faith inside us, but the kingdom bursting forth around us. A tiny seed grows into a large bush, large enough for birds from the corners of the earth to nest in its branches.
Friday night I was walking down the street in New York City with some friends, and we came to an area where the sidewalk had been heavily paved with asphalt from the curb all the way to the building. Whoever paved it did a sloppy job, and the paving reached a foot up the wall. There, at the corner of the wall, was a weed. It had actually shoved its way up through the asphalt, pushing it away from the surface, and growing out beyond it. The stem of this plant, under the asphalt, was about four inches around, and the whole thing had grown as tall as me. I suspect it was there because it had grown so strong that nobody could cut it down—at least, not without damaging the building.
This, Jesus tells us, is what the Kingdom of God is like. Like the smallest seed, it is sneaky, and slips in where you don’t expect. Like an untended seed that grows anyway, it is unstoppable. Like the seed ready for harvest, it produces incredible things that change people’s lives. Like the surprise of the biggest bush, it grows into the Kingdom of the World in ways that are so large they are unexpected, drawing people from the corners of the world to its Good News. Like the weed on the street, it is so strong that it can not be torn down, and its roots will slowly tear away at the building it grows on until all is reduced to rubble. And like unstoppable laughter, it counters the stress and pain and despair of the world by bursting into joy.
If I knew this congregation better, I would know the best way to introduce a section of my sermon here about how we, people who dwell in God’s Kingdom, can counter the pain of the Kingdom of this World; pain like tearing children away from their parents and incarcerating them in concentration camps built out of abandoned shopping centers and then using God’s Holy Word to justify these atrocities. But although I think as God’s people we must counter this with gospel, and I obviously can’t stop myself from speaking about this evil, I just don’t know you well enough, and I so I can’t dwell on it any more than I already have.
Instead, I’ll leave you with a different idea: The idea that you live in both of these kingdoms. You were born into the Kingdom of the World. But Christ has made you a citizen of the Kingdom of God by his gift. Nothing you have done has made this true, it just IS true by God’s gift. By the grace of Christ, you have a foot in both.
I live in New York City now, though I get to leave at the beginning of August, which makes me very happy. It is a stressful place to live, so many people in such a small place. It’s odd; some days, I am disgusted by the way people treat each other, the meanness, the cruelty, even in day to day interactions. Other days, I am delighted by the little acts of love people do for one another, the beauty and dignity and greatness they see in each other. An example: One day, a schizophrenic man started up a conversation with a restaurant patron through the open window, and a server angrily shouted him away. The next day, a different schizophrenic man—mental illness always seems more visible in a large city—walked into a coffee shop and started screaming. A server walked up to him, had a quiet and pleasant conversation, treated him like he mattered, gave him a drink, and sent him happily on his way. Two days in a row, this is what I saw. But oddly, no day is filled with both. Friday this week was joyful, all day. Saturday was angry. And if everyone is kind one day, and everyone is angry the next, I suspect it’s not everyone else who is changing. It’s just me, and the way I’m seeing things. Some days I live in the Kingdom of this World. Some days, I live in the Kingdom of God.
Which will you live in today? And if you end up living in the Kingdom of this World, will you respond as if you only live there too? Or will you help to sow the seeds of the Kingdom of God, a growth that cannot be stopped, a growth that will happen whether you sow those seeds or not, a growth promised by a God who is ultimately, always victorious over every evil, and whose joy God has invited you to be a part of?
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