Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
July 26, 2026
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church, Oakland, CA.
Watching a Red Sox game at Fenway as a kid, mustard on a baseball park frankfurter was always French’s yellow mustard! It wasn’t until much longer when I was introduced to Grey Poupon mustard! That’s gourmet mustard! Now, with a plant-based hot dog, yellow mustard with relish, no catsup is the way to go!
You have heard this before a mustard seed is very small. Contrary to how we have idealized the image of the mustard seed, the mustard shrub was not a highly regarded addition to one’s garden in the past. It was a weed, a shrub bush that consumed valuable garden space. It would be weeded out and burn.
Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven that something small and worthless has the potential for surprising growth that provides a place of shelter and nurture. What we consider to be junk, can have ultimate value to God’s kingdom.
Jesus tells another story about the kingdom of heaven is like yeast that makes bread. But unfamiliar with us today is that yeast or leaven is not the same as we know it today. I remember yeast in these small Fleishmann packets that we bought from the supermarket. My Mom didn’t make bread with them but she used them to make pork buns, the char sui bows we have in a dim sum meal!
In Scripture, leaven or yeast is almost universally understood as something evil or unclean. The leavening agent of the time was created by setting aside a portion of leftover bread to spoil, in order to create leaven used in future baking, like sourdough starter. Not spoiled enough, it is worthless and cannot cause the new batter to rise. Allowed to spoil too long, it not only ruins the bread but can result in food poisoning. Leaven can be fatal. Only a small portion—like a mustard seed—is needed to leaven flour.
Now that I have talked about mustard, relish, and hot dogs on a bun, we need some of John Glaassen’s corn dogs right now!
Kingdom or Realm of Heaven
If we were in the crowd when Jesus told these parables, we probably would have been disappointed. Jesus told stories about seeds and plants, followed by stories of baking bread, plowing the field, and fishing. While he threw in a story about a wealthy merchant, all the rest are as ordinary as a mustard bush.
Under the oppression of the Romans, Jesus didn’t tell stories about kings, military generals or revolutionary leaders. He disappointed any zealots who wanted to hear about big changes to happen. Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven is more than Lord and King, it’s like a farmer or a baker woman. Rather than the way we would like to raise Jesus up, enthroning him to exalt the highest heavens, Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven is literally down to earth.
God’s realm is made up of ordinary people—a tenant farmer, a housewife, fishermen—doing everyday things.
The whole point is that as Christians, we are called to believe in the incarnation, the mystery of the meaning of the divine and human in the person of Jesus Christ. In his parables, Jesus puts that incarnational focus not on himself but on the world around him.
He says, “The Kingdom of God is like…” the most common things in human life. Like Jesus himself, this everyday world embodies the sacred meeting of the divine and the human, if only we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.
Now in this ancient world particularly from Greek and Roman myths like Aesop’s fables, there were gods disguised as humans or talking animals that taught how the divine appears in life. But Jesus says there are no gods disguised or talking animals but the kingdom of heaven can be found in real-life women and men going about their everyday work.
Jesus tells us that this kingdom is not far, far away but “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” He demonstrates that nearness every time he heals someone, reaches out the outcasts, respects women, or cares for the poor. For Jesus, God’s realm is not some kingdom in the sweet by and by, but as close as the next mustard bush or a loaf of bread.
That nearness, far more than the threat of eternal agony in verse 50, is the call to believe. Of these five parables, only the last includes an apocalyptic judgment. The rest envision God in every nook and cranny of daily life, from kneading dough to plowing fields. Jesus transforms human life not by scaring the hell out of people, but by helping them see that the realm of God is close at hand.
Lakeshore Mustard Seeds
What does all of this mean to Lakeshore?
If we were the mustard seed or the leaven, we would be convention-subverting people. Our discipleship is defined against the empires of our world. To be good citizens of God’s realm, we would be different from this Rome-like world.
When our Christian faith, predominantly middle-class, conventional religion in the United States is privileged, we are challenged in what discipleship should look like. Today, we are a sanctuary church against the government so that immigrants and undocumented friends and neighbors can find refuge. We are committed to ending violence and cease-fire in Oakland and beyond whilewe continue to protect the rights to own guns. We work to end hunger with our food bank and hunger walk in a country that is the richest in the world. We are an open, progressive and welcoming and affirming people when the world continues to take away basic human rights from the people we love.
The parables of the mustard seed and the leaven challenge us to be a disciple fit for the realm of God and not for this empire in the world. If our society is basically healthy in the spirit of shalom and mercy, health flowing from the springs of peace and justice, then we can imagine the church working in sync with society. But not today.
But when our society resembles the empire of Rome more closely than the realm of God, our discipleship needs to be like leaven to influence policies and budgets that now value social inequality and violence instead of having mercy and peace.
One of the many things you do as Lakeshore church that I have been blessed Sunday after Sunday is the famous Coffee Hour! Like Stone Soup, you bring tasty food for everyone to partake. Like the miracle of the 5 loaves of bread and two fish, there’s always enough to feed us. Like the naked or hungry that Jesus talked about, we always offer something and in turn, we have given something to eat and drink to Jesus himself.
If there’s one mustard seed or leaven that Lakeshore excels in is the Coffee Hour! It’s not an extravagant production but simple cheese and cracker trays or home-baked cookies or some store-bought fried chicken, Coffee Hour feeds us and we take what has made us full and go out to the streets and highways of life and proclaim the kingdom of heaven is here, right here on Lakeshore Avenue, in Oakland, all around us now.
Just as ordinary and common when a farmer picks out seeds from the mustard bush weed or a woman baker makes a common loaf of bread, Coffee Hour is our daily bread, something we do and in doing so, we proclaim the realm of heaven is here.
Finding Treasures
Our lesson for today include three more parables or stories. We see that someone discovers a treasure someone else buried and with joy goes out to sell the treasure so that he could buy the land. There’s a merchant who were looking for fine pearls and finds one that has great value; he sells everything he had so he could buy it. And then we have fishermen who caught every kind of fish in their nets and when they brought their catch on shore, they sorted out the good ones from the bad ones.
Finding or catching these once hidden treasures but are now found reminds us that we have treasures that may still be hidden but can be found in God’s work on earth with us. In this interim period of the life of this church, there are hidden treasures that are ready to be found when we are ready to have God transform our conventional life to become disruptive and be unconventional again.
We might discover a gift or ability of someone that can take us to new adventures of ministry that we have not gone before. We might decide that there is great value in something that Lakeshore has or currently own that can be transformed into something that we need now, like finding a valuable pearl. Or it could be like catching a large net of fish but we are able to sort out what’s more important for us today and in the future and leave the rest behind.
When a farmer plants the field with seeds to grow something he wants, there’s often mustard seeds in that sack of valued seeds. A mustard bush is not what is expected to spring up, no one notices the seed. It’s hard to see, hard to keep an eye on it, but it has a way of mixing with what is more valued. At the end of the day, the mustard seed germinates and sprouts and grows, its final result radically reorients what is expected.
The disciples like us were shocked to hear Jesus say, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed,” because maybe they assume that the planting and cultivation of God’s kingdom is more orderly and predictable, laid out in neat rows. They probably thought that the kingdom of heaven is like soybeans, or beautiful rows of vineyard grapes.
However, the kingdom of heaven is more like a mustard seed invading into bounded rows of expected crops to challenge what may be the status-quo. Perhaps the kingdom of heaven at Lakeshore as we are sitting in orderly rows of pews means an inbreaking of what we expect. Mustard seeds just hide there in the sack of other seeds for us to understand that God will invade our familiar routines and make something new with us.
The tiny little symbol of the mustard seed is how God is forever invading our orderly sense of things. Like a mustard seed, like a treasure hidden in the field, like a pearl of great value hidden amid the rest, like the tasty fish hidden amid the whole catch, the kingdom of heaven is near.
Archbishop Tutu
In the early 1980s, there was an interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu on public television. It is hard to believe now, but back then when apartheid was very strong and there was no outward sign that it would end any time soon. Tutu said this curious thing: “When the white people arrived, we had the land and they had the Bible. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ When we opened our eyes, they had the land and we had the Bible. And we got the better of the deal.”
The kingdom of heaven, like a mustard seed, invades the cultivated soil of our certainties and our boundaries and creates out of it all something new—“the better of the deal.” Hidden within what we think we see so clearly, it is subversive and grows up in unexpected ways until what we thought we know is transformed and redeemed by our surprising, invasive God.
I used to only put yellow mustard on my hot dogs, but I can use the grey mustard too now because my palette has changed. God is always transforming us in unexpected ways. Maybe you might also like Grey Poupon mustard too! God is transforming Lakeshore church to declare that the kingdom of heaven is here.
Let us pray.
Lord God, teach us to be opened to new ideas, new ways of seeing ourselves, new sense of where you are calling us as Lakeshore church to do your work in the world. Show us to see what we may have avoided and expand our horizons to answer your call for us. Reassure us that it’s often the little things that we do like Coffee Hour is when you show up to feed the hungry, to become friends with strangers, and to give hope that you are in the world to bring about peace, justice, and joy. Lord, may the mustard seed in all of us grow so big that we can make mustard for our hot dogs. In Christ’s name, we pray. Amen.