Idea Sharing

Thanks to my sister Debbie for sharing her experience of yesterday and filling people with new learning.

I love it when that happens, and last night was definitely one of those nights for me too.

We were working our way through Matthew 13 last night in Bible Study and we had several parables. As we got to talking I talked about the Parable of the Sower. I referenced some reading I have done lately on blogs about such parable, that maybe the sower was extremely wasteful. I asked the group to consider why someone might think this way.

It was at that point I took us to the parable of the Mustard Seed and of the Yeast in the Flour. I asked the folks to read them and tell me if it made sense. Immediately they responded that of course it did. I then took a page from my mentor, Rev. LLoyd Saatjian, who often taught that every parable has an "explosion" or something that really is just not right in the telling of the story.

I asked the group to go back and see what they found in those two short parables that was really just not right. The group observed two things - the mustard seed becoming a tree, and the yeast leavening 3 measures of flour. But it still made perfect sense to them. We then talked about how big a mustard plant can really become and whether that vision is correct. This is the "explosion" of something that should not happen that does in the Parable of the Mustard Seed. And in the Parable of the Yeast, we considered how much three measures is. They were coming at it from the aspect of three measures as three cups of flour, when three measures is closer to three barrels of flour.

Explosions went off in their heads. And they had fun. We learned. It was great.