The Parable of Cell Division and Differentiation

Let’s face it we are physical people. We have bodies, we need food, we live in a physical world. It is no wonder then that our first and greatest faith is placed in our physicalness and the physical context we exist in. If you find it uneasy to accept this truth I’ll provide two examples: The first for recognition and the second for comfort.

Recognition:

 Recognize that you are sitting in a pew.  How do you know that the pew would not dissolve from under you when you sat on it? The answer is… Faith!

“Oh wait” you might object, “That’s not faith. I know I won’t fall through the pew because I’ve never fallen through the pew and I’ve sat in this seat for the last 2, 5, 10, 50 years and I’ve never fallen through. And besides that I sit in chairs all the time and I never fall though, unless of course the chair is broken or poorly made.”

So you’re saying you have a reason for your faith. You are prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give a reason for the hope you have…that you won’t fall through the chair.

Yes. We have faith in the physical.

Faith is a simple response but as we’ve seen it is also a very full answer.  Our faith in the physical is our first and strongest faith because we observe it, we test it we correlate our findings and our faith becomes so strong that we don’t even recognize it as faith but call it by a different name. Truth.

Comfort:

This idea of faith in the physical may still be unsettling or even in some way seem wrong, especially as we gather together here in this Christian setting.   We can take comfort in knowing that God put his faith, his first and strongest faith, the faith that was with him in the beginning, in the physical.

For God so loved the world that he sent his son. God sent his son, Jesus, to a physical world, to be a physical man to bring his people back to him. We can take comfort knowing that God recognized our affinity for faith in the physical long before we did and sent his son to teach us heavenly things, in large part, through the physical world we live in. 

Parable:

Jesus teaches us about heavenly things by pointing out the truths of the physical, the same physical truths we easily recognize and accept without thinking about them because they are the realities we live with from the moment we come into this world.

Jesus points to the physical in parables and if we have eyes to see and ears to hear we can correlate the familiar with the unfamiliar, the physical with the spiritual. Jesus uses our first and greatest faith in the physical to illustrate THE first and greatest faith in him.

So what can we learn from a mustard seed? Let’s find out!

Mt. 13:31

He told them another parable: The kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so the birds of the air come and perch in its branches”

Jesus said he tells us the truth so let’s review just what those truths are.

In Mt 13:31 we read -

Truth 1: The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed.

Truth 2: Mustard seeds are small.

Truth 3: Mustard plants grow really big.

Later in Matthew 13:35 Jesus tells the disciples:

“I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter the things hidden since the creation of the world.”

On this side of faith, when we have eyes to see and ears to hear, the truths of the mustard seed illustrate powerful spiritual concepts.

 Faith is powerful.  Small, seemingly insignificant things can have a big impact.

Awesome! That’s true, God’s Truth. Thank you mustard seed. Thank you Jesus.

Yet are you left with any other questions? I am, and I think others might be too.

We want to know how. We want to know why. Pastor Kerry mentioned that kids ask questions like this. How? Why? We’ve heard about how Jesus appreciated the faith of a child and a child’s faith is simple and pure but it is not immune from questions?

For example a child might ask: how does it get so big? What happens between small seed and giant plant? What happens between humble beginnings and the kingdom of God?

A few weeks ago we had a stink bug lay a bunch of eggs on the glass of our backdoor and a week later they hatched.  Upon observing the change from egg to nymph stink bug my youngest son, Kellen, asked, “How did they get so big?”

To this I said, “Well Kellen, It’s like the Kingdom of God.” No I’m just kidding. That just wouldn’t have made sense. Instead, naturally I answered, “Cell Division and Differentiation.”

Ok so maybe I’m not as good a teacher as Jesus, but we’re also not comparing apples to apples.  I gave a physical answer to a physical question. And even if I had been trying to explain a spiritual truth at least I was on the right track. 

Start with the physical. That is where we live, that is what we know. Then use the truth of the physical to illuminate the truth of the spiritual.

You know, like Jesus would, with a parable.

Kellen’s question about the stink bugs is really the same one I asked about the mustard seed, and the Kingdom of God. How does it get so big? And you know what? In true parable form, an exploration of the physical explanation can illuminate the spiritual truth of the expansion of the kingdom of God.

So let’s try it out with the parable of… Cell Division and Differentiation

In order for the parable to work we first need to know the physical context that it draws from so let’s start with cell division.  Be warned I’m going to jump organisms a bit but that is possible because the principles are pretty universal across organisms.

This is Xenopus. Xenopus is not a mustard, or a stink bug, it is a frog. And also the subjects of many developmental biologists gaze and therefore there are some pretty neat pictures!  It starts as a single cell and then as you can see from the video the single cell divides into 2 then 2 to 4, 4 to 8, 16, 32 and on and on until there are hundreds of cells packed together.  This is cell division, and while this example comes from a frog it happens similarly in all animals, this is how we all got our start. The cells are in community, they have shared experiences and a shared lineage.

So that was cell division in early development. We could also talk about how established cells of the body continually divide and create replacements for themselves before they ultimately die, leaving everything they have accumulated over their lives to the body they have been a part of. But we’re not talking about that and besides Amy covered that in her tithing and financial planning sermon a few weeks ago.

So if this is going to work as a parable it should also be pretty simple so I created this little cartoon of the blastula (or big hunk of cells) that we saw forming earlier. What we couldn’t see from the last video was what was happening inside of the mass.  After the initial phases of division, cells start to become differentiated. The cells in green represent embryonic stem cells which have the potential to become any type of cell in the body.  Some of these will become the heart, some will be cartilage then bone while others will form kidneys, liver, brain, blood guts and on and on. It is this differentiation that moves us toward functionality. One body many parts.

So the model is nice for looking at but it also helps to see the real thing in action so let’s continue on with our friend the frog.

This video picks up where we left off in the first and we can see some real structures forming. The first part is called gastrulation and then neuralation. By the end of this video we can almost see the beginnings of a head. What we can’t see from this view is the further differentiation of cells further fated to become and beginning to form the spinal cord, heart, respiratory organs, connective tissue etc etc etc. Everything that is needed for the body to function comes from differentiation. What is even more difficult to see but essential to the process is the environmental physiochemical encouragement each cell gets to be different, to follow its purpose. To be a hand, a heart, a brain.

An important step later in development is the refinement of the parts. Here we are jumping organisms to a human, but again the process is the same for all animals.  In order for the foot to take on it’s full function some of the parts that were built up have to die. There is a programmed cell death, that carves away the old flesh revealing the refined organism ready to truly live.

 So, now with the physical to light the way does the parable hold up in revealing a spiritual truth? Does it help us answer how the kingdom gets big how we build the body of Christ? Maybe if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
Closing:

If you didn’t realize it already we talked about science today. We’ve seen that science, and the investigation of the physical world around us can be lifted up as worship. Science can point us to the mind of God. Not in his prescription for how to build this world or breathe life into that body, rather we are pointed to his power, orderliness, his promotion of the truth and his unlimited grace to meet us where we are.

But the methodology of the parable is not limited to science, but is universal across all areas of our experience. 

Faith is like a chair, it will always hold you up when you rest on it, unless it has fallen into disrepair.

Faith is like hitting a softball, wait wait wait wait wait wait wait, but don’t forget to keep your eye on the ball.

We can see God through the parables of our lives whether examining the super small or the grandeur of the universe, as long as we have eyes to see and ears to hear.