Pentecost 4/Proper 6/Ordinary 11 Year B June 17, 2018
Luther Memorial Church Seattle, WA
The Rev. Julie Hutson
Ezekiel 17: 22-24 + 2 Corinthians 5:6-17 + Mark 4:26-34
Beloved community, grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Creator and from our Savior Jesus the Christ. Amen.
I always enjoy a good story. Stories are told when families and friends and neighbors and classmates and co-workers get together. There are the stories that always get told and there are the stories that are sometimes only mentioned in secret and there are the stories that take awhile to come out, but when they do they explain a whole lot. Take, for instance, the story about why Luther Memorial didn’t allow alcohol at any functions for some time. It seems that at one wedding reception, the punch bowl had a little extra, shall we say, kick to it. The guests were all rather sloshed and it was quite the unintended wild party in an otherwise quiet Broadview neighborhood. And there are so many others. Stories of hikes into Holden and choir parties and Pride parades. Stories remind us of who we are. (Inge)
This is why Jesus was a great story teller. He knew how to tell stories about people’s real lives; what they experienced every day, what they knew, what they saw. He told stories about families, about dinner parties, about baking bread; about losing things in your house and getting robbed and taking care of livestock. And he told a lot of stories about the land – about planting, harvesting, failing; about seeds that grow and those that don’t, about weeds and bad weather and every unexpected thing that has ever happened to anyone who’s tried to grow something green.
Each of his stories had a meaning – or, more honestly, many meanings. Stories about families were also about radical love and forgiveness. Stories about being robbed turned into the beauty of being saved by the most unexpected person – a foreigner, no less. Stories about sheep and lost coins and baking bread turned out to be images of the very life and work of God in the world.
And so, today’s stories about seeds are not just about seeds. God at work in the world, says Jesus, is like seed scattered on the ground, which finds its way into the soil, into the cracks, into any bit of dirt it can find and somehow, grows. The farmer has gone to bed, but the seed has a life of its own and though the farmer has no idea how it happens, the seed will not be stopped.
Jesus then looks around and finds one of the very smallest seeds available. It’s a mustard seed, a tiny speck, which, when put into the ground, grows up and becomes, he says, the greatest of all…shrubs. Is there such a thing as a great shrub? It’s an odd image, but what seems to be great about this particular shrub is that it provides shelter for birds and shade for those underneath it.
Many times we hear in this story the greatness of small things. Don’t underestimate what can be found in a seed, what can happen when you plant one. Jesus said other things like this too, things like: the last shall be first, and the meek shall inherit the earth, and one sheep is worth leaving the whole flock so that no one will be lost.
All of that is contained in the seed of this story. Hidden a bit deeper, for those of us who don’t plant mustard seeds very often, is the humor of the fact that the mustard plant, in addition to being a shrub, was also a nuisance. Honestly, very few people would ever sow a mustard seed on purpose, any more than you or I would stand over our gardens and blow dandelion seeds onto them. The birds are happy about it, but the farmers are not; mustard seeds grow into irritating weeds that will take over inch by inch no matter how hard you try to get rid of them. “The kingdom of God is like ivy,” Jesus could have said to those of us in the Pacific Northwest. Or like kudzu for those in the deep south. Which means that it’s coming for you, and there is nothing you can do about it.
You and I could try to pick one of these meanings as the right one, the only one, or at least the best one, but much of the genius of a story is that you can never really do that. If you are struggling to see the good at work in your life, then a story about a seed that grows in the dark and will keep growing even if you do nothing about it, can be a beautiful word of gospel. If, on the other hand, you are feeling pretty happy about your well-tended garden, then the image of God’s kingdom creeping in like dandelions, or ivy, or kudzu, is unsettling, to say the least. Same stories, different meaning. And with many such parables, says the Bible, Jesus spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it.
What the bible means and how we read and talk about it and refer to it, matters. I know that many of us have had that conversation this week when the bible – or at least some verses of it – came up in a few press conferences about the complexities of immigration in this country, particularly the practice of separating parents from children.
Wading into the murky waters of political conversation from the pulpit easily makes many of us nervous. It makes preachers nervous too. But politics is, at the heart of it, simply the way we organize our human activity – our decisions, our priorities, and our action. Jesus never shied away from that, in fact he called us to it. The church has always been a place to talk about the real impact our faith has on our real lives, in the same way Jesus told stories about the real things that people experienced every day. He certainly got in trouble for it. But he was unafraid to remind us that the kingdom of God is not some thing or some place far away, in another time or another world – it is right here, right now, as close as your hand, he said, like seeds in the earth, like weeds in your garden.
Regardless of our differences on important questions about immigration, we can say some things about the breadth of the biblical witness on how we treat our neighbors, and especially how we treat strangers and foreigners among us, as the scripture often says. One of the most central commands God gives the nation of Israel is to care for the widow, the orphan, and the ‘resident alien,’ or what we might call, the undocumented immigrant. God commands this for two reasons: one, because God is God and this what God wants; and two, because, God says to the Israelite people, you know what it is like to be strangers, to be immigrants, not to belong. You know what it is like to start over, to speak a different language from everyone else, to have people look at you sideways because your food, or culture, or religion is different from theirs. This is baked into your history, says God, and you are commanded to remember it in your action.
We can also say that the bible is full of stories of people who disobey unjust laws. At least two midwives of Egypt refused to follow Pharaoh’s orders that they should kill all the male Hebrew babies, and their disobedience – even including the disobedience of Pharaoh’s own daughter – brought Moses safely into the world. Jesus flipped over tables of merchants in the temple, because sometimes disruption is the way of the kingdom, just like that pesky mustard plant in the garden. So while Paul encouraged early Christians to cooperate with the government for the sake of good order and the protection of all, he kept going until he got to the one law about which God will not negotiate, “love your neighbor as yourself.” Like everything in the bible, if we read the beginning of a verse or a chapter, we need to read all the way to the end.
As people of faith and followers of Jesus it is our duty and delight, our command and our joy – to insist on love for all and resist ways of violence and oppression. It is our job to say together that we don’t agree on everything, but what we do know is this: that the bible’s wide and generous witness is to the power of love, and justice, and mercy for every human being. That we are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. That the bible does not tell us to be silent in the face of cruelty and wrong, but to be courageous and bold, clear and compassionate.
Our faith calls us to believe and act on hard things. Hard things like believing that seeds can still grow in the dark. Hard things like trusting that the kingdom of God is more determined than the weeds in your garden, and its roots run even deeper. Hard things like remembering that there is no such thing as someone else’s children – for we belong to each other in the kingdom of God. The smallest seeds among us are nothing more than the presence of God.[1]
Thanks be to God and let the Church say…Amen.
[1] I am grateful to my friend and colleague, Katy MacCallum Sachse for the bulk of this sermon. Being part of a text study group means that we sharpen one another’s ability to see Gospel and then, to proclaim it.