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| A kingdom of ... mustard plants? |
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(Please feel free to email a response or a question) June 14, 2009 Ezekiel 17: 22-24; Mark 4: 26-34 More light, more truth, is breaking from your Word. More light, more truth, Holy Spirit, help us hear what needs to be heard. (from a hymn by Christopher Grundy) I think I have a lot more in common with the farmer who ignored his crops in the first parable from Jesus in today’s Gospel than I do with some of the really good gardeners among us. No one will ever mistake me for a master gardener. If I get involved in this at all, I am likely to plant a few seeds early in the season and then be surprised several months later to discover that there is new growth around our house. This assumes I haven’t run over the new growth with the lawn mower. And those of you who have been out to Terry Kiss Frank’s house pulling up garlic mustard have an appreciation of how a little tiny seed can grow into a pretty hardy and expansive plant. The mustard plants in Israel can look scrawny, but they still grow to a size that is pretty amazing for something coming from one small seed. So these are the images Jesus uses to talk about the kingdom of God. Images of a bountiful harvest growing untended. Images of a small seed springing up into a wild and hard-to-control shrub that provides shelter for the birds. What a contrast to the very well tended, very orderly and rather inhospitable empire of Rome. What a contrast to what we think of in our day as images of power and glory, images of an empire or a kingdom. In the reading from Ezekiel, that imagery is much more grandiose – an eagle taking the sprig off the top of a mighty cedar, planted high upon the mountain. But even there, Ezekiel offers a hint of things to come – this new tree, too, will shelter birds of every kind. And God will turn the world upside, making the high tree low and the low tree high, drying up the green tree and making the dry tree flourish. That’s part of what I find fascinating in these two readings today. The imagery is so vivid. The stories Jesus tells cry out for us to reflect on what they tell us about God. Let me offer two contemporary stories about ways to think about God’s kingdom breaking through among us and then I’ll go back and try to connect those stories to our readings. The first story is from Diane White. I heard Diane about a week ago at a breakfast for those churches that are involved in the Allied Partners project. Many of you bring food or cash donations for the food pantry on Allied Drive as part of our participation in Allied Partners. So Diane told her story to those of us gathered at that breakfast and I asked her if she would share it with us today. Diane talked about losing her job in Ripon, moving from Green Lake in March to live with her son on Allied Drive, called 2-1-1 for ideas about how to survive and getting referrals for furniture and food. She went to food pantry on Allied, got help, then volunteered to help others. Since mid-May, she has been working at Walgreens. She expressed her appreciation to the people of Memorial for helping with the food pantry. The second story is from Izzeldin Abuelaish. That name probably does not mean anything to you, but his story might sound a little bit familiar. Last January, when the Israeli army launched a massive incursion into Gaza in an attempt to stop rocket attacks on Israeli cities, Abuelaish’s voice was one of the Palestinian voices that was heard often on the news in Israel and in the U.S. He is fluent in Arabic and Hebrew and English. He is a well-regarded doctor who was educated at Harvard, who treats patients both in Gaza and in Israeli hospitals. As the offensive intensified, he hunkered down in his house in Gaza with his family, talking on the phone with journalists from Israel and the global media. His where-abouts and his activities were a very public fact. On Jan. 16, an Israeli tank fired a shell into his house, saying they thought it was a Hamas shelter. The shell pierced a bedroom in the house, killing three of Abuelaish’s daughters -- ages 14, 15 and 21 – along with a 17-year old niece. Abuelaish dug deep into his Muslim faith after that, trying to figure out why he had been selected to experience such a horrible tragedy. “I lost three, precious, beautiful daughters, but I can’t return them back,” he told National Public Radio last week. “I have five more and I have the future. I have many good things that I can do for others.” So he is taking the money that the Israeli government is giving him in compensation for the deaths in his family and using it to give scholarships and other support to needy Palestinian women and girls in Gaza. “The blood of my daughters will be the seeds of that money,” he said. And just imagine what those seeds can grow into as the scholarships and grants open new opportunities for women in that scarred land of Gaza. These are ways that God’s realm begins to break forth in our days. Notice that in both of these stories, it took actions by people to make good things happen. The folks here donating to the food pantry, the people who work there, Diane choosing to join in helping them – these were not folks who just laid down for a nap while the plants were growing. Izzeldin Abuelaish did not just withdraw and tend to his grief. He is planting new seeds. We can understand that sort of action. Where I think we might have trouble with the parables of Jesus is that things are happening in them without much human action. Yes, the farmer plants the seeds, but then he goes to sleep. The grain grows without any further action on his part. The mustard plants don’t need a lot of human help to emerge from that tiny seed. Wendy Farley, who is a professor of religion at Emory University in Atlanta, has a wonderful way of describing the difference between how we get things done in our lives and the way Jesus describes how things work with God. It makes sense to us to be busy, to act with certainty about our convictions. We achieve all sorts of things, Farley says, “by working hard and committing ourselves to values: well-run offices, good grades, better schools, the politicians of our choice, svelte figures, neatly trimmed lawns.” Not much would happen in our world if we did not work for it or if we were indifferent to the moral and political issues of our time. Farley says that our way of doing things makes sense to us. It is just not the way that Jesus describes how it is with God. She writes: “Jesus is calling us to a very different way of being with ourselves, with one another, with the divine, by asking us to recognize that spiritual growth and intimacy with God arises as naturally as seeds growth. The harvest will come without us having to work for it because God adores us and it is this love that is the power of growth.” And I would suggest that as we sense God’s love growing within us, that in turn empowers us to do the kinds of things that make a difference in the world. Diane experienced a tangible manifestation of God’s love in the food that was waiting on shelves for her --- and that, in turn, inspired her to help others. Izzeldin Abuelaish tried to find the presence of God in the midst of his overpowering grief and drew on one of the fundamental tenets of his faith. As he put it: “We have to respect each other as a human, as equal, that the dignity of both is equal.” Or, to use the imagery from our readings today, that the branches of the cedar tree as well as the branches of the mustard plant are there to shelter all the birds. I started out by talking about the contrast between the well tended, very orderly and rather inhospitable empire of Rome and the unruly and unpredictable nature of the grain and shrubs in Jesus’ stories. With the children earlier, I talked about the inadequacy of judging people by appearances. It seems to me something that we can pull out of these stories is this: in the way Jesus describes God’s realm, greatness is measured not by the size and grandeur of the tree or by the beauty of the rows of grain, but by the way shelter is given. We rely on God’s grace to break through in unexpected places, not because of what we do, but because of God’s love. When it breaks through, we begin to see the world in new ways, to find that what we thought was a large and green tree is really less impressive than this mustard shrub that grew from the tiniest of seeds. Then we can go about our lives with a renewed commitment to do what we can to help transform our lives and the lives of those we encounter in ways that create a place of compassion, courage and hope in the midst of empires that foster hate, hopelessness and fear. I’d invite you to join with me in singing through three times a short hymn from the community of Taize in France the hymn in your bulletins about the Kingdom of God. At Taize, they look for ways to create the spaces for God’s love to grow even as they stand along side those who live in the most dire of circumstances. So let us sing. |