Preached on June 14, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, OH, UCC
Mark 4:26-34
Dedicated to my creative writing professor, whose name I am sorry to have forgotten; and always to the glory of God.
As I think back on my life, and how it is that I came to be standing in this place, I know that there were many people who planted seeds along the way, not knowing what they would grow into, or even if they would grow into anything at all. I think about the person who, when I was three years old and beginning at a preschool located in a church we had never heard of, invited my parents to attend worship there. It became our church home, and that brought me into contact with the people and experiences that would lead me to be confirmed, ordained, and married in that sanctuary. That’s one seed.
I also remember my English professor in college, whom I happened to run into one day at the sinks in the English building’s bathroom, where we stood and talked for about ten minutes about my progress in Creative Writing. His affirming and honest encouragement about my work made me realize that I was capable of more than I had thought. He has no idea of the confidence he gave me to pursue seminary upon my graduation.
Those are two people who touched my life at a decisive time. There are many more, and of course there are many people who had a much larger and extended influence in my life. But I think about those small encounters when I hear these parables of Jesus about seeds. They remind me of the people who affected my life in a significant way. And I am certain that what has grown in my life because of them is more than they ever imagined. That’s the wonderful thing about the image of planting seeds. The thing it calls for and celebrates is our action at a decisive moment. We just scatter seed, and the growth can be astounding.
Jesus says that the kingdom of God is like this. It’s like someone who scatters seed which grows on its own, without our even knowing how. We can trust God to make the seed, and we can trust God with the growth. All we are asked to do is to scatter the seed we have as widely and as generously as we can. And thank God for that, because when we forget that this is how it works, we get into trouble. When we forget, we get into at least two kinds of trouble, and you see where I’m going.
The first kind of trouble we get into by forgetting that the kingdom of God is like the growth of scattered seed is to imagine that it’s all up to us. It’s up to us to make everything work; we are self-reliant, independent, and responsible. The trouble is that when you’re doing all the work to be independently self-reliant, convinced that you can fix everything on your own (or convinced that you should be able to fix everything on your own), when we do that, then there’s no room to discover our divine dependence, our reliance on God and on each other. I wonder if this is why Jesus said that the poor in spirit receive the kingdom of heaven, because everyone else thinks that we can create the kingdom on our own. The poor in spirit are the only ones who know better.
It’s a wonderful thing to be successful, to achieve your goals, but the trouble is that those who are successful at achieving can be unsuccessful at receiving. When Jesus said that it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, it was because the rich man who had achieved so much had trouble receiving the kingdom of God the only way that we can, as a free gift.
It is all too easy for good, responsible people who are filled with love for the world to find themselves holding the longest to-do list in the world. This parable reminds us that there is a balance between taking and letting go responsibility. It’s good to be responsible, and good that we have so many responsible people here, but let’s be sure to remember which part is our responsibility: scattering seeds. We are called to invite people to come to worship and join us for a meal, to work beside us on a mission tour or board, but it is not our job to make them accept the invitation. We are called to be friendly and welcoming and reach out to people we don’t know, but it is not our job to make them like us, or even to make them like God. We are called to serve people at times of funerals, for weddings and baptisms, to provide food and support, but it is not our job to do their work of grieving, or seeking, or committing to a new way of life.
As a part of a family, you are responsible for how you treat your parents, children, or siblings, but the growth of compassion, forgiveness, and patience in the rest of your family is up to them and to God. The same goes for your neighborhood, your country, and the world. What would happen if our nation based our relationships with others based on who we want to be, instead of responding in kind to how we are treated? All that you’re responsible for is your own seed to scatter, to give generously, and then to turn over to God the mysterious growth that happens whether we understand it or not. We get into trouble when we think that everything is up to us.
The second danger of forgetting about how the seed grows is the discouragement and cynicism that says nothing we do makes a difference. You know this feeling. It seems like I work and work, and nothing seems to be getting better or easier. When we don’t see the results, when we don’t see our work coming to fruition, we begin to think that nothing is making a difference. It may be that Jesus told these parables because the disciples were starting to get cynical. “Jesus, you keep saying the kingdom of God is at hand, but everything looks the same to us. The Roman empire still oppresses, the poor are still poor, you healed the sick in a couple towns, but you’ve barely made a dent in illness, and half your family still thinks you’re crazy.” So Jesus tells them that the kingdom is not like fireworks going off – it doesn’t happen in a bright, wondrous moment; it’s like a seed. Have some patience, some trust. Have some some faith. That’s what seeds are about, sometimes they’re growing even when we can’t see anything at all.
There’s another, better known parable about sowing seeds, in which a farmer scatters seed and some falls on rocky ground, some among the thorny weeds, and some along the path where birds eat them. The only place the seeds grow is in the good soil. So when we scatter seed, it grows in one place out of four. That’s a 25% success rate, and Jesus tells us that it’s enough. And just when the disciples are scratching their heads about this inefficiency, Jesus tells them that the seed in the good soil produces returns of 30, 60, and 90 fold. We’ve got to trust the kingdom, even when it seems like nothing is happening.
Who has scattered seed in your lives? Who has shown you, in some small way, that you are valuable? That you are accepted? That you have something to offer? In other words, who has shown you that God’s love is so great that God loves everyone in this room just as much as if you were the only person on earth to love?
Once, when Mr. Rogers was being honored for his work in television, he asked the same kind of question. You all remember Mr. Rogers, don’t you? He was the one who found a way to preach the gospel every day on his television show for children, when he would walk into his house singing about neighbors, take off his jacket and shoes and put on a cardigan and shoes more suitable for being at home (at wouldn’t it be great if we all did this?), and then he would look right at each child sitting at home and say “I like you, just the way you are.” Unconditional love – that’s the gospel. Well, he was being honored at one of these shows where the theater is filled with celebrities and the movers and shakers. And when he walked on stage to make his speech, he said that there were many people who had helped him along the way. And then he said “I bet that each of you can think of someone special who was very important to you. Let’s all take ten seconds to think about that person.” And then, with a smile, he said “I’ll watch the time,” and this televised broadcast went silent for ten seconds. Ten seconds is a long time on the air. Anyone else would think it was a waste. But no one was going to tell Mr. Rogers he couldn’t do it. As the seconds ticked by, there were moist eyes and tears all through the audience in the theater, and probably at home.
Now, since we can all think about people who made a difference, who made our lives and the world a brighter place, even when their actions were very small, how does that affect the way we think about what we can do? What are the ways that you can scatter seeds of love so that the kingdom of God can keep growing?
That’s the question for us to carry out the doors today. And with that question, we can carry our trust that the kingdom of God is growing all around us. God is at work, and if we can’t always see it, or if we don’t know how it could possibly happen, that’s okay, because seeds don’t need us to know all that they are doing for them to grow, and that’s just how it is with the wondrous, mysterious presence of God.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Monday, June 1, 2009
Sermon - A Light by which to Understand
Preached on May 31, 2009, Pentecost Sunday, at The First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC
Ezekiel 37:1-14 & Acts 2:1-21
Dedicated to the high school graduates of this congregation; and always to the glory of God.
The disciples that we read about in Acts believed that they had met God in the life of this son of Mary from Nazareth. They believed that in the life of Jesus, God was with them. But now Jesus was gone; not dead, but resurrected and returned to the heavenly realm, but not before he’d had the chance to tell them that God would still be with them, and that is what this day of Pentecost is about. The message for us today (and you can forget everything else if you remember this) the message of Pentecost is that God is still with us. God is with us, and the way that God is made real to us is as a Spirit, as a spiritual presence that we call the Holy Spirit.
I think that this day of Pentecost is important because it gives to us a story that helps us to see our own lives in a new way. It helps us to see what God is doing in our lives. I mean, it’s nice for me to get up and say that the message today is that God is with us, but what does that mean? If God is here, then what is God doing?
That’s where the story comes in. Now, this is an old story, told and heard by people in a very different time and culture than ours, so it will take a bit of understanding for us to hear what this story meant to them, and then what it can mean for us. That’s true for any part of the Biblical books, sometimes the language, ideas, and metaphors seem particularly foreign, and this is one of those times. So let us listen with careful ears to hear what God is doing as the Holy Spirit.
Pentecost was an interesting occasion for their first experience of the Holy Spirit, because Pentecost was a Jewish festival held fifty days after Passover, and a time when many Jews whose families had long since moved to other regions and kingdoms to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. That’s why we heard that list of all those people and places that are hard to say and don’t mean anything to us, pronounced correctly or not. What that list meant to people in the first century was that a lot of foreigners were in the city that day. They spoke different languages and had little understanding of each other. This is an important list, and we’ll get back to it soon.
So here are all these people together at Pentecost, when suddenly they have an amazing religious experience of the spiritual presence of God. I love the way they it’s described in the book of Acts, because you get the sense that it was too amazing for words, and they just tried their best to explain it. There was “a sound like the blowing of a violent wind,” they said. It makes perfect sense that these words would come to mind, because they grew up hearing the scriptures that always talk about God’s spirit as a wind, or a breath. The Hebrew word Ruah can mean both spirit and wind, and so I’ll tell you what I tell the confirmation class every year: whenever you hear the words wind or breath in the scriptures, you know that they are symbolic of the spirit of God. So when the disciples have their own spiritual experience of God, they say that it was like the sound of wind, and everyone knows what they are talking about.
The next thing we read, as they search for some adequate language to describe the indescribable, is that “they saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.”
Tongues of fire? Really?
“Well, that’s what it seemed like.”
Fire makes us think of warmth and light, power and energy for those days before electricity. It is as if they felt enlightened by the Holy Spirit. Maybe if the story were told today, we would say that the experience of God is like a light bulb clicking on above each of our heads. Aha! Now we get it! Now we have a vision for our lives, for our community. Now we understand what our lives are all about.
The light bulb went on for the disciples, and they began to share the good news that they had learned from Jesus, and now another amazing thing happens. All those foreign people from that long list understand the good news in their own languages. The Holy Spirit came to people who didn’t understand each other and brought about understanding.
Now, you may be wondering about what the story said about the disciples speaking in tongues. That’s something that gets talked about in the early church, and some churches still talk about it, but not really in our tradition, and so we often don’t know what to make of this speaking in tongues. I’m not going to get into it except to say this. Since we don’t know what it’s about, let’s accept that in the New Testament, they saw speaking in tongues as a gift from God. It was legitimate and it was a good thing when it became the means of producing understanding. Do you remember the beginning of the famous passage in I Corinthians chapter 13? Paul is writing to a church in which some people have gotten out of hand with speaking in tongues, even when no one understands what they’re saying. So he writes to them “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” This speaking in tongues is supposed to increase love, and if it doesn’t, it’s just an annoying noise. That’s true about everything in our lives, isn’t it?
So that’s all I’m going to say about the speaking in tongues because figuring out what that means is not the point of this story. The point is that the Holy Spirit brought about understanding.
Now we are back at our question. If the message today is that God is with us as the Holy Spirit, then what is God doing?
God is helping us to understand each other. God gives us a flame of insight – or a light bulb – which becomes for us a light by which to understand. If we want to look for the presence of God among us, then we should pay attention to wherever people are learning to understand each other. Or, to put it another way, we should look to how we can share the good news of God in a way that others will understand. I’ve never believed that showing up at someone’s door with a pamphlet, or telling people that Jesus is the answer does much good. You can’t say that Jesus is the answer if no one is asking a question.
I remember of St. Francis, who said that we should “preach the gospel always. If necessary, use words.” To me, that means that we might help others to understand the message of God more with our actions than with our words, and this came from a man who showed great love to the poor and the sick, who gave them the comfort of hands-on care. When we act to alleviate the suffering of hunger, homelessness, illness, or loneliness, our actions reach across barriers of language, culture, and creed. People understand the message of being cared for, of friendship and community. I bet you know about this in your own lives, and I hope we know about this in this church.
I remember being a child and hearing in church about a group of missionaries who found out that they would be allowed to work in a foreign nation only on the condition that they could not say anything about their religion to anyone. They thought about it, and finally said “that’s no problem. Everything we need to communicate about our faith is in our work to improve health care, water quality, and education.” And when people would come to them privately, to ask why they did what they did, they would say “because of what Jesus taught us.”
On this day of Pentecost we celebrate that the Holy Spirit of God is with us here and now, giving us light by which to understand. Frederick Buechner described this gift so well, and I will close with his words, which speak so well to our graduates today, as you begin the next part of your lives. And they speak to all of us who wonder what the next part of our lives will be.
“Jesus himself is beyond our seeing, but in the darkness where we stand, we see, thanks to him, something of the path that stretches out from the door, something of whatever it is that keeps us trying more or less to follow the path even when we can hardly believe that it goes anywhere worth going or that we have what it takes to go there.” (Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, page 62.)
Ezekiel 37:1-14 & Acts 2:1-21
Dedicated to the high school graduates of this congregation; and always to the glory of God.
The disciples that we read about in Acts believed that they had met God in the life of this son of Mary from Nazareth. They believed that in the life of Jesus, God was with them. But now Jesus was gone; not dead, but resurrected and returned to the heavenly realm, but not before he’d had the chance to tell them that God would still be with them, and that is what this day of Pentecost is about. The message for us today (and you can forget everything else if you remember this) the message of Pentecost is that God is still with us. God is with us, and the way that God is made real to us is as a Spirit, as a spiritual presence that we call the Holy Spirit.
I think that this day of Pentecost is important because it gives to us a story that helps us to see our own lives in a new way. It helps us to see what God is doing in our lives. I mean, it’s nice for me to get up and say that the message today is that God is with us, but what does that mean? If God is here, then what is God doing?
That’s where the story comes in. Now, this is an old story, told and heard by people in a very different time and culture than ours, so it will take a bit of understanding for us to hear what this story meant to them, and then what it can mean for us. That’s true for any part of the Biblical books, sometimes the language, ideas, and metaphors seem particularly foreign, and this is one of those times. So let us listen with careful ears to hear what God is doing as the Holy Spirit.
Pentecost was an interesting occasion for their first experience of the Holy Spirit, because Pentecost was a Jewish festival held fifty days after Passover, and a time when many Jews whose families had long since moved to other regions and kingdoms to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. That’s why we heard that list of all those people and places that are hard to say and don’t mean anything to us, pronounced correctly or not. What that list meant to people in the first century was that a lot of foreigners were in the city that day. They spoke different languages and had little understanding of each other. This is an important list, and we’ll get back to it soon.
So here are all these people together at Pentecost, when suddenly they have an amazing religious experience of the spiritual presence of God. I love the way they it’s described in the book of Acts, because you get the sense that it was too amazing for words, and they just tried their best to explain it. There was “a sound like the blowing of a violent wind,” they said. It makes perfect sense that these words would come to mind, because they grew up hearing the scriptures that always talk about God’s spirit as a wind, or a breath. The Hebrew word Ruah can mean both spirit and wind, and so I’ll tell you what I tell the confirmation class every year: whenever you hear the words wind or breath in the scriptures, you know that they are symbolic of the spirit of God. So when the disciples have their own spiritual experience of God, they say that it was like the sound of wind, and everyone knows what they are talking about.
The next thing we read, as they search for some adequate language to describe the indescribable, is that “they saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.”
Tongues of fire? Really?
“Well, that’s what it seemed like.”
Fire makes us think of warmth and light, power and energy for those days before electricity. It is as if they felt enlightened by the Holy Spirit. Maybe if the story were told today, we would say that the experience of God is like a light bulb clicking on above each of our heads. Aha! Now we get it! Now we have a vision for our lives, for our community. Now we understand what our lives are all about.
The light bulb went on for the disciples, and they began to share the good news that they had learned from Jesus, and now another amazing thing happens. All those foreign people from that long list understand the good news in their own languages. The Holy Spirit came to people who didn’t understand each other and brought about understanding.
Now, you may be wondering about what the story said about the disciples speaking in tongues. That’s something that gets talked about in the early church, and some churches still talk about it, but not really in our tradition, and so we often don’t know what to make of this speaking in tongues. I’m not going to get into it except to say this. Since we don’t know what it’s about, let’s accept that in the New Testament, they saw speaking in tongues as a gift from God. It was legitimate and it was a good thing when it became the means of producing understanding. Do you remember the beginning of the famous passage in I Corinthians chapter 13? Paul is writing to a church in which some people have gotten out of hand with speaking in tongues, even when no one understands what they’re saying. So he writes to them “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” This speaking in tongues is supposed to increase love, and if it doesn’t, it’s just an annoying noise. That’s true about everything in our lives, isn’t it?
So that’s all I’m going to say about the speaking in tongues because figuring out what that means is not the point of this story. The point is that the Holy Spirit brought about understanding.
Now we are back at our question. If the message today is that God is with us as the Holy Spirit, then what is God doing?
God is helping us to understand each other. God gives us a flame of insight – or a light bulb – which becomes for us a light by which to understand. If we want to look for the presence of God among us, then we should pay attention to wherever people are learning to understand each other. Or, to put it another way, we should look to how we can share the good news of God in a way that others will understand. I’ve never believed that showing up at someone’s door with a pamphlet, or telling people that Jesus is the answer does much good. You can’t say that Jesus is the answer if no one is asking a question.
I remember of St. Francis, who said that we should “preach the gospel always. If necessary, use words.” To me, that means that we might help others to understand the message of God more with our actions than with our words, and this came from a man who showed great love to the poor and the sick, who gave them the comfort of hands-on care. When we act to alleviate the suffering of hunger, homelessness, illness, or loneliness, our actions reach across barriers of language, culture, and creed. People understand the message of being cared for, of friendship and community. I bet you know about this in your own lives, and I hope we know about this in this church.
I remember being a child and hearing in church about a group of missionaries who found out that they would be allowed to work in a foreign nation only on the condition that they could not say anything about their religion to anyone. They thought about it, and finally said “that’s no problem. Everything we need to communicate about our faith is in our work to improve health care, water quality, and education.” And when people would come to them privately, to ask why they did what they did, they would say “because of what Jesus taught us.”
On this day of Pentecost we celebrate that the Holy Spirit of God is with us here and now, giving us light by which to understand. Frederick Buechner described this gift so well, and I will close with his words, which speak so well to our graduates today, as you begin the next part of your lives. And they speak to all of us who wonder what the next part of our lives will be.
“Jesus himself is beyond our seeing, but in the darkness where we stand, we see, thanks to him, something of the path that stretches out from the door, something of whatever it is that keeps us trying more or less to follow the path even when we can hardly believe that it goes anywhere worth going or that we have what it takes to go there.” (Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, page 62.)
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