Tuesday, July 26, 2011
July 24, 2011 - Pentecost + 6
This past week, I heard a story on the radio that greatly disturbed me. It was about the drought in the Horn of Africa, which is on the eastern coast. It's where Ethiopia is. Where Somalia is. Somalia – where the UN has recently declared a famine to be taking place. The radio host and his guests were talking about how bad the situation is there, about the vast numbers of people who are struggling to leave their country & make it to a refugee camp on the border with Kenya, walking for miles on foot, with no food, no water, carrying their starving children on their backs.
That same day, I read a story in the NY Times about parents who pay extravagant amounts of money to have playhouses built for their children. And by extravagant, I mean between $50 & $200 thousand dollars. In some parts of the US, you could buy a complete, grown-up sized home for that amount of money. It was an interesting story, but to read about that and then to be starkly reminded that there are places in the world where there is not enough food or water was startling. I was angry at the injustice of it. I was discouraged, thinking of how much good 50 or 100 or 200 thousand dollars could do in the world.
Then Friday, we heard of the tragedy in Norway – people killed in when a building exploded, and then so many youth and young adults shot down at a summer camp for political and religious reasons that don't really make sense. And again, I was disturbed in spirit by the pain and tragedy that exists in the world.
Yesterday, I read a follow-up story of a teenager in Florida who killed his parents and then had a party that same day in his home for his friends. The article talked about how it had shocked his community, how people were stunned and confused, trying to figure out what had happened, what had led this young man to such unspeakable acts of violence. And I shake my head, and I weep for all of these people, all of these situations, and so many more – and I know that God does too, because this is not what God intended when God created the world, created humankind in God's image and called us good. These are NOT signs of the kingdom of heaven coming near. And I don't know about you, but it seems to me that often much easier to see the places where God's kingdom – where God is in charge, where God rules, where God's will is being done – so much easier to see the places where God's kingdom has not yet come than it is to see the places where the kingdom of God has come near, where it is breaking into the world. Some days those places where God's kingdom isn't come into such sharp focus that I long for a deeper vision, to see those signs that the kingdom of heaven is coming with a much sharper ache.
I imagine Jesus' audience in the gospel longed for such a vision too. They too wanted to know when the world would be set right. They wanted to know what God was doing about all the bad things in their world and in their personal situations, wanted to catch some glimpse of what God was up to in the world and the signs they should be looking for. And so Jesus has been teaching them just that, all through this chapter in Matthew's gospel, as the crowds hung on his every word. We've heard Jesus trying to describe what the kingdom of God is like the past few weeks in the parable of the sower and the parable of the weeds among the wheat, and again today in these 5 different parables – all of them starting with, “The kingdom of heaven is like...” (Matthew always used the words “kingdom of heaven” instead of kingdom of God, in an attempt, we think, to make sure he didn't use God's name wrongly or disrespectfully, but he was talking about the same thing.)
And I want to focus us today on just one of those five parables, the first one we heard, the one about the mustard seed. Jesus says to his listeners, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”
Now on the face of it, this parable sounds like “great things come in small packages” or “out of insignificant things, important things come.” But while that's certainly part of it, that's not all of what's going on here. Because part of what Jesus is trying to get across here is that the Kingdom of God comes in ways that we don't expect. I've never grown a mustard plant, but sermon prep gives me a reason to go look up random things on the internet, and what I've learned is that mustard is considered almost a kind of weed. Those little seeds Jesus is talking about, well, the mustard plant puts out a lot of those. And if the seeds get loose in your garden or field, watch out, because they germinate in something like 3 to 10 days – and then they reseed themselves, and grow and spread. It's not something you'd deliberately plant. This is the last kind of plant the people of Jesus' day would have expected him to compare God's rule to. They would have expected something tall and majestic, like a mighty oak tree, or the towering redwoods of California – something mighty and strong – not a humble mustard plant.
And yet, Jesus says, the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone sowed. It has great staying power. It has the ability to spread itself around & come up in places where you never would have expected it. The kingdom of heaven, Jesus says, is like that. It may not look like what you were looking for, but there it is, popping up again, in the far reaches of your yard, spreading past your property onto your neighbor's lawn, and then down the block...
And with this parable comes the reminder from Jesus to keep your eyes open. The places where God's kingdom is not are plain to see. But look around you – the kingdom of heaven is coming, in small, unexpected ways, when people reach out to each other with love and patience and compassion – as the ELCA and other Lutheran churches throughout the world are already doing in Somalia, providing food and water to those desperately in need. See those mustard seeds growing in upstate New York, where a secular community has reached out to the grieving Amish in their community after 5 of their members died in a car accident. See those plants springing up in our local community as people and churches reach out to those who are suffering in so many ways – from hunger, or homelessness or hopelessness. It may be harder to see where God's kingdom has come near – but it is coming, Jesus promises us that, and it will spread itself with God's grace and mercy... So be on the lookout. See what seeds have been sown in you, and then go sow some of those seeds yourself.
Amen.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment