Keep Walking Jesus to Your House

Mark 5:21-43

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Back when I was in seminary I did some hospital chaplaincy intern work and our instructors told us to be aware that people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds handle the news of death quite differently than what we are accustomed to.  For example, one of my colleagues at the hospital was with a family from a different background than him when they got the news of death.  It was about twenty members of a big extended family packed into this small little family waiting room outside the Emergency Room.  The doctor stepped into the room and as soon as he said, “I’m sorry…” they all started screaming and most of them just fell to the floor and literally rolled around wailing loudly and then the whole thing spilled over into the hallway. My colleague had no idea what to do.  

Myself, I was once with a young woman of a different ethnic background than me in the surgical waiting room when she got the news that her father had just died in surgery.  Sadly, they had only recently begun to mend years of estrangement.  As soon as the doctor walked in, she saw the bad news in his face and started screaming “No. No. No.”  Then, she literally started bouncing against the walls.  She was big; well over 6’ tall and had to be pushing probably 230lbs.  A sizable orderly managed to get himself between her and the wall to keep her from busting her shoulder.  Those folks don’t get paid enough.  It took over half an hour for a well-experienced nurse (not me the chaplain) to talk her back from the world of delirious shock.  

Looking here at our passage, if you can imagine most of the people in a small village caught up in grief in a way similar to what I’ve just described (loud and physical), well then that’s the situation we’re talking about Jesus walking into.  Mark calls it a commotion, a commotion of people weeping and wailing loudly, throwing themselves about, pounding their chests and heads.  The Greek word for commotion is pretty potent.  It means a great disturbance, like a riot.  

These people were very broke up over the death of this child…as they should be.  A little twelve-year-old girl had died.  Children aren’t supposed to die.  She was also the daughter of a well-respected leader of the synagogue.  That’s just not supposed to happen either.  Spiritual leaders are supposed to be blessed with every blessing, aren’t they?  (A huge bit of sarcasm there.)  This was a terribly unfair, unjust thing to happen that forces us not simply to question God but to challenge the steadfast love and faithfulness of God.  We should fully expect there to be a “commotion”.

Jesus arrived on the scene and he aced the pastoral care exam (yes, that’s more sarcasm.).  Jesus said to the people, “Why are you making such a commotion and weeping?  The child is not dead but sleeping.”  One thing that you don’t do when rolling into a situation like this is say something that denies the reality of the overwhelming tragedy that’s happened.  It’s like saying, “Everything’s going to be OK” when in reality it’s not going to be OK for a very long time if ever; or saying “God has his reasons and he loves you and works all things to the good” when in reality God is the first person a person would want to punch in a situation like this because God let it happen.  And absolutely don’t say “How are you?”  There’s a time and a place for those questions and comments, just not when the bomb has just dropped.  It’s best to just be there in the midst of the commotion and not say anything at all but give hugs to those who want them.  

Anyway, I’m sure these people would have loved to believe Jesus that the girl was only sleeping. But instead, they mocked Jesus.  This was just not the time or the place to be hoping against hope.  They knew that child was dead and it was so wrong, unfair, and unjust!  Even though they knew he had done some pretty remarkable things, they couldn’t imagine that he had power over death.

I wonder what the disciples were thinking about all this.  It might be helpful to place it into the context of what they had seen Jesus do in the last few days.  They had been watching Jesus do stuff that only God could do.  A few days before they had been on a boat with Jesus, getting swamped by waves during a windstorm that seemed to be personally out to get them.  They had to awaken Jesus from a sleepful repose from which he raised up and rebuked the wind and…it stopped and there was a great calm, not a ripple on the water.  When that happened Mark says they “were afeared with a great fear”.  They were filled with fearful awe not because they had just almost died in the storm, but because Jesus spoke and calmed it.  Only God can do that.  Were they in the presence of God?  That’s some scary, mind-blowing stuff.  

Immediately after that, they arrived in Gentile country on the other side of the lake where there was a strong Roman military presence.  They watched Jesus cast 1,000 demons (the equivalent of a Roman military Legion) out of a man and restore him to his right mind.  The townspeople were afraid and amazed because previously the man could not be bound, not even with chains.  He would break them.  He lived among the tombs and would run along the hillsides howling and screaming and hurting himself with stones.  Jesus delivered the man from that.  Jesus was stronger than the strongest of demons just as God is.  There’s also an underlying message there about Jesus being more powerful than the evil that undergirded the Roman Empire, but that’s a sermon for another day.  Again, Jesus had done something only God can do.

  Just minutes before this commotion, the disciples were leading Jesus through a crowd of people when a woman simply touched his cloak and was healed of a menstrual haemorrhage that she had suffered for twelve years wasting everything she had on useless doctors.  He gave her life back to her.  That’s salvation.  I should mention that because of this haemorrhage people considered her to be “unclean” and refused to touch her or come near her for fear of becoming unclean themselves.  They even believed she wasn’t welcome in God’s presence because she was embodying.  

People back then believed that the blood was the life of a person or animal.  She was bleeding out her life from where she was supposed to be giving life and was thus bringing forth death.  They believed that no one brings anything that appears to be death-like into God’s presence for it offended God to bring death before the presence of the one who gives life.  Thusly, they believed God would strike an unclean person dead or even plague the whole village or some other version of all hell breaking loose, if someone unclean came into God’s presence.  But Jesus, this Jesus who had been doing things that only God can do, let her touch him.  In essence, he took her uncleanness to himself, became unclean because of her, and yet, surprisingly contact with him healed her instead of all hell breaking loose.  It stopped her leaking death and made her able return to human community free of those death stigmas.

Then, it was at just that moment when Jesus healed this woman, that people from the house of Jairus came with the news of death.  “Your daughter is dead.  Why still bother the Teacher?”  Uncanny timing, don’t you think?  For the disciples, Jesus had proven more powerful than chaos, evil, and incurable disease.  How would he now fair against death?

Looking at what Jesus said to Jairus upon hearing the news that his young daughter had died, I once again say that Jesus aced the pastoral care exam, “Do not fear, only believe.”  Faith? Believe?  Believe what? Jesus had just told a woman that her faith or rather her faithfulness had made her well from twelve years of suffering; the faithfulness she demonstrated by sneaking up on Jesus to touch his clothes in a desperate attempt to be healed.  Jairus had also made his last chance, desperate attempt at faithfulness by coming to Jesus.  And remember that Jairus was a synagogue leader, a religious authority and the religious authorities typically had it in for Jesus…but what was there left for Jairus to do?

Let me take a brief excursion and again talk about faith for a minute.  Biblical faith isn’t just the mental act of believing something or the emotional act of trusting someone.  Faith is our active participation in the reality where the hidden reign of God is becoming manifest in and around us.  Remember how I’ve said it’s like taking a glass of pond water and letting it sit.  The water will seem clear but after a while there will be sedimentation in the bottom of the glass.  Hidden stuff you couldn’t see before has become visible.  Sometimes, if you let pond water sit long enough, little living things will start to appear.  Faith is being a part of what God is doing to manifest his hidden reign and bring new life into this corrupted creation that is threatened by chaos, evil, disease, and death.  

Jesus told Jairus, “Don’t be afraid only be faithful.”  All Jairus has to do to be faithful is keep walking Jesus to his house, take him in, and let Jesus be God.  That’s so powerful.  All Jesus has to do is keep walking Jesus to his house, take him in, and let Jesus be God.  Even though everybody else has given in to the harsh reality of death. Jairus just has to keep walking Jesus to his house; keep walking according to God’s reality rather than the reality that death creates.

So, against the reality of his peoples’ advice, Jairus takes Jesus to his house.  Jesus clears the house and takes Jairus, his wife, and Peter, James, and John to the little girl’s room.  Mark says they “went in where the child was.”  In the New Testament Greek, what we translate here in English as “went in” does not accurately reflect what’s there in the Greek.  The Greek word is one that gets used for when people metaphorically talk about taking that journey into death, like crossing the River Styx.  “Going in” to where the little girl was here means Jesus entered into her death, the realm of death where she was and gave her the command, “Little girl, get up.”  The command to “get up” is the command to get up from the dead.  It’s resurrection language.  I like how Mark ends this.  A literal translation would read, “They were immediately overcome with great ecstasy (of the experience of God kind).”  A death riot turns to spiritual ecstasy, that’s what happens when Jesus comes against death. 

So, what to say about all this? Jesus, great winds and stormy seas obey him, evil flees before him, incurable disease turns to restored life, death is undone.  He turns the disillusionment and grief of chaos into great calm, amazement, sanity, salvation, spiritual ecstasy – and he does it all by touching people whom the religious authorities labelled unclean and unwelcome in the presence of God.  Jesus goes to the root of everything that’s twisted and diseased in God’s good creation and sets it right.  

So, what about us when it seems life is personally out to get us, or when evil has beset us, or incurable disease strikes us, or death turns our lives upside down, or when our little churches are facing the challenge of believing in the midst of this soul-crushing pandemic?  Jesus’ command to Jairus – “Don’t be afraid, only be faithful” – may not top the list of best things to say in a pastoral care crisis such as this, but that’s what we’re talking about.  In all things we must not let fear rule us, but instead we got to keep walking Jesus into our houses, let him into our lives, and let him be God and in time the hidden reign of God will become evident.  In time there will be calm, amazement, sanity, new vitality, new life, and that ecstatic peace we get from being in the presence of God.  

Just a helpful hint, practically speaking, on how to do that.  When we were children, our parents likely taught us that to pray we needed to kneel at the bedside, bow our heads, close our eyes, and make prayer hands.  And they also probably gave us an image of God, that he was an old man sitting on a throne way, way, way, way, far away.  It might help if we change our method and our image of God.  I have found that it truly helps to throw all the formality out the window and talk to God as you would to somebody sitting in the chair next to you…and get it all off your chest…all of it.  It’s ok and quite healing to let God know you feel like he’s hung you out to dry and that you’re hurt and angry.  God really is like Jesus.  He cares, he listens, he heals the heart.  Amen. 

Mega-Storm to Mega-Calm

Mark 4:35-41

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I’ve twice had the pleasure of backcountry canoe-tripping on North Tea Lake in Algonquin Provincial Park.  The paddle getting into the lake is quite pleasant.  You put in on Kawawaymog Lake for a 1km paddle across to the Amable du Fond River.  The paddle on Amable du Font is the highlight for me.  It’s a narrow waterway and you get to see a lot of animal and plant life up close.  After that paddle, you come out onto North Tea which becomes a typical outback big lake paddling experience.  It’s nice and peaceful if there’s no wind.  

But any way, the wind.  Both times I have been to North Tea the end of trip paddle out on Kawawaymog has been insane due to the wind.  Apparently, it really picks up in the afternoon.  The first time, which was about sixteen years ago, I was on a trip that Dana was guiding for a group of people and their dogs.  The headwind was blowing so strong and the water was so choppy that we didn’t even try to paddle across.  Rather we walked the canoes around the edge of the lake.  A 1km paddle became about a 2.5km slog pulling loaded canoes.  

This past summer we returned to North Tea and took another family with us who had one 3^rd Grade age kid.  We were a flotilla of 3 canoes and a kayak.  There was a weather system blowing out with a lot of wind behind.  The Amable du Font is very sheltered and it didn’t seem like there was any wind; and so, I was hoping that Kawawaymog would be tame.  But no, Kawawaymog was churning up pretty good.  Gordon Lightfoot could have probably got a nice shipwreck song out it.  We decided to go ahead and try to paddle it.  William and I were sharing a canoe.  I was in the stern and he was in the bow.  Dana and Alice were in the same situation.  The other family, well, the mother was kayaking.  She made it across in record time.  The dad and daughter they made it across too because he was a mountain of muscle.  But, Dana and I and the kids weren’t fairing so well and the kids were getting scared.  It was a bunch of up and down and getting sideways and rocking.  Dana and I were more or less having to solo loaded canoes in a big headwind with big waves with scared kids riding a roller coaster up in the bow.  It was either head for shore or call in Gordon Lightfoot to write the memorial song.  300 meters in we headed for shore to slog it around edge. 

Being out on a lake when the wind and the waves are against you is no laughing matter.  It’s dangerous.  I think of Jesus and the disciples here.  In reality I’m not a very experienced canoer, so it doesn’t take much to get me convinced to opt for the safer route when the water gets choppy.  But the disciples, at least half of them were career fisherman and they were concerned, to say the least, at the situation they were in.  This was no ordinary windstorm.  It was a mega-windstorm.  The Greek word for great is mega.  

Since we’re into the Greek, if you pay close attention to the way Mark words things in this story especially where Jesus commands the storm to be quiet and still, it becomes apparent that something mega-not-right was up with it, something had cosmically gone awry.  Jesus didn’t just bark a command at the wind.  He rebuked it.  Rebuking was what Jesus did to the unclean spirits to cast them out and to anyone else who was working against him in his mission to bring in the Kingdom of God.  So, he rebuked the Wind and the Sea and silenced them like he silenced the demons and drove them out of their victims leaving the person in calm.  Silenced was also how he left the religious authorities who were out to kill him after a good dispute.

This mega-windstorm was a ”cosmic-matter” like Creation gone rogue against its Creator.  The picture Mark is painting is that this was not just Jesus calming the storms of life, but rather God the Son incarnate putting down a Cosmic rebellion led by the primordial forces of Chaos.  I know that probably just made you say “Hmm.  What’s he talking about?” so let me ramble this one a little bit.

Let’s take a moment to remember the Creation story in Genesis 1.  Genesis 1 tells of how God made this big Bubble called a firmament in the midst of Primordial Chaos.  Remember everything was this formlessness, voidness, and darkness over waters and a wind or the breath of God was hovering ready to act.  If you compare the Genesis 1 creation story to other stories like it from other ancient cultures in the Middle East from that time, it appears that God is making this bubble in the midst of Chaos to serve the purpose of what temples served in the ancient world.  Temples were places for gods to come down from the heavens and repose, to rest and enjoy the goodness of their works.  Creation is God’s place to come and repose and have joy.  

Let’s remember how God did it.  God created light, the light by which all can see and understand what God is up to.  God separated the light from the darkness.  Then God made the Bubble by separating the waters.  Then he created sky and land and the sun, moon, and stars. Then God filled it with life.  Then, God created humanity in their image to tend the Garden so to speak.  Every temple back then had an image, an idol, of God in it that was believed to somehow embody the presence of the god the temple was meant to house.  Finally, God called it all very good and then rested.  He reposed and that doesn’t mean that he slept or went on vacation.  It just means he sat down to enjoy the beauty of it all.  

Well back to Mark’s Gospel and Jesus and his disciples on the Sea.  There are some similarities with Genesis 1.  It was evening which meant darkness was beginning to set in over the Sea.  Remember in Genesis how darkness was over the waters.  They are on this boat along with some other boats and it’s kind of like they are in the Bubble.  Sitting in a boat looking up and around gives a sense of sitting in a bubble.  There are birds in the air, fish in the sea.  Jesus (God) has just had a very successful, very good, first round of Kingdom of God spreading ministry there in his stomping grounds in Galilee.  He’s been preaching, healing, and casting out demons, and confronting the religious authorities.  People were flocking to him and seem to be getting the idea that he just might be the Promised Messiah.  He is there with his disciples, his key followers who will shortly bear his image, so to speak, when he sends them out on Kingdom of God mission trips in his name to preach, heal, and cast out demons just as he did.  With everything having been so good, Jesus decides to repose on a cushion in the back of the boat.  Being fully human, his reposing involves a solid nap.

Well, the wind begins to blow.  If you remember from Genesis 1:2 that “a wind from God swept over the face of the waters” which was a reference to the Holy Spirit.  In Hebrew the word for wind can also mean breath or spirit; so also in Greek.  The image there is of the wind of the breath of God breathing across the waters in the midst of the darkness preparing to speak the Word of Creation.  Please call to mind how Scripture says that Jesus is the Word of God in, through, and by whom God created and creates and recreates everything.  There’s a wonderful Trinitarian image of God at work in the Genesis 1 account of Creation.  Back to Mark and this wind that comes blowing across the Sea stirring up those perilous waves; this wind is remeniscent of the time before Creation when the wind of the breath of God swept across the waters, but this wind is obviously not God breathing on the waters to bring forth the Creation.  This wind is doing the opposite.  It’s seeking to destroy Jesus and the disciples.  

Just a note about the waters here.  In Greek the word for lake and sea are the same and you need to know when to call something a lake and when to call it “The Sea”.  Jewish apocalyptic writers the image of “The Sea” to mean those pre-Creation waters of Chaos that contained hidden dangers like sea monsters and other nasties that sometimes flooded into God’s very good Bubble.  “The Sea” is the unknown.  It’s the “left field” from which stuff comes that turns our lives into complete upheaval.  It’s the political upheaval of invading imperial forces that completely upend your way of life such as what the Romans were doing in Israel at the time.

Well, I hope you are grasping that this moment that Jesus is sharing with his disciples out on a windy sea is more than just a windstorm at sea.  It’s more than just a story that we can look back on in devotional nostalgic hindsight piously say “Jesus calms the storms of life”.   Yes, Jesus calms the storms of life.  But, the way Mark is telling this story it is on the level of the forces that exist outside the Bubble of God’s very good Creation attempting to destroy what God is doing in the power of the Holy Spirit in, through, and as Jesus (God the Son become human) to save his Creation which has been invaded by the oppressive forces of Sin, Evil, and Death.  The Wind and the Sea are threatening to altogether collapse God’s very good Bubble of repose.  We could and should presume that if Jesus is unable to do anything about this mega-windstorm of Chaos, then all is lost.

So, the boat is swamping and in desperation the disciples went to the sleeping, apparently unconcerned Jesus to say, “The feathers have hit the fan, Jesus.  Don’t you care?”  We do that in the midst of the storms of life.  But for the disciples, this was a mega-moment for the Creation.  Perishing was probably an understatement for what was happening.  Maybe they grasped the magnitude.  Maybe they didn’t.  Nevertheless, they were staring at the senselessness of God’s very good Bubble being collapsed back in on itself as if to become a blackhole or something.  

As I said before this was more than just a story we can look back on and say “Jesus calms the storms of life.”  He does calm life’s storms, but this is the grandaddy of all storms. In Mark’s understanding of reality this mega-windstorm on the Sea (of Galilee) comes from and is orchestrated by the same force that brings tsunamis, hurricanes, pandemics, holocausts, diseases, oppressive empires, poverty, all those inexplicable not-good-at-all forms of Chaos that break into God’s very good Bubble just to wreak senseless havoc as the Roman Empire was doing in Jesus’ day.

As noted, Jesus raised up (a resurrection hint) and rebuked the Wind and the Sea as if they were demons or religious authority types who just need to shut up.  The mega-windstorm turns to mega-calm.  The Wind ceases.  The Sea goes placid.  It’s a great calm, not even a ripple.  Where the disciples, these seasoned fishermen, were just a little bit more than concerned, now after the calming they have become afeared with a mega-fear.  I’m not sure it is an accurate translation to say as the NRSV says here that “they were filled with a great awe.”  Jesus had just done something that only the Creator Lord God Almighty could do.  Jesus turned the mega-windstorm into mega-calm and they are mega-fraid.  Seriously, who are they in the boat with and what is really going on with him?  

Well, who are we in the boat with?  Paul in Colossians 1:15-20 puts it like this: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.  He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.  He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.  For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”

We are in the boat with the one through and by whom all things were created and hold together.  Jesus is the one who holds our lives in his hands; the one who died to bring reconciliation into God’s very good Bubble that is constantly being assaulted by Chaos.  Paul says at Romans 8:28 that all things work together for the good of those who love him.  There are times in our lives when it seems that all Hell is breaking lose on us and it seems like it’s a personal attack by the universe or something.  Well, it just might be, but Jesus is in our boats and he will calm the storms.  

Jesus then asked the disciples why they were being cowardly.  Our translation says “afraid” but the word is really the word for cowardly rather than afraid.  This word was the word they used in the early church to describe those who left the fold when persecution arose, when the fear and death-wielding powers of Roman empire, Roman emperor worship, and the worship of false gods and even false understandings of the one true God being enforced with violence by the religious authorities caused the followers of Jesus to abandon hope and faith in him.  

Faith is the boat we are in.  If you remember, last week I defined faith as something more than just belief or trust.  It is active participation in the sphere of realtiy in which the Triune God of grace is making manifest according to his promises what God is doing in, through, and as Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit to save his very good Creation from Sin, Evil, and Death.  In the boat of faith is where we find God personally present and evidently at work.  The boat will get attacked because of that.  But Jesus brings mega-calm to the mega-storm.  The continued existence of the Creation depends on that.  It is only natural that we be afraid, that there be times when we don’t believe or lack trust.  But it is important we stay in the boat and not get cowardly.

For the past 60 years people have been jumping ship left and right for something called “spiritual but not religious”.  We just had a census here in Canada.  If one of the categories of religious affiliation on it was “done”, done with the church, the number of those who checked it would be as high as those who checked “none”.  The magazine Christianity Today did a recent poll with ministers in the midst of this pandemic and discovered that there is a concerningly high number of ministers who say they will leave the ministry as soon as they can once they sense the pandemic is abated.  That’s like the disciples jumping out of the boat once Jesus calmed the storm.  That’s bizarre, but I don’t judge.  Congregations need to really appreciate that their ministers may not be able to go forward with vim and vigour once this is all over.  It was hard enough being a minister in a world where the church has dwindled off to nothing and everything you’ve striven to do to turn it around did not have the desired effect.  In the world, people hate the church (sometimes for good reason) and for all they know Jesus looks like a Pope who won’t make apologies or a slick-haired, Bible-thumping Evangelical who is anti-everything that might actually be scientifically valid and compassionate.  Now, in the midst of all that disillusionment, imagine being forced to take your societally irrelevant talents and gifts that weren’t working to turn the church around in the first place into isolation into a dark cave where you find yourself having to do something you never imagined you’d have to do nor got trained in how to do it (lead congregations through a pandemic) all the while knowing that all that stuff that you used to do that was supposed to reinvigorate the church and save the world still needs to be done, but you can’t do it and add to that you have absolutely no idea whether what you’re doing in the cave is really making a difference in the grand scheme of things because all you’ve got to go by is a dwindling number of weekly views of your worship video on YouTube.  That’s a small taste of what it’s like to be minister right now, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a nurse.  They’re also vowing to leave their callings behind in droves as well.  

There is a mega-storm afoot and it’s bigger than just the storms of life and its more than just a matter of “Will your anchor hold in the storms of life”.  Yes, WE each are going through our life-storms and I hope you know that Jesus is there with you in the boat.  But there is yet a bigger, major global upheaval of “the way things are” that is happening at present.  Decisions made or not made now with regards to the climate and to issues of economic justice will have consequences like no other time in history.  There is a mega-windstorm happening, and we are the ones who are in the boat with Jesus.  He is going to calm the storm.  He is going to mega-calm it.  Otherwise, God’s very good Bubble becomes a blackhole or something.  Something “Very Good” can come out of all this and I hope that faithful Christians will lead the way.

 Jesus asked his disciples after he calmed the storm. “Why are you cowardly?”  He also asks, “Do you still have no faith?”  The disciples answered those question saying, “Who is this that even the Wind and the Sea obey him?”  I can’t answer those questions for you.  I can only answer for myself.  I answer saying that I’ve had a glimpse of Who it is that I am in the boat with, the One whom even the Wind and the Sea obey.  Yes, times are hard.  The boat is swamping.  Yet, every day I remind myself that I am in the boat called faith and I am somehow participating in that sphere of what God is doing in his unimaginably great love to save his very good creation from Sin, Evil, and Death in, through, and as Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.  Every day I have to come back to the reality that I am a beloved child of God.  I won’t be jumping ship.  God works all things to the good for those who love him.  That’s my answer.  What’s yours?  Amen.

 

 

Kingdom Farming

Mark 4:1-9,26-34; 2 Corinthians 5:6-10,14-17

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I very much enjoy driving around in the countryside this time of year.  Most of the farmers have gotten their crops planted and the plants are beginning to sprout.  Two months ago everything looked like that familiar brownish, greyish, post snowmelt wasteland that Winter leaves behind.  Then, the ground got dry enough for the farmers began to plough and till and suddenly the vast expanse of dingy fields became rich, brown soil ready for planting.  All the while the winter wheat began sprouting and adding green hope and anticipation to the countryside.  A few of weeks ago an opportune warm-spell got the farmers busy planting and now corn is sprouting up all over the place.  Heads are on the winter wheat and its soon to go golden.  Some brave folks are even beginning to make hay.  It’s beautiful.  We just need some rain.

It’s such a mystery, such a wonderful mystery, how crops grow.  Modern farming can turn the countryside into a broad tapestry of art.  In the sprouting you can see the brush strokes of the farmer’s planting.  Today’s big machinery makes short work of preparing the land, planting, fertilizing, and harvesting.  Technology and science have aided farmers in increasing the yield of the land and added a few years to their lives, I’m sure.  I can’t imagine just how back-breaking the work must have been a century or so ago.  

Back in Jesus’ day, farming had to be brutally hard.  If you had an ox or a good mule that could pull a plough, you were blessed otherwise you pulled the plough yourself.  The plots of land were much smaller and usually owned by some “land-owner” who seemed to believe that keeping the tenant farmers hungry and in debt was the best way to produce a high yield.  So often, sowing seed was the very wasteful practice of just throwing it on an unprepared field and watching and waiting to see what comes up, and then the harvesting by sickle and scythe, and gathering, bundling, and threshing.  Then you only got to keep that small portion that the “landowner” measured out to you.  He kept the rest as your rent.  Too often the measure of grain you sowed, was the same amount the landowner measured back to you and you couldn’t eat that.  It was next year’s crop.  You ate from your garden or from what you could earn odd jobbing.  Crop farming was tough and unfair to the farmer.

Anyway, crop growth is still a mystery.  Today, biologists can tell us that moisture can activate certain enzymes that cause a seed to germinate and then sprout and eventually go to seed and they can genetically modify the seed to manipulate that process to produce a heartier plant and a higher yield.  It doesn’t sound very mysterious unless you stick to the simple wonder of it all: it’s still a tiny seed that grows and produces abundantly that we might eat and have enough to plant for next year.  In my opinion that’s a God-thing and not just some accident of nature. 

Back in Jesus’ day the sense of mystery was much greater.  Plant growth was the hidden, mysterious process of how, in Jesus’s words, a grain of wheat can fall into the earth and die, and if it dies, it bears much fruit.  In this parable, the sower simply scattered seed giving no mind to soil preparation and then watched and waited and watched and waited day and night and I’m sure prayed for rain and that the earth would give forth abundantly.  The sower did not know how the plant grew.  Jesus says “the earth of itself produces fruit” – of itself.  The Greek word is automatē from which we get automatic.  Plant growth is mysteriously automatic in God’s good creation.  It’s just the way it is...and it’s abundant.

There’s a “wow-factor” there we need be careful not to miss because, that’s the mystery of how the kingdom of heaven grows.  The seed all on its own it grows from being a seed into a seed-bearing plant capable of producing hundreds more seeds and seed-bearing plants.  It is a miracle of multiplication, of exponential growth.  This is God’s abundance at work.  Such and so is the Kingdom of Heaven.  The workers simply sow and then wait for the harvest.  God looks after the rest.

Jesus also compares the Kingdom of Heaven to a mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds that grows to be a huge shrub.  The shrub has sturdy branches where birds can come and safely make their nests and rear their young.   Thus, the Kingdom of Heaven grows naturally, abundantly, and provides safety.

I should say something more about what the Kingdom of Heaven is.  First, Kingdom of Heaven and Kingdom of God are interchangeable terms.  The Kingdom is where God’s reign from heaven becomes evident on earth.  There’s also a correlation between where the Kingdom shows up and the presence of faith.  So, let’s talk about faith for a moment. 

If I had to define what faith is in the Bible, I would say that it is devoted participation in the sphere of reality, the realm, where the promises of God to save and heal his good creation from sin, evil, and death and becoming evident.  Hebrews 11:1 is a good verse to look at for defining faith.  Most recent translations read, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  These translations reflect Modernity’s idea that faith is just subjective belief or trust, an internal to me thing.  But if you look at the Bible and other Greek writings from that period of time faith isn’t simply subjective belief or trust.  It is objective, outward, visible.  It is devoted participation in the sphere of reality, the realm, where the promises of God to save and heal his good creation from sin, evil, and death and becoming evident.  In my opinion, a better translation of Hebrews 11:1 would be “Now faith is the substance of the hoped for things, the evidence of things not seen.”  Oddly, that’s the pre-Modern KJV.  The word for substance carries the idea of sediment.  Get a jar of pond water and let it sit for a while.  Though it may look clear initially (or maybe a little cloudy), sediment will eventually appear on the bottom as if out of nowhere.  Probably more amazing than that, let it sit for a few days and the next thing you know there are things swimming around becomes visible where in the power of the Holy Spirit the promises of God to save and heal are sedimentizing into the contrary reality of this sin-diseased world and this therefore involves the efforts of those who are faithfully devoted to God through Christ Jesus.  

Growing food involves the hard work and devotion of the farmer, not simply the farmer’s belief that a crop will grow.  Likewise, the substance and evidence of the Kingdom of Heaven is what results from our acting according to the compulsion to love that God has planted within us.  Paul says in our 2 Corinthians reading. “For the love of Christ urges us on” – compels us.  God has planted the Holy Spirit within us who compels us to love both Jesus himself and one another as he loves us.

We are a new planting by God.  In 2 Corinthians 5:17 Paul says, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.”  The past couple of weeks I have mentioned that we are a new creation, a new humanity; new in that God the Holy Spirit dwells in us, the followers of Jesus, permanently working to transform us to be more like Jesus, indeed, making us to participate in the new life God created at his resurrection.  This new existence – human beings permanently indwelt by the Holy Spirit – did not exist before Jesus. 

The Kingdom of Heaven is the mysteriously growing New Creation of the fulfillment of God’s promise to save and heal his creation breaking into, sedimentizing into, this sin-broken reality which becomes visible as the followers of Jesus indwelt by the Holy Spirit faithfully act on the seed of the compulsion to love that God has planted within us.  The fruits that the plant of the Kingdom of Heaven mysteriously produces are the fruits of the Spirit which Paul lists in Galatians 5:22,23 - Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Just as a seed must die for the fruit-bearing plant to come into existence, so must we also die to this old self of ours that is diseased by sin so that new creation may sprout forth.

The Kingdom of Heaven comes forth automatically, sedimentizes, among groupings of people who in devotion to Jesus and by the empowerment of the Holy Spirit love one another as Jesus has loved us.  This is what the Church, the Body of Christ is.  The Church is where the New Creation of humanity being saved and healing is beginning to become apparent.  Our relationships with each other in Christ are also indwelt by the Holy Spirit who is at work among us urging us to build one another up, encourage one another, and speak the truth to one another in love so that we grow and become human community in which the new resurrected life wrought by and present with Jesus can be sensed, felt, experienced.   

Now, I have to say that we must not carte blanche equate the Church that I’ve just described with what has become the institution called the Church as we know it in the Western World.  I am reluctant to use the term “true church” because that’s the sort of thing cults and sects are made of, but I will for teaching purposes. The true church can be found among the institution of the church, but the institution of the church does not always act like the Body of Christ it is supposed to be.  

Jesus told a parable about a man who planted a field with good seed and in the middle of the night his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, a particular kind of weed that looks like wheat while it is growing with the intent that it would do as weeds do and choke out the good wheat resulting in a reduced yield.  The workers wanted to pluck the weeds out but the landowner says not to because they would also uproot the wheat and destroy the whole crop.  They would just have to wait until the harvest and separate the wheat from the tares then.  The particular weed Jesus was describing is called darnel.  It is poisonous to eat and, go figure, there’s a fungus that particularly likes to grow on it that will kill livestock if they graze on it. Poisonous rye is another name for it (not recommended for making rye whiskey).  You can distinguish it from wheat because when wheat is ready to harvest, the head of seed bows as if in worship while the darnel stands upright as if to bask in its own glory.  Beautiful metaphor, I think.

When we ask how it is that churches can be avenues of racism, homophobia, white privilege, Colonialism, Imperialism, Nazi-ism, sexism, misogyny and so many other evil things it is because there are weeds sown in our field and there are times when the weeds overtake the wheat and begin to choke out and kill the wheat.  There have been times throughout the history of the institution of the church that you would be hard pressed to find the wheat at all and then other times and places and moments when the beauty of the true church has shone forth.  

Looking closer to home and the problem presented by the church’s involvement in the Indian Residential School system, we need to ask how it is that the church could operate these schools here in Canada in the first place?  Any serious disciple of Jesus at the time could have and should have seen the evil in removing small children from their families and communities to strip them of their indigenous culture, but majoratively (almost to the point of unanimously) we, Christians did not.  We good, church-going Christians thought we were saving these wretched beings.  We were weedy with Colonialism and white privilege.  We should also ask how it is then that among such “well-intentioned”, good Christian people such atrocities could happen to these children under the care of our schools?  Well, poisonous fungus grows on weeds.  When people look back on this blighted part of Canadian and Church history, because the field seems so full of the weeds there are those out there now who literally would love to burn down the whole field of us and on occasion have done so.  Nevertheless, we must persevere and take responsibility for our weediness and try to effect healing.

The Presbyterian Church in Canada operated two such schools after 1925 and a handful more before that which were transferred over to the United Church at the union.  Did abuse and atrocities happen at ours?  We would be naïve to think they did not.  But we have confessed our weediness and made apology and are actively striving for reconciliation.  The best we each can do is to come to terms with the persistent weediness we each have in us which exists as innate racism, a colonialist attitude, and white privilege, and let the Holy Spirit replace the weeds with the compulsion to love our Indigenous neighbours to whom we, as immigrants to this land, owe a great debt.

I’ll close with this.  We are all weedy.  We are each littered with ism’s and phobias that we grew up with and which shape the way we view the world.  I grew up in the Southern US.  I know what racism is and even worse I know what it is to be a racist.  I also know Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit changed things for me, changed me, changed my heart, changed the way I think, changed the way I see and hear, changed the way I act, changed the way I will raise my children.  There is hope.  That compulsion to love that God has placed in each of us, prayerfully, do not let your weeds choke it out.  Go with the urge, compulsion to love rather than the instinct to hate.  Amen.

 

  

Where Are You?

 Genesis 3:1-15

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Years ago when I was preparing for the ministry, I was under the care of the Presbytery of the Shenandoah down in Virginia.  That presbytery had so many people going into the ministry that they had a special committee called The Committee on Preparation for Ministry to look after them.  I had to meet with that committee once a year to review where I was at.  There were certain tasks that needed to be completed, but also seminary can be a place, a time, a period in life when stuff gets churned up within that can make you rethink your call and so forth.  The CPM made sure we candidates for ministry were faring well as we trod the beaten path.

There was a particular person on that committee that I never looked forward to seeing.  She always seemed to be playing the Devil’s Advocate, the person who made you doubt your fitness for ministry (if anybody is ever fit for such a thing).  She would ask questions in such a way as to let you know you were never going to meet the standards.  She called it a “rhetorical question”.  It went like this.  “Randy, you’ve had a painful childhood.  Don’t you think that’s going to have an impact on your ability to be a minister?”  Before I could answer, she would say, “That’s a rhetorical question.  You don’t have to answer.”  It didn’t matter that I could answer it and would have gladly answered it.  Her shutting me down like that only seemed to me that, contrary to Scripture, she believed wounded people shouldn’t be ministers…at least not until they had taken responsibility for their lives and sought healing for their wounds.  She always hit the button in me that spun me off into some very negative self-reflection. 

Well, an odd thing happened at the end of the preparation process.  She came to me at the reception following my ordination service and said, “Randy, I know you think I’ve been especially hard on you.  It’s just you remind me so much of my own son and I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”  She took her role on the committee seriously because she knew that too often certain people in churches and/or the system of relationships in churches will seek out a minister’s wounds and exploit them and hurt ministers badly and in the same way, ministers in their woundedness can and will hurt their churches badly.  She just didn’t want to see anybody get destroyed; especially somebody for whom she felt motherly instincts.  She was making sure I knew to tend to my wounds by asking those “rhetorical questions” that made me evaluate how well I was taking responsibility for my life and caring for myself.

One thing I have learned in my years of wrestling with the Scriptures is that when a passage has a question in it, it might just be one of those “rhetorical questions” that we should take to heart and let it push our buttons.  Again, a rhetorical question is a question that makes us own up and take responsibility for our own lives.  In our reading here from Genesis there are some “rhetorical questions” that God asked of Adam and Eve.  I think God already knew the answer to the questions, but God asked them to make Adam and Eve take responsibility for their lives and own up to what they had done and come to terms with the consequences.  And, oh my, isn’t it telling that Adam and Eve answer these “rhetorical questions” by blaming someone else.  Such a display of human nature!

The first question, “Where are you?”  God comes strolling through the Garden in the cool of the day to enjoy the aesthetics of his wonderful Creation and to hear what wonderful new discoveries his beloved Adam and Eve had had that day.  Adam and Eve’s eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil has not changed God or God’s daily routine.  In fact, we would be reading into the text any sort of notion we might have that God knows that they have eaten of the Tree he told them not to.  The story doesn’t say God knew “it” had happened.  But then again, God is God and could something this cataclysmic have escaped his all-knowingness?  It would be so easy to answer the “Why did you let that happen, God?” question by saying that God didn’t know it had happened until we brought it to his attention.  That way God is not all-knowing and all-powerful and only gets involved as a “fixer”.

But, I don’t think the God that the Bible challenges us with is oblivious to the bad, to the evil stuff that happens in his good Creation before, during, or after it happens.  God knows.  An oblivious God only leads to oblivion.  For all the bad that does happen, there’s limitless more that doesn’t and I like to believe God puts a limit on the chaos.  Yet, we are still left asking, “God why did you let this earthquake, this tsunami, this cancer, this pandemic, this holocaust, this murdering of children slip by? God, are you not still ultimately responsible for what happens in your Creation even in the wake of Adam’s sin?”  That’s an unanswerable question.  Yet, God does answer it but not with a rational explanation.  God’s answer is his presence with us giving us peace and the strength to go on and we have to learn to live with that.

Back to our passage and it’s rhetorical questions. “Where are you?” God calls out to his child Adam.  Like a child Adam is hiding from God and why is Adam hiding?  He feels naked and afraid.  Now tell me, who can’t relate to that?  You would be a rare human being arguably suffering from a personality disorder such as narcissism if you did not get out of bed this morning with a little bit of inexplicable shame weighing on your heart.  We all have a bit of irrational shame and guilt buried in us, a sense of failure, a sense of inadequacy and in turn, for fear’s sake, for feeling vulnerable, we keep our “self’s” hidden from others, even those closest to us, so that our secret self won’t be discovered and we get rejected.  

But the thing is, we can’t hide our “self’s” from the God who made us.  I can’t hide “me” from God.  Whether I’ve done something wrong or I just feel like there is something wrong with me, I cannot hide my “me” from God.  We cannot hide ourselves from the God who in love made us and who in love comes searching for us, not to smite us, but to heal us and save us from ourselves.  Yet, we try to do it.  We try to hide and the list of the stupid, hurtful, and self-destructive things we do ever grows.

Adam could have done something a little different here.  Instead of hiding Adam could have taken the approach of the Psalmist in Psalm 130 that we read at the beginning of the service. “Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD.  Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!  If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand?  But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered.  I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning. O Israel, hope in the LORD! For with the LORD there is steadfast love, and with him is great power to redeem. It is he who will redeem Israel from all its iniquities.”

Adam could have stayed out in the open waiting for God to come round in his usual manner, and in hope thrown himself into his loving Creator’s arms saying, “I have done what you said not to do and now there’s something wrong with me that I don’t understand.  Can you heal me?”  But fear kept him from it.  Why be afraid of the God who in love made you?  Well, Adam is sick in his mind.  He now has an irrationality with respect to God.  Instead of adoration, hope, and faith in God and his steadfast love and forgiveness, Adam has an irrational fear of God that he cannot shake that is easily exploited.  This is what we call Sin.  Sin is a disease of the mind with respect to God that affects everything else in life, particularly our relationships.

This irrationality of the mind leads Adam to blame Eve for all that’s happened rather than accepting full responsibility for his own actions.  Eve, the smart, curious, wonderful perfect friend God gave him whom Adam, for fear of not wanting anything terrible to happen to her, he didn’t exactly tell her straight about what God said about that tree.  It was Adam’s interpretation, his version, of what God said about the Tree that the Serpent was able to twist and trick Eve into eating.  God said “But of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil you shall not eat of it, for in the day that you do you shall die”.  Adam didn’t even tell her the name of the Tree.  Like a parent telling a child not to open a box of cookies by saying “Please don’t open that box” instead of “Please don’t open that box of cookies”.  Mention cookie and the child will likely open the box.  He simply called it the tree in the center of the garden and he added, “Don’t even touch it.”  Adam’s patronizing version of God’s warning made it appear that God was being petty and controlling.  Adam’s insecurities seem to have preceded this thing we call the Fall and led to it.  Something wasn’t right with Adam even before he ate the fruit – he was simply being human.  Adam more or less lied, “white lied”, to Eve to protect this woman whom he loved and it came around to bite them.  So much for Adam and Eve being created in a state of perfection from which they fell.  This story is very accurate description of what it is to be human rather than a historical record of something called the Fall.  Topic for another day.

“Rhetorical questions”, “Where are you?”  Answer: hiding from God.  “Why?”  Answer: I feel vulnerable and ashamed.  “Have you done something you shouldn’t have?”  Answer: “Well yeah, but it’s not my fault.”  Now to the consequences. The one consequence mentioned here was that God cursed the Serpent because the Serpent willfully took advantage of the situation to work evil.  On his belly he went and God pledged a day when an offspring of Eve would finally crush the Serpent’s head.  That’s the first inkling of a hint of the Incarnation, of God the Son becoming a human and reversing the effects of Sin.

One comment I had on last week’s sermon on the Trinity was that this person got lost once I started reading from the labyrinth of Romans 5 about how Jesus’ one act of obedience wrought healing for all just as Adam’s one act of disobedience brought ruination for all.  God has set about healing this disease of irrationality in the mind we have with respect to God, self, and others that makes us think and do terrible stuff.  Jesus, God the Son born of Mary according to promise, was the beginning of a new humanity, a new creation.  By the work of the Holy Spirit God the Son was born into diseased human flesh but he always turned to God the Father so that he “knew” no sin.  His death, the death of God the Son in human flesh, put to death sin and death bringing about a new life for us all.  God gives this new life to us now by the gift of the Holy Spirit coming to indwell us and giving us the gift of knowing the steadfast love of God so that we need not irrationally fear him and hide.  Those who are in Christ are a new creation, a new humanity because God the Holy Spirit is permanently dwelling in us healing us of this irrational, sin-diseased mind that we have.  Before Jesus, this was not the case and that is why we call it a new creation.  It is a foretaste of the full New Creation that is coming when Christ Jesus returns and all things are made new and as Isaiah said, “The earth will be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.”

Until that day, it is important that we take the route of the Psalmist and turn to God, waiting on God in hope assured of God’s unfailing love and forgiveness.  It is important that we take responsibility for our lives rather than blame others.  We’ve nothing to fear from God because God will be with us through all the having to live with the consequences of our acting on our short-comings.  In Christ we are something new.  God created a new humanity as Jesus, a new humanity in which God dwells.  By the gift of the Holy Spirit, God makes us to be that new humanity.  Our task is to die to that old humanity that’s in us and live according to the new and for that we need each other.  Just as the Committee on Preparation for ministry looked after my pastoral development and regularly checked in with me to see where I was, so must we do the same with each other.  And so, I’ll close with a rhetorical question, the very first one we find in the Bible:  Where are you?  Amen.