B Proper 6 BFC
2015
Mark 4:26-34
June 14, 2015
Maybe
because I was around the time of the baby boom generation, but it sure seemed
like there were all kinds of movies directed at my adolescent angst. All those movies made my fears and
insecurities feel universal in nature. For that reason, I have always been amazed by
teenage boys or girls who have an unflappable confidence about themselves. Not stuck up or above it all, but confident
about who they are and what they are all about in the world. For I
experienced my teenage years as fraught with minefields no matter what a person’s
grades, no matter how many touchdowns the person may have scored, no matter how
many first place ratings the person may have received at band, chorus, or
forensic competitions. Pimples,
hormones, and wanting adult responsibility with the safety of still being a kid
are enough to knock anyone off balance.
Several
youth and young adult movies from my teenage years put on display how hard and
difficult adolescent life is—trying to fit in as cliques, hormones, and
decisions about life direction hit us full force. And movies like “The Breakfast Club” remind
us that it’s not just the burnouts, or the geeks, or the nerds, or the bandos
who have a hard time with what it is like to fit in. The “in crowd”—stereotypically the jocks, the
cheerleaders—also struggle with trying to keep up appearances, having who they
are supposed to be dictated to them rather
than choosing for themselves. It’s hard
for anyone to walk through those years and not feel a little bruised by it all
no matter in crowd, out crowd, or, perhaps the most painful, the ignored crowd.
Still .
. . I know there were some groups of kids that were more picked on than
others. Individuals or groups that were
routinely ridiculed. How did those kids
hang on? What were their hopes for the
future?
“Revenge
of the Nerds” was a 1984 movie where the odds finally got even. Those outcast and outsiders have had enough
of the abuse and insults and decide to unseat the “in crowd” and steal their
girl friends. So it is with several
youth or young adult movies like two of my favorites, “Mean Girls” or “Napoleon
Dynamite.” Pedro for President.
We
laugh, maybe seeing how geeky we see or saw ourselves, or maybe even to avoid
the pain of how too true it all is. Or
maybe because we would like to see some of the reversals the movies give us.
Many
of these movies are all about imagining, for one moment in time, if that whole
system of who is in and who is out came tumbling down. What if we could reverse who is in and who
is out—you know, if the nerd got the cheerleader?
Beyond
these movies, what if we could help youth and young adults hear the very deep
pain created by a system that harms almost everyone? We know the pain is deep because sometimes
the pain manifests itself in tragic suicides or school shootings where those on
the outside decide that they will finally be the ones who will dole out the
abuse and the insults.
And though some of us gathered here today are no longer that age, we
still carry remnants of that pain with us.
Author Madeleine L’Engle wrote, “I
am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a
child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies,
these are still part of me, and always will be . . . “[1] So we carry those ages with us, hopefully not
to trap or enclose us. But that is where
some of us remain. We have either learned to live lives of quiet
desperation, or we believe we are a part of the “in group” enough in our
adulthood to believe we have won, beat the system, finally made peace with the
game. Whether we secretly suspect that
we are the outsiders or hope to God we are successful enough to be insiders,
even on into our senior years we wonder whether we are worthy. Does Pedro ever get to be president?
It is one of the most devastating mythologies
that exists in our country. Even if we
are the outsiders, we hope and pray for the day when all of our fortunes will
be reversed through hard work, ingenuity, and a chance to
rise to the top ourselves where we secretly ponder what it will be like to be
at the top of the pyramid, ridiculing those who now find themselves on the
lower rungs. There must have been
something about their character that left them behind, the outsiders, the
losers.
I remember how when my beloved University of
Illinois Fighting Illini would be beating down the Northwestern University
Wildcats in football or basketball on Northwestern’s home court or turf. The student section would inevitably take on
the chant that told people from the University of Illinois they would soon be
leaving college, working for people who had graduated from Northwestern. Pinheads!
Nerds!
What
if it is not about reversal though? What
if it is about a change in perspective about the way God works in the
world? Oliver Jeffers, children’s author
and illustrator, reflects on how perspective changes the reality we are
viewing. He says:
But then, I fell in with this project with Professor Quantum
Physics, and through that I discovered the actual theory of duality, which
looks at light in particular — light when measured in particles becomes a
particle and light when measured in waves becomes a wave. What I took from that
was that it’s up to us, then, how we define it — we choose the equipment with
which we measure, so therefore it’s up to us… That was what fascinated me —
that we have the ability to look at anything and make it anything we want, to
some degree.[2]
Jesus
lived at a time when only a select few, who were willing to play with the
Romans, were part of the “in crowd.” And
it was more than just adolescent anxiety but struggles over whether people had
their daily bread. In and out meant life
and death. With incredible poverty outside the Roman halls of power, sickness,
deformity, and death became commonplace.
Through its images, messages, and military and economic power, Rome
tried to convey to all peoples beneath them that life as it was, was as god
intended it. Rome is the right, the
true, the virtuous, bringing civilization and technology to the rest of these
misfit and oddball peoples. Anyone who
might be critical of Rome must not have gotten the memo, would need to be
quieted for fear of exposing the cracks in the system.
And
in steps the Jesus of the gospel of Mark, an exorcist, who expels the Roman
occupying army from the land. The whole
of Mark’s gospel is resistance literature—resistance to the Roman gospel which
creates sickness, deformity, and death in the Galileean countryside.
Rome
was the first commercial agrarian empire.
Where former empires allowed occupied peoples to farm their land and give
a percentage of the crops on their farms in tribute, the Roman Empire taxed the
people and leveraged their debt until people who were subsistence farmers
became sharecroppers on their own land.
So
gospel teaching is replete with fields, farms, seeds, day laborers, debt, and
weeds. Jesus’ teaching asks, “In the
midst of such oppression, loss of land, and occupation, how do day laborers,
former farmers, and sharecroppers make a life for themselves?” The Jewish people do not own the land, the
very thing God had promised. They do not
own the field, for growing grain for daily bread. They do not own the boats and nets used for
fishing to keep themselves and their loved ones fed. The Biblical stories told the Jewish people
God had given them the land for the welfare of their whole community. Rome and Caesar owned the land, the farm, the
field, the boats, the nets. And Caesar only
shares the land with those whom Caesar favors.
The
other story the Jewish people knew well was the story shared by Ezekiel the
prophet. That story was the story of
empire. Here is that story detailed in
Ezekiel 31, verses 2 through 6.
Mortal, say to Pharaoh king of Egypt and
to his hordes:
Whom are you like in your
greatness?
3 Consider Assyria, a cedar of Lebanon,
with fair branches and forest shade,
and of great height,
its top among the clouds.
4 The waters nourished it,
the deep made it grow tall,
making its rivers flow
around the place it was planted,
sending forth its streams
to all the trees of the field.
5 So it towered high
above all the trees of the field;
its boughs grew large
and its branches long,
from abundant water in its shoots.
6 All the birds of the air
made their nests in its boughs;
under its branches all the animals of the field
gave birth to their young;
and in its shade
all great nations lived.
3 Consider Assyria, a cedar of Lebanon,
with fair branches and forest shade,
and of great height,
its top among the clouds.
4 The waters nourished it,
the deep made it grow tall,
making its rivers flow
around the place it was planted,
sending forth its streams
to all the trees of the field.
5 So it towered high
above all the trees of the field;
its boughs grew large
and its branches long,
from abundant water in its shoots.
6 All the birds of the air
made their nests in its boughs;
under its branches all the animals of the field
gave birth to their young;
and in its shade
all great nations lived.
. The
metaphor for the great empires of the world is the mighty Lebanon cedar whose
expanse allows birds of every kind to nest and flourish.[3] The book of Daniel also has a tree of such
magnitude, growing from the center of the earth, cut down to suggest the end of
the Babylonian Empire.
This
mighty, huge tree, the cedar of Lebanon, would be what Jesus hearers would
expect to hear from him. Tell us, they
would hope, that we will reverse the rule of Rome and rival the great empires
of the world in majesty in magnitude.
Tell us we will become the in-crowd, Jesus. That was the expectation as Jesus began, “The
Empire of God is like . . .” Jesus used
such expectations, such suspended moments in time, to turn images on their
heads, to take expectations into a new possibility. And Jesus says, “The Empire of God is like a
mustard seed.” A what? A mustard seed? A weed?
A shrub? Early Christian scholar,
John Dominic Crossan, refers to these moments in Jesus’ parables as “the dark
interval,” that moment just before your jaw drops, your mind gets flipped, and
the whole realm of possibility expands.
Pliny
the Elder, a historian from the first century, writes that mustard grows
“entirely wild,” and that mustard, “when it has once been sown it is scarcely
possible to get the place free of it.”[4] Mustard seed is so aggressive in the way it
takes over a field from below that it is thought of as unclean.[5] Mustard is a pungent shrub with dangerous
takeover qualities, perhaps attracting birds during cultivation when birds
might just ruin the intended crop in the field.[6]
Imagine
the confluence of those images in your head.
Imagine the choices Jesus offers the listeners, the possibilities for
resistance to the Roman Empire. You know
they own the land. You know their
story. It is told to you day after
day. And they treat you as unclean. And they treat you like weeds.
And
Jesus chooses a weed, an outsider, an oddball image. Live in that image. Know that God’s activity moves in and through
you. The mustard seed is not as dominant
as it is pervasive, not as over as much as it is under.[7] If you are the one that owns the land, one
might say that a mustard seed very quickly can take over your field, farm or
garden: not with power and violence but
with organic growth, not dominating but pervading, not working from above but
from below, not majestic, not mighty, not noble, not like the cedar of Lebanon.
Jesus turns an Empire image on its
head. Be weeds. For that is how God works in the world.
So
this parable should give us pause about how we see God acting in the
world. Do we justify our own power in
the world by suggesting that God has given us the field? Or do we recognize that God acts particularly
in the place where we are unclean, outcast, and oddball? Because the message of this parable is that
God in Christ acts exactly in those places where we are not part of the in
crowd.
This
is not a sermon to suggest that we all be nerds or geeks. Rather, it is a call for us all to recognize
that God does not affirm worldly power which proclaims other peoples as
unclean, outsiders, and unworthy. God
does not allow the empires of the world to proclaim that some are unworthy and
therefore deserve a power and poverty which leads to sickness, deformity, and
death. In fact, in those very places
where the world names people in that way, names us in that way, God is working
to redeem the field—through weeds.
This
parable should give us pause. If we are
cultivating beautiful fields and gardens, winning the game of life, satisfied
and eating off the fat of the land, does that come at someone else’s expense? Are we reaping the benefits from the great
cedar of empire; or working on an alternative system and structure from below
that might even overrun the field or garden?
As the
systems and the structures of the world name us as weeds, Christ smiles and
says, “The Empire of God is like a weed.
Grow. Pervade the field. Nonviolently work from below. And know that all you outsiders, all you
oddballs, are helping to create a world that is not about being the
insiders.” Be a weed. Amen.
[2] Design Matters
with Debbie Millman: Oliver Jeffers https://soundcloud.com/designmatters/oliver-jeffers
[3]
Ezekiel 31.2-6
[4] Pliny the Elder, Natural History 29.54.170 [Loeb]
[5] William Herzog, Jesus,
Justice, and the Reign of God, p. 206
[6] J.D. Crossan, The
Historical Jesus: The Life of a
Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), pp. 276-279.
[7] Brandon Scott, Re-Imagine
the World: An Introduction to the
Parables of Jesus (San Francisco:
Polebridge Press, 2001), p. 39.
No comments:
Post a Comment