Earth Day

Sunday, June 14, 2015

Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 14, 2015

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?
    Consider Assyria, a cedar of Lebanon,
with fair branches and forest shade,
    and of great height,
    its top among the clouds.
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.
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.
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.

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