Red Bison Faith: Akbaakuxshé: Sermon, 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 13, 2021, "Be a weed!"

Friday, June 18, 2021

Sermon, 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 13, 2021, "Be a weed!"

B Proper 6 11 Ord Pilg 2021

Mark 4:32-34

June 13, 2021

Tracy and I are still hooked into our pandemic habits of finding a TV series we can sit down and binge-watch over the time of a week or two. I would be embarrassed to share with you the number of movies and series we have burned through in the past year. Tracy estimates that the sectional sofa she bought just before moving to Sawyer a year and a half ago has aged dramatically with our butts firmly planted into permanent indentations in now aging sofa sectional cushions. In pandemic years, we’ve had it for about 22 years now.

We go from watching escapist, feel-good romps to edge-of-our seat thrillers and horror movies which we promise we will watch only one more episode before we go to bed at 1:00 a.m. in the morning. We just finished one of the most moving series we have seen in some time, “Mare of Easttown.”

Although a good mystery, the series is heart-wrenching in how it shows the systemic brokenness, the generational trauma, and the deep family pain found throughout the small village of Easttown, Pennsylvnia. One of the city police officers, Mare Sheehan, drowns the pain of her police officer-father having completed suicide, her mentally struggling son having completed suicide, and her ensuing divorce by emotional cut-off, vaping, and a beer in her hand in almost every scene we see her. With all the depressing things happening in the series, I began wondering why I found “Mare of Easttown” so uplifting? I think the series is powerful because it realistically portrays systemic, familial, and generational brokenness, trauma, and pain and yet, how the characters piece together moments of meaning and joy.

I wanted to watch the show because I saw so many people I respect on social media share how the show touched something deep within them, gave them a sense of meaning as we move out of pandemic.

Just three years ago I read a book by early Christian scholars Hal Taussig and Maia Kotrosits that turned my world upside down. Re-reading the Gospel of Mark Amidst Loss and Trauma helped me to recognize the cause and effect of Jesus Christ. Healings were necessary because poverty, malnutrition, and dire circumstances were part of everyday life in rural Galilee. Good news of great joy was revelatory in a time and place rife with family losses, brokenness, violence, and death. Feedings and bread and fish shared were necessary because food was scarce among a rural populace who were largely farmers and fisherfolk who had lost their land and their boats.

For the first time in my reading, I recognized the Gospel of Mark as a powerful portrayal of how Jewish people in First Century Rome moved through real brokenness, trauma, and pain to experience moments of meaning, and joy.

The word fear, in Greek phobos, is used dozens of times in the Gospel of Mark--by far more than any other book in the Bible.[1] The Gospel of Mark aches with loss and trauma, is littered with destruction, undercuts sentimentality, and attends to the possibility of the good news of piecing together life in the context of unthinkable loss and brokenness.[2] While I had always read the Gospel of Mark romantically, too often only seeing Jesus, as I went deeper the gospel revealed a world around Jesus that should have undercut my sentimentality.[3]

Jesus lived at a time when only a select few, who were willing to play with the Romans, were able to avoid the everyday occupation, poverty, and violence that led to demon possession, sickness, and disease. Day by day, people fell alongside the road of life as they lost their farms or boats to debt and experienced the everyday anxiety of where they could find their daily bread and fish. To not be on the road as a leper, a paralytic, one possessed, 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 the gods Roma and Jupiter intended. Ordained by the gods, Rome portrayed themselves as the right, the true, the virtuous, bringing civilization and technology to the rest of the broken, occupied, and conquered 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 Jewish 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. But that was not the reality. 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.
⁴The 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.
⁵So it towered high
    above all the trees of the field;
its boughs grew large
    and its branches long,
    from abundant water in its shoots.
⁶All 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.[4] The book of Daniel also has a tree of such magnitude, growing from the center of the earth, Daniel the prophet envisioning the cedar 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 and replace the rule of Rome and rival the great empires of the world in majesty in magnitude. Tell us we will become the rulers and conquerors, 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

Uwe Conrad

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’s 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.”[5] Mustard seed is so aggressive in the way it takes over a field from below that it is thought of as unclean.[6] 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.[7]

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, unworthy, below and powerless. And they treat you like weeds.

And Jesus chooses a weed, something unclean, something that works from below. Live in that image. Know that God’s activity moves in and through you. God works in unclean ways? God acts like a weed? The mustard seed is not as dominant as it is pervasive, not as over as much as it is under.[8] 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 those broken by the world, those ruptured by trauma and loss? Because the message of this parable is that God in Christ acts exactly in those places where we are not part of those who lived the romantic, sentimental, and charmed life.

This parable is a call for us all to recognize that God does not affirm worldly power which proclaims other peoples as unclean, occupied, and unworthy. God does not allow the empires of the world to proclaim that some are unworthy and therefore deserve their suffering and poverty which leads to greater 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.

The good news of the Gospel of Mark is that our lives do not have to fit some idyllic, romantic, sentimental small town, picket-fence drama. Rather, God is often at work in the midst of our divorce, addiction, mental illness, brokenness, loss, trauma, and pain to carve out moments of community meaning and joy—often subverting systems and structures that profit off suffering, violence, and death-dealing.

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 who live in brokenness and violence, pain and generational trauma, are helping to cobble together a world that is not about the perfect life. Pain and loss may still exist. But imperfect repair can pervade across the field or farm to bring about an unexpected goodness. And life . . . using some of the broken parts and new material may even know a God who is divinely active to bring about repair. That repair may even carry some of the brokenness in it.”[9] Be like the empire and activity of God. Be a weed. Amen.