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.
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.[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.

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[1] Kotrosits, Maia., Taussig, Hal. Re-reading the Gospel of Mark Amidst Loss and Trauma  (United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 150.

[2] Ibid, pp. 13, 27, 38. 

[3] Ibid, p. 35.

[4] Ezekiel 31.2-6

[5] Pliny the Elder, Natural History 29.54.170 [Loeb]

[6] William Herzog, Jesus, Justice, and the Reign of God, p. 206

[7] J.D. Crossan, The Historical Jesus:  The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco:  HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), pp. 276-279.

[8] Brandon Scott, Re-Imagine the World:  An Introduction to the Parables of Jesus (San Francisco:  Polebridge Press, 2001), p. 39.

[9] Re-reading the Gospel of Mark, p. 37.

Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 23, 2017, "What if we're the weeds?"

A Proper 11 16 Ord BFC 2017

Matthew 13:24-30

July 23, 2017

          Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie comes from 39 generations of rabbis and leads a pop-up synagogue in New York City, in keeping with the Wilderness Story in the Jewish tradition. Pop-up and Wilderness convey faith as a transient journey—with evolving understandings and truths. The identity statement of this pop-up synagogue is:  “everybody-friendly,  artist-driven, God optional.”  Rabbi Lau-Lavie arrived at this identity statement, coming back to his Jewish tradition, after having moved away from it in his teens.  During those teen years, Rabbi Lau-Lavie believed that enjoying storytelling, theater, and drag, places where he found meaning as a gay man, were somehow not a part of what it meant to be a Jew.    As he struggled with Jewish teaching during his early 20s, he began to ask himself questions about “what if?.”  What if there’s something else here?  What if he, as a gay man who loved to dress in drag was not an abomination?  What if it’s not either/or, good/bad, abomination/sanctity.  He went on to say,

What I’m feeling doesn’t feel unholy, it doesn’t feel messy, and so maybe the Torah is not right. And I remember feeling, at some point, like there was this thing — thinking, “OK, one day I’m going to die and I’m going to stand before the Throne of Glory, and there’s this one option where God’s going to look at me and say, ‘Why didn’t you follow all the rules that all the rabbis told you? Eh. You go to hell.’ Or the other option was that God’s going to look at me and burst out laughing and say, ‘Wow, why didn’t you follow your heart?'” And I thought that that latter option is much worse.[1]

What if?  What if following our heart, charting an authentic path, however strange is the desired will of God?  What if God doesn’t think in these dualities?  What if God’s dream for communities is much more expansive than our own?  That “we” is more expansive than what the culture tells us?  Rabbi Lau-Lavie believes his holy work is about reinventing the meaning of “we.”  As in you and I.  In this together.  We. 

Last week I dared to suggest that we might critique Scripture in its final form, that the writer of Matthew added a moral to the interpretation of a wisdom saying of Jesus that was never the intent of the original saying.  As Jesus moved from community to community to teach his wisdom, share his stories, and present his parables, we can imagine that he refined and shaped them in such a way that sharpened their point and had meaning for a particular location.  Part of the oral tradition is the continuing development of presentation, wording, and pattern with each new opportunity.  How do people react?  What do people remember?  Is the truth told yesterday one that needs to be pushed today?  Jesus would have been about this task.

            Though the written tradition can have its own development and direction as people interpret and re-interpret, the written tradition also locks in words, phrases, and patterns.  For example, the author of Matthew very often includes a phrase used also by the author of Luke and included in the book of Revelation, “For those who have ears, let them hear.”  That little phrase, used by Matthew as a moralizer, asks the reader to pay attention and can be seen as a little slight to the reader or listener who just doesn’t get it.  Don’t get it? (said with snarky tone) Well, I guess you just don’t have ears to hear?

            Today, we once again have before us a parable that the author of Matthew interprets to be one of strong judgment and vindictiveness.  That strong judgment and vindictiveness might not be found in the parable itself, but Matthew has bracketed this parable with the telling of the sower of the seed parable and the interpretation of the sower of the seed parable, which, as I stated last week, comes with a strong statement of judgment against seeds which are strewn in various kinds of soil.  Though the Gospel of Thomas parable is much more similar to Matthew’s this time around, it does not come with the sower of the seed and its meaning bracketed around it. 

            From its context, I believe Matthew interprets this parable to mean, “We are the good seed and the children of the Reign of God.  They are the weeds and the children of the Evil One.”  Within this context, the parable is no longer a parable.  Parables are meant to take what we know, invite us into conventional understandings, and then totally flip or change our perspective, to open up new ways of thinking or acting in the world.  Telling you and me that we are good and those people who are not like us are bad is not a unique way of seeing the world.  Using an “us” and “them” perspective, as Matthew does to put this parable in context, does not flip, change, or transform the perspective.  It is very human nature to suggest that we are the “in crowd”, and you, and your people, well, you are not only the “out crowd” but probably the people who will be gathered and burned.  

            “We are the children of God” and “they are the children of the devil.”  I believe Matthew wants us to use this teaching as an insider game that becomes a weapon against others.  Matthew suggests, “Jesus is on our side.  We root for Jesus.”

            So this is a scary theology for me, scary because it sure seems like the theology I also hear coming from many pulpits and churches today.  We are the good people, and everything else outside the church is evil.  We don’t want to be the weeds.  All we have to do is round up the bad people, institute morality, and all will be right in the old barnyard once again.  Reading this text, remembering the text we had for last week, we can certainly see how the tradition of God as judge was based in holy text. 

There is something that tells us that God as judge is a little off here though.  The one who burns the weeds in the end is the person who owns the land, runs the farm, the plantation owner.  That is not somebody that rural peasants would have identified as good, right, or just—certainly would not see the plantation owner as Divine. 

So I would suggest that there is a wider context that follows this parable, might follow a natural pairing Jesus used as he was teaching along the sea, speaking to these rural folk.  In this parable, we get a clue that this is Matthew’s interpretation because Jesus has the plantation owner talking about burning the weeds.  Jesus’s community and following would not have been sympathetic to plantation owners.  They would have been seen as the very people who had created suffering and pain for a great many people, leveraging debt to buy up land and drive the poor and very poor into suffering.

Further in Matthew, Jesus continues with his Empire parables to say that the Empire of Heaven is like a mustard seed added to the garden or leaven added to the loaf.  We have long heard those passages understood as something small that grows into something large.  But hear this, mustard was a weed that would take over the whole garden.  The Kingdom of God is like a weed?  Unlike today, leaven was considered unclean[2] and unleavened was a strong metaphor in the Hebrew Bible for all that was sacred and holy.[3]   Leaven was kept separate in a kosher kitchen for it could change the dynamics of bread and make all that was sacred profane.[4]  The Kingdom of God is unclean? 

Now remember to whom Jesus is offering these metaphors that turn the world upside down, that open up another world view, these parables.  These people are the poor and destitute, thought of as the lazy, good-for-nothing, corrupt masses.  They are the leeches who drain Rome of its riches.   These are people who have heard time after time that they are the weeds and they are unclean.  And now these people hear that the very home of God, the Empire of Heaven, is among the weeds and the unclean.  One of the most widely known scholars on the parables, Bernard Brandon Scott, suggests that the association Jesus is making is so strong that Jesus is effectively saying that God cavorts among weeds and the unclean or the very self of God is unclean and weed-like.[5]  God is a weed?  God is unclean?

Can we even imagine what good news this was to people who had heard the world, call them unclean and weeds time after time?  Can we hear this good news for our world?

Jesus knew how he and his community were perceived by others.  He offered real life lessons of the width and breadth of God’s arms and how far they extended that might scare off any well-meaning church.  For Jesus suggested that once weeds are welcome in the garden, the very nature of harvesting is changed. 

Merriam-Webster defines a weed as “a plant that is not valued where it is growing”[6] and Dictionary.com defines a weed as “a valueless plant growing wild.”[7]  As I related in the worship service that began Billings Sanctuary Rising, a weed is a weed because we call it such.  Is a dandelion a weed or a burst of sunshine which can be used for medicinal and culinary purposes?

In 21^st Century North America, these parables can really get under our skin.  So much of our culture preaches success, working to identify ourselves as good seed from good stock. 

Jesus lived in a time when the political, religious, and economic morality codes were being clearly defined by those in power to stay in power.  If someone came along to blur those codes, to call the legitimacy of claims as to what brought life and who was an insider into question, that person would be considered mighty dangerous by the authorities.  And what if Jesus came from a community and created a community which blurred those lines, which called people’s claims to being the good seed into question. 

What if, what if Jesus comes at night to plant weed seed?  Maybe he knows that he and the people gathered round him are the enemy?  Better yet, what if God is our secret planter of weed seed? 

For that reason, I think this parable says, at the very least, that those who have made it their job, their vocation in the world, to determine who is good seed and weed to exclude and diminish, these people have not chosen a holy vocation.  To say, “I know who is seed and who is weed,” is to say, in effect: “I know how God sees you.  More than that, I know who is favored by God and who is not.”  The parable says that we cannot claim to know the heart and mind of God when we declare others a wicked part of the garden.

The Jesus community embraced the least and the last, the poor and outcast, and recognized that the world changed when they did so.  The garden could not grow as before because a small mustard seed grew as a weed to become the biggest plant in the garden.  A woman has secretly placed leaven in the bread and changed and transformed its very nature.  The Jesus community took people who were defined as an abomination, unholy, shameful, impure, unclean, and morally corrupt and called them the Children of God.  Distinctions were blurred such that the old categories did not work. 

So the good news I have for you all today is that you do not have to believe what the world calls you.  If you are called weed, mustard seed, or leaven, you can find a place in the Empire of Heaven.  Remember that the character of weeds is not so much that they are dominant as pervasive and persistent.  Remember that our God and our God’s activity are defined by such unholy, unclean, and profane metaphors. 

Rabbi Lau-Lavie came back to find storytelling and theater deep within the Jewish tradition and his drag character, Hadassah Gross, widow of a Jewish rabbi, opened up a point of humor for his rabbi father to come to terms with his son coming out.  When asked what he thought of Hadassah Gross, Amichai’s father replied, “She has nice legs.”  I think some of what the parable is teaching, as Rabbi Lau-Lavie is that people and concepts evolve, that we must be patient, that we aren’t there, and we should not be out pretending like we know who is truly a weed and who is just not evolved.  Or, maybe it is we who need to evolve.  He counsels:

So we need to read some of those sacred words as metaphor, as bygone models, as invitations for creativity, and for sort of the second meaning and the second naïveté here that still retrieves this text as useful and these narratives as holy, not as literal.  I think that is, of course, the conversation between so many of us of different religions who are struggling with our brothers and sisters who choose to read things literally and speak for a Biblical truth that is unalterable, where we — some of us think that there is room here for creativity, for sacred metaphor and change. And we’re not there yet. We’re not there yet for those days of dignity and equality and radical justice . . .[8]

Parables open us up to a new way of thinking and being in the world.  In God’s garden, those emerging as seed and weed from the earth do so alongside each other.  And whose to say which is which?  Whose to say?  What if those considered to be an abomination are just evolving?  Or maybe we need to evolve? So that we can move to a more profound “we.”  What if God’s idea of community is that much more expansive?  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

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[1] Krista Tippett, “First Aid for Spiritual Seekers:  Conversation with Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie,” OnBeing, July 13, 2017, https://onbeing.org/programs/amichai-lau-lavie-first-aid-for-spiritual-seekers/.  Rabbi Lau-Lavie tells the great Talmudic parable as a way of recognizing that we are all in this together: “[A] ship that is sailing, and there are many cabins. And one of the people in the cabins on the lower floor decides to dig a hole in the floor of his cabin, and does so, and sure enough, the ship begins to sink. And the other passengers suddenly discover what’s going on and see this guy with a hole in the floor. And they say, ‘What are you doing?’ And he says, ‘Well, it’s my cabin. I paid for it.’ And down goes the ship.”  We’re all on the ship together.

[2]“[T]he process of leavening  frequently stood as a metaphor for moral corruption.”  Bernard Brandon Scott, Re-Imagine the World: An Introduction to the Parables of Jesus (Santa Rosa, CA:  Polebridge Press, 2001), p.25. “In the Hebrew Bible, unleavened bread is a powerful symbol of the holy.” 

[3] Ibid, p. 26.

[4] Pliny the Elder (23 CE to 29 CE), a chronicler of history and nature was the author of thirty-seven books of Natural History.  He wrote, “It [mustard] grows entirely wild, thought it is improved by being transplanted:  but on the other hand when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once.” (Natural History, 29:54.170 [LOEB]) quoted from Bernard Brandon Scott, Re-Imagine the World: An Introduction to the Parables of Jesus (Santa Rosa, CA:  Polebridge Press, 2001), p. 37.

[5] Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable:  A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus  (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 1989), p. 308.  Since Brandon was Rev. Tracy Heilman’s New Testament Professor, I have heard him elaborate on this in lectures and informal conversations. 

[6] www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/weed

[7] dictionary.reference.com/browse/weed    

[8] Tippett, OnBeing.