A Church is Not a Franchise: A Homily on Regional Ministry

Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, on the Ninth Sunday After Pentecost (Yr B).

Readings for this Sunday:  2 Samuel 7:1-14A; Psalm 89:20-37; Ephesians 2:11-22; Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. (Eph 2.14)

A few decades ago, it was very common to drive into a small town anywhere in Canada and see one of those blue signs that said “The Anglican Church welcomes you” with a helpful arrow to point you in the right direction.  Those signs were always very useful if one was staying over on a Saturday night and wanted to visit the local church in the morning.

Those signs were a feature of the postwar decades when every new neighbourhood seemed to have a new Anglican church built in the modernist style with lots of concrete and glass.   In those pre-GPS days, the blue church sign was a helpful landmark when I had to go to clergy meetings in the city, which were often held in churches tucked away in labyrinthine 1960s-era neighbourhoods.

Those signs were helpful, but I think they led churches to adopt what I call the Franchise Mentality.   We thought of parishes rather like Tim Hortons, and felt that every neighbourhood should have one.   Each Anglican parish offered more or less the same menu of worship and programs, on the assumption that there would be a steady stream of people interested in our menu.  Of course, there were other “chains”, so if we Anglicans were Tim Hortons, the United Church was Coffee Time, the Presbyterians were Second Cup, and so on.   

But as you know, the times changed.   Fewer and fewer people wanted what we were selling. Churches that used to put out extra chairs for Easter Sunday found that they were no longer necessary.   Our kids grew up and moved away or lost interest.  Children’s choirs and Sunday schools dried up.  We got older and fewer and so did our buildings.

And then then blue “Anglican Church welcomes you” signs began to disappear from towns as the churches dwindled and closed.  Recently I drove through Listowel, where Christ Anglican Church was a distinctive presence with its old stone tower, very much like ours, and its bright red doors.   The building’s still there, but the Anglican congregation closed in 2016.

As we Anglicans began to dwindle, we discovered that our Franchise Mentality had not in fact served us well because it had conditioned us to see our neighbouring parishes as rivals.  We were all competing for fewer customers, with each parish thinking of its own needs.  

When two or more small congregations tried to share the cost of a minister there could be nasty fights over who got more of the priest’s time (I have the scars from my first parish).  The Franchise Mentality meant that each congregation tended to think of its own survival when Anglicans should have been thinking about how to be the family of God and the Body of Christ in a challenging time.

I think it’s always been a struggle for Christians to see themselves as a wider family, because our life as communities, with our places and our practices, tends to be intensely local.  Paul faced this challenge when he was writing to the believers in the Greek city of Ephesus.  Gentile believers in Jesus were trying to find a place with Jewish Jesus followers who had their own ideas about how to be community.  Different groups with different customs and practices were trying to figure out how to live together and enjoy the peace and healing that Christ offers to all of us.

Paul writes that Christ has “broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us” (Eph 2.15).  There were some high solid walls between Jewish and gentile Christians that fortunately we don’t face as Anglicans but we have our own walls and hostilities.  There were unhappy marriages between small congregations that foundered because of money.  Some small churches closed and faithful people were left embittered and grieving.  We blamed the bishop, or the diocese, or each other.

In the last few years our Diocese has wisely decided that the Franchise Mentality has to go, and in its place we’ve been building something called Regional Ministries. The premise of regional ministry is on an idea of community that’s wider than the local parish. As you know, All Saints has a relationship with our Anglican friends in Wasaga and Creemore.  We’ve been sharing clergy for some time, and this fall we at All Saints our new curate will have a more visible role here while she also supports the folks at Prince of Peace.   We’re also beginning to share ideas, we have a regional newsletter and we’ve done some regional events and services together.   We’ll do more together in the coming year, and we’ll meet make some new friends along the way.

For the last month I’ve been in discussions about welcoming the congregation of Good Shepherd, Stayner, into our regional ministry.  There are some good, faithful and generous people there, but no longer enough of them to support even a part-time priest.  So as of August we’re going to help them and Good Shepherd will join our regional ministry.   I’m very proud that our clergy team are willing to step in and give their time in the sort term, while we work on a grant application for Diocesan funding.  

I’m also grateful that some of our lay leadership here is willing to help them, since they have no wardens.  The alternative is Good Shepherd closing, and if they did I suppose we could shrug and say that it’s not our problem, but I don’t think that’s how the family of God and the Body of Christ works, and I don’t think that’s who we are.

How will this impact us at All Saints?   It won’t affect us fiscally, but I won’t lie, it will mean that our clergy team will be busier in the short term.   You may see either Sharon or myself leaving half way through the service a little more frequently as we will now have 11:15 commitments at St Luke’s and at Good Shepherd.  I’m grateful to Father Gordon for also being willing to step in, and we have a deep and talented bench of retired clergy to draw on.  

So we will manage, and I think we’ll find that we’ll make some new friends that will enrich our common life through shared events.  The fifth Sunday of September will be a combined service where we can all meet and worship and eat together, and more on that soon.  My hope and prayer is that we will find, like the Christians in Ephesus did, that the Body of Christ is just that, a body of faithful believers that is larger than any single parish. 

A Power We Need Not Fear: A Homily for the Eighth Sunday After Pentecost

 

Preached at Prince of Peace, Wasaga Beach, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, on the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Sunday, 14 July.  

Readings for this Sunday:  2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12B-19; Psalm 24; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:14-29

David and all the people with him set out and went from Baale-judah, to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called by the name of the Lord of hosts who is enthroned on the cherubim. (2 Sam 6.2)

If I put three theological propositions to you, I’m sure you would agree with the first two.  “God is good”:  yes, I’m sure we’d all agree to that.   “God is love”:  ditto, I’m sure.  Here’s the third.  “God is powerful”.  Would you agree?  I suspect we’d have to think about that a bit, and would probably want the third proposition to be constrained by the first two, because a powerful God who is neither good nor loving would be terrifying to contemplate.  

I’m thinking about the power of God because of a powerful object from our first lesson that was made famous forty-years ago by a major Hollywood movie.   Yes, you know the one, made when Harrison Ford, like most of us, was a lot younger.   I suspect that for most of the people who watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, it was their first introduction to the piece of holy furniture that the ancient Hebrews called The Ark of the Covenant.

So for those of us who remember the film more vividly than we do the Hebrew Scriptures, here’s a bit of a refresher on the Ark.  When the Israelites were in the Wilderness, God told Moses to build a kind of portable chest which would contain the stone tables on which the Ten Commandments were written (Ex 25:10-22).  On top of the ark there was a kind of throne called the Mercy Seat, and the seat was flanked by the golden figures of two angels, or seraphim.  

God told Moses that when the Israelites needed instruction, God would speak to the them from above this mercy seat, and God commanded that the ark accompany the Israelites on their journey.  So, one way for us to think of the ark is as a kind of portable church which would a focus for God’s people and which would allow them to hear the word of God.

It’s one of the ironies of the film Raiders that the Nazis would want to find and posses the Ark.   They think of it as a kind of super weapon, and as one of the characters in the film says, any army that possesses the Ark of the Covenant will be unbeatable.   Perhaps the Nazis remembered the story of how the Israelites paraded with the ark around the walls of Jericho for six days, blowing trumpets, and how on the seventh day the walls fell and Jericho was captured (Josh 6:1-14).  But, as you may remember from the film, it does not end well for the Nazis!

What the Nazis in the film don’t understand is that the ark has power because it is a place where God is present.   God’s power is righteous and just, it doesn’t exist to serve human agendas.  In scripture, when bad men try to use it, like the corrupt sons of Samuel who take the Ark to use against the Philistines, they die and the Ark is captured(1 Sam 4.10-11).   Likewise it doesn’t go well for the Philistines.  They are so tormented by plagues and diseases that they send the Ark back to Israel (1 Sam 5,6).  Obviously the Philistines never saw the Indiana Jones movie.

So the Ark can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how people stand with God and whether they follow God’s will.   The Ark is full of a God’s power, like one of those electrical transformer boxes with the scary decals telling kids to stay away.  In one of the strangest stories from the bible, as David is bringing the Ark to Jerusalem, it starts wobbling on the ox cart and a poor guy named Uzzah reaches out to steady it (2 Sam 6:6-8).  Altar guilds today can be eternally grateful that the Ark of the Covenant is not a standard piece of church equipment!

Which raises the question, what happened to the Ark?  The answer is, we don’t know.   After King David placed it in the Temple in Jerusalem, it stayed there for centuries, but God’s covenant always depended on Israel wanting to be God’s people.  When the people pulled away from God, God’s protection was withdrawn, and so Jerusalem was captured by Babylon, and the Ark vanished, lost to history. 

The Temple was rebuilt, but it didn’t last either.   Jesus told his disciples that he could destroy the Temple and rebuild it in three days, which got him in trouble, but as St John says, Jesus was speaking about how own  body, which predicted would be destroyed and raised again (John 2:21).  That body now exists as the church, the body of all faithful people across the centuries.  As St Paul tells us in Ephesians, we are the “living stones” out of which the church is built, with Jesus Christ as our foundation (Eph 2.22). 

Now if you look around this church, you won’t see anything like the Ark of the Covenant.   Even so, we acknowledge that there is power here.  Perhaps you know that praise song, “Sure the Presence of the Lord is in this place”.  We sing it at All Saints every Sunday after communion, and the words go like this:

“Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place, I can feel his mighty power and His grace.  I can hear the brush of angel’s wings, I see glory on each face; Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place”.   

At the conclusion of our Communion service, we give thanks for God’s “power, working in us, which can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine”.   But it’s not a scary power.    Some of us may bow to the altar as a sign of respect and piety, but the altar isn’t going to strike us down or kill us.   

After the Ark of the Covenant was lost, God decided to use God’s power differently, which is one of the ways of understanding the New Covenant.   We call this place “Prince of Peace” rather than “Prince of Power” for a reason.    

CS Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters that God refuses to use this power to overwhelm us and conform us to his will.   Good chooses instead to try to win us as if God was a suitor:  “He cannot ravish. He can only woo” (Screwtape Letters Chapter 8).  

The price of this self-constraint is that God often appears powerless, and so we wonder why God lets bad things happen.   Sometimes it seems like God lets evil triumph, as we see very clearly when we hear about the killing of John the Baptist.  John was the cousin of Jesus, he was given the Holy Spirit to preach and to baptize, he was the one who would announce the coming of the Messiah, and yet he’s murdered by a corrupt and sleazy king and his courtiers.   How could God let this happen?

Someone once said that just as John announce’s Jesus’ coming, he also predicts Jesus’ death.   And just as Herod fears that Jesus is somehow John resurrected, Jesus will, as he predicted, rise in three days.  The Spirit of God raises Jesus because it has power over death, the Temple of Christ’s body becomes the church, and the church lives on for two thousand years.

So the good news, my friends, is that we don’t need an ark of the covenant.   We don’t need to carry God around in a box, and we don’t need to fear what’s in that box.   God’s power is here, in this place, and it is the power of goodness and the power of hope.  It’s a power that comes to us gently, like a friend or a beloved’s invitation, and it promises to hold us and never let us go, so that we can be the people of God, in this life and in the next.  And for that power, we say thank you, and amen.

To Serve Him With Callused Hands: Homily for the Seventh Sunday Afternoon Pentecost

 

To Serve With Callused Hands:  A Homily for the Seventh Sunday After Pentecost.  

Readings for this Week (Proper 14B): 2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10; Psalm 48; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13

Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. (Mk 6.6)

Recently Joy and I needed a tradesman.  In a larger town, tradesmen will say they’re too busy, assuming that they even return your call.   However, because Collingwood is small town, and we asked the right person, a prominent and well connected local, we found someone who had a good reputation and who was willing to do the job right away.   In a small town, connections matter.

The fellow came, he was polite and knew his business, and he did the work for a reasonable price.   We were happy.    It would have been weird, though, if he had preached to us, called on us to repent, and said that he was doing God’s will.   That would have been weird and inappropriate, because we just wanted him to be a tradesman.

Something similar happens in our gospel reading today from St. Mark.  Everyone in Nazareth knows  him and his family.   He’s gone off, met some odd friends, and there are wild rumours about miracles and healings.   But really, we all know that he’s the carpenter’s son, and now he’s come back and he’s preaching at us?   Who do you think you are, kid?  Come on, buddy, let’s see some miracles.  Do a trick for us!   Yeah, didn’t think so.   He’s just Jesus, the carpenter’s son.

Mark tells us that Jesus was “amazed at their unbelief” (6.6).  Last Sunday we heard about the power that just seems to flow out of Jesus to heal the sick women (Mk 5.30).  Here in Nazareth, that power seems to be blocked in the face of scorn and disbelief from the people who only see Jesus as one of them.

Often it’s said and preached that the gospels celebrate ordinary folks.  Mary’s song, the Magnificat, imagines a day when the rich are brought low and the hungry are fed.  Jesus called humble fishermen as disciples.   Jesus spoke to crowds, healed outcasts, and preached in folksy parables.   All of this is true, and admirable, because by his choice of associations, Jesus showed us that the Kingdom of God reserves the warmest welcome for the humblest of people.

However, it is also true, and perhaps this is the point of today’s gospel, that it’s not just rich folk, Pharisees, and kings who can be close minded.   One of the themes of country and western music is that small town people can be close minded and even vicious.   It’s as if no one can get past the idea that Jesus is just the son of a tradesman (the Greek word, teknon, meaning worker), which is ironic, because as N.T. Wright notes, Jesus is the only worker who can fix our hearts and fix the world.   

Perhaps because he knows that his time is precious (we are already half way through Mark, Jesus has made enemies, and soon he will go to Jerusalem and to the cross), Jesus doesn’t waste any time in Nazareth.  People have made their choice.    

But Jesus doesn’t give up on small towns.   He sends his disciples out “among the villages”, knowing that some will listen and some won’t (Mk 6.6-12).   The seed of God’s word will fall on good soil and bad.  It’s always up to each of us to hear the message and to decide if we want to learn more and to follow Jesus.  Rich or poor, special or ordinary, Jesus asks a decision of each one of us.

What’s interesting to me about the mission of the disciples is that they don’t go out to start a church, or to raise money, or sell memberships or books.  Yes, they tell people to repent, but repentance can simply mean turning to God and being made whole again.   People are healed and anointed, God’s love is shared, and the world is made a better place for those who want it.  In such ways does the Kingdom of God become a reality on earth and a blessing for those who want it.

I think this idea of the kingdom of God as a blessing to those who want and need it is helpful because it leads us to the real Jesus.   We have a similar problem to those hometown folks in Nazareth.  Our age doesn’t don’t  Jesus as a neighbour but they know Jesus in all sorts of ways, through layers and layers of perceptions.   For some, religion has made Jesus overfamiliar.  Others outside of religion know Jesus through satire and comedy and through internet memes, and through the negative perceptions created by crass TV evangelists and celebrity preachers who turn out to be predators.  There's also the scepticism of our age which says, this guy was an inspirational preacher, but that's all.   Like the villagers in Nazareth, we have our own layers of familiarity and even contempt to cut through before we can say, yes, this is the Son of the living God, and I will follow him and do as he commands.  And all that Jesus really asks of us in return is to love him and to use our hands and hearts to serve the broken world that he loves.

Let me finish by telling you a story about what that service  might look like.   Sometime around the end of the first century, around 90AD, the Roman Emperor Domitian was persecuting the Christian church.  The Christian historian Eusebius wrote that Domitian felt threatened by prophecies about descendants of King David, and so he wanted to kill of any Jew who was a descendent of King David.

The story goes that he had two Jewish men arrested.   They admitted that they were Christians, from a family descended from David, and they confessed that they believed in Jesus and in his return one day to judge the world and start the kingdom of God. The Emperor then asked them if they were wealthy men of property.   They said no, that they were only simple farmers, and they showed Domitian their hands, callused with “incessant labor”.   The story goes that the Emperor decided that such humble men, not even worth his attention, and so he released them.   

We don’t know the names of these two ordinary Christian farmers, but according to the story their great grandfather was there in the synagogue in Nazareth that day.   Their great grandfather was a guy named Judas, and he was one of the brothers of Jesus (he wasn’t the bad Judas).  We don’t know anything about Judas, though there is a tradition that he wrote the Letter of Jude, the penultimate book of the bible.  Jude is a very short letter, mostly an attack on “scoffers” and unbelievers (Jude 1.18), which may recall how he felt that day in the synagogue.    What we can say though is that he chose to believe in his brother, and that he must have been an influence on his two grandsons who would one day show their callused hands to an emperor and say that they too had chosen to follow Jesus.

Jesus called his twelve disciples to go and serve the world that he loves, and that call echoes across the generations.  Judas’ grandsons, those two simple farmers, made their choice to follow Jesus and served the world God loved with their calloused hands.   The same goes for us.  We’re called to decide who Jesus is and whether we want to follow him.  Jesus doesn’t care if we’re rich or poor, special or humble.  Jesus doesn’t mind if the hands we reach out are callused or smooth.  Jesus just asks that our hearts aren’t callused.

He Cares that We are Perishing: A Homily for the Fifth Sunday After Pentecost and for a Baptism

 A Homily for the  Fifth Sunday After Pentecost and for the Baptism of Darius Axel Weekes-Shaw.  Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, June 23, 2024.  

Texts:  1 Samuel 17:(1A, 4-11, 19-23) 32-49; Psalm 9:9-20 2 Corinthians 6:1-13; Mark 4:35-41

 A Homily for the  Fifth Sunday After Pentecost and for the Baptism of Darius Axel Weekes-Shaw.  Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, June 23, 2024.  Texts:  1 Samuel 17:(1A, 4-11, 19-23) 32-49; Psalm 9:9-20 2 Corinthians 6:1-13; Mark 4:35-41

But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” (Mk 4.38)

A beautiful and historic church burns down, and we wonder if there will ever be funds, or parishioners to replace it.   We feel like saying "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

A person we love dearly has a terrible accident, or announces that they have a terminal illness.  Meanwhile we are acutely aware of our own again bodies failing us.   We feel like saying, "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

We hear news of nuclear threats, of new waves of refugees and  racism, of political violence, and a steadily and scarily heating planet, and we feel like saying "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

We can all relate to the frightened disciples in today’s gospel.  Our collect today stated this reality when it said that “storms rage about us and cause us to be afraid”.  When I was learning to paddle, my instructor told us “stay in the canoe and all will be well”, which is good advice except that the storm is raging and the boat is filling with water.  

So we turn to the guy in the stern and he’s not paddling, he’s not bailing, he’s just sleeping. "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

Well, the good news is that the guy in the stern does care, and he will save us, because we’re not just in any boat, we’re in his boat, which just happens to look like a church.    As you may have learned in confirmation class, the long centre part of the church, with all the pews, is called the nave, from the Latin word navis meaning ship.

Ancient church preachers loved to note how the church saves us in the same way that the ark saved Noah and his family, or the reed basket saved Noah.

None of the disciples with Jesus that day knew what a personal floatation device was, unless it was a floating plank.   Today we don’t dare go boating unless we have a PFD, for fear that the police marine patrol will ticket us, or worse.    

Well, you all have a spiritual PFD, though you can’t see it.  It’s that cross that the priest drew on your forehead when you were baptized, to mark you as Christ’s own forever.  Christ’s own need not be afraid.   Our Lord who sleeps, trusting in his Father, was also given a voice to calm storms, to silence demons, and to call the dead back to life.

Yes, storms and water can be scary.   Poor Darius will discover that when we splash him with water in a few minutes.    But after today, in whatever storms of life he will face, Darius will have Jesus at his side.   If he is taught to trust and to listen, he will hear the voice of Jesus, calling to him gently, telling him that he is God’s beloved child.  

When he is afraid and troubled, he will hear that voice, loud and commanding, telling the storm to be still.   

When he has wandered far and ashamed, may he hear that voice, s[-eaking words of forgiveness and welcoming him home.   

And finally, may he, along with all of us, hear Jesus telling him to wake and rise, to greet the day on which the sun will never set.

This Land Is Our Land: The Land Acknowledgement at All Saints, Collingwood

 This Land Is Our Land

(From the June 21 edition of our All Saints Alive Newsletter)

I write this close to Friday, June 21, a date which for some years in our Anglican Church of Canada has been fixed as the annual National Indigenous Day of Prayer.    As many of you are aware, our Anglican Church of Canada, along with many other Christian churches in our country, has been on a long journey of reconciliation and understanding with our indigenous brothers and sisters.

This seems to be a good occasion to talk about the reading of the Land Acknowledgement which has begun our Sunday worship for many months now.   Church is not the only place where you will hear a land acknowledgement - they are commonly used in government, higher education, and at civic events.  

First, what is the purpose of the Land Acknowledgement?  Our Diocese of Toronto website gives the reasons for it as follows:   

“In the Church, this practice helps us acknowledge that we’re located in a particular place with a particular history and reminds us of our obligations toward both the land and to those who have inhabited it long before the arrival of Christian missionaries. It’s also our way of expressing a willingness to move toward reconciliation and a renewed, respectful relationship with Indigenous peoples.”

It’s also worth nothing that in 2016 by the Primate’s Commission on Discovery, Reconciliation and Justice recommended that churches include land acknowledgements in their worship services.

I’ve written our Land Acknowledgement in the form of a prayer, in which we ask for wisdom, attentiveness, and a desire to repair relations, because these all seem to be things worth praying for.

Occasionally I’m asked what the purpose of saying these words is, and whether there’s a danger that they become rote.    To be frank, I’ve also heard that some parishioners are unenthusiastic about this practice.

Confronting our history is hard work.  For older Canadians, our sense of history and national identity can be challenged when we hear indigenous people refer to us as “settlers”.    Canada Day, just around the corner, is an occasion of civic pride for the country that our own ancestors moved to, helped build, and fought for.  The Land Acknowledgement is a way of helping us into a new reality as Canadians and as Christians.

It’s difficult for many of us who don’t know indigenous people to know what exactly we are meant to do.    An indigenous friend of mine once told me that my job is to learn.    Learning is an opportunity presented to all of us, through cultural events hosted by Collingwood’s indigenous community, through books, and through conversations.   In this time of climate uncertainty, we can all benefit from the deep wisdom of indigenous traditions around care of creation.

After this Sunday, the Land Acknowledgement will continue to be printed in our bulletin, though my intention is to no longer read it aloud at every service.  It will be said at our vestry meetings, in certain seasons (Lent, a time of repentance, seems appropriate), and in June as we approach the National Indigenous Day of Prayer.   We will continue to look for occasions to learn about indigenous people and to embrace reconciliation in meaningful, local ways.

Finally, let me just say that if hearing the Land Acknowledgement has made us uncomfortable, then it may have served its purpose.

Father Michael

Open to God's Greenness: Video of the Gospel and Homily for 16 June

Link to the video of the gospel reading and homily may be found here.

Open to God's Greenness: A Homily for the Fourth Sunday After Pentecost

 Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, June 19, 2024,  Readings for this Sunday (Proper 11B):  1 Samuel 15:34-16:13; Psalm 20; 2 Corinthians 5:6-10 (11-13), 14-17; Mark 4:26-34 

^26[ [Jesus] also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, ²⁷and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how (Mk 4: 26-27)

Long ago, in a former life, I used to teach first year English Literature.   When we got to the poetry section of the course, I was always interested by the ideas and preconceptions about poetry that the students brought to the course.  Many of them came with the idea that poems had were essentially puzzles to be solved so that the reader could unlock the hidden meaning.   Instead, I would encourage them to just enjoy the poem, to hear what the poet had to say in their own words, the way we enjoy a painting or a piece of music.

I would suggest that the same thing is true of Jesus’ parables, like the two we hear from Mark’s gospel.  There’s a perception that the parables are homespun stories about everyday situations that would have been familiar to Jesus’ listeners, and yet that they are also riddles that need to be solved.  This perception is reinforced by Jesus himself, who when he says things like “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” (Mk 4.9), which suggests that we have to work hard and listen carefully if we are to get the message.

Likewise in today’s gospel, when Jesus tell parables to the crowds, but “explained everything in private to his disciples” (Mk 4:33-34), we get the sense that the parables merely hint at some truths that are only made apparent to Jesus’ inner circle.   So, seeing that we weren’t there to hear that private explanation, what if we try simply taking the parables at face value, as if they were poems or songs?   

Let’s start by noting that Jesus begins most parables with some variation of the phrase, “the kingdom of God is like …”.   Jesus is telling us something about the kingdom of God, but what is it?   Is it a place that we can go to?  If so, Jesus never gives us directions to get there.  Is it political?   If so, as I said last Sunday, the kingdom of God does not look like earthly kingdom.   

So maybe we should set aside this question of “what is the kingdom of God” and follow the word “like” to see what the kingdom of God is being compared to.

In both our parables today, the word “like” leads us to seeds and plants, but there’s very little said about us.   As I said in my little children’s video posted online, the first parable about the seed should not be taken as gardening advice, because the guy in the parable is terrible gardener.   He throws the seeds hither and yon, and then has a nap.  He’s totally passive.   Likewise, in the second parable, the mustard plant is self-seeding.  There’s no humans involved.

So maybe the first thing we can say is that the kingdom of God grows of its own accord.   The Greek word Mark uses is automatatē, the seed grows by itself, without human help (I'm grateful to C. Clifton Black for this observation in his Working Preacher commentary).    Also, there is something mysterious about it, as the sower in the parable “does not know how” the seed grows.   It’s a mystery, but it’s a good mystery, because the seed grows to be harvested.

So who is the harvester with the sickle?  Again, we aren’t told.  In other parables and sayings, the reaper is associated with divine judgement, but here we can’t say that for sure.   All we can say is that the seed grows into grain to be harvested and to sustain life.   Likewise the mustard seed in the second parable provides shelter for the birds.  

So based on all this, even while we admit that the kingdom of God is a mysterious thing, we can say two things about it.   First, we can say that the kingdom of God is God’s doing, it comes about because of God’s initiative, not ours.   Second, we can say that the images of harvest and shelter tell us that the kingdom of God is benefit and blessing.  I hope this comes as a relief to you, because it’s very tempting to think that we have to do something to make the kingdom of God happen.  This is an especial temptation to those of us in the church business, where it’s easy to think that we have to be busy doing things too make the kingdom of God happen.

But what if it’s simpler than that?   What if it’s simply up to us to trust that the kingdom of God will happen because God wants to make it happen?  What if it simply comes down to us believing in God’s goodness and in God’s desire to share that goodness with us?   What if it’s simply about us daring to believe that God is actually present and active in our lives, and in our church?  

Let me finish by saying that trusting in God’s doing stuff is not a prescription for passivity or even for apathy. Christian spirituality has always been about listening to God and about opening ourselves to what God wants to do in us.    This is where the plant imagery in the parables is helpful, because our the goal of the Christian life is spiritual growth, a response of God’s reaching out to us in the same way that plants respond to the sun.

So said the German abbess, Hildegard von Bingen, a  medieval saint of the 11th century fondly remembered for her musical, theological, and botanical wisdom.   Hildegard had a wonderful concept of viriditas, a Latin word meaning “greenness”.   She believed that God created all things with what she called God’s “green finger”, that all of the earth was imbued with God’s creative energy.  Hildegard taught that the healthy soul opened itself to God’s greenness  in the way that plants open themselves to the sun’s energy.

Think about the language in today’s gospel, of how the seed goes from stalk to head and then to grain, and think of how that might describe the spiritual life that we all want, from disblief or indifference to doubt to faith, tranquility, assurance and peace.   Don’t we all want that growth in our hearts and souls?

In one of her famous and mystical passages, Hildegard offers a vision of the soul fully grown and ripe with God’s energy.

Good people, Most royal greening verdancy, Rooted in the sun,
You shine with radiant light, in this circle of earthly existence.
You shine so finely, it surpasses understanding.
God hugs you. You are encircled by the arms of the mystery of God.

Dear saints, I can’t explain these words, any more than I can explain a parable or explain any other divine mystery.  But why explain it, when we can open ourselves to the love and energy of God?   Perhaps for today, its enough for us to leave this place, willing to be open to that divine green energy of God, and trusting that we are encircled in the “arms of the mystery of God”.  What could be more wonderful, more desirable?