Sermon by Reverend Dr. John W. Mann | June 16, 2024

Mark 4:26-34

A few years ago, my brother-in-law Perry remodeled the fireplace in our living room. He made it look like it might have when the house was built in 1905. The fireplace he replaced had a 1970’s green bathroom tile motif. When he removed the old mantlepiece, underneath it was a few old coins and trinkets, some of which were Nazi themed. One piece of paper that looked like it might be the cover to a small tract was titled, “A Message From Der Fuhrer.”

We wondered what the purpose was of putting that in there. Before he installed the new mantle, Perry sat down and wrote a letter. He put it in an envelope, sealed it and placed it underneath the new mantle. I don’t know what his letter said, I didn’t ask. Someday, maybe if someone gets around to their own remodeling project, they will find out. For now, it remains a mystery.

The longer I live the more I appreciate living with mystery. For me, God is mystery. That may sound odd coming from someone who’s been talking about God for over 40 years. I suspect there is more of God that we don’t know that we can’t know than what we do know. That’s the mystery we live with, as Paul wrote, “For now we see in mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” (1^st Cor. 13:12)

A few words by Oscar Romero to help us focus upon today’s truth –

“It helps now and then to step back and take a long view.  God’s realm is not only beyond our efforts, but also beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the realm of God always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.  No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection, no pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the Church’s mission. No set of goals and objectives include everything.

This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water the seeds already planted knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.”

Oscar Romero was a Roman Catholic priest in El Salvador. He was a proponent of “Liberation Theology.” The idea behind Liberation Theology was that people’s experience of God does not come from the top down, but from the grass roots of life. Historically the Church has been like the empires it supports. It imposes a religion upon the people by use of force.

There was a movement in El Salvador and other Latin American countries in which Christians sought to create a sense of church based on community and common cause. It was reflective of the teachings of Jesus when he said that the “Kingdom of God is among you.”

Jesus revealed the nature of God through his life, his work and his teachings. In doing that, he alluded to God, as in, “This is what God is like and the life God makes possible may be compared to…” He never said things like, “The kingdom of God is like getting struck by lightning; you’ll know it when it hits you.” He never described it as a once and for all reality. Rather, the life God makes possible is something that grows in us.

His use of images of growing things implies that the life God intends for us is something we grow into more than something we accomplish. It is something we realize more that something we achieve. The people Jesus spoke to were not trying to form a church. They were trying to survive under the harsh conditions of their lives.

God’s activity in the world is like planting a seed and watching it grow. When Jesus said the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds that grows into the largest of all plants, he was not being a literalist. He described it thus as an exaggeration by way of making his point about God’s way of life. It’s not merely that big things can come from small things. Rather, something profound can come from something that seems insignificant. Something important comes from something that seems unimportant.

The seed is something you plant. You put it in the ground, not take it out every day for a pep talk and some spit-polish. It sprouts, it grows, and it comes time to harvest. Still, we think, “But look at how big that mustard plant gets.”

There is something that gets missed in the translation; something that the original audience to these parables would catch onto. The mustard plant was viewed as a noxious weed. If it takes root and gets into your fields, the next thing you know, you have this overgrown bush.

Looking at it that way, the kingdom of God is countercultural. It upsets the natural order of things. It’s a blight on the status quo. The kingdom of God is trouble. And what you do with weeds is you put some weed killer on them. Just like they did with Jesus. But God makes things grow anyway.

And we need to remember that when Jesus was talking about the realm of God, he wasn’t talking about church on a Sunday morning and the number of people who attend a worship service. He was talking about life lived as God makes possible – the realm of goodness and love – the realm of peace and justice. In some places it exists like a vast agricultural field; in other places it grows up through cracks in the sidewalk. But it grows. Worship is not the harvest – worship is more like tending the soil or watering the pants.

The right-wing militias in El Salvador responded to Liberation Theology by trying to kill it with violence. When Oscar Romero was serving communion in church one Sunday gunmen came in and murdered him at the Lord’s Table.

But his legacy lives on – The rest of the quote from Oscar Romero –

“We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing this. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.”

Kingdoms rise and fall. The Church in our age is changing. Some parts of it are dying out and some are being reformed. Our role is not to worry about power and influence, but to plant the seeds and trust that God makes them grow.

In our worship service in Wahkon, there is a piece that I think of as planting seeds. It’s the part that comes after the welcome and announcements, the “Time to Prepare.” I gather these from different sources. I like to think that they remind us of who we are and why we are here. Thinking about what we are preparing for in worship, we take some of that with us when we leave. Here are a few of these seeds that have been planted in the soil of our hearts and minds. 

We have come here, not because we have all the answers, but because Christ Jesus has made us pupils in his school. We have come, not because we are better than others, but because we know that God welcomes us. We have come, not because our lives always run smoothly, but because by faith we work together towards a promised land. It is God, in the dawning, In the renewal, In the arrival, In the new day. God’s presence fills this place of gathering.

This church is a haven for those who, stressed by tensions or oppressed by dark fears, seek a place of peace and light. This church is a temple for those who are full of gratitude for life’s joys and who seek a place where they can express thanks with kindred spirits. This church is a house of hospitality for those whose faith is small and frail, yet who want it to grow towards the fullness of the faith of Jesus. This church is a holy place, blest by the Holy Spirit and dedicated again and again by the common people who have come with prayer and praise to the glory of God.

We gather in community to rest from our labors, to greet our neighbors, and to open our being to insight and intuition of that greater reality of which we are a part. May we discover inspiration and renewal. May we find here a calm peacefulness that will carry us through the days ahead.

From the power of our memory and history, with high hopes for the days that lie ahead, we gather to craft the destiny we share with one another. May we dream and design a bold future. May we bring our best selves to this service, and may we dream these dreams and do this work with love.

Much of our human struggle is with what we do not know or understand. It is often difficult not to want answers — or even more difficult, not to think we have them already. May we experience what we do not know not as an individual failure but as an invitation to community. May we seek not the true answers so much as the true questions, knowing that true questions make of our lives meaningful even if sometimes restless journeys. May we be grateful for the restless voices in our communities.

There are precious times when the light of God strikes us.

Our whole being for a moment is illuminated.

Things that were clouded become clear. 

We cannot manufacture these times. They are gifts from God.

All of us, with faces uncovered as we look upon the radiance of the Lord Jesus,

are being changed, bit by bit, into his likeness

Amen.