the DNA of mustard

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, DUNEDIN NORTH

ORDINARY SUNDAY 17 (July 25th) 2020

READINGS

Genesis 29: 15-28

Psalm 105: 1-117

Romans 8: 26-39

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

 He put before them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.’
He told them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with^[a] three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.’

At the heart of the tiny parable of the mustard seed is Jesus’ belief in a fundamental unity between that which we already see, know, experience, and that which is beyond comprehension. It is no accident that in his careful construction Matthew emphasizes the absolute finality of the death of Jesus: “so they went and made the sepulchre secure by sealing the stone and setting a guard” (Mt 27:62). Sentence after sentence makes it clear that the sort of analysis beloved of figures like D. H. Lawrence and others who hypothesize that Jesus took a decent dose of Rohypnol and popped back to consciousness after a couple of days’ black out simply do not wash with Matthew. The same is true of all the gospel writers, but Matthew adds his narration of a sealed tomb to emphasize that there can be no mistake.

The writers also emphasize that there was – I would add can be – no witness to the resurrection. To be fair the term “witness to the resurrection” tends to be applied to the whole Christian community in which resurrection good news is proclaimed, but I refer here to the event itself, breaking out of the limitation of human understanding, human intellect. In my own churches I have found easter day to be the perfect time for holy riot – for a somewhat un-Anglican joy surreptitiously to infiltrate the mysterious rites of liturgy. The resurrection is both holy mystery and holy madness. The soldier had to fall asleep, to be protected from the in-breaking in full of God’s absolute, immeasurable majesty.

Which may seem to have little to do with a grain of mustard. So many sermons focus on the tiny size of the seed, and the enormity of the subsequent tree – they draw a contrast. As it happens neither the claim that the mustard seed is the smallest of seeds, nor that the adult bush is the greatest of shrubs, is anywhere near accurate. That minor detail we can easily assign to the nature of the Incarnation: the glorious “carmen Christi” or “hymn to Christ” of Philippians makes clear that the Incarnation involves a renunciation, as it were, of superhuman, certainly infinite divine knowledge. But let’s park that for a moment – accept that the black mustard seed is fairly small and that the adult bush is a reasonable size – and that the teacher Jesus was satisfied with that as an illustration of his point. As one conservative Christian commentator delightfully puts it, “the context of Matthew 13 makes it quite clear that Jesus was addressing a local lay audience, not an international conference of botanists.”[1] But was his primary point one of contrast?

Well maybe. But there is here, too, a point about continuity. Organically, if you like, the mustard seed and the mustard shrub are one and the same: the DNA is one and the same. This is not rocket science. But the theological implications are not passé.  The parable suggests a total continuity, however improbable, between our experiences of love, joy, hope, light and life, to name just some benefits of human existence invaded by Christ, and some future, unimaginable state of blessedness, an eschatological state in which the down-payments of our relationship with God, experienced this side of death, blossom into the fulness of God’s presence.

Which can, like much of Christianity, sound very pie in the sky. It is. But it is not a pie to be ignored. As we see planet earth turning into a plastics soup, as we watch the implosion of the American Empire, as we witness surge after surge of Covid-19 simultaneously both ignoring and enhancing human boundaries (ignoring our politics but certainly disproportionately attacking the poorest and most vulnerable in sociological scales) we surely want to know, to cling to the hope, to the belief that darkness and confusion are not the final word in human or cosmic existence. We can choose to treat the parable as rampant nonsense or as a naïve fairy tale, but Jesus, I suspect, was wanting a better response.

And pie in the sky this could be if we were to pull up our ladders of self-righteousness, to ignore the plight of vulnerable humans and species, to reach no further than our own self-interest. Sadly the discourse of much Christianity sounds as if that is its sole focus: my place in some sort of eternity is assured, and beyond that who cares? A doctrine of judgement might well remind us that we are not cosy, complacent chums of the Author of Eternity. We mind be reminded too, by the next mini-parable of Jesus, that our integrity as Christ-bearers is an essential aspect of our hope, our light, our life: leaven without integrity simply destroys the loaf.

Where are we left with this? Matthew alone of the gospel writers wanted to affirm continuity between the disciples’ pre-resurrection and post-resurrection understanding of Jesus. They didn’t always get him, and neither do we, but they were caught up into the unending journey of knowing him. Part of the DNA-continuance implication of the mustard seed is the knowledge of the continuity in Christ and Christ’s resurrection for those we love and pray for: that in itself is good news. I could not have stood at the graveside of the many infants and young people I have buried without a fundamental belief that that resurrection (that no human could witness) is absolutely God’s promise.

But of course, the other side of the parable is true, too: of course there is massive contrast between seed and bush, and a silent mysterious interaction between yeast and dough. Of course we are called to be, in word and more importantly in action, bearers of the eschatological hope that we proclaim each time we celebrate Mass together (1 Cor. 11:26). And of course we simply cannot do this without the daily intervention, the daily invasion, of the Spirit of God – the Spirit who is the guarantor of continuity between present life seen and future life unimaginable. As one commentary puts it, “Our parable is an invitation to contemplate these two things – the present and the expected future, reality and hope – in the light of the mustard seed’s story.”[2]

It is to the infiltration of that Spirit of the Resurrected Lord that we must surrender daily, to become the seed that falls and dies and rises, to be the leaven that infiltrates, and to be now and always a people that rumour resurrection hope despite and perhaps precisely because of the chaos and darkness that we experience each day.

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[1] Daryl E. Witmer, “Is the mustard seed the smallest of seeds?”, online at https://christiananswers.net/q-aiia/mustardseed.html.

[2] Davies and Allison, Matthew (Volume 2, Edinburgh: T. & T Clark, 1991) 416.

handed over ... to what?

SERMON PREACHED at St ANDREW’S, MAHENO

and St LUKE’S, OAMARU

ORDINARY SUNDAY 15 (JULY 12^th) 2020

READINGS:

Isaiah 55: 10-13

Psalm 65: 1-13

Romans 8: 1-11

Matthew 13: 1-9, 18-23

I was caught up in a wonderful conversation a couple of days ago, up the road in Omarama, as a group of church members discussed their earliest ventures into faith. Particularly they reflected on their ventures into the scriptures of our faith. Too often I fear we leave the scriptures as a sort of oratorical performance experienced on a Sunday, to be returned to the cupboard after use, stored for the next encounter a week or month or decade ahead. This was not their story. The joy I experienced was powerfully enhanced as two of those present spoke of their journeys in the writings we call Isaiah – though they are probably two or three Isaiahs.

So as I turned to the passages set for this day I heard echoes of their joy of Isaiah-encounter, the joy of the encounters around the table with these and other scriptures that had beamed radiance into lives that were open to the transforming power of sacred writings. Radiance is not always comfortable. I thought more of Isaiah: how challenging it can be to know the crippling weight of judgment that he announced to God’s people:

Ah, sinful nation,
    people laden with iniquity,
offspring who do evil,
    children who deal corruptly,
who have forsaken the Lord,
    who have despised the Holy One of Israel,
    who are utterly estranged!

The first Isaiah was relentless. The people who claimed to be a godly nation were playing games with God. Their prattling on about a god on their side, a god in their sanctuaries, a god to whom they stretched out enthusiastic hands and uttered empty phrases, this prattling was no more than empty verbiage. Yet they prattled on, all the while neglecting justice, compassion, worshipping prosperity, devouring the poor, building mighty towers of self-aggrandizement. They prattled on in self-adoration, while despising the broken and vulnerable of the earth. If we read the Book of Kings we find from another source that they received from God what they deserved: incompetent leadership that sucked them dry, left them to die. First Isaiah was more poetic:

You shall be ashamed of the oaks
    in which you delighted;
and you shall blush for the gardens
    that you have chosen.
³⁰ For you shall be like an oak
    whose leaf withers,
    and like a garden without water.
³¹ The strong shall become like tinder,
    and their work^[a] like a spark;
they and their work shall burn together,
    with no one to quench them.

It went on for maybe a century and a half, that outpouring of God’s wrath. The “daughter of Zion,” shorthand for God’s people, watch as their land becomes a wasteland, that eerily desolate collapsed civilization so brilliantly directed by T. S. Eliot: “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water.” Prophets like Isaiah and Eliot offer little relief. Nor does history.

 Isaiah the First even dares to refer to his nation as “rulers of Sodom, people of Gomorrah.” There could be few more shocking likenesses to a people who proclaimed themselves God’s people, God’s nation. Sanctimonious sorts son’t like to be thought of as sinners.

A century and a half later another Isaiah or two began to proclaim words of hope. Their people weren’t particularly interested, of course. They had become contented in their wasteland, not particularly concerned about a troublesome God who demanded a little sliver of love and a few acts of worship. But prophets are never silenced, even when they are executed: “You shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace.” “Whatever,” the ostensible people of God replied. “And we should care why?”

We might well disagree where we stand in this sorry and eternal tale of the people of God. Are we yet to be expelled from our complacency, from our Eden of self-satisfaction? As we devour the resources God provides through Mother Earth, devouring the portions of the less fortunate, as we watch Covid-19 disproportionately but not exclusively affecting the world’s most vulnerable, and as we watch the leaders of the world desperately propping up their crumbling towers, as we watch day by day on our media, it probably doesn’t matter which cycle of Isaiah’s scenes of horror we are emulating. It was ever thus; the God of Isaiah has for ever handed human beings over to the implications of our selfishness.

The words “handed over” are no empty throwaway. Paul, in particular, uses them with the full weight of their meaning: we are surrendered to our impulses, left to our own devices. He uses the idea when referring to Jesus, too. Jesus though when he is handed over to his own devices is handed over to the devices of love and redemption. Jesus, the perfect unpacking of the impulses and the heart of God cannot – or does not – do anything but surrender himself, allow himself to be given over to (Rom. 8:23, 4:25) to the full potential of love. He lives, loves, teaches, suffers and dies, but not for himself. He rises, too: for all humanity. And we are called to respond with likewise-love, likewise-compassion, likewise-justice.

And likewise-joy. For while our encounter with the Risen Christ is clearly not a get out of gaol card, as the lives of many of the great followers of Christ remind us, it is a focussing of our attention. It is for that reason that Paul, in the passage following ours, will declare, despite his considerable sufferings, that “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.” It is why, indeed, our prayer book, echoing the book we call Hebrews, will declare that we are “called to suffer.” But not end the story there.

As Jesus earlier declared to his followers, we are not left on our own. We are infiltrated by the Comforter, the joy- and hope- bringer who, as we see in the lives of the greatest Christ-followers, will transform even suffering into hope. And while, speaking strictly for me, I may not embody that hope, and whinge at every ingrown toenail or unfair judgement or greater disaster that comes my way, nevertheless we are called to be a people who radiate hope in the midst of suffering. In the midst of the sufferings to which we as individuals, we as church, we as nation, we a humanity, may well be handed over ewe seek to rumour resurrection hope. Then indeed “The strong shall become like tinder, their work like a spark; they and their work shall burn together,   with no one to quench them.”

Our prayer as a people of God, even as much seems to fall apart around us and the old certainties crumble, must be that we are indeed Christ-bearers, resurrection-hope proclaimers, for all our faults, individually and corporately. May God so fill us with divine spirit that we are indeed bearers of the living, risen Christ.