Parables - standing in both worlds

The first sermon for Ordinary Time, 2009 (June 14th)

God was perplexed. He had made such a beautiful universe and that little gem of a planet, that blue and green marble, was a particularly fine piece of work. It all said something about what and why God is. It was such a special place that it needed watching over and so God had created that human vessel to be the ones he could count on. He had even breathed something extra into them. On some days he worried that that experiment wasn’t going as well as he had intended. Humans were proving to be a head-strong lot but once having given them the freedom of their own minds, what could he do?

After much thought and a good night’s sleep, God had a plan – an Outreach Plan. He would select a group of them and make a real effort to be closer to them. Maybe when they got to know him a little bit better and see what he was trying to accomplish, they would work better together and as the word would spread, eventually others would want to join in.. But which people to pick? He sent out a memo.
The first people to present themselves to God were fierce warriors. They said, “We are the strongest and fastest people on earth. No one can withstand our might. We can win your battles for you.” God raised the divine eyebrows and said, “Thank you, I think.”

The next people to come brought drawings and said, “We are the best builders on earth. Our cities are without equal; look at these urban layout concepts. As a builder yourself, you can see that we already think alike. We’re the right choice for you.” God said, “Interesting.”

Another group came in and brought examples of their produce, grains and fruits and vegetables. “We are the best farmers on earth, we can make things grow in places even you didn’t think of. If you want to reach a big audience, we’re your best bet because, well, you know, people gotta eat!” God said, “I’ll get back to you.”

Finally, all of the peoples of the world had made their cases to God, but one, a small raggedy group of people still waited. They came in, somewhat hesitantly, for they had heard all of those before them. They said, “We are a small people, we are not warriors, we live in our tents and wander around so we’ve never built anything. We’ve never grown anything because we don’t stay long in one place so we have nothing to show you. But what we do have is our stories, lots of them, and they are good stories.” At that God sat up straight and looked over this small ratty, bare footed, band of wanderers and said, “You will be my people and I will be your God, because I love stories. Let’s get to know each other.”

What makes a good story? In his book Storytelling; Imagination and Faith, William Bauch says there are four characteristics of a good story. First, stories provoke curiosity and compel repetition. You know that when you hear a good story, you cannot help but turn around and tell it to someone else. Bauch says that a good story is like a secret, a secret that is impossible to keep to oneself.

Second, stories unite us in a holistic way to nature, our common stuff of existence. From American Indian lore to Tolkein to George Lucas, good stories connect us in some way to our elemental beginning. The stories of our faith in the book of Genesis are perfect examples.

The third characteristic of a good story is that it provides a bridge to one’s culture, one’s roots. George Washington probably didn’t fess up to cutting down a cherry tree, but it’s a good story about the ideal of honesty and integrity in leadership. Paul Bunyan probably didn’t really have a blue ox for a friend, but his story is about the strength it took to settle a wild country. These stories give us our identity as Americans.

The last characteristic of a good story is that it binds us to all of humankind, to the universal, human family. With Joshua tumbling the walls of Jericho and Red Riding Hood confronting the big bad wolf, we learn how to address the fears and limitations of our human condition. From Romeo and Juliet to Jesus, the best stories tell of love so great that we will die for it.

Jesus was a storyteller, and he particularly liked to use a special kind of story known as a parable. Our reading today is from the 4th chapter of the Gospel of Mark which introduces his use of parables as his way of teaching people about God and the Kingdom of God. Marcus Borg says in his book Jesus, “..Jesus was a teacher of wisdom. Wisdom is not about knowledge or information…(but) focuses on the most central questions of life.” He taught about the character of God and what it is like in that other world that exists in the midst of our everyday life – the unseen Kingdom of God that I talked about last week. He taught people how to see and live in that unseen world.
That’s why he used parables, because they are stories that live in both worlds at once. The word parable means to “to throw along side.” So what Jesus is doing is throwing the two worlds down together for us to see and understand how they reflect two different sets of priorities.

He begins with very real images, “the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed.” That line gives us all four characteristics of a good story, but here is the twist added by the parable—for the farming community, mustard is an anathema – it is a weed that will spread faster than wildfire, and for the primarily agrarian audience Jesus was addressing, this parable must have been a little unsettling. “You’ve got to hear what Jesus said today. What on earth is he thinking?” Well, what he was thinking was that this story centered on nature, the land, and the “weeds” of Roman control that had grown up all around them. In one simple little parable, Jesus tells a story with all the four major elements William Bauch alluded too, with its connection to nature, the culture of land, the history of Jewish enslavement in Egypt, and the issue unifying all of them – how to survive on the land after having had lost control of their farms to the Romans, who were taking most of the produce. Oh the power in the little story of the little mustard seed.

What Jesus’ parables show more than anything is that in the unseen Kingdom of God that Jesus describes, things often look upside down. The farmers in his audience would immediately have recognized the mustard seed a menace, and the analogy of the weed it grows into as the evil of Roman control of their land and lives would be straightforward. But in Jesus’ parable that lowly mustard seed and its resulting voracious weed becomes a thing of wonder and beauty. If such a weed is glorified so is every discarded and dismissed oppressed person in the world, and so the parable causes us to wonder if the other things that the world hates might also be divinity in disguise. The parable not only reminds us that the Kingdom of God has different priorities than the material world of land and weeds, but it calls us to think long and hard about the things that the world does value.

I wanted to find a modern equivalent of the mustard seed that would give you the same level of discomfort as the farmers in Jesus’ audience must have experienced, so here is what I came up with…The Kingdom of Heaven is like a computer virus. Well, I bet I fit the first criterion of a good story and got your attention. And certainly, this parable breaks into the mainstream of our culture. A computer virus will break in on you despite your carefully constructed firewalls and anti-virus software programs. It can rob you of time, even take some of your work, and perhaps even cost you some money to repair the havoc it can wreak. It can even sober you to the realities of how much you rely on a machine for your well being in the world.

One of the things we know about computer viruses is that there will always be another one trying to breach our defenses and that’s the good news of the Kingdom of Heaven, which will break in and scramble your defenses and leave you vulnerable to the power of compassion and love.

Don’t you just love a good story?