Father Keith's Sermon, 6/14

Greetings all,

A while back I asked Father Keith if he would be okay with having his sermons posted on this blog. His reply was that that was one of the original ideas for the blog anyway! So, here is his sermon from today, Sunday June 14 2009. Today's readings were: 1 Samuel 15:34 - 16:13, 2 Corinthians 5:6-17, and Mark 4:26-34. It is helpful to review these readings so that the context of the sermon is fully understood. Everything within the quote marks is taken directly from the sermon print-out provided in the front foyer at St. Peter's Church.

"WEEDS AND REBELS, Proper 6, Year B"
"'With what can we compare the Kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of the seeds of the earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of shrubs, and puts orth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.'

If you are one of those people who take great pride in having a lawn that could make it onto a Scott's Turf-builder fertilizer advertisement; if you aspire to a yard that looks like a fairway at Augusta National Golf Course; if you're an artist in green who could pass for the groundskeeper at Progressive Field; then you do not ever want to live next door to me and my family. For a variety of reasons economic and philosophic, Monica and I practice more of a wild meadow approach to lawncare. If it's green, let it grow! Keep those chemicals off of our children's feet and our of our storm sewers.

Which, of course, means that every May, in addition to the random selection of grass species that populate our lawn, we have an abundance of Dandelions. And in August, as the grass is drying out, we enjoy a bumper crop of crabgrass. So, it is by definition a yard that likes to share itself with neighboring yards. Every May, those pretty yellow dandelion flowers overnight become those fuzzy dandelion seed-heads. And just a puff of wind is all it takes to scatter from each one of those plants thousands of tiny aspiring dandelions, which rise into the atmosphere to float along with the offspring of thousands of other dandelions, to create what sometimes looks like a warm-weather snowstorm. And each of those little flying seeds is looking for one of those perfect green lawns into which to settle. And there, it will wait patiently until next May, when it will spring up to repeat the glorious process all over again, or to die and agonizing death, burned and poisoned by the lethal chemical weapons of mass dandelion destruction arrayed against it by the lover of thoroughbred Kentucky Blue Grass.

What is this priest babbling about, you are asking yourselves?

Well, I'm using an image that for us might evoke the same kind of wonderment and wry confusion that the image of a mustard plant would have evoked for Jesus' listeners. In Jesus' day and place, the mustard plant was, and still is, a nuisance. It is a prodigious reproducer, each plant capable of producing thousand of tiny seeds to send aloft in a gust of wind, or in the guts of birds. Left unchecked, mustard could largely take over a farmer's field in just a few seasons. Galilean farmers, to this day, go through their fields hand-plucking as many of the plants as they can, and in late May and June, use the old-fashioned form of herbicidal warfare: burn over their harvested fields precisely to destroy mustard plants and their seeds on the ground, and other plants like them.

So, to those Galilean peasants, and to us this morning, Jesus must have sounded slightly demented here: The Kingdom of God can be compared to mustard seed? The kingdom of God can be compared to dandelions? What gives?

A similar thing is going on in today's reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, one of the most tantalizing tales in all of Scripture. [Discursus: this Summer the Lectionary takes us through one of the wildest ancient soap operas you'll ever encounter - the story of King David. You won't want to miss it, so be in church every Sunday.].

So here, in our Scriptures today, we have held up for us two pretty strange images of God at work: rebels and weeds. For those of us whose values tend more towards law and order in politics and uniformity in lawn-care, those images are probably not just strange, they may be positively alarming.

And yet, step back for a moment. Let your historical imagination be free. Look at the story of God's people, and see if rebellious weediness isn't precisely what you see. God's people have always faced suppression, God's Kingdom has always been opposed. Yet, somehow, in every generation, God's people and kingdom have managed to survive. And not only survive, but thrive, and grow, and like weeds, spread. God's Kingdom, Jesus seems to be saying, is like weeds: you can keep them in check, but you can never, ever get rid of them. God's work, we see in the story of David, will almost always be done by the most unlikely of people - the youngest son of Jesse the shepherd, the son of Mary of Nazareth - found along the margins of established power, quietly undermining the edifices of control.

And interestingly, the most dangerous form of suppression that God's people and kingdom have always faced has never been the active forceful opposition of the world; the most dangerous form of suppression is domestication, the taming of the wild. Wild prairie grass is tamed and domesticated to become the perfect, lovely fescue to adorn McMansions. The rebel shepherd becomes the oppressive king. The tiny Jewish cult of Jesus Messiah, becomes the institution of the Church.

And so, hear the Good News this morning: the Kingdom of God is like a weed. You can't stop it. The world will try, through force, intimidation, and domestication, to keep God's kingdom under its thumb, but ultimately that effort will fail, the control will break. God is, even now, calling and appointing the rebels, the Davids, who will undermine that control. One or two of them might even be in this room, looking for all the world like good, domesticated, tamed blades of grass.

Watch out, these wondrous Scriptures seem to both promise and warn us, right now, in this room, in our own souls, unseen, are the mustard seeds, the dandelions, the unremarkable peasant boys, through whom God may renew the face of the earth."


Peace to you,
Jen