Hunger

The dust in the earthen courtyard swirled around their feet and over the hems of brightly colored skirts. It was hot, a dry heat, and the brown hills shimmered in the distance like a mirage. The line of mainly women and children snaked on and on, doubling in upon itself, winding through the village. The people’s faces were blank with exhaustion, and many limped barefoot through the dust, leaning on sticks or on one another. Some women carried babies with swollen bellies and thin legs, the tell-tale signs of starvation, and the arms of other mothers hung limply at their sides, their empty hands grieving for the children who no longer filled their arms, the lifeless children who had to be left a few miles back by the side of the road. Yet the people had heard that there was hope in this dusty courtyard. They had heard that there was food here, salvation from the imminent death that stalked them. They had heard that here, the gnawing in their bellies could be soothed and the crying of their children comforted. And so they poured over the brown hills from miles around, walking and clinging to the thin thread of hope that was pulling them to this place. In the center of the courtyard, sweating under the hot African sun, were followers of Jesus Christ, scooping some kind of porridge out of a big kettle into bowls and passing them, passing them to the waiting crowd, one little bowl after another, seemingly without end, replacing desperation with hope, one meal at a time.

We can’t read today’s Gospel reading about Jesus feeding the crowds in Galilee without thinking of the famine that looms today in Somalia, where almost 400,000 starving people have walked across the border into Kenya, seeking food. Here at St. Thomas, we are faithful in bringing food every week to the Eastern Area Community Ministries food pantry right down the street, and in bringing it forward into God’s abundance along with our offerings at the Eucharist. But it is easy for us to wring our hands in helplessness when we are overwhelmed by the terrible reports of starvation in far-away places like Somalia. Often, our feelings of helplessness cause us to shrug hopelessly, and to push the images of the dying babies as far from our minds as we can. As Jesus’ disciples, it is easy for us to identify with the Twelve in today’s Gospel, as they tried to understand what their Master expected of them on the shores of the lake. Think about it--it is the end of a long day for them. They have done their best and put in their service hours already, running around helping Jesus to heal the sick for hours under the hot sun. They figure that it is time to get rid of all of these pesky strangers and to settle down with their master around the fire to eat and talk in peace and quiet, so they suggest to Jesus, quite reasonably, that he send the crowds away to buy their own food in surrounding villages, before it gets dark and late. Jesus, however, refuses to send the crowds away. He says, “No, let them stay and YOU give them something to eat.” In the Greek grammatical structure, the pronoun “you” is especially emphasized. “You, YOU all take care of things. YOU all provide resources for the hungry ones,” Jesus demands. With divine power, Jesus could have called down manna from on high like Moses did; or all by himself, he could have mysteriously taken away the hunger pangs of the people, filling them from the inside, without the nitty-gritty trouble of dividing paltry rations of food. But he doesn’t. Jesus asks the disciples to find the resources themselves. Jesus’ feast, even in its miraculous abundance, places demands upon Jesus’ followers. With Jesus, helplessness is not an option. I was interested to learn that the word “ministry” comes from the Latin root for small things (think, “mini”). Our ministry in Jesus’ name works miracles through small things. Writes Martin Smith, “[Christ empowers us by] unlocking the secret that hidden and small actions have enormous transformative potential.”[1]The tragedy of hunger in our world is not going to go magically away. Just because we have already brought in our canned goods for the week, the starving crowds will not disappear. Just as God continually pours out God’s good gifts upon us, God expects us to share them just as continually with others in need: one can, one dollar, at a time.

Our Gospel lesson, though, is not just about literal porridge for the hungry, and we are not only to identify with the scrambling, laboring disciples. We are also the hungry crowds. Matthew purposefully frames the story of Jesus feeding the 5000 in a way that will make us think of the Heavenly Banquet. It is no coincidence that Jesus “takes,” “blesses,” “breaks,” and “gives” the bread to the people by the shores of the lake—the same actions that Jesus performs at the Last Supper and the same actions that Jesus performs at every Eucharist. For Jesus and his followers, the Heavenly Banquet at the End of Time was a familiar image for the Kingdom of God, for God’s presence on earth, for the joy and abundance and celebration that await us with God. We continue that imagery when we say in our liturgy that our Eucharist is a “foretaste” of that Heavenly Banquet in God’s Kingdom. What we need to notice about the Great Feast in our Gospel lesson, however, is the strange kind of Banquet that it describes.

          In Matthew’s Gospel, our lesson comes right after the description of another great feast—King Herod’s gory feast, at which the King beheads John the Baptist and serves his head up on a silver platter. Herod’s feast is a meal in which court intrigue, abuse of power, sex, corruption, and vengeance result in murder. In contrast, Jesus’ feast is completely removed from the realms of power and prestige. When Jesus asks the crowd to be seated for their meal, he has them recline not on couches in an elegant Roman banquet hall, but on the ground in a deserted place. The meal that Jesus offers the people of God does not consist of aged wines and multiple courses of rich food, but of the simple peasant food at hand, of dry bread and salted fish. Where the earthly king’s banquet offers titillating entertainment, sumptuous food, inclusion in the realms of power, and even the violent murder of God’s own messenger, the banquet of our heavenly king feeds us in simplicity and peace, with pure compassion, healing, and overflowing love. In the heavenly banquet, we are offered abundant goodness, wholeness, mercy, and forgiveness. These are the things for which even we well-fed Americans are starving.

          Not to diminish the pain of the starving people of Somalia, but we cannot ignore the similarities of that line, snaking through the dusty village, with the line that leads to the altar in our churches. Aren’t we limping, too, toward the hope of being fed, pulled inexplicably forward, despair sometimes clinging to our feet like dust, arms often longing for deceased loved ones, resentment often churning in our stomachs, souls often on empty? Behind the masks that we put on each week with our Sunday clothes, don’t we all have hidden wounds, remnants of secret battles, like Jacob’s wrestling with the stranger in the night? Don’t we all come limping and longing into God’s Kingdom, seeking blessing, seeking God’s Face? And at that altar, we receive a little piece of wafer that resembles cardboard more closely than it does bread, and a tiny sip of wine. And yet, miraculously, we are filled. The emptiness becomes purpose; the resentment becomes forgiveness; the longing is stilled. For awhile. Until the next time. As the old hymn goes: “Bread of the world in mercy broken, Wine of the soul, in mercy shed, by whom the words of life were spoken, and in whose death our sins are dead: look on the heart by sorrow broken, look on the tears by sinners shed; and be thy feast to us the token that by thy grace our souls are fed.”

As we are fed, so must we feed others, gathering up the remnants and building the Kingdom. Just as we know, from experience, that we do not hope in vain as we approach God’s banquet table, we know, by faith, that our best efforts to feed the world, physically and spiritually, will not be in vain, either. Out in the remote places, far from the banquet halls of earthly power, Jesus hands his disciples the bread, the disciples give the bread to the crowds. “And all eat and are filled; and they take up what is left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.”

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[1] Martin Smith, Compass and Stars, 56.

The Kingdom of Heaven and the Island in Norway

Imagine the Kingdom of Heaven. God’s reign. Christ ruling on the heavenly throne. Light and glory. Suffering and evil banished by the mighty power of God. God in control. “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Imagine that island off the coast of Norway. The death of innocent children, shot in cold blood. Terror. Darkness. Hatred. Chaos.

If we human beings live in places like that island in Norway, where, O God, is your Kingdom? And how can we enter into it? How far do we have to swim to get away from the evil, how deep do we have to dig to dig ourselves out of powerlessness, how strong do we have to be, to get there?

Jesus answers[1]:

 “When you say ‘kingdom of heaven,’ don’t see greatness and power. See the tiny grain of mustard seed, the minute speck that turns into those big bushes that sprout up everywhere like weeds. Don’t see a farmer methodically planting wheat in nice, neat, Kosher rows. See a farmer sticking mustard where it doesn’t belong, breaking the law of Moses, risking chaos by mixing ‘kinds,’ risking failure by planting the mustard in a field where it can get into his wheat and contaminate it. Don’t see the great, tall cedar of Lebanon, symbol of strong, powerful nations, with its sturdy boughs that provide a home for birds and nations from far and wide. See the birds finding safety and shelter among the weak, drooping branches of a four-foot tall mustard bush. See God’s Kingdom among the weak and insignificant. So you don’t know about planting mustard ….? Have you heard the one about the computer virus, a little bitty equation, that was dropped into the computer system? It brought banks and governments to their knees.

And when you picture the Kingdom, don’t imagine that God is going to announce it by holding up the righteous ones with trumpets and fanfare. See instead a housewife taking a tiny piece of decaying bread, called leaven, bread that has been sitting in a damp, dark place until it is full of mold, and quietly hiding it (yes, hiding it, for after all, who would want to eat that, if they knew?!) hiding it in enough flour to feed 150 people.[2] As the mold spreads in that massive amount of flour, watch all of that dough rise into at least 110 pounds of warm, delicious bread. See the woman preparing enormous amounts of bread, enough to encompass even the presence of the Holy One, the same amount that Sarah baked for God when God appeared to her as three hungry travelers at her tent in the wilderness.[3] Don’t see the pure, holy unleavened bread of Passover, though, but impure, corrupt leavened bread, bread born of mold. See God’s Kingdom slowly breaking down the boundaries of pure and impure, of holy and corrupt. See God stealthily joining what cannot logically be joined. Have you heard the one about the crucified criminal who becomes the messiah, the one where death becomes the way to eternal life, the one where suffering leads to glory?[4]

And when you think about the Kingdom of Heaven, think of treasure, think of joy, think of the undeserved delight that rushes through you all the way to your finger tips when you are surprised by sudden reward: a winning lottery ticket, an unexpected kiss, a lump that is found to be benign.  But wait, don’t think that you did anything to earn the treasure, the love, or the good news, or that you will know the right thing to do with it, once you have it in your all-too-human hands. Imagine that you are a worker, digging in the heat in a field, and your shovel unexpectedly hits the top of a chest full of gold coins. What can be better than that! But wait, the field does not belong to you. You are a mere servant. So can you keep the coins? Don’t you have to return them to the owner of the field? See yourself quickly covering the coins back up with dirt, hiding them with sod, and pawning everything that you own to buy the field before you announce your miraculous find to anyone. Then the treasure that brings such joy will belong to you undisputedly and forever …. Won’t it? Don’t your actions make you a bad person, deserving of punishment rather than reward? But you’ve already been rewarded! Or imagine that you are a rich art dealer who finds the most beautiful painting in the world, the perfect one that you have been searching for in auction after auction, all of your life. You want its beauty so badly that you sell your shop, your house, and your car in order to buy it. Now you have your painting—but what were you thinking? If you want to eat or have a livelihood, then won’t you have to sell it again, because, except for the painting, you are now broke?  The kingdom of heaven is a treasure, a treasure that you did not earn, a treasure worth giving everything for …. but it is not a treasure that can be bought and sold, or possessed without corruption.[5] Have you heard the one about the medieval Church who sold the free gift of forgiveness of sins in order to fill its coffers with gold? Or the old song from the ‘60’s about the people with the One Tin Soldier who kill everyone in the mountain kingdom for their treasure—their treasure that turns out to be a stone inscribed with “Peace on Earth?”

We often interpret the final parable in our readings today to mean that the Church is like a big net, full of all kinds of people, people that we have to accept with a sigh until the final judgment, when God will give the rotten ones what’s coming to them. As the Kingdom, however, God’s net is bigger than the Church and bigger than we could ever imagine. We the Church are just one of those sea creatures in there, one that has yet to prove by its actions whether it is fresh or rotten.[6] One young adult advises the church:

“People sometimes assume that because I’m a progressive 30-year-old … I must want a super-hip church—you know, the kind that’s called “Thrive” or “Be” and which boasts “an awesome worship experience,” a  fair-trade coffee bar, its own iPhone app, and a pastor who looks like a Jonas Brother. While none of these features are inherently wrong … these days I find myself longing for a church with a cool factor of about 0. That’s right. I want a church that includes fussy kids, old liturgy, bad sound, weird congregants,  and…brace yourself…painfully amateur “special music” now and then… I want to be part of an un-cool church because I want to be part of a community that shares the reputation of Jesus, and like it or not, Jesus’ favorite people in the world were not cool.” [7]

The great spiritual writer and priest Henri Nouwen often describes the uncool Kingdom in his illustrations of life at the L’Arche Community, a community of mentally and physically challenged adults. The gifted Nouwen, deep in spiritual burnout after years of teaching at Harvard, went to live among God’s children at L’Arche. There, he found that everything that he had learned, all of his scholarly knowledge, meant nothing. No one understood any of it or cared about any of it. At L’Arche, he learned that love and acceptance are much more powerful and healing than accomplishment and competence. He also learned to live with surprises. The mentally challenged people with whom he worshipped didn’t wait until after the sermon to tell him that they disagreed—they just shouted it right out. They didn’t hold their emotions in check with fancy words or convincing arguments—they just let their hearts speak right out. By necessity, Nouwen learned that he had to let go of being in control, let go of the illusion that he had power over other people and that could make them listen to him.[8]

Today’s Gospel parables show us that there is nothing clear-cut about the Kingdom of Heaven or our place in it. How far do we have to swim from evil and suffering to find God’s Kingdom? The Good News is that we don’t. It is a Kingdom in which a cold-blooded killer can find rest and forgiveness. Yet it is also a Kingdom in which justice will be done. It is a Kingdom with a King who bleeds just like the wounded ones do. It is a Kingdom that waits silently within tragedy, waiting to transform it in ways that we don’t always understand. It is a Kingdom that we can’t control or possess or regulate. It is a Kingdom whose best teachers are children, the handicapped, and the outcast. It is a Kingdom that spreads in spite of evil, uses corruption for its own purposes, and breaks down every boundary that we put up in its way. Thanks be to God.

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[1] My interpretation of these parables is highly dependent on that of Bernard Scott in his book, Hear Then the Parable.

[2] See Ulrich Luz, Matthew, 262.

[3] Barbara Reid, Parables for Preachers, 112.

[4] Scott, 328-29.

[5] Scott, 319.

[6] Luz, 284.

[7] Rachel Held Evans, “Blessed are the Uncool,” found at http://rachelheldevans.com/blessed-are-the-uncool.

[8] See Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1989.)

How do we tend the garden? With apologies to my new neighbors, who hopefully don't read my blog

        In my new home, each condo owner has a little bitty patch of grass out in front of his courtyard, and it gets mowed every week by the condo association. Every time I look at that little bitty patch of grass, my heart leaps with joy, because I think of the great big yard at my old house that I no longer have to mow, treat, rake, or otherwise worry about. What freedom! What delight I find in that little bitty patch of grass! But then last week I came home from church, only to find two of my neighbors out in front of their little bitty yards, sweating in the heat to put down new sod. “It’s these weeds,” they said to me in exasperation. “This grass is just so full of weeds that you can’t even see the grass anymore. It looks just awful,” they complained. Their eyes then drifted disdainfully over to my little patch of grass. “You know, you’re going to have to do something about your grass, too,” they said. “All of your weeds are going to blow their little seeds over here in our yards and get them all re-infected. And we can’t have that. You need to get rid of those weeds,” they warned.  I looked at my pretty little patch of green, where weeds and grass were growing peacefully and freely together on a little bitty piece of soil that I didn’t have to rake or mow, and I sighed a deep, inward sigh.

          Today’s Gospel lesson, however, gave me some renewed hope! Is Jesus telling me that I don’t need to remove the weeds from my little bitty patch of grass? Can I go next door and read it to my neighbors for proof? Should we just let the grass and the weeds alone, confident that all will turn out right in the end? Do I really need to weed my yard, my heart, or my community? One blogger thinks that I do. Danielle Schroyer challenges our parable, implying that it is advocating a harmful, laissez-faire attitude. Is Jesus saying, she asks, that “If you have a terrible sore festering right alongside your healthy skin, just leave it alone, untreated, because by remedying it you might kill some of the good skin, too [?!] Try telling that to someone with a terrible sore … Weeds. Festering sores… Even deep-seated anger. We don’t tend to advocate inactivity in any of these cases. Any good gardener, doctor, therapist, or friend will tell you that the best approach is to confront a problem and do what you can to change it. Trim back the weeds. Treat the illness. Talk out the problem. Nobody in their right mind would say to leave it alone until some undisclosed future time when someone else will come along to fix it for you… [At least] Can we be proactive, even if we can’t be reactive? Can our doors have locks, our gardens have gates, and our bodies have probiotics and vitamins? … [If I’m going to follow Jesus’ advice,] I’m wondering if it would just be easier to sit vulnerably in the middle of a street and wait for a car to run me over.”[1]

          Danielle’s confused and outraged reaction is probably the reaction of the slaves in our parable, as well as the reaction of the Galilean farmers to whom our parable was first addressed. Scholar Ulrich Luz thinks that this strange parable, found only in Matthew’s Gospel, is a response to the similar parable found in Mark 4.[2] Here, Mark’s Jesus says, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how… But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.” “Wait a minute,” we respond when we hear Mark’s parable about the kingdom, “it doesn’t work like that!” What about the presence of evil? The grain just doesn’t come up all perfectly. The grain ripens full of weeds! Just look around in my community, in my heart! How can we have a good harvest, if bad and good are all mixed up in there?       

Scholars are pretty sure that the word translated “weeds” in our Gospel is really a plant called “darnell,” a wheat look-alike common in the Middle East that usually carries a poisonous fungus along with it, a fungus that will sicken all who mistakenly gather it up with their wheat and turn it into bread. Good farmers in the Holy Land know that they need to recognize that noxious weed, and they would indeed usually root it out early, before it can run the risk of getting mixed in with the wheat at harvest time. Darnell does not prevent the wheat from growing, but it does hurt the people who mistakenly feed off of it.        

If you were a slave going out into the wheat fields one sunny morning and found that the field where your master himself had planted good wheat seed was suddenly full of poisonous weeds, you would be afraid of a beating. As a helpless slave, you would wonder if you were going to be blamed for the disaster. You would sigh in despair over all of the work that would be expected of you in weeding out all of the bad plants in the field. And then when the master told you that, “No, this time we are going to leave the wheat and the weeds alone. You won’t even have to do the reaping. I’ll bring someone in from the outside at harvest time, and they will take care of it,” you would shake your head in confusion at the change in practices, at the master’s new generosity toward you and at his new slovenly way of farming. “If I had my own land,” you would probably grumble to yourself, “I would put up a big fence around it, with guard dogs to keep the enemies out. I would make my slaves root out those weeds before some of that fungus got mixed in with my wheat, and no one would ever want to buy my grain again!” You would think that your master had lost his mind.

          Jesus loves to make us think that God has lost God’s mind, because Jesus is trying to transform our minds. We react to evil in our hearts and in our communities just like the slaves react to the darnell in the wheat field. What do you say when you wake up to find sin in your soul? Do you think that you can root it out on your own? Do you blame God or another human being for its presence? “Master, aren’t you the one who planted that wheat?” cry the slaves. What about when you wake up one morning to find dissension at your workplace or in your family or in your church? Do you start blaming those who disagree with you, thinking, if not acting on the thought, that the community would be a better place if the poisonous people could be rooted out? Do you attempt to gather those who agree with your position into neat bundles of wheat? Do you start ripping at the soil of your heart or your community until the ground lies dead and barren? Jesus knows this is how we all react. Jesus also knows that the old proverb, “What you sow is what you reap,” is not always true in this world. Jesus knows that in this world, even in this world into which his kingdom is dawning, we can sow love and still reap death on the cross; we can sow goodness, and still reap condemnation.

          No, our parable does not advocate sitting back and letting the weeds destroy us. The weeds in our parable do not harm the growing wheat.  But our parable wants to help us avoid wasting our time judging parts of ourselves or parts of our community as dispensable. Our parable wants to free us from games of blaming and judgment and gossip and shunning. I heard a wonderful quote this summer from a contemporary Swiss theologian who said, “If there is a final judgment, it is to keep us from doing it ourselves.”[3] Our judgments only lead to paralyzing guilt, destruction, violence, or hatred. Barbara Brown Taylor tells the story of a group of European knights who came into an Arab town somewhere on their way to the Holy Land during one of the early Crusades. They immediately killed every supposed heathen in sight. Later, when they turned the bodies over, they found crosses around most of their victim’s necks. Explains Taylor, “it never occurred to them that Christians came in brown as well as white.”[4] The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., someone who certainly did not shrug or sit back and give up in the presence of evil, understood the gist of today’s parable. “All I’m saying is simply this,” he wrote. “That all of life is interrelated, that somehow we’re caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”[5]

          Well, maybe my neighbors are right. What we really need is new sod. But for now, grass and weeds share the same sod, with roots inseparably intertwined in dark, invisible places. Let’s not tear up the little bitty green patches that bring us, and God, such joy, in order to seek a perfection that they cannot sustain. Let’s not starve our hearts to eliminate the evil within them. Let’s not render sterile our communities in order to make the people in them perfect, either. The harvest belongs to a generous, loving God. As we work the fields of the Kingdom together, that’s all we need to know.

           

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[1] Danielle Schroyer, www.the hardestquestion.com.

[2] Ulrich Luz, Matthew, 254.

[3] Lytta Basset, quoted by a friend of mine who heard her lecture.

[4] Barbara Brown Taylor,  Bread of Angels, 151.

[5] Martin Luther King, Jr. Quoted in http://www.edgeofenclosure.org/

The Potentiality of Seeds

          The problem with seeds lies in what Paul Ricoeur would call their mysterious potentiality. Closed in upon themselves, almost secretive, they hide all kinds of possibilities within their stubborn shells, not sharing their mysteries with us in the present. It requires the complex workings of our imaginations to look at a lumpy little seed and to see a tall stalk of corn or a waving field of wheat. The seed’s protective shell demands of us a certain faith that future vision will indeed emerge from present reality.

          A few summers ago, I got the notion to plant some flowers in a lovely container on my patio. As I planted my package of seeds, scattering what looked like hard grains of dirt all over the vitamin-enriched potting soil, I could immediately see in  my mind’s eye the tall, beautiful potential blossoms; I could smell their sweet scent and could imagine them waving softly in the summer breeze. The next day, however, my two-year-old great-nephew came to town for a visit. Puttering around my patio, he spied my planter, and mischief glimmered in his eyes. I explained to him that he should leave the pot alone, since I had just planted flowers in it …. But despite my clear warnings, he couldn’t put together in his mind the “flowers” that he heard me describe, and the empty reality that he saw in the nice “miniature sandbox” right at his level. In the blink of an eye, my bountiful flower “harvest” lay scattered in clumps on the concrete and clung to sweaty two-year-old fists. In the simplicity of his vision, my little great-nephew didn’t grasp the glorious potential of seeds. I, on the other hand, did not grasp in my flights of fancy that seeds require some careful tending before they can be called flowers. The challenge before us, Jesus implies in the parable of the sower, is to recognize the potentiality hidden in the present and—somehow—to tend it.

In the Gospels, the parables of Jesus are themselves like seeds:

mysterious, enveloped in a tough, hard-to-crack shell, difficult to categorize

and to understand. Like the truth that they carry within them, the parables

          are deceptively simple and unremarkable in appearance, yet they are bearers of enormous transformative power. Unfortunately, rather than hearing the parables in their transforming truth, we, like Matthew in today’s Gospel, tend to allegorize Jesus’ strange tales, to tame them so that the elements line up logically and the stories mean just one thing. In the parable of the sower, so often we turn—like Matthew does in verse 18—to focus on the soil, rather than on the more nebulous potentiality of the seed itself.  We immediately start to judge our own spiritual soil, or the soil of our neighbors, weighing who might treat the seed well and who might squander its gifts. With the precision of a horticulturalist, we measure the depth of our thoughts, the fecundity of our hearts, the size of the pebbles blocking our wills. We want to reassure ourselves that we will be among those who will welcome the word with a dark, rich loam, the kind found deep beneath an ancient forest floor. And we imagine how the hard-hearted unbelievers next to us will only squander God’s word upon the rocky soil of their inadequate souls.

          Yet Jesus begins his parable with a wide-open image. As he was speaking to the crowd at the seaside, his listeners knew that there were a large number of Galilean farmers out in the hills around them, casting seed upon the ground in a timeless, simple gesture of sowing. Jesus tries to wake his listeners up, to encourage them to look at the farming scenes around them in a new and different light. He shouts, “Let anyone who has ears to hear, hear!” “Pay attention! Right now, as you watch your neighbors sow their fall crops, the compact little seeds of the kingdom—those tiny specks no bigger than  mustard seeds—are being sown. At this moment. All over. In all kinds of places. Not just in the places that you would expect. Not just in the favorable places, or in the places were you like to look for them, but everywhere.” In his parable, Jesus presents to our imaginations not only the seeds that withered and the seeds that were choked, but he opens our minds to the seeds that are still growing up and increasing, with ever greater and greater yields.

          The catch is that, no matter how hard we try, we, like my little great-nephew, have trouble seeing potentiality. When faith tells us one thing and we seem to see another, we are left squinting and rubbing our eyes. We believe, for example, that we are the body of Christ—yet often when we gather, we see individuals struggling to work together. We talk about Eternal Life and Resurrection, and yet we watch loved ones suffer and die. We read about signs of the kingdom of God breaking forth, yet every day we pass by signs of injustice and poverty. We are like Sarah, laughing in incredulity as God tells us that we will give birth to nations while seeing only the wrinkled, sagging skin of our old age. How much easier it is to walk through the fields and point out the worm-eaten sprouts and shriveled leaves around us that it is to speak confidently of the abundant, hundred-fold yield that will come from clusters of grain only a few inches tall.

          Seeing potentiality, and living by it, is a spiritual discipline. Not long ago, I came across the night-time prayer that Eleanor Roosevelt used as she took a key role in the creation of the universal declaration of human rights. This strong woman of action prayed at night, “Make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new.”[1] It is interesting to note that Roosevelt’s drive to work for change in the world was accompanied by her nightly practice of praying to be made aware of potentiality. As she sat, day after day, week after week, in a room full of stinging cold War rhetoric, dealing with soaring egos, blind governments, and impossibly lofty ideals, her prayer kept her eyes open to the potentiality of one-hundred fold yields. Seeing the world as God sees it, as “a world made ever new,” Roosevelt was able to persevere in her work, to respond to what she saw, and to work for God’s Kingdom.

          Can we train ourselves to look at our church community in light of God’s gift of potentiality? Can we look at St. Thomas like a seed about to break out of its shell? Can we gather each week as if we are gathering in a world made new in Christ? Can we yield fruit more abundant than seems logically possible? Yes, we can. It will take time, and prayer, and practice. It will take coming together with hearts full of prayer and with eyes open to see what lies beneath the surface of things. Living into potentiality doesn’t mean just sitting back and imagining some vague and easy flowering that will come someday, without any effort on our parts. Neither does it mean flinging dirt around like my great-nephew, ignoring the seeds that God has planted in our midst. We can look at our parish and see cracks and weeds and empty pews. Or we can look at our parish and see God’s light shining through who we are and what we do. We can start listing our potential, God’s potential within us, rather than our troubles. We can pray that we, and others, will be able to see us as God sees us, filled with light and infinite possibilities. And we can show that true self out in the world. As God cries out to us, “Pay attention! The seed is being scattered here!” I pray that we will have all been trained by faithful spiritual practice to fall silent as we stand even on untilled soil and automatically to respond, “Pass me a scythe that I may join in the harvest!”

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[1] In Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001), unnumbered page.

On Baggage

          When I was a toddler, I had a fascination with the buttons on the television set. What a feeling of power and wonder to pull the little silver knob and to watch the screen fill with pictures and sound! And then to give the knob just a little push and silence the life within it, all on my own. My parents, of course, did not want me turning the TV on and off, and they made a strict rule that I was not to touch the buttons, with a little hand slap as my punishment if I disobeyed. Even as a toddler, I was a child who wanted to obey the rules. I had figured out that I could earn my parents’ approval—and love—by my obedience, and I was scrupulous. The story goes that, in the case of the TV knobs, my mother would find me studying them with longing, quickly reaching out to touch them, and then slapping my own hand. Some might applaud my sense of compliance and self-censure at the young age of two …. Except that I had developed an ulcer from stress …by age five.

          In today’s New Testament readings, both Paul and Jesus point out that it is a heavy burden indeed to live according to a system of reward and punishment. It’s not that the proscriptions of the law are bad things. We need God’s law to tell us what is right and what is wrong, for without a moral compass, we are lost. For Paul, however, the problem with the law is that the law can identify sin but not prevent it. The law cannot make us do the things that it teaches us are right. If the law shows us what we are to do, yet cannot make us do those things, it puts us under a terrible burden. New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson uses the metaphor of a dying patient who is given a prescription for medicine from the doctor. For the patient to live, he needs to ingest the medicine. The doctor’s prescription is like the law; it tells us what we need in order to live. But that paper prescription alone doesn’t have the power to give life. We need the medicine itself for that.[1] The medicine is not law but loving relationship--loving relationship with the God who freely pours out upon us the gift of life, the life that shines in the healing, saving acts of Jesus Christ.

The trouble is that, in living a life based on obeying certain rules, we close ourselves off to much of the full and abundant life that Jesus offers us. Often, our obedience is based on an attempt to control our relationships, through controlling others and ourselves with rules. Johnson explains in terms that enlighten my own unhealthy, perfectionist childhood:  the loving relationship between parent and child, like our loving relationship with God, is not just about being obedient or following the rules. It is about a loving exchange of gifts above and beyond rules and expectations: parents want us to eat healthy food, but they still take us out sometimes for huge and delicious banana splits; parents want us to go to bed on time, but they still host slumber parties for us; babies don’t know the rules of etiquette, but they still spontaneously and lovingly offer their mom or dad half of their slobbered-on cookie. Like a child attempting to protect herself from the vulnerability of relationship, however, we anxiously concentrate only on obedience so that we can say to the parent (and God), “you must reward me because I did everything you said perfectly.” Living only by the rules, explains Johnson, is a “rigid form of self-protection and extortion,” that cuts us off from any unexpected, unusual gifts of love and grace.[2]

How easy it is to become frozen like the people that Jesus addresses in the marketplace in today’s Gospel, closed off from God while using the rules to judge God’s inspired ones, like John the Baptist, as crazy and to judge God’s own self-giving, as seen in Jesus, as rule-breaking and immoral. Cutting ourselves off from superabundant love in an effort to control our relationships, results in behavior like that of the Pharisees, who use the law to attack Jesus for healing on the Sabbath and welcoming even tax-collectors and prostitutes, and who are more concerned with what herbs one should tithe than with caring for the poor and bringing about justice. Frozen in what Paul Ricoeur calls a “logic of equivalence,” a “tit for tat” way of living that ignores unexpected grace, we have no way to cope with the wretched dilemma of our human failings. We can indeed feel as if we are yoked in slavery to desires beyond our control, bearing burdens that have become intolerable.

After returning home from vacation on Wednesday, as soon as I read Jesus’ famous invitation in today’s Gospel: “Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest,” I pictured myself with my suitcases in the Paris Metro. When I left for vacation, my bags were slim and examples of restraint in packing. I was proud of myself for being so wise and frugal in my choice of wardrobe. As I traveled, however, temptation got the best of me. I was not able to do what I knew was right. I bought books and wine and souvenirs galore, and “just one more jar of paté.” My bags grew fatter and heavier, until, when it came time to tackle the subway stairs once again, I was in trouble. The weight of my bags became intolerable. Up the stairs, down the stairs, tripping on the escalator, hitting myself in the shins when pulling them, lifting them onto luggage racks and hoisting them on and off of trains, I began to hate my bags. I longed to be free of them just as much as I desired to keep what was inside. They became an unwelcome part of myself, a weight around my spirit and a literal pain in the neck. Twice, gentlemen stopped and offered to help me get one of the bags up or down the stairs, but mistrusting, I refused. What if they stole my precious treasures? Alone, I struggled on.

In Romans 7:7, just before today’s epistle begins, Paul chooses “covetousness” as the commandment that he continues to break, as the sin that controls his actions so that “the very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.” Luke Timothy Johnson points out here that covetousness is the “desiring disease,” the “’I want to have’ passion.” It is the need “to have, possess, or acquire in order to secure being and worth.”[3] How often our desire to secure being and worth leads to baggage as intolerably heavy as my suitcases last week. Possessions, unhealthy relationships, addictions, compulsions …. What heavy baggage we all drag with us up and down the stairs, baggage that we just can’t let go of.

Jesus stops us on the stairs and offers us another way: the way of grace and loving relationship, the rest of Sabbath in the arms of God. If we muster the trust and courage to hand Jesus our bags, if we can just let go of all of the security and defenses and material “stuff” that we have packed away inside of them, then our hands are free to hold out to one another, our legs are free to go where we are called to go, and our hearts are free to love. We can’t haul our bags into the Kingdom of God; we can’t follow Jesus along the Way of Life if we can’t even make it up the Metro stairs. To be free, we must follow—follow not just the law, but the gentle, humble way of Christ, the way of self-giving love that has no bounds. It is a risky way, not a secure one, but it is a way without ulcers or self-recrimination. How can the way of the Cross be “easy” or kind? How can its burden be light? Ask Deitrich Bonhoeffer, the martyr/ theologian of World War II, who returned with joy and peace of mind from the security of asylum in America to rejoin his countrymen in the dangerous fight against Hitler. Ask St. Paul, who gave up one life in the secure confines of the Law to find new life in Christ. Jesus’ yoke is light and kind because it brings the only true freedom and the only true rest that we as human beings can ever know. As St. Augustine wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." 

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[1] Luke Timothy Johnson, Reading Romans (Smyth and Helwys, 2001), 119.

[2] Ibid., 120.

[3] Ibid., 121.