Trust God. Plant Seeds

 This is my sermon from August 19th, 2012. It's on Mark 4:26-34.  It was inspired by a comment made by one of the elders on session, about how we should just keep planting seeds and see which ones God decides to raise up.

This is from my first garden, in my window at Union Theological Seminary. The seeds that were planted there have grown much faster than I dreamed.

Trust God. Plant Seeds.

Fred Craddock is a famous preacher and teacher, whose stories are well-known to preachers for their depth of understanding. And he tells this one story about coming in to do a funeral for an old parishioner.[1] After the funeral, he stayed around talking with folks, until most of the peripheral people had gone, and it was just family there, including the oldest daughter Kathryn. Fred says Kathryn was a wild-child. She wouldn’t sit still, she wouldn’t listen, never paid any attention, was always pushing, shoving, and breaking things. When he left that old church, he would have said that of all the people that had been there, if there was one who never heard a word he said, it was Kathryn.

            And now Kathryn was there sitting with him after the funeral, and she’d long since grown up. Now with a little bit of gray in her hair, she was an executive at a telephone company. And Fred leaned over and he said, I’m sorry, it’s such a tough time.”

            And Kathryn said, “It is tough. When Mother called and said Dad had died of a heart attack, I was just scrambling for something. Then I remembered a sermon you had preached on the meaning of the Lord’s Supper”

            Fred said, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” but she proceeded to quote back to him a piece of this sermon he had given, must have been twenty or thirty years before. When you plant a seed in someone, you never know when it might sprout.

“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. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.

            This is our story for today, it’s called the parable of the growing seed. And like any good parable, it’s a tough nut to crack. They call this parable a kingdom parable, because it describes what the kingdom of God is like. But this kind of parable doesn’t describe it with adjectives. The kingdom is described through story, perhaps because stories hold a lot more within them than what adjectives could describe. But the meaning of a parable isn’t always clear at first sight. It pulls you in, forces you to ask the questions, to search for the answers. What does it mean that the kingdom of God is like if someone scattered seed on the ground, and it grew, but they knew not how?

           

            Rev. Craddock tells another story, of a summer camp he went to one week.[2] And there was this director there, and he was so committed to everything being the most meaningful thing that had ever been. The campfires were so meaningful. The trees were meaningful. Even the squirrels and the pinecones were meaningful. And from the beginning of the week he had been telling the kids that Thursday, they were going to have a special breakfast. It was going to be a meaningful breakfast, almost like a communion service. It was going to be so meaningful, it would be like being “in church having communion with Jesus by the side of the Sea of Galilee.”[3] 

            On Thursday morning they all shuffled in, unsure of what to do with the gravitas of this breakfast that they were about to have. One boy even dressed up. Where they’d been noisy and raucous all week, this breakfast was quiet. You could hear forks scraping against the plates as they pushed their food around. What do you do with meaningful eggs? And eventually someone got up, and then another one, and they all rushed out. The director was crushed. Rev. Craddock tells this story, and then he said, “You know what I think? If he had trusted what was prayed and sung and said, like a seed that carries its own future in its bosom, if he had just put it out there and left it alone, I daresay that as they loaded the blankets and things into the bus on Saturday, the meanest kid in the group would have said, “You know, this has been more church than church to me.”

“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. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.

 In the summer of 1994, Janet was the choir director at First Presbyterian Church in Cartersville, GA and she was waiting on the last choir member to arrive at church so they could leave to go to Montreat for the Worship and Music Conference.[4] The last choir member was Susan, who at the time was a part of the ministry of hospitality. She arrived half an hour late because she’d been taking a homeless person to the shelter in Rome. As they got on the bus, Susan said, “You know, we sure need a homeless shelter in Cartersville.” Janet didn’t think anything of it at the time, they were running late for a long drive, and she had a lot to worry about, but the seed had been planted.

            Well, they got to Montreat, up in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, which is in my humble opinion one of the most gorgeous places on God’s green earth, and the worship was wonderful, and in the midst of that week Janet heard God’s call. “You need to open a shelter for the homeless in Cartersville.”

            When she came home she shared it with her husband and a few friends, to see if it was something that could happen or if it was just crazy. They were supportive, and one of those friends invited her to go with him and see the county commissioner. And the seed began to sprout.

            The county gave them a little run-down house that the church and community helped fix up. They formed a board. Eventually they found a new home and a whole new building was built there, and now it shelters more than 30 people who need rest, help, and hope. Susan didn’t know that she had planted a seed in Janet’s heart. She didn’t know how it grew from an idea into a hope and into a ministry. But as they walked into that new building everyone could see that the harvest had come.

“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. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.

            So what do we do with this kingdom of God whose keys have been given to us even though we only know it in parables and stories?  We’ve been given the task of proclaiming that the kingdom of God is at hand, but we feel like we don’t know what we’re doing. Like if someone gave me a hammer and some nails, and said, “Go build me a city” I think this may be a part of what the disciples were going through at this point in the story. They had tasted glory, they had seen miracles, healings, heard words that spoke to their soul. But they’d also been with Jesus as he was rejected by his family, chased out of the cities, and hunted by the authorities. They realized that this kingdom-building was not as much of a cakewalk as they had imagined. It would be neither quick nor painless. But here Jesus tells them not to worry. God is doing all the heavy lifting. The seeds that they plant will grow even if they don’t understand how. It is a matter of “finding the right soil and trusting that the seed will grow.”[5]

           

So what do we do with this kingdom, of which we’ve seen just a glimpse, had just a taste, heard just a whisper. We sow seeds. We scatter the word all around us, on the path, on rocky soil, among the thorns, and in places where it will take root. A healing touch. A word of comfort. Refusing to give up on a flawed friend. An unexpected card. A prayer. Sharing an idea. We plant the seeds of love, hope, and promise. And then, though we don’t know how, God takes the seeds which we have planted and raises them up.

This is the good news. We have been charged with the salvation of our world. We’ve been sent out to shine the light of Christ even in the darkest places. We’ve been charged with the transformation of this community of people into the body of Christ. And  when it seems like it’s too much to bear, more than we can handle, we’re given this. Jesus came down to save us. We were created in God’s image, that God’s light be our light and shine through us on the way. The Holy Spirit transforms us into a Pentecost people, filling us with the words to say, the actions to take, the places to go. We plant the seeds, and trust that God will raise them up, and the harvest will come. For as Paul told the Romans, “If God is for us, who can be against us?”

“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. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.

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[1] Craddock, Fred. Craddock Stories, St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001, p. 30.

[2] Craddock, Fred. Craddock Stories, St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001, p. 31.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Smith, Ted. “Planting Seeds” Sermon on Mark 6:24-34. First Presbyterian Church, Cartersville, GA, June 14^th,  2009.

[5] Myers, Ched. Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus:  Orbis Books: Maryknoll, NY, 2008.

A Story that Can Change the World

This is my sermon on 2 Samuel 12:1-15. It's my last on Samuel, I think, which is both a relief (the next parts of the David narrative get really hairy - Ammnon and Tamar, Absalom, etc.) and a loss (I've really enjoyed studying the David cycle over the past two months, and I just got a new book to help). It's about stories and how they can change our world, the parables we encounter in every day life, and the way telling our own stories can make a difference. It references Blood Done Sign My Name, by Tim Tyson, which is one of my favorite books. It's chocked full of good stories and makes you think differently about what the Civil Rights Movement was really like for people growing up in the South. 

A Story That Can Change The World

            To most people, telling stories isn’t much more than an idle pastime. In fact it’s often regarded as something even less valuable. When I was a kid and there was some sort of trouble, my Mom would bring me and my brother out and hear our accounts of what had happened. And when something dubious stood out to her she would look at us real hard and ask, “Now is that true or are you telling me a story?”

            When you hear about something so incredible it’s unbelievable, you might say, “That’s not true, that’s just a story” But the truth is that stories (even ones that never happened in real life) have the power to change lives, to change the course of history, even to change the world.

Tim Tyson, in his book Blood Done Sign My Name, tells about a story told by Miss Amy Womble, that changed a church forever. Tyson’s father was the Methodist minister in Oxford, North Carolina in 1964. He was one of those socially progressive type preachers, always a step ahead of his congregation. And one fall, without thinking much of it, he invited Dr. Samuel Proctor, one of the leading African-American preachers of the time, to come and preach at his church on Race-Relations Sunday. But by the time that Sunday came around, Reverend Tyson realized that he was in hot water. There wasn’t nearly as much support for this type of gesture as he thought. The night before Dr. Proctor was to preach, Rev. Tyson called an emergency meeting, thinking he might smooth things over with the board before the big day. Some of the board members demanded that he call and cancel. “This thing is going to tear this church apart,”[1] said one man. And in the midst of this, Miss Amy Womble got up to speak.

“Miss Amy” as everyone knew her was an old school teacher. She had had just about everyone in that room as a first grade student at some time or another, and everyone honored her, but nobody had ever really given much care to what she thought about pressing matters of the day. And she stood up and said, “I hear some of us saying that this thing is going to tear this church apart.” And she looked at the man who said it as only teachers can do. “Now I know our pastor, and you know him too, and he’s not going to tear anything apart. And I don’t suppose Dr. Proctor is going to tear anything apart either. If there is going to be any tearing done, we’re going to do the tearing apart ourselves.”[2]

            And then she told her former students a story: “There was a case up near Chapel Hill recently. Where a teenage boy went around a curve too fast and was killed in a car crash. So they thought. He was down there by the side of the road and they were just waiting for the ambulance to come and take him to the funeral home. There wasn’t any signs of life.”

            “But then an airman from Pope Air Force Base stopped. He was home on furlough, and he say the boy lying there and he scrambled down the embankment and opened that boy’s mouth. And he saw the boy’s tongue stuck back in his throat, and he ran his finger back there and pulled out that tongue, and then gave that boy mouth-to-mouth rescuscitation. By the time that ambulance got there, that boy was walking around alive as you or me. And the next week they had a big dinner up at the fire station out in Orange County for that airman, celebrating how he had saved that boy’s life.”

            “What I haven’t told you, is that the boy who had the wreck was white, and that airman who saved him was a black man. But that’s the truth. And I want all you fathers to tell me something….which one of you fathers would have said to that airman, ‘Now don’t you run your black fingers down my boy’s white throat? Which of y’all would have told that airman, ‘Don’t you dare put your black lips on my boy’s mouth?’”[3]

            The board voted 25-14 to welcome Dr. Proctor to their pulpit. That evening people kept coming over to Rev. Tyson’s house with tears in their eyes. Miss Amy’s story had changed their lives.

            Now Nathan walked into a situation not that different from Rev. Tyson’s. He knew that he was about to do something dangerous. Only for Nathan, it wasn’t his job or his reputation, but his very life was on the line. David had just killed a man merely for having a beautiful wife. What would he do to Nathan, who came to condemn him?

            And so Nathan told a story. He told David the parable we just heard, about the rich man and the poor man. The poor man with only one ewe lamb, and the rich with many flocks, who took the poor man’s only lamb because it inconvenienced him to take one of his own.

            It matched perfectly with David’s actions against Uriah the Hittite, but David, in his righteous indignation on behalf of the poor man, does not notice. He is outraged, and leaps up to proclaim judgment on the rich man, not realizing that in doing so he also judges himself.

            No sooner has David issued his condemnation than Nathan turns it around, and declares that he is the man who has taken another’s only, cherished belonging, and that the judgment he issued on the rich man should fall on his own head.

            A quick side note about this story. The crime here, the way the story is told, and the way Nathan’s parable is crafted, is not adultery. As king, David could and did take any woman he wanted, as long as she was not someone else’s wife. The crime—according to our biblical author—was theft. [This is why Bathsheba is almost always referred to as the wife of Uriah (even in Matthew!), to emphasize that David has taken what was not his]. This is where we differ from biblical authors, who, constrained by time and place, saw women only as possessions. We have made great strides towards a world in which our sisters, daughters, and mothers are equal partners in seeking the kingdom of God. But as we notice that Bathsheba was not much more than property then, we should also notice that even today, some women and men are still being treated as property, bought and sold, even here in America. We’ve made great advances in understanding since the Bible was written, but we have a long way to go.

             Back to the story: David, suddenly confronted with his own self-condemnation, confesses. “I have sinned against the Lord.” Given that he was king, he did not need to say these words. God only knows how many people in our world are confronted with their own sin and choose other words:

Let’s not dwell on the past…

It wasn’t my fault…

It was a victimless crime…

I don’t recall…

Even though it was late, David was still willing to face his situation. He was still willing to cast himself down and ask for mercy. Our God is a God who extends mercy even to such a person as David. There is no sin which is so great that we can’t get down on our knees and beg forgiveness, and it will be granted to us through Christ who died for us.

            Nathan’s story enacts a change in David. Before it, he was King David, who controlled his fate, took what he wanted and apologized to no one. Afterward, he is once again the David that we once knew, throwing himself down in God’s mercy, a man after God’s own heart.  Nathan could have got up on his high horse and issued a condemnation of David, rather than telling him that story. That’s the kind of thing most of us Christians like to do: make sweeping proclamations about the sinfulness of others. It’s great if you want to feel superior to others for having the right answers, but not so good if you want to change someone’s behavior. Instead, Nathan invites David to understand the other side of his actions, and in doing so, he causes David to change his behavior.

David’s not the only one who doesn’t realize the effects of his action on others. There’s a growing body of literature that tells us that many criminals have less empathy than people outside of prison. They often critically lack the ability to understand the effect that their actions have had on someone else. Now an organization called the Sycamore Tree Project has started to do something about it. It (and other restorative justice programs like it), brings violent criminals together with victims of unrelated violent crimes. And the victims tell their stories.

They tell their experiences of the crime and of the effects that it has had on their life. Prisoners are rarely ever exposed to their victims’s stories in the trial process, and it can be quite a shock for them to hear of the crippling emotional and psychological effects of the crime. For the first time, they understand how it feels to be a victim of a crime. Prison insiders are surprised at how much change they see in inmates who have gone through these programs. The state of Iowa saw a decrease in reoffending rates of 15 and 17 percent in two similar programs run in the state. The crime victims who volunteer their time are changing peoples’ lives…just by telling their own stories!

As Christians we believe in the power of story to change people’s lives. In particular we believe in the story of Christ, who came down among us and told stories to guide us to an understanding of God’s kingdom, who lived among us and died for us, that we might have eternal life. We believe that this story has the power to change lives, for it has changed ours. It has called us into new realizations of what it means to be a part of God’s community. It has called us to realize our own sinfulness and throw ourselves down upon the mercy of God. It has lifted us up in the knowledge that we are redeemed in Christ.

Now like Miss Amy, like Nathan, and like the crime victims in the Sycamore Tree Project, each of us has a story to tell. It may be a story of how God came into your life. It may be a story of how a mentor or a teacher changed you, and how you can change others. It may be a story about how you were hurt, told so that others might understand that pain and work to prevent it.

What is your story?  How has your life been changed by the Gospel message?  And how can you tell your story so that it changes someone’s life, or even the life of an entire community, for the better?

---

[1] Tyson, Tim. “Blood Done Sign My Name” New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004. p. 77.

[2] Ibid, 77

[3] Ibid, 77.

Building Temples for God

Here's another July Sermon. It's on 2 Samuel 7:1-17. It's the story of David wanting to build a temple for God. God tells David that he will not be building God a house, but God will be building him a house. The story reminds us that our plans for God aren't nearly as big as God's plans for us. . .

Building Temples for God

So we’ve arrived in our journey through Samuel at the point where David has finally settled down. His times as a fugitive from Saul, as a paid mercenary for the Philistines, and campaigning for the kingship were all over. David had gone out to battle against the Philistines and was victorious. He had finally arrived. He has a big palace in an impregnable city, he has great status and the respect of nations. No more groveling before the king of Gath like a madman to keep himself alive.

            And when he looks around, he realizes that the God who has brought him through all this, the God whose spirit rested upon him and tormented his enemies, has not achieved the status that David has. David is settled in his house, but God still lives in a tent. That won’t do. It doesn’t work for God’s reputation, and it doesn’t work for David’s reputation. Other nations have temples for their gods, big buildings that impress and intimidate people by their greatness. David will build God a temple. He tells Nathan his plan. It seems like a good idea to Nathan. “God’s Spirit has been with you in everything you’ve done, go for it,” he tells David.

            It is interesting that this is Nathan’s first appearance in the Bible. The moment David has acquired power and establishment is the first moment in which another voice is interposed between him and God. It is as if the text is trying to remind us that God’s interests rarely align with those of the powers that be. That the powers must be challenged, and pushed to do the right thing, because it is often so much more appealing to do wrong. Over the rest of David’s life this will come up again and again.

            It is only that night that the conflict comes out.  God reaches out to Nathan in a dream, and puts David in his place. We can see this in the tone of God’s speech to Nathan, and in the fact that David is referred to as “the king” in the beginning of this story, God repeatedly refers to him as “my servant David.” God calls David out for his egotism and his naivete, “You think you are going to build me a house?

            It brings to mind a passage in Isaiah found in chapter 66, “Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool. What is the house that you would build for me, and what is my resting place? All these things my hand has made, and so all these things are mine.” David wanted to build a temple, to put God in God’s place, but it’s God who puts David in his place.

            What David has done is something that nearly all of us try to do at some point or other.  He’s tried to decide what God wants and where God belongs. He’s tried to set up a place that is God’s, which then of course turns around and defines all other places as not-God’s. He has sought to institutionalize God.

That’s a funny word, institutionalize. It has two meanings: to make into an institution, and to put into an institution. When we make something into an institution, we preserve its current form, we let it crystallize. We want it to be something that will remain the same for years to come. We say this kind of thing about restaurants, or local legends “Kerbey Lane is an Austin institution, it hasn’t changed in thirty years.” 

And When we put someone into an institution, we silence them. We pull them out of society and place them somewhere where they don’t interfere in our lives so much.  David seems to want to do both. He wants God to stay the same forever, his God.  He wants to put God in a temple, where God will be contained, the wild and dangerous deity put away, to be visited only during visiting hours, 11:00 am – noon on Sunday mornings.

            We try to do the same thing David did all the time. We build up temples of our own creation for God, and then try to fit God inside our temples. We do this in a lot of ways, but I’ve got three in particular that I think are particularly easy to fall into, and particularly dangerous for churches seeking to remain faithful reflections of God in our world.

            So how do we build a temple for God?  We start to worry more about looking like a church, than actually doing the things that Christ calls his church to do. A few years ago there was a church plant in a growing neighborhood on the outskirts of a big city. They met in an elementary school, but they hoped one day to have a building of their own. 

 One day one of the members found them a great little spot that they could go and worship. It was a movie set, built out to look like a small town, complete with a little white church building that looked just right for their size. It was perfect. They loved it. They thought, after all that hard work, “We’ve finally made it!” But then they realized that looking like a church wasn’t what it meant to be a church. This building wasn’t any different from the elementary school for having pews instead of folding chairs. What made them a church was the community that came together every week to praise God and to love each other. It was their ministry that made them the church, not what they sat on on Sunday mornings.

            The other way in which we build a temple for God is that we try to preserve the institution rather than letting our mission dictate our form and structure. There are a couple of phrases that always seem to come up in churches, said as if they should have some bearing on the way the church behaves, even though they really don’t. I’m sure you’ve heard them before. They are, “We’ve always done it that way,” and “We’ve never done that before.” 

There are plenty of examples in Scripture of the church doing something completely different. When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with ten commandments, nobody looked at him and said, “We’ve never followed those before.”  When Joshua led the people into the Holy Land across the river Jordan no one stood on its banks and said, “But in the past we’ve always wandered in the wilderness, why shouldn’t we keep doing that?”  They recognized that God calls us into new forms and new structures to accomplish God’s mission in a new era.

This is why I’m so excited about the PCUSA’s 1,001 Worshipping Communities commitment. In an era where so much is changing, our church is seeking ways to change with it, and to respond to the Spirit moving in the here and now. On the other hand, seeking to preserve the institution at all costs can not only be counterproductive, but dangerous. Child sexual abuse scandals at Penn State University and within the Catholic church have shown us that choosing to protect the institution at the expense of doing what is right can be disastrous.

            The final way in which we fall into the trap of trying to build a temple for God or is that we seek to capture the Holy Spirit, rather than letting the Holy Spirit capture us. I think back to the story of the transfiguration, when Jesus led Peter, James, and John up a mountain, and his face was transfigured, and they saw Moses and Elijah with him, talking. They truly had a “mountaintop experience” in every sense of the phrase. And Peter gets excited and he wants to grab a hold of this experience, he says we need to build tents up here, for you and for Elijah. He has this mountaintop experience and he wants to stay on top of the mountain. It’s tempting. And there are Christians who just go out and find themselves the perfect feel-good experience, and just try to get that over and over and over. They want to capture the Holy Spirit, package it up and have it anytime and anywhere they want. They’re like Peter. They want to stay on top of the mountain. That the whole point of a mountaintop experience is so that you can go back down into the valley and do something about it.

            Imagine hiking up the Grand Canyon, and you get up there and you’re just struck by awe at God’s creation. So you decide that you’re going to stay right there. And you build a house, four walls and a roof, and you sit inside it, no longer able to see the view, but confident that you are in the presence of God. The Holy Spirit isn’t something that we can control, it isn’t something that we can capture or take a hold of. It’s something that captures us. That moves through us, alighting on us to inspire and instigate among us, pushing and pulling us into new ways of relating with one another and with God.

It doesn’t matter how we try to build a temple to put God in, we can’t put God into a box. God doesn’t fit. It’s like that old J.B. Philips book that came out fifty years ago or so, “Your God is Too Small.” We can’t build a box big enough for God to fit in. Our plans for God aren’t nearly as big as God’s plans for us.

            David says he wants to build God a house. God says he will turn David’s house into a dynasty. Eugene Peterson puts it this way, “God showed Nathan that David's building plans for God would interfere with God's building plans for David.” This is what happens when you open yourself to the Holy Spirit, you find that God will take you far beyond your wildest dreams.  You say you want to build God a temple, God says God will build you a ministry.

            The message that our text has for us today is this: God is building plans for us. God is building plans for us as individuals, and God is building plans for us as a community. We just have to realize that we are not kings of our own destiny, but servants of a someone much greater than ourselves. We’re not in the driver’s seat, but passengers on an adventure far greater than we imagined. We have to stop trying so hard to look like we’re a church that we forget to act like a church. We have to stop letting our structure determine our mission, and begin letting our mission determine our structure. And we have to stop trying so hard to capture the Holy Spirit, let go of the reins and let the Spirit capture us. Then and only then can we begin to experience the incredible plans that God has for us.