A Generous Undertaking

This week I am at The Church of the Reconciliation in Webster. The sermon is on the epistle reading, a rarity for me, from I Corinthians. It can be found here.

Well, Church of the Reconciliation – a lot has happened since we were last together! As a reminder, I had agreed to be here  with you for most or all of Lent 2020 as you began looking for a new rector. And I’d been here for what? Two or three weeks, I think, before the whole world shut down. It feels like a lifetime ago.

Since then you have forged a new partnership with Zion Lutheran in Oxford and have called Pastor Michael to serve with you, for the sake of the Gospel. Thanks be to God. I’ve been Canon to the Ordinary for eight years now. One of the big parts of my job is working through transitions with congregations. Between January 2020 and today we’ve had twenty clergy transitions out of 51 congregations, including yours. Often when I’m out and about in this itinerant diocesan ministry, I’m talking transition. Last week, for example, I was at St. Luke’s in Worcester,  one week after they said goodbye to their rector.

There is always something to find in the Scriptures for the day about transition. Think about it:

•         Abraham and Sarah leaving home to go to a new land.
•         The journey through the wilderness to the Promised Land.
•         The experience of exile and then coming home to rebuild the temple.
•         Jesus and the disciples on the way.
•         Paul traveling around the Mediterranean.

And so it goes. There is lots to draw on. In the Bible, the journey is home. Always, God’s people are “on the way.” So I can always find something in the texts to say about that. And that’s bigger, of course, than just clergy transitions. It’s also about transitioning in and now out of a global pandemic. What have we learned? How have we been changed? It’s also about the ongoing transition from being a mid-twentieth century church to becoming twenty-first century congregations. So I’ve done that here, in various ways – even though there has been a very long break since my last time with you.

So today, on this last Sunday in June, I’m not going to talk about transition. I’m going to talk about money and generosity and stewardship, and gratitude. And I’m going to take my lead from St Paul and the words we heard in today’s epistle reading.

Now I know what you are thinking. It’s not November! Episcopalians tend to be even more reluctant to speak about money than about change – but we know once a year we get a sermon about how we should fill out a pledge card. But in June? What gives? The thing is that Jesus talked about money more than anything else except the Kingdom of God. He talked about lost coins and he talked about talents, which were a form currency. He talked about what should be rendered unto Caesar and what belongs to God. He talked about the widow’s mite. He talked about the wages of the laborers in the vineyard. He said that where your investments are, there will your heart be also.  

Today, we hear St. Paul giving his stewardship sermon to the followers of Jesus in Corinth. As you will remember, Paul was sent out by the Jerusalem Church to be an evangelist to gentiles; that is to non-Jews. The Jerusalem Church was the one founded by the disciples on Pentecost. It’s Peter and the gang. But Paul travels around the Mediterranean to places like Thessalonica and Galatia and Corinth – and he’s reaching out to non-Jews. The Jerusalem Church is like “Mother Church” before Rome eventually takes that role on, at least in western Christianity. Those other ones in Thessalonica and Galatia and Corinth and initially Rome, too, are like church plants. You with me, reconcilers?

Paul is writing to the congregation in Corinth which seems to be in good shape financially about the needs in Jerusalem, which is struggling. The scholars call this the Jerusalem Collection. It’s not really an assessment to the diocese but it is a way of sharing the ministry, of remembering they are connected so it’s not unlike that. It comes up in Acts and in other letters of Paul too. But for today it’s enough to just stick with his “sermon” to the Corinthians that we heard today.

Paul says to those good folks: listen, you excel in everything: in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in utmost eagerness, and in our love for you. So (wait for it) - now I want to ask you to excel in one more thing. I want you to excel in this “this generous undertaking.”

He goes on to say that he’s not ordering anyone to do this, but he’s testing the genuineness of their love. He’s asking them to put their money where their mouths are. He’s asking them to walk the talk. I don’t have pledge cards today – it’s just June – although you know that one can always go back and increase a pledge halfway through the year. But I’m not here for that. I’m here to remind you – to remind myself – that our checkbooks really do show what we believe. This is not a fundraising sermon. Instead, it is a very short sermon about the spiritual gift of gratitude which leads to the spiritual fruit of generosity. I say a short sermon, because I’m finished. Amen. But I want to conclude with a fairly long prayer by Walter Brueggemann, “On Generosity.” So, let us pray:

On our own, we conclude:
that there is not enough to go around
we are going to run short
          of money
          of love
          of grades
          of publications
          of sex
          of beer
          of members
          of years
          of life
we should seize the day
          seize the goods
          seize our neighbor’s goods
because there is not enough to go around.

And in the midst of our perceived deficit:
          You come
          You come giving bread in the wilderness
          You come giving children at the 11^th hour
          You come giving homes to exiles
          You come giving futures to the shut-down
          You come – fleshed in Jesus.

And we watch while
          the blind receive their sight
          the lame walk
          the lepers are cleansed
          the deaf hear
          the dead are raised
          the poor dance and sing.

We watch
          and we take food we did not grow and
          life we did not invent and
          future that is gift and gift and gift and        
          families and neighbors who sustain us
                   when we do not deserve it.

It dawns on us – late rather than soon -
          that “you give food in due season
          you open your hand
                   and satisfy the desire of every living thing.”

By your giving, break our cycles of imagined scarcity
          override our presumed deficits
          quiet our anxieties of lack
          transform our perceptual field to see
                   the abundance…mercy upon mercy
                                             blessing upon blessing.

Sink your generosity deep into our lives
          that your muchness may expose our false lack
          that endlessly receiving, we may endlessly give,
                   so that the world may be made Easter new,
                   without greedy lack, but only wonder
                   without coercive need, but only love
                   without destructive greed, but only praise
                   without aggression and invasiveness…
                             all things Easter new…
                                      all around us, toward us, and by us
                             all things Easter new.
Finish your creation…in wonder, love, and praise. Amen.

                                      From Inscribing the Text: Sermons and Prayers of Walter Brueggemann

Storm at Sea

This sermon was preached at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Worcester on June 20, 2021. The readings for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost can be found here.

Not too long after September 11, 2001, I got on a plane just up the street at the Worcester Airport and headed to Atlanta, Georgia. My best guess is that it was mid-late October, weeks (and not months) after 9/11. I was enrolled in a D.Min program at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur and at that time Delta had direct flights from Worcester to Atlanta, which made it pretty easy.

Shortly after take-off, the flight attendants started running up and down the aisle. There was smoke coming out of one of the restrooms and they looked, well…terrified. Not at all under control. All of a sudden the plane (which had reached its cruising altitude) headed down, pretty sharply. The pilot told us that there was going to be an emergency landing in Hartford. And that’s what then happened in pretty short order. Let me tell you, it’s not a long flight from Worcester to Hartford but it felt like forever. We landed, were surrounded by fire trucks, and we got off the plane. I later learned it was an electrical fire – not an act of terrorism and also not someone smoking a cigarette. It was real, and yet all was well.

I cannot think of a time when I was more frightened in my life, before then or after that. Nothing happened, really. I’ve certainly had more turbulent flights in my life and that’s scary too. But the timing, so close to 9/11, and the looks in the eyes of those flight attendants and the rapid descent and then the fire trucks was a pretty scary combination.

Now I am not going to do an open mic here today, but I want you to think of a time in your life when you were scared. Really scared, that it might be the end. I bet many of you – maybe even all of us, have at least one story. I don’t want to re-traumatize anyone here. But what I want you to do is reflect with me on how that felt. Because it’s easy to make fun of the disciples in the gospels; the gospel writers in general and in particular, Mark, seem to encourage that. None of them seem to be the sharpest blades in the drawer. They get it wrong at least as often as they get it right, including and maybe especially Peter, the so-called “rock.” It’s tempting when they do to be dismissive of them.

But in the story before us today, there is a lot more going on than a few waves washing into a boat. Mark tells us that they are going “to the other side.” The Sea of Galilee is really a lake, and on the other side of that lake are the gentiles – the Geresenes to be precise. In fact when they get there the next story will be the healing of the Geresene demoniac. This journey across the lake is for the sake of racial reconciliation. It’s about crossing to the other side to face fear of the unknown, fear of the foreigner, fear of the ones who are different.

The storm was no doubt real, but it doubles as metaphor. Sometimes life is stormy. And not just the personal struggles we will all inevitably face. Not only the difficulties of losing a loved one or facing unemployment but also the social struggles of racial and economic injustice. The kind of struggles still going on in the land of the Holy One. Crossing the lake that day is not unlike crossing the boundary from west Jerusalem into east Jerusalem, or going into Gaza or the West Bank, or Bethlehem.

The storm is sometimes life itself, in a time of pandemic perhaps or a time of social turmoil. This boat ride from hell is a stand in for what it’s like to wake up afraid and go to bed afraid, for yourself or for you kids or for your neighbor whom you love. When Jesus calms the sea – when he says “silence!” and “be still!” this is more than a magic trick, and more than a miracle story. Jesus is taking on the chaos of this world.

There is a book written years ago by a scholar named Jon Levinson called Creation and the Persistence of Evil: the Jewish drama of Divine Omnipotence. I read it a long time ago and it’s a nuanced and wise book but as I remember it, the premise is pretty straightforward: God isn’t done with creation yet. God started ordering the chaos of this world in Genesis and after six days rested. But on the eighth day God got up again and went back to work. There are forces in our world that do indeed work to destroy the creatures of God and draw us from the love of God. You can call them racism or homophobia or economic injustice and that’s right, but the Bible calls them evil and they all seek to destroy the creatures of God.

In this little parable today, we are being reminded that Jesus is king of creation. Even the wind and the seas obey him. We are reminded that while fear can paralyze us, the opposite of fear is faith. That is, trusting that Jesus is worthy of our trust. In the Bible (as well as, I imagine, in what Karl Jung called our ‘collective unconscious’) the sea represents danger and the forces of chaos. Remember back to the first creation story, when God parts the sea and creates dry land – it’s an ordering of the chaos. The fact that it is nighttime when Jesus and the disciples get into a boat to “cross to the other side” only heightens the awareness of danger in this story.

The boat is a metaphor for the Church. There are six boat trips in Mark, two of which are narrated at some length. Notice how well the metaphor works—even if it is at times a bit overused. The image is not static. It suggests that the Church is called to set out on an adventure, called to trust the Holy Spirit to blow us in the right direction. There are times when we will feel seasick and afraid: the Greek word used in the fourth chapter of Mark could in fact be translated as “timid.” I know no one at St. Luke’s has ever been timid. But it is my experience, as a parish priest and in diocesan work that too often church people can be timid. One might even suggest that the disciples are tempted to be timid landlubbers who would rather hang around Galilee than set sail on dangerous waters at night into unknown territory. Jesus is saying, however, that the antidote to our timidity is to put our trust in Him, as the One whom even the winds and the sea obey.  

Notice where Jesus is: he is in the boat with the disciples. In their anxiety and timidity they cry out because it feels as if God isn’t paying attention. But the truth is that Christ is present; he’s right there with them in the boat. He simply refuses to join the disciples in their anxiety. Sleep, in the Bible, is often a metaphor for trust in God. The anxious and the guilty toss and turn at night, while those who have done what they could do and have let go of what has not been done and put the rest in God’s hands can sleep like babies. So it is that the psalmist can pray:

In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for thou alone, O Lord, makest me dwell in safety. (Psalm 4:8)

I think that the key point in this narrative from the fourth chapter of Mark’s Gospel is that it makes a theological claim about Jesus: like God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, Jesus has power over the destructive forces of chaos that threaten to destroy the people of God. “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” He is Jesus, the Son of God, and He is worthy of our trust. We therefore need not be so timid and afraid.

The disciples no doubt remembered and told this story because it helped them to overcome their fears after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. In those early years of the Church’s life together, as they continued to cross new boundaries, I imagine that they remembered this story for the same reason we tell stories about those times when we were afraid and it all worked out: so that maybe the next time we are in a boat and the waters rage we will be a little less afraid. So that maybe next time we’ll have a little more faith.

Remember that none of the four gospel writers claim to be eyewitnesses with clipboards in hand. They aren’t making a documentary about Jesus’ life. That’s not the genre of what a gospel is. Mark isn’t on the shore watching all this unfold so he can write it down exactly as it happened in order to report it to us. That is so fundamentally important for us to remember if we mean to make any sense of Scripture.  Rather, like the whole of the gospel narratives, these stories get told and re-told over decades as the Church tries to find its way in the world guided by the Holy Spirit. Mark, the earliest of the four gospels, doesn’t get written until forty years or so after the Resurrection. So already, by then, the story is laden with meaning. It has become quite literally, “good news.”

The stories get organized and shaped by the communities that face their own boundary situations, their own challenges and fears. We think that Mark’s community lived in the very heart of the Roman Empire: a small, fledgling community of house churches that faced persecution and possible extinction. It must have felt to them at times that even if Jesus was in the boat with them that he was definitely sound asleep on some cushion in the stern. It must have felt to them at times as if somebody needed to wake Jesus up! Because as they tried to build communities that included Jews and Gentiles, slave and free, male and female, it surely must have felt at times as if the boat would capsize under the conflicts that emerged. Living into this new creation of Jesus isn’t easy. It requires courage and patience and incredible trust and its messy trying to get there.

And so I imagine someone saying:

Hey, remember that night when Jesus and the disciples crossed the Sea of Galilee into the Gentile world, and it felt scary to them? Remember how Jesus calmed the waters and stilled the winds and calmed their hearts and called them to fidelity and trust? I have this sense that he’s here, right now, with us; that it’s still true. That he’s alive and hasn’t deserted us at all; that he is here among us as a non-anxious presence among us. Maybe we will be alright too…

And so it goes, from generation to generation. So here we are today, after the wild ride of this pandemic. Jesus is here too and he is not anxious about the future. He’s got this! He knows that transitions are the path to new and abundant life, and new possibilities. None of us are Jesus; we are followers. We are disciples. Some days we will feel timid and some days we will feel afraid and some days we will feel hopeful. But we keep on telling the stories of our faith, the stories that remind us that faith casts out fear and from that place we carry on to the work that lies ahead.

Jesus still says to us: “why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” Like the Church in every age, we are called to rise above our timidity and fear and to put our trust in Christ alone and to do the work we have been given to do. To love God, and to love neighbor. With God’s help.

 

Training Scribes for the Reign of God

And Jesus said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”
                                                                                                                                               Matthew 13:52, NRSV

What is a scribe, anyway? In the New Testament they often get lumped in with the Pharisees and then  together, both groups are caricatured as opponents of Jesus. But that's not really fair, with all due respect to Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Apparently, just like there are good priests and bad priests, good lawyers and bad lawyers, good presidents and bad presidents, so also there are good scribes and bad scribes. Jesus refers here to kingdom scribes, those who are in service to the Church or the Jesus’ movement or whatever we may call it. Presumably they are among the good ones. 

They are scribes like Baruch, who made the book of Jeremiah possible by writing it all down and passing along the wisdom of Jeremiah. They are scribes like Ezra, who helped (as Walter Brueggemann puts it) “to reconstitute the community of Judaism” after the exiles came home and gathered at the Water Gate in Jerusalem. There at the original Water Gate (not to be confused with the Washington Hotel made famous in the early 1970s) the Levites helped the people to understand the Torah, reading from the scroll with interpretation to give the sense, so that the people understood the reading. (See Nehemiah 8:7-8) [1]

This is what scribes do: they help the people to attend to the text and to listen for a Word of the Lord. This is never immediate, nor obvious. It takes time and it takes intentionality. As one of our prayers in The Book of Common Prayer puts it, we “read, mark, learn... [so that we might] inwardly digest” which then allows us to become what we eat: a word about the Word before we ever open our mouths to speak. We read, mark, learn and inwardly digest these words of Scripture as “kingdom scribes” because we trust that there is a not just a history lesson there, but a living Word of the Lord addressed to us in this time and place.

Developing eyes that see and ears that hear, however, requires a deep dive, and no small amount of imagination. It means that we can’t keep coming and doing it the same old way or preaching the same old sermons, because always we are trying to discern what is new and what is old. That is our tradition: not mere repetition of the past as if curators of a museum, but discernment of what needs to be kept alive as well as making space for the new thing God is doing. Kingdom scribes are like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.

I've been reflecting (and even ruminating) on this a lot lately. I don't think it's just the work of the ordained. I think it is communal work as we reflect on what the past year or so has been like, and what we have learned. And that may will take some time. Nevertheless, we begin where we are.

Some people want to go back to what is old - to what they call "normal." That is not possible. Others seem ready to embrace all that is new, to deconstruct what was in order to birth a brand new reality. There may be other Biblical texts to back up this approach, but I tend to personally be built more for reformation than revolution. And so this text resonates with me. And so I ask again: what that is old will continue to serve us? What that is new needs to emerge? And how do we work together to value both old and new, as we look to the dawn of a new day?

Planting Seeds

Beginning last weekend and continuing through to the end of November, the lectionary will have us reading from Mark’s Gospel. (There is one slight digression: four weeks in late July and August we will jump over to the sixth chapter of John, where Jesus explores the metaphor of what it means to call him “the Bread of Life.”) For now, though, as we pick up on this journey with Mark, it may be helpful for preachers and congregants alike to recall where we are in his third gospel, the shortest and the earliest one written.

Mark does not begin with a birth narrative. Instead, the opening scene is in the Judean wilderness, where we are introduced to John the Baptist and his diet of locusts with wild honey. We meet Jesus when he comes out to the Jordan to be baptized by John. Immediately afterward, Jesus is driven by the Spirit further into the wilderness to be tested. When he returns, he calls the first disciples, performs an exorcism in the synagogue, and then heals a leper. All that in chapter one!  

Then he returns home to Capernaum and immediately there is controversy with the religious authorities, followed by more healing, more callings, and more conflict. By the end of chapter three Jesus has re-defined family in a way that is dramatically counter-cultural, not only to the norms of the culture of his day but of ours as well. Those who would speak for Jesus about “family values” (or say their congregation is "just like a family") need to pay close attention to what he does and does not say in those verses. In the Kingdom of God, according to Jesus, “family” is not one mom and one dad and 2.2 children living in the suburbs. “Who is my sister and brother and mother and father?” Jesus asks. The answer is simple and concise: “the one who does God’s will.” 

Christian family values are not founded on allegiance to tribe or family lineage or ideology. The new community that Jesus calls together is bound together by the waters of Baptism. For the new family that is created by those who put Jesus at the center of their lives, “water is thicker than blood.” Baptized  with Christ and in Christ, we become sisters and brothers and mothers and fathers to one another. 

In chapter four of Mark, Jesus begins to teach his disciples about this Kingdom of God. Through the healings and exorcisms we’ve already seen signs of that Kingdom. But now Jesus turns to stories—parables of the Kingdom. That is important. He doesn’t offer a catechism or a creed or dogma that defines who is in and who is out of this new family he is forming. He doesn’t say you must read the Bible this way or that way, or how the church will be organized as an institution. Rather, he tells parables that challenge anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear to imagine the world in new ways. He tells stories that give us “hints and guesses,” and which are always in need of being interpreted anew in each generation.

I suspect that most of us can go weeks and even months without using the word “eschatological” in our vocabularies. But it's a word Christians should know. Eschatology is simply talk about the end times. Whether or not we use the vocabulary it’s important to know that most of us probably do think eschatologically when we think about the Kingdom of God: i.e. we focus on the end result. We focus on the end of the world as we know it. What will the Kingdom look like? Will the streets be paved with gold? Will the lion and the lamb lie down together, and a little child lead them? What will it look like when every tear is wiped away, and they study war no more, and they do not hurt or destroy on God’s holy mountain? What will it look like when Christ is all in all and the world is restored to unity and every knee bends and proclaims Jesus as “king of kings and lord of lords?” The mystery of faith is that Christ has died/Christ is risen/Christ will come again. Eschatology is about that last part—about the end (and the fulfillment) of human history.

Yet we live “in the meantime.” We live with wars and rumors of wars. We live with violence in the land of the Holy One and in Jerusalem, the city of "shalom/salaam." We live in a nation where the divide between rich and poor just keeps growing. We live within a context where not only are the systems of racial injustice still intact but overt acts of racial violence and hatred and bigotry are on the rise. We seem to have reached a new place in the fight against COVID, at least in the United States. But globally we cannot un-see the images coming out of India and other parts of this fragile earth, our island home. We live with these deep divisions. We have become used to polarization of a society that isn’t comfortable with “maybe” or “I don’t know.” And so it feels like a long way from “peace on earth and good will toward all.” In fact we live at a time when the future even of this good earth is in peril. 

So how do we live in such a world as followers of Jesus: with hope and with patience and with perseverance? That question is always before us: what does it mean to be an Easter people who carry with us a vision of the Kingdom and yet not live in denial about all the hurt and pain and suffering of the world? What does it mean to live faithfully between “Christ is risen!” and “Christ will come again?”

This, I think, is the context in which we need to see and hear these two parables about seeds in the reading appointed for this coming Sunday, from Mark 4:26-34. It’s relatively easy to paint a picture of the Kingdom of God when it comes to fruition - when it comes to an eschatological reality. But how do we develop the kinds of eyes that can see the seeds of that reality already in our midst today? Where is the Kingdom already present?

I’ve been wearing glasses since second grade for near-sightedness. I can still remember the feeling on the first day of wearing those glasses that there was a whole world out there I hadn’t been able to see before. Right around the time I turned forty (now eighteen years ago!) my optometrist told me that I needed progressive lenses; trifocals. I had been wondering why the font in the newspaper had gotten so tiny, and my arms were getting shorter, but I was still shocked at this news and in denial for about a year. I finally agreed, however, that this was a necessary change. I was now not only near-sighted but also far-sighted. The joys of aging! 

I think that the parables of Jesus are above all else about helping us to see the world from another angle, through another set of lenses. Most of us hear “Kingdom of God” just as the people of Jesus’ day did. We tend to look for the big things, for the things you can’t miss like a mighty sequoia or redwood in our midst. (The Biblical equivalent is the cedar of Lebanon—but that’s all it means—something big and unmistakable and grand.) Yet if our glasses are just for seeing big things far away, it’s very easy to miss the mustard seeds that are already in our midst—right up close. And I think that Jesus is trying to get his disciples—then and now—to look at the world close up.

The parable of the mustard seed is not only hope for the future, but about patience and endurance for the present. The theologian’s word is to speak of the Kingdom as present “proleptically” which is an even better word to use than eschatological if you want to impress people. But in the end its meaning is quite simple: for there to be peace on earth it has to begin with me and with you. For us to deal with the original sin of racism in this nation, it has to begin with people (especially white people) who are willing to help dismantle racism. 

When I served as rector in Holden from 1998-2013, every second Wednesday of every month that parish served a meal at a place called the Mustard Seed in Worcester. Interesting name, eh? To do that work, somebody had to go and buy those super large cans of baked beans and a whole bunch of frozen hot dogs and somebody else cut those hot dogs up and opened those cans of beans and stirred the pot and put them in the oven. And another bunch of somebodies would stop by and drop off desserts, and somebody else would come by to pick up the cooked beans and franks and drives them into Worcester where somebody else had dropped off the salads and then they would plop it on the plates of a whole bunch of somebodies with real names and real lives and their own stories so that they can put food into an empty belly. And then the pots would go back to St. Francis and somebody would scour them out and put them away. I got to witness this happen again and again. Occasionally I'd find a way to go in with them but as the rector, I had a Wednesday night service and a lot of the time I was there I had little kids. It was our ministry but it existed before I arrived and as far as I know it still continues; it was not reliant on the clergy.

And here is the thing: on Thursday night another congregation did the same thing in their own way, and on Friday night another congregation did. Little tiny seeds—barely visible—especially if you don’t know where to look. Because the Worcester newspaper was, for the most part, not all that interested in covering what happens at a place like the Mustard Seed.

You don’t feed the world by waving a magic wand. You do it one plate of beans and franks at a time. And maybe along the way someone begins to ask a question about the roots of hunger. That's when they will no longer call you a saint, but perhaps a communist: when someone wonders what it would take to deal with underlying causes of poverty and to begin to make that arduous journey from charity toward economic justice. 

In the moments when such questions are asked, and changes are worked for, the Kingdom of God is very near indeed. Indeed, wherever seeds are being planted and nurtured, the Kingdom of God is truly in our midst. It’s already present—here and now—even if the harvest remains in the future. It's present proleptically, and that truly is good news. It sustains us in doing the work God has given us to do today. It means that we must not allow ourselves the "luxury" of becoming paralyzed by the enormous scope of the challenges that face us, but that like that guy walking along the beach and throwing the starfish back in the ocean we do what we can. We do not lose heart. We entrust the future to God, trusting in the shade of the mustard bush where the birds of the air come to find peace and refreshment. The work we are given to do is to keep hope alive, and to not lose heart. Our job is to keep on planting seeds. 

I imagine it was hard for the first hearers of Mark’s Gospel to be patient and hopeful: a tiny, fragile community standing against entrenched imperial power. Yet they persevered. We are the beneficiaries of their perseverance.  I know that it is hard for us, increasingly aware that the mainline churches are sidelined from the power structures of our society. Yet maybe that isn’t all bad news. Maybe it is as a tiny, fragile community that we are better able to bear witness to the love of God we have known in Jesus Christ. Maybe our work is to keep on tending to the Kingdom in mustard-seed like ways here and now, so that our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren enjoy the fruits of our labor.