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Proper 11 – Year A

July 27, 2011

I Kings 3:5-12; Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

 

This past week I worked as a Chaplain at the Barbara C. Harris Camp, the summer camp run by the Diocese. The news of the tragic events in Norway came across my Blackberry as I was standing in the middle of two hundred youth and young adults gathered for morning worship. As they were singing their hearts out about the love of God, a very different scene was unfolding at a summer camp across the Atlantic.

One of the first things we knew about the man responsible for this atrocity was that he is a fundamentalist Christian. A fundamentalist Christian without any regard or understanding of Christian fundamentals.

What this man did is exactly what Jesus was speaking against in today’s Gospel. Violence is never, Jesus tells us, how God moves in the world. But how this man acted in Norway, in Oslo and at that camp is probably pretty close to how those of Jesus’ day thought the Kingdom of God would be brought into the world. They were waiting for a Messiah to do just what this man chose to do.

If you had asked any of the crowd listening to Jesus what the Kingdom of God was going to be like when it arrived, you probably would have heard images very different than the ones Jesus gives in today’s Gospel. You would have heard the crowd suggest that the Kingdom of God would be more like the Kingdoms of their own day. The Kingdom of God would be like a mighty army…The kingdom of God would be like a warrior standing over the defeated…the kingdom of God would be like a powerful sword silencing any perceived enemy.

That’s what the crowd might have said. It’s what they were expecting Jesus to say when he began, “The kingdom of God is like…”

But the images Jesus gives of the coming Kingdom of God are quite different. While the crowd is expecting something big, something grand, something exerting power over, Jesus gives them images of things that are small, indeed Jesus gives them images of the smallest things they could possibly imagine; things that are not about power over, but power within.

The Kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed…it is like yeast mixed in with three measures of flour.

No majesty. No triumphant victory.

We know that Jesus liked to turn things on their heads and his continued parables about what the Kingdom of God would be like are no exception. In today’s Gospel, Jesus continues his radical upheaval of all that was believed about God, what was assumed about how God worked in the world.

He uses these images, I think, to prove three things.

First, the kingdom of God is not a destination, but a way of being. None of these images Jesus offers are of a static place one arrives after death if one has been good, done the right things or said the right prayers. They are images of change, images of transformation. The mustard seed blooms in one year to a tree big enough to house birds. The yeast leavens three measures of flour. In his descriptions of the kingdom of God, he isn’t talking about a place; he’s talking about how God’s dream for the world works.

Second, the Kingdom of God is about now, not about later. He says the Kingdom of God is like, not the Kingdom of God will be like. In these parables, Jesus is explaining how the Kingdom of God is working in the world, right now. The Kingdom of God is.

Finally, Jesus teaches that the kingdom of God, God’s dream for the world comes about in the smallest, the most unexpected of ways.

After spending a week up at camp I can assure you that these things Jesus teaches is true. The kingdom of God is a way of being; it is here, and it happens in the smallest, most unexpected of ways.

Many of you know that I spent eighteen summers of my life at the summer camp the Episcopal Church in Rhode Island ran. I loved camp, couldn’t wait to go, didn’t ever want to leave. I don’t think I realized it at the time, but I know now that the reason I loved camp so much was that it gave me a glimpse of what Jesus means by the kingdom of God.

Unlike the rest of the life of a teenager, camp was a place where it didn’t matter who I was or what I looked like or where I came from. At camp, I was just part of the family. At camp everyone mattered and everyone had the potential to be all of who God was making them to be. If you were a geek, your “geek-dom” was celebrated. If you were a jock, you got to shine on the ball field. If you were an outsider at home, at camp you were right in the middle of things.

I think my time at camp spoiled me for life. I say it spoiled me because there I had experienced what life could be like, how the world could be. And once I knew what God’s dream for the world could look like, I could never un-know it. I could never again think it was unattainable. I could never resign myself to “the way things are” because I knew that wasn’t how they could be.

In many ways I think I have spent my years since camp trying to find that truth again, and to make that truth known for others. We don’t have to wait ‘till we die to experience the kingdom of God. We just have to make it so.

Making the kingdom of God is easier than we think. It isn’t ushered in grand ways, or in big gestures. Often, most often in fact, the kingdom of God is made from the smallest of beginnings; the mustard seed; the yeast in the dough.

When I look back at my time at that camp, I don’t remember any one big thing that let me know what the kingdom of God was like, or how to bring it about. I had no big epiphanies, no voices speaking from the clouds, no major miracles. What I had, though, was thousands of the smallest of miracles. Thousands of conversations, hundreds of small deeds, hands extended in friendship, ears offered to listen, words of love and hope spoken to me.

Each of these words, every small deed, hand after hand extended were like seeds planted in my soul, yeast added to my heart.

I don’t want to make camp out to be the perfect place. There were lonely days and scary nights, there were times of doubt and summers of fear, but in those times the thousands of tiny gestures, the multitude of kind words continued to grow, continued to fill me with the sense that no matter what was going on in my world, there was a place where I was loved, where I was safe, where I was seen not just as the world saw me, but as God might see me. It was all the many seeds planted for me that helped me to understand for myself what St. Paul writes about in his letter. That nothing, ever, anywhere or anytime, could separate me from the love of God.   That is my truth. That is what I know. And all because thirty years ago some seeds were planted in my heart.

When events like those in Norway happen, I want so badly to respond in an equally grand, but loving, way. I want to make it all alright. I want to gather all those who are in pain and instantly let them know some kind of peace in the midst of their pain, some kind of hope in their despair.

But the kingdom of God doesn’t work like that. What I have, what I hope is that this week, lots of seeds were planted, lots of yeast added to this group of these two hundred youth and young adults. These seeds of God’s great love, this yeast of God’s dream for a world of hope and justice and love will continue to grow and fill them until they, too, begin planting seeds of their own.

If we think the only way to bring about the Kingdom of God is in great and glorious ways, we might never try doing it at all. But what if each day we simply planted one seed; extended one hand in friendship, one word of love, of hope, of encouragement. Well, who knows what might happen.

But it sure would be great to find out.

 

© 2011 The Reverend Jeffrey W. Mello