Proper 6B
June 13, 2021 Church of Our Saviour 1
Introduction
I start off this week where I left off last week. I wasn't here, I was at Lancaster, but it's a continuation of the same narrative. There's a prophet named Samuel. The people complain and want to be like everybody else. They get their wish to have a king. It doesn't go well. There's another prophet like no other prophet before named Jesus. The people imagine he's a prophet like all the others. He confounds them. And then, of course, there's God. He is still in the story.
And we pick up this week amid the wreckage of getting their wish to have a king like everybody else. Samuel is still at work, though he's kind of worn out from a lifetime of being a prophet. He sets out to choose the 2nd king. God is still guiding his hand. And God does not disappoint. He does not choose what was expected.
It wasn't the oldest. It wasn't the most experienced. It really was the least obvious choice. God keeps doing that.
And Jesus. Remember that as we moved past Pentecost, we begin a cycle of readings from the Gospel that take us through the narrative of Jesus' ministry. We're just beginning that long cycle, lasting until Thanksgiving time, and so we hear, today, from near the opening of Mark's gospel.
Jesus is working his way into being a prophet like no other prophet before. Really truly like the longed for prophet, the Messiah.
But we're beginning to anticipate, aren't we, that though he's long expected, he's not going to be what was expected. Today we hear how he is above all else, a story-teller.
God loves stories
The late writer Elie Wiesel is widely known, though when he was rescued from Auschwitz he was utterly unknown. Wiesel wrote once, "G-d made man because He loves stories."
I got to see and hear Elie Wiesel. Twice. It was one of the great privileges of my life. One occasion was at Notre Dame with the then University President, Ted Hesburgh, a great man in his own right. Wiesel had given a passionate and enthralling talk and ended with reference to the exiled scientist and activist Andrei Sakharov. He turned and gestured to the head of Notre Dame University and said, "Fr. Hesburgh we have to do something. Come." And I had the distinct sensation that there was so much power in the moment that immediately Sakharov would be freed from exile in Siberia. It actually came a little later.
The next time was at a synagogue in Michigan City. I would later become rector of a church in that city and have as a guest at one of my annual seder meals a matron of that synagogue. It was at that talk that I first heard Wiesel relate the story of the group of prisoners at Auschwitz who put God on Trial for having betrayed his covenant with his people.
God continues to be the main character in the narrative. There's just no shaking him.
We have heard today 2 of Jesus' stories:
The Kingdom of God, he says, is like a farmer sowing seed in his field. It grows amazingly. First the tiny sprout, the shoots like we see out there right now. With good weather -- an increasingly problematic "if" -- we'll have mature corn by July 4th. Then the harvest and production brings it all back to the table.
I can picture well enough the corn or wheat. But how is that like the Kingdom of God? In fact, what does he mean by the "Kingdom of God"?
But Jesus doesn't leave it at that. He says it is like a mustard seed. Amazingly it grows, from the tiniest thing to a mighty home for the birds.
What is this, "Kingdom of God"?
We need to get to know this term: "Kingdom of God." It will be repeated over and over again as we listen to the stories week by week. And I have a thought that it's not really something Jesus intends for us to figure out. It's something he wants us to do. He doesn't want us to think about it. He wants us to change. He's not speaking to each of us for our own individual benefit. He's trying to reach each of us so that he can enlist as many as possible in the project of changing the world.
Stories change the world
Stories are deeply personal. They touch us deep inside. When they do it is as if they were told just for us.
Yet stories also create and nourish, sustain and continually re-create communities.2 Stories change the world.
Wendell Berry 3 or his work may be familiar to some of you. He is not easy to pigeon-hole into one thing or another. He's a farmer. He's a philosopher and poet. He's also a story-teller. He tells a story about a bucket.4:
FOR MANY YEARS MY WALKS HAVE TAKEN ME down an old fencerow in a wooded hollow on what was once my grandfather's farm. A battered galvanized bucket is hanging on a fence post near the head of the hollow, and I never go by it without stopping to look inside. For what is going on in that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is making earth. The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their droppings or perhaps a feather or two. This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human. ...
However small a landmark the old bucket is, it is not trivial. It is one of the signs by which I know my country and myself. And to me it is irresistibly suggestive in the way it collects leaves and other woodland sheddings as they fall through time. It collects stories too as they fall through time. It is irresistibly metaphorical. It is doing in a passive way what a human community must do actively and thoughtfully. A human community too must collect leaves and stories, and turn them into an account. It must build soil, and build that memory of itself—in lore and story and song—which will be its culture. And these two kinds of accumulation, of local soil and local culture, are intimately related.
...
A human community, then, if it is to last long, must exert a sort of centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory in place. Practically speaking, human society has no work more important than this.
...
It's vital that we never become complacent. It's essential that we never lean on what is familiar or the ways the rest of the world expects. Annie Dillard writes in a vivid way about the power and the impact of these sacred stories.
“The higher Christian churches--where, if anywhere, I belong--come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect that in any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
God is at work changing the world in unexpected ways and using the stories we tell.
Wiesel told stories, as rabbis for millenia before him had done, that changed lives and changed the world. They were fertilizer, intended to ferment and percolate in order to produce far more than could be imagined.
Wendell Barry tells stories like that and reminds us that that's how stories have worked, stretching back as far as time itself. God's stories are our stories, and they are more important than we can know or imagine.
We must be careful about the stories we repeat. We must bend our expectations in unexpected ways.
Samuel didn't choose the obvious son. He chose David.
Jesus didn't come riding in victorious on a stallion or Sherman tank. He arrived telling stories.
And they weren't fashionable stories that would play well on the late night TV shows or most popular blogs on Facebook. They were about seeds in the hand. Sprouts that broke through the dark soil.
And they were like -- "The Kingdom of God".
We're still asking 2 millenia later, "What does that mean? What is it like?"
The tradition of storytelling is long and far more varied than even the interesting variety we see before us today. It has consistently lifted up the least among us, the out of favor, the unexpected, the unheralded.
Perhaps it is enough to paint the picture this way:
From the Beatitudes of the Gospel of Matthew, The Common English Version, 5:3-10.
God blesses those people who depend only on him. They belong to the kingdom of heaven!
God blesses those people who grieve. They will find comfort!
God blesses those people who are humble. The earth will belong to them!
God blesses those people who want to obey him more than to eat or drink. They will be given what they want!
God blesses those people who are merciful. They will be treated with mercy!
God blesses those people whose hearts are pure. They will see him!
God blesses those people who make peace. They will be called his children!
God blesses those people who are treated badly for doing right.
May God bless you. In the stories you tell that they become God's stories. In the community you build through the stories you tell, may they move you and transform you into God's likeness. May you be blessed among God's story-tellers.
Notes
cf. http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp6_RCL.html↩
A good community is a good local economy. It depends upon itself for many of its essential needs and is thus shaped, so to speak, from the inside. --Wendell Berry**↩
Wendell Erdman Berry (born August 5, 1934) is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. cf. "Wendell E. Berry biography". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved April 26, 2015.↩
The Work of Local Culture --by Wendell Berry, syndicated from centerforneweconomics.org, Mar 04, 2014 cf. https://www.dailygood.org/story/576/the-work-of-local-culture-wendell-berry/↩
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