Beams of Heaven Ezekiel 17:22-24
June 14, 2009 Mark 4: 26-34
Metairie, LA
We preachers tend to bring up heaven or, as Mark calls it, "the kingdom of God" at funerals but not so much at ordinary times. At funerals we tend to select texts that are descriptive and set in another time zone- life after death. For example, John's Gospel says that in God's home there are many rooms and that Jesus is going away to another realm.
In contrast, today's parables depict heaven as woven through creation- in trees and mustard seeds and loamy earth. God's kingdom is already here- structured in to our reality and bursting forth just as a tiny seed, hard and dry, becomes a living thing.
Both parables depict God's kingdom as fruitful and hospitable, a place where birds find haven. Three parables remind us that God's world is a gift to us and the flourishing of creation is beyond our management, careless or otherwise. God is the one who assures the flourshing, thank God.
That seed is heedlessly tossed, but it grows exceedingly tall like the cedar and exceedingly wide, like the mustard bush. No farmer toils to make the seed grow. God's plan is already engineered into that seed. The cedar that grows in the forest- no person fertilized or watered it. So much of creation- the forests, the wildlife in abundance, has nothing to do with human striving. This is humbling, I think. Also comforting. And really rather amazing, when you take time to think about it.
Parables by nature are elusivve, playful, full of contradictory meanings which can be teased out; that's why they are such good teaching devices. Mark tells us that some of the listners got the meaning, but others were pretty much in the dark.
The best way to approach parables, I think, is through poetry, music, stories. So do pay attention to the hymns you sing today. And listen if you will to a poet's comment on heaven in "The Afterlife" by Billy Collins, Poet Laureate of our nation.
While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.
They are moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief.
And this is the secret that Lazarus would not reveal:
That everyone is right, as it turns out.
You go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.
Some are being shot up in a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.
Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals- eagles and leapards- and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key.
While others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.
There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to a mysterious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three headed dog.
The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at the window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.
What ever afterlife is about, says the poet, it is deeply related to your life now. The afterlife is a projection of whatever we expect in our wonderings about heaven. The poem and the parables try to explore mystery. There is playfulness and humor, but they are also dead serious. There is a warning in the poetry that echos the adage: be careful what you wish for. Treat your imaginative excursions with due respect and know that there is continuity between the life you are living today and whatever follows.
A personal story, I hope, will illustrate that God works his holy kin-dom into ordinary time the way a baker works yeast into the dough. Or the way a mustard seed, the tiniest of seeds, becomes an expansive flourishing safe haven for fragile creatures.
In the 1980's I was newly arrived in Danbury, Ct. where my main vocation was mothering two pre-schoolers. I wanted to connect with some adults about adult issues and so, one day, I wandered into a women's center, wondering what I would find.
The Center was a gathering place for women to dialogue, just hang out, read about women's issues. The receptionist, Ruth, also gave referrals. But she was stymied when she had multiple calls from battered women, asking for help. Ruth had no agency for them to call, so they came to the Women's Center and started a support group. Then they decided to gather information and start a hotline so they could offer support over the phone. As more women, and occasionally a man, called the hotline, we added some part time staff, Vista workers.
We began to recruit and train volunteers to staff a 7 day a week, 24 hours a day hotline. Then we began to help with transportation for women who were escaping their abusers.
Remember now, this is not according to some long range plan, but rather grew organically, according to needs and talents as people befriended one another.
We began to see the trauma that children endured as they lived in violent circumstances, so childrens' support services and parenting skills were provided.
Co-incidentally, remember this was the 80s when domestic violence was pretty much dismissed as "just a family squabble", co-incidentally a battered woman to whom the State Police had failed to respond when she called them for help, was badly injured in a domestic violence event. So she sued the State Police for their failure to respond and she won a huge settlement. That caught the attention of the authorities and suddenly their were funds available for education of law enforcement agencies. So we began a mission of education and information that included the wider public, social service and religious agencies. As awareness grew, of course, we had more clients and we learned that for some victims there was no safe haven. They did not have family or financial resources to relocate and start a new life. And so they stayed with their abusers.
This sparked the idea to build a shelter for domestic violence victims. We would call it : Ruth's Place. To this point The Women's Center was exclusively female. But once construction was proposed we invited men into the project. This is not to say we had no skilled women carpenters because we did! But by that time we felt that a few good men would be an asset to the cause.
And a shelter was built. And a Rape Crises Services was formed. And an Executive Director was hired who wrote grants and helped supervise the programs and staff. Suddenly the little seedling of a women's center in an old industrial town became an agency with multiple branches. What is the kin-dom of God like? It is like a gathering of a few women to chat about life and then a God thing happens!
The parable of the mustard seed engenders hope for any who are downtrodden or burdened with any kind of misery. Consider the circumstances of our hymn authors, who are leaning towards heaven out of woeful circumstances. All our hymns today testify that the thrust of history is determined by God's promises of a Holy Commonwealth which surely will arrive someday.With them, we summon our trust that poverty of today will give way to wealth of tomorrow. We believe into a future where fragile creatures will be provided a generous, safe home. The birds in the shade of the branches, the women and children who flee violence.
The audience of Ezekiel's parable about the cedar tree were down and out and knocked about by the more successful nations like Egypt and Babylon. The same people, the Israelites, later endured expulsions, pogroms and the Holocaust, and this week the insult of an assailant at our National Museum. But by God they as a people stand tall as a cedar. I read that though Jews are a tiny minority of our nation, they hold a highly disproportionate one third of all Ph.D.s God promised they would flourish and prosper so long as they remained faithful to the covenant.
The audience for Jesus' parables was a small band of fishermen, a lowly and insecure occupation, even as today. But the message of the mustard seed transformed their lives and so they carried the message to others and even all over God's good earth.
If we at Good Shepherd let the seed take root into the soil of our hearts, individually and collectively, we certainly can expect to flourish and grow abundantly and harbor all sorts of fragile creatures in our extended branches. You can count on that- what God speaks will be accomplished. Amen
