The Parable: Cracked Open

Sermon Preached on Sunday June 14, 2009

Parables as Jerome Berryman, the creator of Godly Play our church school curriculum says, are difficult to engage and we need to be ready for them. You see parables, when we’re ready to hear and explore them usually tell us just what we need to hear.
Parables are, at their core, morality tales which are dynamic stories, designed for us to re-visit again and again, each time taking a little something else out of them, something different, something more. What we need to hear, not necessarily what we want to hear. Oftentimes they remain closed to us, inexplicable, meaning nothing more than what the story says on the surface---regardless of how hard we try we don’t get it, the insight they’re designed to engender just doesn’t happen. Jesus encountered that a lot as he exclaims, “you mean you still don’t get it?” It’s not uncommon to stay on the top layer of the parable and move on, none the richer for it.

This week I was staying on the surface of the Gospel, ready to preach a fairly typical sermon about how the kingdom of heaven, God’s grace if you will, is like the mustard tree—a large shrub spreading all over and when its gained a foothold? Impossible to move.
But just as Berryman says in Godly Play, sometimes parables crack open and surprise us.
The seeds described in today’s parable, the growing and the mustard are pretty persistent—we’re told the growing seed sprouts and grows without the planter doing anything ---he sleeps through the whole process, and the mustard seed, smallest of all the seeds sown grows into the largest shrub on earth. These seeds have odds stacked against them, yet they prevail, they prevail because they are fed by a faith in God which creates things far beyond our wildest imaginings.
The odds, at times, seem stacked against us. The economy is terrible and our cathedral resources are strapped—we are really hurting. But if something so small, can grow into something so great then what’s stopping us from taking the seeds of our declining Cathedral resources and planting them, nurturing them and watching them grow into something greater than we could ever imagine?

Times are tough, our pledge income is down, our endowment is down, our loose offering receipts are down. Just this week we said good bye to our Cathedral Secretary her job eliminated due to budget constraints. The need in this City is great—the hungry, the homeless, the illiterate, the drug addicted, the mentally ill---there is a steady stream of need knocking on our Cathedral doors. If we can’t balance our budget how will we ever meet the increasing need of the world?
BUT, our donations to the food pantry are up, the Liberian community will graduate 60% more of their high school seniors this year than last, due in large part to the tutoring program we host ,my email request for some help with a Burmese refugee family has rendered very positive response—in the midst of deprivation and decline we have these bright spots.
Some small actions on the part of several of you does make a big difference. And right there---that’s the parable of the mustard seed … even though our financial situation feels weak what we’re able to piece together continually grows into something bigger and stronger than we, individually can imagine. That’s the lesson: each of us here has something we can give and we should for even if it seems meager, joined with others through faith it will grow into something much stronger.
Each of us sitting here today is gaining something by being here. Likewise, each of us here today is responsible for this place—the building, the worship and most importantly each of us sitting here today is responsible for the Word of God, as given to us through the love of Holy and Undivided Trinity. This love, and our work in its name, is what we are all about. Whether it’s giving a world class music education free of charge to children, whether it’s preserving a national historic landmark –a building which draws people in through its sheer beauty, whether it’s offering our space to refugees desperately trying to make a new life in the United States, whether it’s protecting people from the changes and chances of this life through the work of our Hunger Outreach committee---food for the hungry, clothes for the naked, housing for the homeless--or showing a four year old through Godly Play what the great stories of the Bible mean in our daily lives, our ministries at this Cathedral spread the Good News of Christ .
This place and you its people provide, like the mustard tree, a place of healing hope and hospitality to the world. I know it is scary right now and I know it is easy to cut your pledge ---or to not pledge at all—thinking that someone else will pay the bill---but that’s not how it works.
One big seed doesn’t grow into a beautiful house of worship, a variety of ministries to serve the world, a wonderful music program and glorious liturgies. No this place, and all that we do in its name, is sown through the individual seeds of each of us. A dollar here, a dollar there, teaching when asked, hosting when asked, helping when asked---these are the seeds of our faith and when sown together they grow into something more magnificent than we could ever imagine, something more stupendous than we could ever do alone.
In the words of the grace ending Morning Prayer (BCP page 102) remember:
Glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.
Just like the Mustard Seed.
Amen.

And Then A Miracle Happens

Sermon preached at St. Paul's Cathedral, Trinity Sunday, Yr B
+
One of my favorite comic strips is The Far Side. One of the best shows a man resembling Albert Einstein standing in front of a blackboard upon which is diagramed some complex equation divided into three steps. Under the heading Step One are scribbles numbers and equations; likewise, Step Three, at the other end of the board, has similar markings. But under step Two, right in the middle of board are just five words: “And Then a Miracle Happens.” I love it----the notion that something so intriguing, an idea so historic, a formula which explains so much…could be boiled down to a “and then a miracle happens,’ is funny…and refreshing.
I empathize with the Einstein figure—how hard it is to explain something which seems so logical to you, yet it is so difficult to convey. No doubt the real Einstein had times when he wished he could just use Step Two! At times what we know so clearly deep inside is almost impossible to put into words.
It’s the same with certain Christian doctrines...the incarnation, resurrection, ascension, the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and The Trinity. No doubt the Bishops in Nicaea at the fourth century council which gave us the doctrine of the Holy Trinity struggled mightily to find the words to describe our faith. Words we recite each week in our Creed, words which, to this day, cause a lot of consternation both within Christianity and beyond.
Let’s face it, it can be very difficult to explain our faith to another. Just because we have experienced it doesn’t mean we understand it. It can be so big and overwhelming that words fail us and we end up with “Step 2:” and then a miracle happens!
Jesus may have felt the same way speaking to Nicodemus…Nicodemus, you see, wasn’t thinking BIG enough, he was so constrained by his adherence to the law and to the ways things had “always been done” that he couldn’t open himself up to understand the full magnitude of what he was experiencing through the ministry of Jesus. Nicodemus, a Pharisee had been raised to follow the rules—rules designed to please Yahweh a distant, all powerful loving yet also wrathful God. But being pleased isn’t God’s ultimate goal--
God’s ultimate goal is to be in relationship with us. Through the ages of prophets, patriarchs and matriarchs God has been trying to reach us—to connect with us. God wants to experience us and God wants us to experience God.
This is the purpose of the Trinity: God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit gives God various routes to us and we, in turn gain various routes to God. A roadmap of sorts*.

The Trinity gives us, and God, a variety of ways to communicate, to connect, to relate.
Some of us connect to the parental “Father God” because we have caring nurturing parents or we long to have a caring nurturing parent---either way, for some of us the image of God as parent, as Father/Mother is comforting.
For others, the fleshy God, the incarnate word of Jesus is an easier image to connect with---a friend, a companion someone more accessible, more real, more tangible for us.
For others, there’s a sense that God is all in all—everywhere, in all things, of all things and deep within us experienced as intuition, inner voice etc. The Holy Spirit, while not physically present, is deep within us, expressing itself in our innermost thoughts, our soul searching and our heart’s desire.
Our heart’s desire, when we let ourselves feel it, is to receive God’s love, to accept God’s pursuit of us. The Holy Trinity comes for us in a number of ways because, beyond all human reason or reckoning, God wants to reach us!
When Jesus says in today’s Gospel “the wind blows where it chooses” I see an image of God in the person of the Holy Spirit, seeking us out reaching into the recesses of our hiding places to offer to us what God most wants to give: Love.
That’s the real miracle of our Christian faith: God so loves us, so wishes for us to accept that love, that God continues to come after us—as we heard in the Gospel: God so loved the world he gave his only Son (John 3:16)- his incarnate self to see and touch and taste that love, God gave us his eternal and all encompassing self, the Holy Spirit, to course through our very being at all times and in all places. This is a miracle indeed…and one we are called to proclaim…if only we could find the right words!
The three persons of the Trinity are traditionally described as Father Son and Holy Spirit but others prefer: Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier or: Artist, Rescuer, Companion and many other permutations to numerous to mention here. It is a challenge to find the right words to describe the mesmerizing, fantastic and most amazing experience of God working in our lives. This struggle continues to this day—not because God is elusive, but because God is so big, so ever-present that language proves insufficient in describing it.
That is why this Cathedral, each Sunday, offers three distinct liturgies utilizing various styles to express our love of God and God’s love for us.
In the course of 4 hours we in-- three distinct ways---proclaim the Glory of God. We do this because as Jesus explained to Nicodemus: We speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen….and what we know and what we have seen of God is so huge and so varied we must use a variety of words and images to express it. And that’s ok, because it doesn’t matter so much how we say it. What matters is that we experience it; that we delve into a relationship with God dying to our limited human roadmap, allowing ourselves to be reborn into the life of “And then a Miracle Happens”---the Holy and Undivided Trinity, One God Creator Redeemer, Sustainer, Artist Rescuer Companion, Father Son and Holy Spirit.
Amen.



*CS Lewis Mere Christianity considers the doctrines of Christianity to be roadmaps to reality