disclosing new worlds

1 Samuel 17: (1a; 4-11; 19-23) 32-49 NRSV text
Psalm 133 NRSV text
2 Corinthians 6: 1-13 NRSV text
Mark 4: 35-41 NRSV text

“Who on earth is this guy?” That’s how the gospel passage ends (4:41), with Jesus’ closest friends – the ones who should have known him best – discovering more and more how little they know and understand him. What makes this all the more intriguing is the conclusion of the parables section from last week, where Jesus apparently leaves the crowds to figure things out, but “explained everything in private to his disciples” (4:34). On the one hand, there’s a dynamic of the disciples being drawn closer and closer to Jesus – of getting to know him better and better. And yet Mark immediately goes on in the very next paragraph to tell us a story that leaves the disciples puzzled! Now we’re into dramatic narrative irony here, of course. We, the readers, understand what the disciples cannot see. And that’s certainly one of Mark’s major emphases at this transition point in his gospel: we are watching an increasing distance opening up between Jesus and the disciples, caused by the disciples’ inability and failure to grasp what Jesus is about.

But there’s something important here beyond mere narrative device. They are discovering something in Jesus that is true in human relating: getting to know someone is not a “flat”, linear process. It is not about getting to know “facts” or “mere information” about them, but being drawn into the mystery of their otherness. Think of getting to know someone whom you have met and befriended. There’s an initial period in which who the other person is seems to unfold – startlingly and thrillingly. They “make sense” to us. This is a period of relating during which we find ourselves instinctively “understanding” the other person. It’s the time in a relationship when we’re constantly making connections – finding out all the things we share and have in common. The friendship is a celebration of precisely the amount we have in common with one another.

But then things appear to begin to change. The other person does things that shock or surprise us. We’re jolted. We didn’t expect it, and we don’t like it. This person who seems so “like me” has just done something that I wouldn’t dream of doing! It appears to run counter to everything I’ve known until now. This is about being confronted with their individuality – their otherness and difference. We’re suddenly aware of the fact that we do not “control” them. They’re unpredictable. There are other things that make them “tick”. Some of them we will admire, or share. Others we will come to like and adopt for ourselves. Others will be neutral. Some we will simply dislike and resist. And when we discover that some of those last things are not open for negotiation, we have decisions to make about the future of the friendship.

That’s when friendships change. They have to. They move into a different phase. They will either deepen, becoming relationships of mutual engagement and negotiation, or they may well fall apart in disillusionment: “I found I didn’t know her/him after all!” That is precisely what we see happening in this week’s story about Saul and David. It had started so well! We see Saul, the king, meeting an astonishing young man who volunteers to go out and fight Goliath, when everyone else is too afraid. The young boy, David, does more than answer the taunts of the Philistines (and vindicate Yahweh): as a result of his victory, “all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel” (1 Samuel 17: 46). In the context of the story, what is vital is that Israel learns about her own God – Israel, who has been cowed into faithless, terrified and helpless submission.

In the context of this text’s place in this week’s lectionary readings, I want to draw out a related but slightly different emphasis. Saul responds to David’s slaying of Goliath along with the rest of Israel. There is excitement and admiration. He wants to get to know David better. In 1 Samuel 18:2, Saul makes David part of his own household. He, like his son Jonathan, responds to David at “soul level”. It is when he hears what people are saying about David’s victory that things change. He is suddenly aware of a whole new dimension of David – in this case, David’s charisma and ability to arouse love and admiration. He cannot “control” David. Here is a dimension of David that he did not immediately recognise – David’s power to threaten him. This is the crucial point is a developing friendship: it was much bigger and more multidimensional than Saul had first thought or imagined. And we see the results in vv9ff.

That’s the point the disciples have begun to reach in their relationship with Jesus. The question, “Who is this guy?” is not an appeal for information! It’s a baffled acknowledgement that they are in for a (boat!) ride that they hadn’t actually signed up for. They recognise something fundamental both about human relationships and about faith in Jesus: getting to know Jesus can be wonderful, exciting, high-octane, disturbing, offensive … the point is, you can’t get to know Jesus and stay the same! Being close to Jesus means having to make decisions; means changing. And in this particular journey of friendship with Jesus, it is Jesus who sets the terms. Jesus, like his counterpart, Aslan, in the Narnia chronicles, is not a tame lion!

Control, conflict and change in the Church (2 Corinthians 6: 1-13/Psalm 133)
Most instances of conflict in relationship arise from a defensive response to the “otherness” of other people. How do you handle the dimensions of other people in relationships that you do not like, or which threaten? The standard move is to try and find ways of controlling the other person. The classic move is to ascribe moral value to difference: those aspects of the other person that you dislike are “wrong”, rather than potentially enriching. That is what Saul does in 1 Samuel 18:8 – he assumes that David’s strengths are in fact greedy designs on Saul’s power and kingship. The following chapters of the book describe the escalating and deadly conflict between the king and the boy.

That is the sort of battle that Paul has been fighting with the Corinthian Church. His opponents have sought to portray him as unspiritual, ineffective, foolish, unworthy, unimportant, heretical and insane. It is a remarkably effective strategy! Differences of opinion are elevated to a struggle of good against evil, truth against falsehood, God against Satan. The point is that we lose sight of the humanity of one another in those sorts of conflicts. Human beings – people with feelings, fears, failings and strengths – are reduced to ciphers – symbols of some cosmic struggle. In so doing, the opportunities for growth, mutual enrichment and deeper knowledge that conflict affords (yes, conflict is essentially – and potentially – positive; it is a sign of life and passion) are lost. During Apartheid, the champions of the system demonised voices such as Tutu, Boesak, and Beyers Naude as Communist agitators. They didn’t need to be heard and taken seriously; what is important is that they were crushed. The Church has historically done that over conflicts of power (ie issues of control): one has only to look at the ways in which women were relegated to second-class human beings on a lower spiritual plane than men as an example. We are doing the same thing over the sexuality debate.

By the time Paul writes 2 Corinthians, the conflict has been significantly resolved – or is in the process of being so. The Corinthians are more open to Paul, who defends his very vulnerability, suffering and lack of credentials as a mirror of Christ. But the point to note here is that, in order to resolve the conflict, Paul repeatedly draws attention to their shared humanity and the things that they found so helpful in one another initially. He calls on them to “open their hearts wide” (6:13).

The epistle is a masterly lesson in conflict resolution within the Church. It’s a model we would do well to heed, because we don’t “do” conflict very well. We’re good at papering over the cracks. We like to think of ourselves as welcoming and friendly. That is not always the experience of people who come in “from the outside” – particularly people who haven’t already been socialised into “church”. Underlying much of our welcome is the desire – and supposition – that people join in order to become more and more “like us”. We want to clone people – not make disciples. “Otherness” is unsettling. How many times do we find the dynamic in today’s gospel reading and Old Testament reading repeated in church life: someone new comes along, and initially things are great! They seem to fit in well – take an increasingly active part, swell the ranks and are generally good news. But then, as time passes, they become troublesome – by which I mean, they want to do things differently. And if they can’t be “controlled”, we begin to ask ourselves, “Who is this person, anyway?”

We then make a virtue of absence of conflict, and a vice of questioning the status quo. “Tradition” becomes self-evidently right. We betray our lack of interest in growing – because these sorts of conflicts are, as I have said, signs of life and growth. They are opportunities for change and development, and signs of the activity of the Holy Spirit. Small wonder, then, that churches are increasingly becoming smaller and smaller enclaves of like-minded people! The “non-conformists” leave, because it is too uncomfortable. There is no space for them to bring new insights and new ways – their gift to the church. They find them unwelcome and unwanted. We talk about radical change in the Church, yet we want to control it. We pray for renewal, and quench the Spirit. True, we minimise conflict – but that is not the same thing as the “unity” the Psalmist speaks of in Psalm 133!

“Like-mindedness” is not unity. The unity of Psalm 133 presupposes significant differences of opinion. Unity happens when people are allowed to be different; when their differences and insights are valued and treasured. Then difference becomes life in startling, divine variety! It is like the “dew of Hermon” (Psalm 133:3) that waters the slopes and allows all sorts of life to flourish. It is a sign of Yahweh’s blessing of life.

That sort of unity is what Paul considers the single, knock-down argument for evidence of the presence of the Spirit. It isn’t the manifestation of the spiritual gifts that the Corinthians prized so highly, but the fact that Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians could live together and be part of the same Church without killing each other and without the community tearing itself apart at the seams. Unity is the sign of spiritual maturity. It is a gift of grace (as Paul reminds the Church in 2 Corinthians 6:1). It is the grace that doesn’t seek to silence the other by exercising control.

The stilling of the storm in the narrative structure of the gospel
All of this brings us full circle to the gospel story set for today. Mark 4:34 concludes the opening section of Jesus’ ministry. We are about to enter a new phase in the narrative, and it is marked by the lake crossing – Jesus saying “Let’s go across to the other side” (4:35). There is symbolic significance here in terms of the narrative. Mark makes symbolic use of place and movement, and here Jesus is crossing from the “Jewish” side of the lake to the “Gentile” side to begin a new phase in his ministry. On arrival, he will be confronted immediately by the Gerasene demoniac.

Mark, we must remember, presents Jesus as the one who binds the Strong Man (Satan). His ministry is a ministry of confrontation with the powers that threaten and imprison human beings. Mark’s Jesus is a Liberator. And here, at this moment of transition, Jesus confronts and defeats a storm at sea.

If that sounds a peculiar way of putting it, look at how Mark shapes the story. Sudden, violent storms are common on Galilee. But this is a lake, not the sea! By casting this as a sea voyage, Mark is quite deliberately evoking the biblical symbols of the sea as a place of chaos and danger. That’s the first point to note.

The second is that Mark casts the stilling of the storm in terms of an exorcism. Jesus “rebukes” the wind and the “sea”, literally saying to them, “Be muzzled!” “Rebuking” and “muzzling” are technical terms for an exorcism (cf the very first exorcism at Capernaum in 1:25). If we read this as a “nature miracle”, we are missing the point that Mark is trying so hard to make! The power of Jesus that is displayed here is not that of a “miracle worker” so much as an exorcist and liberator. The biblical tradition describes creation as disordered. Paul talks about it “groaning in bondage”. Its deadly power is assign of disorder: creation is meant to give life. Yet all of created reality is symbolically described as being under a “malign power”. It isn’t free. So one answer to the disciples’ question in 4:41 is, “This is the Liberator king of the universe!”

The disciples’ failure to “get” Jesus
Finally, we need to note that this transition piece in the gospel has a theological parallel to the change in the relationship between Jesus and his disciples that we were considering earlier. Mark has set us up in 4:34 to assume that Jesus will reveal himself in a special way to his disciples – and this is precisely what is happening in this incident! The trouble is, instead of the disciples going, “Ah! I see!” they are left puzzled, wondering who on earth (no pun intended!) Jesus is! Why?

This is part of the Messianic Secret motif in the gospel. Jesus is revealing himself as the Messiah – but not the sort of Messiah that the disciples are interested in having! Jesus’ messiahship entails suffering and death – and that is not on the disciples’ messianic agenda. What Mark signals here is the start of an increasing alienation between Jesus and the disciples, caused not by a diminishing of his affection for them but by their refusal to allow him to be who he really is. They want to write the messianic script – to “control” Jesus. As the gospel unfolds from this point onwards, their attempts to dissuade Jesus from his course of action will cause more and more friction. Increasingly, Mark marginalises the disciples from the significant action that happens around Jesus. They want to make Jesus in their own image of what a Messiah ought to be, and so Mark will develop the theme of the disciples’ blindness more fully. Ironically, more and more, it is the very group to whom Jesus wants to reveal himself that is least able to see and hear. Their relationship with Jesus has reached crunch point. Either they are going to walk with Jesus and learn to grow and change, or there will be a parting of the ways. They elect to stay – for now – but to resist Jesus and to seek to manipulate him. It won’t work. The final parting of the ways takes place in Gethsemane, when they will all flee. Restoration, understanding and appreciation lie on the other side of the cross.

Jesus refuses domestication! Discipleship is not a guarantee in and of itself that we “get” Jesus. Church history is littered with spectacular failures of the Church in this regard: Christendom, the Inquisition, the oppression of women, Apartheid, the Holocaust, the Religious Right. The Jesus who is on the side of the poor and the marginalised, who welcomes sinners and who comes to liberate humanity from all that threatens and destroys flourishing and life is a constant thorn in the side to a middle-class, respectable Church. Taking Jesus seriously is constantly to be amazed, affronted and challenged. It is to face up to the things about Jesus, his message and his mission that we dislike and wish fervently were different. We need to face up to our tendencies to control him; remake him in our own image; resist the changes he urges on us through the Spirit. How can we begin to do that? We can be honest: these are the things that make us afraid. Fear. Good, old-fashioned, paralysing terror. The future of the Church can look pretty bleak just at the moment. Like the disciples in the boat, we long to shake Jesus and say, “Wake up! How can you be asleep at a time like this! Don’t you care that we’re perishing?” If that’s how we feel, then let’s be honest about it – because only then will we hear the words of Jesus: “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?” This is the One whom even the winds and seas obey!

Amen.

1 Samuel 15:34-16:13 NRSV text
Psalm 20 NRSV text
2 Corinthians 5: 6-17 NRSV text
Mark 4: 26-34 NRSV text

Our task is to be faithful, not successful. In a culture that is outcome-oriented, constantly devising measurable goals in order to quantify performance and achievement, the two parables of the seed growing secretly and the mustard seed stand as a profoundly counter-cultural sign. We will all have to give an account of our discipleship and ministry to God, Paul reminds us in today’s epistle (2 Corinthians 5:10), but we will be judged on our faithfulness, not on results. In the final analysis, the outcomes of our mission and ministry are dependent on God.

Measuring life by a different set of criteria is as important and challenging today as it was to both Jesus and Paul. Jesus’ own ministry was hardly a glorious success! That may be a shocking and sobering thought, but it’s actually true. Jesus did indeed attract a huge following and a widespread reputation. He did well. He was certainly the centre of attention wherever he went, and whatever else he was, he was neither boring nor anonymous! You couldn’t be neutral about Jesus. Either you loved him, or you hated him. He didn’t allow disinterested neutrality: he forced his hearers to make decisions.

Yet for all that, his mission was a gigantic failure. This is Mark’s gospel we’re in, remember. The final verdict on his ministry is the cross. Even Jesus’ closest, most faithful and enthusiastic followers will desert him. His most voluble supporter will deny three times even knowing him. His central message of the kingdom – the context for all his notable “successes” in healing, exorcisms and miracles – will be utterly rejected. He is the Messiah – but people ultimately don’t want the kind of Messiah he is. He is the Son of God, and he will die screaming in bewilderment, “Why have you forsaken me?”

Paul didn’t fare much better. The church at Corinth was his church. Yet, in his absence, it had been infiltrated by other, more impressive and successful preachers and leaders who had won significant followings. They seemed far more “spiritual”. They were more credible than Paul. Their theology appeared deeper and wiser. Paul had become passé – “yesterday’s man”. He was criticised openly and vehemently by some, and regarded with amused tolerance by others as a madman (cf 2 Corinthians 5: 13). Here in the letter he has to defend both himself and his ministry. So much for the seed he had selflessly sown – and at such personal cost – in Corinth!

Doesn’t that ring bells with being the church today? Ministry is incredibly difficult. It is soul-destroying. I run ministers’ pre-retirement courses at the Windermere Centre, where, on several occasions, ministers have agonised over whether or not their ministries have been a total waste of time and life. That is tragic – but it is a realistic response to a life measured by achievable goals and measurable outcomes.

The parables of seeds growing: Good News for battered ministers!

Of course, by “ministers”, I don’t just mean ordained ministers of Word and Sacrament. Today’s parables are Good News for all of us who are engaged in God’s mission of the kingdom and who are discouraged by the devastatingly obvious lack of success that we experience. They ought to encourage us. Of course, we need to remember that these are parables, rather than explanations. When we dissect them (when we get bogged down in discussions about how a farmer does more than just sow, but prepares and fertilisers the ground etc; when we note, for example, that the mustard seed is not the smallest seed, and that mustard plants are shrubs rather than enormous trees), we miss the point. A parable is designed to effect a paradigm shift. It reconfigures a situation, so that we look at it from a different perspective. In doing so, the whole of reality becomes reconfigured. We no longer look at it with the same criteria (in this case, through the eyes of measured achievement). Parables aim for the “Aha!” moment – the gestalt switch. They’re meant to be “got”, rather than understood. Some people “get” them (as Mark reminds us in 4:33); others just don’t. So what are we supposed to “get” here?

1. Sowers, not growers
It is our task to sow seeds. Period. Thereafter, we cannot control what happens. We can do everything we can to ensure that we communicate the gospel as faithfully and effectively as possible. At the end of the day, though, we cannot legislate or control how it will be received. The gospel is a message; an invitation; a gift. What happens to the seed we sow depends in no small part on the hearers. There are no formulae that we can follow to ensure that it will produce the desired harvest, because the image here is of growing, not building. Jesus doesn’t say that we are engaged in placing one brick upon another, cementing them into place, ensuring that the angles are correct. He talks about a farmer scattering seed on the ground. That is all the framer can do. What happens next depends on the soil, the weather and the processes of nature. And the good news is that nature brings life and growth! Not always, it is tragically true, but it is essentially orientated towards life.

That is true also of God. God wills Life, not death. We are in the hands of a God whose passion for Life and the earth’s flourishing will not be deflected, crushed or thwarted. When things die – when you bury seeds in the ground – they spring to life! It’s miraculous, because it has nothing to do with us – but it’s also the way of things. There is real liberation in knowing that we are not in control, because we are not, therefore, finally responsible for those processes. It’s liberating because it stops the endless anxiety of searching for that elusive formula that will guarantee success; that endless, anxious self-examination that says, “There must be something wrong with me (or “us”)!” Like the farmer in the parable, we can sleep peacefully at night, because we can’t do anything further.

2. Sowers, not necessarily reapers
Growth takes time. That may be obvious, but we live in an age that expects and values instant results. We are endless “tinkerers”, trying to manipulate things to ensure that we see our desired outcomes as quickly as possible. The natural world is a wonderful counter to human hubris. We measure things in life-spans of 70-90 years: nature operates in aeons. Did the farmer who planted the olives in Gethsemane know – or care – that the same trees in whose shade Jesus wrestled with God would be yielding fruit in the 21^st century? This is God’s timescale. The promise of the parable is that we cannot possibly know what our seeds will yield over time. But we do know this: they have eternal significance.

3. Size doesn’t matter!
What we sow yields results out of all proportion to the size of the seed planted. That is enormously encouraging (no pun intended!). What is the difference between faith and fantasy; between realistic belief and blind optimism? This is an important question because the evidence for God, for the growth of the kingdom, for the fact that we are not just squandering our lives on some sort of utopia is ambiguous at best and generally pretty firmly against us. There is little evidence that we are making a real difference to the world. The state of the Church is hardly a source of hope! Even if it is going wonderfully well in our little section of the field, we know enough about the wider picture to realise that this will have at least as much to do with local factors, circumstances and coincidences as it does with the movement of the Spirit. Our faith is about God’s salvation for the world. It doesn’t do simply to say, “Well, at least it’s working here!” That’s a return to the notion of tribal gods, not faith in the God of the Universe. Unambiguous “hard evidence” would have to show that things are progressing generally and globally; that growth and harvest are the rule rather than the exception. And that is not the weight of the evidence.

But we do have reason to hope! Our faith is not “blind” or fantastical. There is evidence – not knock-down, unambiguous proof, to be sure, but then, we’re talking of faith here, not certainty! The “evidence”, if you like, is more akin to the microscope than the telescope. With a microscope, we could see the processes of life and growth in the seed. And when the seed germinates, we know that it will grow into something immensely bigger than what was sown.

That is the point of Jesus’ healings and exorcisms. They happen in small ways – to this individual and that. Yet they carry within them the promise of something much bigger. The healing of a leper carries the promise of the healing of the world. The deliverance of a demon-possessed man points to the liberation of the human race. The feeding of 5,000+ signals the end of starvation. The raising of a friend announces the final destruction of death’s reality.

That’s the same lesson that we learn from Samuel anointing David in today’s reading from 1 Samuel 15. Samuel is grieving over Saul. He had anointed Saul, and it had gone spectacularly pear-shaped. He had seen Saul for the last time. And now Yahweh sends him off to dome godforsaken, unimportant place (Bethlehem), to anoint a new king. It’s one of Jesse’s sons. Who’s Jesse, for goodness’ sake? Why not pick someone notable! Yet Samuel heads off as instructed. He’s looking for a big bloke. That’s the point about him looking at each of the “possibles” in turn. Yet it isn’t any of these – it’s the boy whom even Jesse didn’t think was worth mentioning! What small beginnings – a prophet anointing a young shepherd boy, privately, in an obscure village. And yet what incredible things are to come from this! Size and the spectacular don’t matter. Faithfulness does. Thank God for Samuel’s faithfulness!

We need to learn to “think small”; to read the very small signs of transformation, and then commit ourselves to the God whose vision is global in size.

4. Sowers of a new world
It often feels as though we’re engaged in “ambulance ministry” rather than wholesale transformation. Yet the isolated, individual things we do are part of nothing less than a new world.

The “birds of the air” who build their nests in the mustard tree are symbolic of the Gentile nations. Jesus is making a point about Jewish eschatology: the belief that Israel’s Messiah will make the nation the centre of God’s salvation that will extend over the whole earth. This is the “kingdom” that Jesus proclaims – the kingdom that is the subject of these parables. Biblical images of salvation are frequently about abundant plants – forests, harvests, bumper crops. There is a strong theological tradition of the effects of sin and fallenness that plays on the image of “frustrated fruitfulness”. We fins it in the narrative of the Fall and the curse in Genesis 3: 17-19. The earth is created intrinsically fruitful. The experience of having to wrest food from the ground is symbolic of the disorder of sin. Not only human beings, but the whole creation is “groaning in bondage to decay”. Salvation time is therefore portrayed in terms of release from famine and infertility.

What we are to take from this parable is the encouragement and assurance that what we are doing by visiting someone who is housebound, caring for the sick, fighting for someone’s rights, helping them to discover faith in Jesus Christ, nurturing them in their growth, is nothing other than sowing seeds of a new world.

That is what Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians 5:17: to be “in Christ” is to be part of the new creation. It began with the resurrection of Jesus. Ultimately, Jesus is the seed of the kingdom that died and was buried – and sprang to life. To be “in Christ” is, like Jesus and through Jesus, to have died to the old world, and to have been raised to new life. We are a new creation. Yet we must not interpret that individualistically. It is something that must become a personal reality, but its purpose is global. Note what Paul says in vv 14-15: he died for all so that all might live! We are not just individually new creations in Christ: we are individually new creations because we have become part of the New Creation in Christ – the new world of the kingdom, symbolised by the mustard tree in which the birds of the air are nesting.

Sowing with an eye to a future that we might not see, but believe in faith to be the ultimate goal of all we do. Sowing, believing that our contribution, however small, is a contribution to something much greater than we can possibly imagine. Sowing in the faith that this is in the hands of the God who raises the dead, brings the harvest and is delighted by our faithfulness: now there’s something to keep us going!

Amen.