[Propertalk] Proper 6 b

Sat Jun 13 13:54:56 EDT 2015

Forwarded, with Bob's permission:

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY                        THE THIRD SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
1 SAMUEL 15:34 – 16:13                                                                                                            PROPER 6 b
2 CORINTHIANS 5:6-17                                                                                                                 PSALM 20
MARK 4:26-34

            Word association always intrigues me. I can hear one word, connect it in my mind with another, then another, and another, and end up so far away one wonders how one got there.
            It makes me wonder whether I’d like to be a philological neurologist when I retire. But there may not be enough time.
            But is there EVER enough time? I should simply be grateful that the Spirit zaps my cerebral cortex and sets me off on flights of fancy, or journeys of the imagination, taking me through creation, starting from the tiniest impulse to the greatest implosion of sensations.
            Sometimes I feel that that’s how the Spirit reaches and teaches me to pay attention to what Jesus may have said in certain situations, what Jesus may be saying to us all right now. Beginning with one word, one phrase, no matter how concentrated, and ending up – well, sometimes the journey is so amazing it never DOES seem to end.
A time there was – as one may guess
And as, indeed, earth's testimonies tell –
Before the birth of consciousness,
When all went well. 1
            These are the first lines of one of Thomas “Hardy's deepest poems from (the collection “Winter Words”) published posthumously in 1928, the year of his death,” words written twenty-three years after “Far from the Madding Crowd”. In these lines, Hardy suggests that good and evil are a consequence of our consciousness.
            It was the opening four words, though, that skimmed along in my neurons: “A time there was” – that time, perhaps, before, during or immediately after there was anything. My mind was caught by the image – or non-image, as the case may be – of the instant of creation, of what flashed immediately before the eruption of God’s joy. That there WAS such an instant, that God is the heart of everything that is, is unquestionable. However, the fun, the enthralling amusement of this is how it came to be.
Some scientists suggest that love came exploding forth from the tiniest particle, so small, so dense, so potent that within it lay the seed for everything that was, and everything that is – and everything that is yet to be.
And, if you’re attempting to follow my brain cells, here’s the first step in associations. Creation – the tiniest seed of love – the mustard seed. Something so incredibly innocuous yet packed to bursting point with such great potential, and if we follow Hardy on this, the potential for good or evil, for the right use of creation or the wrong use of creation – of which we’re a part, in which we’re graced with the power of choice.
In that mustard-seed-like particle, then, in that outburst of love, lies the kingdom of God, waiting to blossom with sweetly fragrant sublimity into not only a place of joy for us, but a place of security, of freedom from all that would trouble us. And we’re surrounded by that fragrance right now, even as the seed grows within and around us, the seed which says that we are not to allow ourselves to be troubled by all those “might-be”s. We are encouraged not necessarily to forget the possibility of the deterioration of physical and mental faculties, or our ability to see, and hear, and touch, and taste, and smell those things which delight us and stimulate our memories and imaginations. But in love, the Spirit reaches us from that time particle to say that none of these should control us. The Spirit lifted Jesus’ imagination and opened it a crack to allow Him to talk of what may have seemed like the most ridiculous, most weak point of creation. Jesus Himself was drawn to find in the least likely areas and circumstances of life the encouragement, and the hope of intimate life with God. Having perceived that, He then passed it along as an almost throw-away parable, what may seem to be such an unattractive advertisement for eternal life in God.
“Well, folks, it’s like you’re going to live in a mustard seed!”
It wasn’t quite like that, of course, but can you not see Jesus smirking, trying not to disrupt His listener’s train of thought, maybe hoping against hope that they’ll be able to play some sort of word- and image-association game to realise how much God loves them.
So where are we on my neural pathway? Creation – the tiniest seed of love – the mustard seed – oh yes! “How Flowers change the world”. You ARE following me, aren’t you?!
In 1957 the anthropologist and nature writer Loren Eiseley wrote his classic, “The Immense Journey”, in which was an essay entitled “How Flowers changed the World”.. 2 A reviewer wrote, “When I started reading it, I doubted that flowers could change the world, but after reading the book, I saw how they did so. An amazing writer as well as a naturalist, Eiseley made me certain of how flowers changed the world, presenting a case as to how and why flowers could and did change the world.” 3           
            “Once upon a time,” Eiseley writes, “there were no flowers at all.” …
            Another writer compared Eiseley to a cinematographer, someone who plays with images to enlighten and entertain us. “Recently,” he related, “I once again viewed Stanley Kubrick's great meditation on human evolution and destiny, 2001: A Space Odyssey. You may remember the classic sequence in which a primitive hominid tosses a bone up into the air and it turns into a spaceship in orbit around the earth.
            “Eiseley is capable of equally breathtaking segues. Indeed, he concludes "How Flowers Changed the World" with one. Imagining the first human being who pondered the possibility of planting seeds, he writes: ‘In that moment, the golden towers of man, his swarming millions, his turning wheels, the vast learning of his packed libraries, would glimmer dimly there in the ancestor of wheat, a few seeds held in a muddy hand. Without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they had continued to exist at all, would be today unrecognizable. Archaeopteryx, the lizard-bird, might still be snapping at beetles on a sequoia limb; man might still be a nocturnal insectivore gnawing a roach in the dark. The weight of a petal has changed the face of the world and made it ours.’” 4
            Creation – the tiniest seed of love – the mustard seed – “How Flowers change the world” – THE MUSTARD SEED!! How the Spirit can manage to navigate my mind is amazing!
            “The mustard seed… is the smallest of all the seeds on earth,” said Jesus, yet see what is accomplished in and through it. To some it’s as a speck of dirt on the shed floor, something to be swept away as insignificant, if it’s even noticed in the midst of the dirt, and the potting soil, and the fertilizer. To some, especially if one lives in California right now, it may be barely worth the effort of spending time and money to prepare the ground, to pay for the labor, to get the seed implanted in such a way as allows room for growth, and to use up a precious allotment of water. We can all come up with other comments, I’m sure.
            Yet from all the possibilities that day, Jesus came up with the mustard seed as analogous to God’s joy- and love-filled reign.
            We might say that it seems to take so little to keep God amused, and that may be true. Maybe God is happy simply to see us get out of bed in the morning, never mind take on any large project. Jesus’ point, I believe, is to say that there may be times when getting up out of bed is ALL that we may be able to accomplish, yet that may be all that it takes to spread and to fertilise God’s realm.
            God’s hope for us is that we’ll be drawn into the mystery of creation, that we’ll be filled with wonder at the potential of creation, that we’ll be filled with amazement that we – you and I – have a dramatic role to play in bringing creation to full fruition.
            Archbishop Kallistos Ware, of the Orthodox Church, wrote in his introduction to Orthodoxy, “We see that it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.” 5 God knows that, try as we might, we will never really be able to analyse the mustard seed. God knows that, no matter how long we live or how much time, energy and money we put into it, we won’t be able to understand fully how so many of the smaller things in life come together to form a whole; God knows how so much of what we see on a daily basis – homelessness, fear, disease, hunger, insincerity, violence, and so on – God knows that all these may be broken into their smallest constituent parts, and while not necessarily being understood, CAN be resolved by tackling each element one-at-a-time planting and tending one mustard seed at-a-time. And with each problem with which we deal we move one step deeper into the joy of our Creator.
            God’s reign is made up of the smallest elements, so that we will NOT be overwhelmed in addressing them. At the same time, God’s reign is composed of such a huge variety of facets that we will always be able to find a niche in which to use our gifts. And if we DO find the thought of announcing and enhancing God’s reign to be overwhelming, remember what Bishop Kallistos said about living in the mystery and developing a sense of wonder. After all, think of all the ways in which the Spirit leads us to move step-by-step, thought-by-thought, word-by-word. Only when we pass through the door in the midst of the realm will be truly understand the glory of the mustard seed. In the meantime, let us not neglect something on account of its perceived size or purpose – ever.

 Robert P Morrison 
robertpmorrison at charter.net
St. Alban's Episcopal Church 
PO Box 1556 
Albany, OR 97321 

541-921-1076
=

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://stsams.org/pipermail/propertalk_stsams.org/attachments/20150613/95d31476/attachment.htm>