June 18, 2006, Second Sunday after Pentecost
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Mark 4: 26-34
Another congressional election draws near and, as we have come to expect,
military drums are beating more triumphantly, and sabers are rattling more
urgently.
Saber rattling is an ancient practice. It is part of nature, and not just human
nature. Snakes, birds, dogs, perhaps all species have ways of making themselves
sound or look dangerous. The purpose of saber rattling is to instill fear in our
opponents, hoping that if we scare them enough we may not have to fight them, or
if we fight, that their fear will give us a competitive advantage.
The triumphant drumming and fearsome rattling going on right now in
Washington is designed to dishearten not only our enemies in the Middle-East,
and Korea, but also those who might protest for peace and political change here at
home. The saber rattlers hope to make their opponents feel discouraged and give
up.
The extreme extension of this behavior leads to a totalitarian society where
people are so intimidated that they allow the wealthy and powerful to do whatever
they want. Throughout history tyrannical governments have gone beyond
propaganda to use domestic spying and secret prisons and even torture to stifle
dissent in the lands they have invaded and at home.
The more we feel as if our small voice can do not good, and the more afraid
we feel, and the more we allow lies, injustice and hate to go unchallenged, the
closer we come to living in a totalitarian state, and the less free we already are.
Jesus himself lived in such a society—in fact, in two such societies at the
same time. Rome was the greater one, but the Jewish religious and political
establishment was almost as repressive. Jesus came among those intimidated,
oppressed people with the revolutionary message that God’s realm was not like the
Roman Empire or the Jewish temple-state. Furthermore, he announced that God’s
realm was at hand. Justice was coming. Freedom was within reach.
The responses to Jesus’ message were what you would expect. The Roman
Empire and the Jewish priests, scribes and Pharisees all attacked Jesus and tried to
intimidate him. In the end, they thought they had silenced him when their
domestic spying led to his clandestine arrest, torture and death.
On the other side, the poor and oppressed rejoiced and thronged to hear
Jesus’ message. At first they hoped that Jesus was the Messiah they had dreamt
of, who would organize them into a violent revolt. Jesus made clear that this is
not the way the realm of God works. The realm of God is a completely different
kind of community, using only those means that are consistent with its ends of
peace and justice, compassion and mercy. Jesus could have commanded legions
to fight on his side, but instead he allowed himself to be arrested and killed. He
taught that only the means of nonviolence and self-giving can produce the ends of
God’s justice and peace. Only love can create love.
The problem was and still is that there is a pervasive myth of violence that
many Christians believe more than they believe Jesus. This myth of violence is
what makes war drums and rattling sabers so persuasive. The myth says that
violence fixes things, that violence creates peace, that violence is more powerful
then nonviolence, that the mighty will inherit the earth, not the meek. Under the
sway of this myth even followers of Jesus are vulnerable to the intimidation
designed by the powerful to dishearten and defeat their opponents.
Christians tend to respond in one of three ways to the myth of violence.
The dominant response has been to abandon or compromise the teachings of Jesus
that contradict the myth of violence. These Christians decide that the means do
not have to be consistent with the ends of God’s realm, and so they can support tax
cuts for the rich that require program cuts for the poor, and they can justify wars of
aggression against weaker nations and the killing of tens of thousands of innocent
people. The myth of violence has persuaded them that it is the only realistic way
to achieve God’s realm on earth.
The second response has been to believe the nonviolent teachings of Jesus
without compromise, but feel that resistance to worldly violence is useless because
the forces that oppose God’s realm cannot be stopped. These Christians tend to
give up the struggle to change the world. They avoid controversy and conflict,
and turn their focus entirely inward, or beyond this life. The myth of violence has
paralyzed them.
The third response has been the smallest by far, made up of those Christians
who have believed Jesus’ teachings not only about the ends of God’s realm, but
also about the means. They have believed that by working nonviolently but boldly
as Jesus worked that the realm of God may indeed triumph, despite the arguments
of human reason and the myth of violence to the contrary. These Christians have
remained hopeful and have continued to try to establish God’s realm on earth
around them. They have been called foolish idealist and extremists by the
compromised Christians, they have been criticized for bringing politics into the
church by the paralyzed Christians, but like Jesus, they have not let anything stop
them. Like Jesus some have been killed along the way—martyrs like Martin
Luther King, Jr. and Oscar Romero, among others.
This third group has put their faith in teachings like the parables we heard
Jesus give us today in Mark. “The realm of God is as if someone would scatter
seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would
sprout and grow, he does not know how.” Jesus is saying the we should do the
kinds of things he did, we should speak our small truth to confront great lies, we
should do the bold if small tasks that love demands in opposition to what hate
inflicts. We should do all this not by violence or overwhelming force, but by
planting seeds in the faith that while we sleep and go about our lives the seeds will
sprout and grow, we know not how.
Jesus said, “The earth produces of itself,” and this is the greatest of good
news. It means that we do not have to do everything ourselves. We do not have to
do more than we can. It means that God’s realm is a real, living force. If we plant
a seed of God’s realm, by its own power it will grow and multiply and produce
fruits beyond our ability to foresee.
Jesus says we should not be anxious about results. We should just sow the
seeds and go about our business, and trust that we will know when the time comes
to reap what we have sown. We will know when the harvest is ripe.
This past January the confirmation class watched the movie Freedom Song
about one small town in the south during the Civil Rights Movement. One of the
key characters in the movie is an African-American barber who encourages
teenagers to hang around his little one-chair barbershop on his ramshackle screen
porch. He gives them free soda pop and listens to their stories, but for years he
has been working the conversation around to the struggles for desegregation and
civil rights across the country. He has urged them to go to church, to watch and
pray, to be ready.
The barber has done whatever acts of kindness he could not only to the
teens, but to the adults in the community as well. He has raised their
consciousness, their self-esteem and their wellbeing. He has nurtured the seeds of
possibility in the community, one soda, one small loan, one encouraging word at a
time. He never knew if he would live to see the day of freedom, but he kept the
dream alive, and he kept patiently sowing small seeds among the people.
Then one day the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee came to
their town, and he knew that the time for reaping the harvest was at hand. The
seeds he had sown sprouted and grew in unexpected ways by a force of their own.
After the adults and organizers had given up, the teens rose up and marched and
suffered and won. It had taken years of sowing and nurturing, but when the day
came, the town was desegregated quickly and people were registered to vote
quickly, because the harvest had come. It did not come easily—some African-
Americans were beaten, arrested or killed—but freedom came.
It is understandable that we feel discouraged or afraid as the adults did in
Freedom Song. Jesus knows why. He felt it himself. Jesus also knows that as
long as we do not lose heart, as long as we keep working toward the realm of God
sowing our small seeds, using God’s means to reach God’s ends, then no matter
how few or how weak we are, God will see to it that the seeds we sow will sprout
and the harvest will come. This is why one of the primary messages Jesus gave us
was, “Do not be afraid.”
Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Jesus said, “With what can we compare the realm of God…? It is like a mustard
seed, which sown upon the ground is the smallest of all seeds on earth, yet when
sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large
branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”
Neither the Civil Rights Movement nor any of the many other successful
nonviolent movements inspired by the teachings of Jesus have ever been waged by
the powerful or initiated in the halls of government. They all began as Jesus did,
with the smallest seeds sown by the meek and the weak out in the unimportant
small corners of society—by the carpenters and fishermen in the Nazareths and
Galilees of the world. They have succeeded because they did not lose heart. They
did not succumb to the propaganda or the overwhelming odds against them. They
believed in what Jesus taught about the way the realm of God works. They
believed each time they did some act for the sake of God’s realm, even as they
died in the effort, that God would use what they did in ways they could not
foresee. Each time they did one small act on God’s behalf they did it saying to
themselves, this seed will sprout.
So keep doing the good you are doing, large or small. Do not let saber
rattling or ridicule or opposition dishearten you. Do what you do for the cause of
peace or justice, compassion or mercy, in the firm faith that this seed, too, will
sprout.
Let us pray. Let us pray for the trust that if “we plow the field and scatter
the good seed on the land, it will be fed and watered by God’s almighty hand.”
Let us pray for the serenity and courage and joy that come with this faith. Let us
pray in silence…
Sermon 06/18/2006