Year B
Ezekiel 17:22-24
Psalm 92:1-4,11-14
2 Corinthians 5:6-10,14-17
Mark 4:26-34

May the words of my mouth, O God, speak your truth…

After the Battle at Carchemish…  which sits on the upper Euphrates river…  in 605 BCE…  King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon attacked Jerusalem…  and Israel’s King Jehoiakim was forced to pay tribute…  for three years…  like paying for protection…  if you’ve ever seen one of those mob movies…  but in the fourth year…  Jehoiakim refused to pay…  and there was another siege against Jerusalem…  Jehoiakim was killed…  and Israel’s elite became subject to a series of deportations…  during this time…  the Temple was destroyed…  and the people experienced crushing despair…  their raw emotion was captured in the first four verses of Psalm 137…  which Don McLean turned into a song…  By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion…  On the willows we hung our harps…  for there our captors asked us for songs…  and our tormentors asked for mirth…  saying…  Sing us one of the songs of Zion…  but how could we sing the LORD’S song in a foreign land…

The prophet Ezekiel was with them and experienced their pain firsthand…  and it was because of this unfathomable need…  that they had an epiphany…  you see…  after the Temple was built…  YHWH said to Solomon…  Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayer that is made in this place…  for now I have chosen and consecrated this house so that my name may be there forever…  my eyes and my heart will be there for all time…  even though they had previously understood YHWH to be bound by the Temple’s walls…  they had an epiphany… that YHWH was really not a locally based and geographically limited city-god after all…  but a God of the people…  whose relationship with them was not confined to the Holy of Holies… and who so longed to be in relationship with them… that this one specific location…  yielded to omnipresence… and they realized that YHWH could be with them in Babylon…  while simultaneously being with all of God’s other people wherever they were…

But Ezekiel also heard God’s promise of restoration…  I myself will take a tender sprig from the lofty top of a cedar…  and I myself will plant it…  so that it becomes a noble cedar…  and so it may bear fruit…  and in the shade of its branches…  every kind of bird will live…  and I will bring the high tree low…  and make the low tree high…  and all the trees of the field will know that I am the Lord…  and don’t Ezekiel’s words sound like part of the Magnificat…  in which Mary sings…  He has cast down the mighty from their thrones…  and has lifted up the lowly…  He has filled the hungry with good things…  and the rich he has sent away empty…

The fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart wrote…  the spiritual life is not a process of addition…  but rather of subtraction…  what he meant by that…  is that we subtract what we don’t really need…  to make room for the Christ that we really do need…  and what we subtract from our lives depends…  of course…  on what fills them…  ambition…  addiction…  things…  suffering…  even our misgivings… in 2 Corinthians…  Paul reminds us that this transformation is possible when we walk by faith and not by sight… when we invite Christ into our lives…  and allow Jesus to make us a new creation from the inside out…

In today’s Gospel…  Jesus shares two parables…  in the first…  which is reminiscent of the Parable of the Sower in Mark 4…  someone scatters seed on the ground…  and goes about his daily routine…  rising and sleeping…  and the seeds sprout and grow…  he doesn’t know how… doesn’t have a clue…  but he sure knows when its time to harvest the crop…  and wastes no time about it…  this is like the Spirit’s work within us…  mysterious…  hidden…  often slow and deliberate…  like thoughts bubbling to the surface…  like how we connect ideas or events that seem disconnected…  like how our insights and our wonderings build on themselves…  like stalks…  heads…  and grains…  until our harvest comes on like a full-blown epiphany… and we know…

And Jesus says that the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed…  Pastor Isaac Villegas remarks that Jesus picks up Ezekiel’s imagery…  although in today’s passage…  Jesus replaces the majestic cedars of Lebanon with a humdrum shrub…  and this shift from the cedar in Ezekiel to the bush in Mark upends our assumptions about the nature of God’s reign…  Jesus promises the glorious presence of heaven…  in places that look more like a storefront church in a strip mall…  than in a historic downtown cathedral…

And so it used to be…  that when I read this parable about comparing a mustard seed to the Kingdom of God…  it used to be that I thought Jesus was saying that the Kingdom would become bigger…  grow to become bigger than we might have thought…  bigger than we might have imagined…  could have imagined…  that in our shortsighted vision…  we would be surprised at how big the Kingdom could really become…  but I don’t think that now…

I believe that we…  are…  the mustard seeds…  just about the smallest seeds on earth…  and while the DNA in the seed tells the seed how to grow…  God’s DNA is in us…  and when we are nourished by the Word and the Bread and the Wine…  and when we trust the Holy Spirit enough…  to blow through us and get rid of the cobwebs of fear and darkness…  when we increasingly live into the understanding that we walk by faith and not by sight…  not by things we can touch with our hands or see with our eyes…  when we can lovingly contend with each other about how scripture informs our communal life…  when we realize that we…  whether as majestic cedars or humdrum shrubs…  grow not for ourselves…  but so that we can provide hospitality and stability and nourishment and shade and food to all of God’s creatures…  then that’s what the Kingdom of God is like…

There was a tiny baby…  born in a manger…  on the cosmic scale…  small as a mustard seed…  this tiny baby was born to be King of kings…  and as Simeon said to Mary in Luke 2:34-35…  this child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel…  and to be a sign that will be opposed…  so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed…  destined…  so that we can care for each other as the people for whom Jesus died…  and when we regard all people as these people…  we find the basis for what we call social justice…  but by any name…  it’s really nothing less than God’s justice…  given life…  by our hands…

Ken Untener…  the Roman Catholic  Bishop in Saginaw from 1980 until his death in 2004…  wrote… It helps…  now and then…  to step back and take a long view…  the kingdom is not only beyond our efforts…  it is even beyond our vision…  we accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work…  nothing we do is complete…  which is a way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us…  no statement says all that could be said…  no prayer fully expresses our faith…  no confession brings perfection…  no pastoral visit brings wholeness…  no program accomplishes the Church’s mission.. no set of goals and objectives includes everything…

And so this is what we are about…  we plant the seeds that one day will grow…  we water seeds already planted…  knowing that they hold future promise…  we lay foundations that will need further development…  we provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities…  we cannot do everything…  and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that…  this enables us to do something…  and to do it very well…  it may be incomplete…  but it is a beginning…  a step along the way…  an opportunity for God’s grace to enter and do the rest…  we may never see the end results…  but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker…  we are workers…  not master builders…  ministers, not messiahs…  we are prophets of a future not our own…

Holy God…  help us to speak the prophet’s words…