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I don’t know how many remember the first movie of ‘Men in Black;’ but there’s a funny scene in it that reminded me of one of our texts this morning. Basically it is the scene where Tommy Lee Jones’ character goes to interrogate “Frank, the pug.” Apparently the alien resides in the dog and in being pressured to reveal where the galaxy is being kept, he blirts out: “You humans… when are you going to learn that size doesn’t matter?”
The
talking alien/ dog mentions this to a flabbergasted Will Smith who can’t fathom
a galaxy being held in something the size of a marble… Well the same could be said for us in
imagining an extremely tiny seed creating a giant tree! Being the parable of
the Mustard Seed Jesus uses today in talking to his disciples. The potential
factor is hard for us to grapple with since we tend to be very limited and
limiting people.
As the
film continues, we find out that the galaxy being held inside this tiny marble
is being guarded and worn around the collar of a common house cat named Orion. Crazy circumstances of course but who is to
say that we can really see or judge just what potential people do in fact carry
with them? What I am talking about is
the seed of the New Creation planted by Christ waiting to be reaped within us!
That
tiny little seed of faith barely being protected within the walls of the heart
awaiting for us to crack open the shell & burst forth into New Life! Why
would Jesus try to teach His simple-natured disciples through such a complex
parable? For that matter why do Christians today try so hard to mold a human
concept of being faithful over a Godly concept?
Just what kind of a world are we creating?
There
are galaxies of churches out there spreading across America either bound to
politics as a form of exclusion and indoctrination or churches that exclude,
supposedly according to the Bible, women to truly serve as pastoral leaders. What matters to some people is trivial in the
eyes of God and diminishes the truth of the Gospel and its role in “urging us
onward…” as a people of faith! Their efforts in essence remain small,
alienating and produce no real fruit except for the ego and for the vitae.
A piece
of paper cannot capture who someone truly is and their potential for greater
things in the life of their discipleship but this is where we are in the
American frontier facing secularism, graceless survivalism of the institutional
church and human blindness to the Truth! Truth be told how can we claim to be
the judge and jury to someone’s efforts to grow and live into that New Nature?
We can’t but are indifferent to allowing people to grow where God is calling
them to GO! Painting that perfect
picture is something we can never achieve when our motives and intentions are
in opposition to both God and neighbor and centered around the very narrow
world of the self.
Culture
goes on the wayside of ideology where that New Nature planted within us is
being fertilized against God’s will with doctrinal correctness and specific
human interests that keep the growth, potential of that mighty tree of faith
from fully or ever really blooming. What does it matter? says some people when
all we know is this one solitary life on this floating rock in space called
earth! Why “try?” It becomes harder and
harder to live into DOING and BEING for the Gospel of Grace and the glory of
God when we allow the world to rule our potential!
We need
to grow into the world of the Kingdom of God, where we don’t really know where
the Good Lord will have us land but live expansively if not explosively into a
Gospel, Grace-shaped life. If we did
this, even a mustard-seed-sized-effort… can you imagine that world we would
create? As New Adams and New Eves the
world as we know it would resurrect into a New Eden dedicated to God and that
forest of Grace, would be grand beyond our imagination!
The
Spirit is willing but our flesh is weak.
There is more truth in those few words than we first thought. St. Paul realized this in hearing through his
very powerful faith of Jesus’ mission for our lives. Living into the lifestyle of Grace is living
by our true nature which is spiritual. What
we thought we’ve known about the world as God sees it, is not nearly grand enough! We’ve become creators of capsules,
encasements of what living towards the Kingdom of God should mean to us, for
us.
In some
senses just like that first image of the galaxy inside the marble; we’ve
created and maintained that hardened case of glass surrounding a whole, brave,
New world, a resurrected world—the Kingdom of God! How do we go forward? Not by
trying but by DOING, and BEING truthfully shaped by Grace in all we are for the
love of Him who gave us that seed, potential in the first place—Jesus.
The
mysterious ways God works is amazing.
What the Good Lord chooses to reveal at just the right times in your
life are, can be miraculous to urging you onward. Just this morning, I saw that crazy house or
shack out in the middle of the far western Californian desert had sold for
$49k. This was the ridiculously large
home with an endless kitchen and backyard with an in ground pool. I remember having fun joking about the
reasons for it being so cheap. Maybe
there were people murdered there, its haunted and so on. Well obviously someone
saw potential in the major cleaning and work most likely needed to make it
livable…
I
originally was looking at that home in hopes to have a job out west there which
has not obviously happened. You can’t be
discouraged from dreaming big, however, for who’s to say if you will be living
in that reality somewhere down the road of that great journey the Lord places
us upon? Think about people like Leonardo Da Vinci, I still greatly admire how
that man lived into his potential, lived into his convictions. He was not someone limited by the world at
all but someone free to be a scientist, mathematician, artist, inventor,
philosopher… and so on. He was
definitely a “Renaissance man.”
The
former art history teacher in me knows quite well what not only the word
Renaissance means but what it was as a movement in “time” for the world going
forward but still lacking spiritual understanding to some extent. Even there,
we were limited or limiting ourselves in what we could DO and BECOME for God
and neighbor. As the French would say—C’est
La Vie or such is life!
Such is
a specification not a total reality, for the reality of the Kingdom of God is
infinite, eternal, ever growing—ever flowing as a fount of endless, timeless
Grace. We must return to being the
children of God in all humility to always be growing towards bigger and
brighter things that the Lord wants for us to realize. When those leaves of doubt and despair fall
away from our struggling branches ever reaching upward towards God the Father… we
will bud again and grow even stronger.
Growing even stronger weathering the winds and currents of a troubled
world lashing out upon our fragile growing frame.
We will
be a part of that great garden, restored, renewed and full of GRACE as only the
Kingdom of God can be. The wickedness and evil we have stirred up around us
will be trampled underfoot by the true and final victory Christ will have for
the Jewel of our heart—soul to be won for His Gospel’s galaxy to break free!
In
closing, let us hear St. Paul illumine this victory: “14For the love
of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all;
therefore all have died. 15And he died for all, so that those who
live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised
for them. 16From now on,
therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once
knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. 17So
if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed
away; see, everything has become new!”
Amen
June 14th, 2015; 3rd Sunday after
Pentecost; Year B; Proper 6; SOLA Lectionary
Sermon by Reverend Nicole A.M.
Collins
Psalm 1; Ezekiel 17:22-24; 2
Corinthians 5:1-17 & Mark 4:26-34
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