How to be a Seed

Here's today's homily.  The readings are 1 Samuel 15:34-16:13 and Mark 4:26-34.

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Good morning, and happy Father’s Day. Hallmark holidays are always difficult preaching occasions. Current events make that especially true today, so much so that I showed Kirk this homily ahead of time. He has approved this message, but asks me to remind you that Episcopalians are not required or expected to agree. We are expected to come to the table with open hearts and minds. We’re expected to listen even when we think the other person is wrong, and to admit that we might be wrong ourselves.

This is a political homily. It may make some of you angry, and that’s okay. Most of us come to church for Good News in hard times, and I promise I’ll get there when I talk about today’s readings. But I can’t do that without first talking about this week’s Bad News. I tried; it didn’t work. I wish to God, literally, that it had. At the risk of being wrong, I don’t believe it’s ethical for anyone preaching today to ignore this week’s events, especially since it's Father’s Day.

So, the Bad News: A few days ago, the Department of Homeland Security released a report stating that in the six weeks between April 19 and May 31, almost 2,000 minor children were separated from their parents at the U.S. border. As of Tuesday, the US Health and Human Services Department said it was holding a total of 10,773 migrant children in custody, up 21% from the 8,886 in custody a month earlier. 

Because it’s difficult to imagine such huge numbers, here’s a story about one family. A week ago, Marco Antonio Munoz, separated from his wife and child when they fled to the United States from Honduras, hanged himself in his jail cell. Border agents reported that they’d had to use physical force to remove his three-year-old son from his arms.
       
On Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, father of three children, used Scripture to justify separating families. Illegal entry into the US is a crime, Sessions said. He went on to cite the apostle Paul and his “clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes."   

People don’t leave home unless home has become unlivable. All of us have fathers. Some of us are fathers. How would we feel if those terrified refugee children and their parents were our families? Let me be clear: that’s a rhetorical question. Our faith tells us that the families at the border are our family, because all of us are God’s family.

The Bible is a multilayered, multifaceted document. It often contradicts itself. Our understanding of it is complicated by translation problems and the very different times and places in which it was transcribed. But one theme sounds clearly throughout Scripture: We are to welcome strangers, because we were strangers in the land of Egypt. We are to extend hospitality, especially to refugees and orphans. We are to seek and serve Christ in all people. Ripping children from their parents’ arms is not what Jesus commands us to do. Wholesale destruction of families is the hallmark of other Biblical leaders: Pharoah and Herod, for instance. In a book full of colorful, complicated characters, those two aren’t the good guys. 

I promised I was going to get to the Good News, and this is where it starts. Pharoah and Herod didn’t ultimately win. In the long run, love wins, even if too many people suffer in the process. Quoting Romans 13 in support of destroying families, Jeff Sessions conveniently omitted a later verse in that same chapter. “‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’” Paul tells us. “Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” Our task as Christians is to live in love, work for love, and believe in love. Today’s readings offer ideas about how to do that, and how to recognize love when we see it. They tell us that the government ordained by God -- what Jesus calls the Kingdom of God -- springs from the last and the least.
 
In 1 Samuel, God has ordained Saul as king, but becomes unhappy with his choice because Saul doesn’t obey his commandments. God ordains a new government. God explains to his messenger Samuel that human ideas of merit don’t apply here: “the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” God has chosen Jesse’s youngest son David, outside tending the flocks, to become the King of Israel. The new king is a shepherd, someone who guides the vulnerable creatures under his charge to richer pastures and protects them from predators. 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus uses two metaphors to describe the kingdom of God. The first is that the kingdom is like someone scattering tiny seeds, which in turn create harvests abundant enough to sustain entire communities. The second example involves even tinier seeds, mustard seeds, which sprout into “the greatest of all shrubs . . . so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” The Kingdom feeds its inhabitants, however many miles they have traveled to get there. It shelters them. It offers them safe places to build homes where they can nurture their families. Welcome and sanctuary are intrinsic features of the government ordained by God. 

If you’re looking for the Kingdom of God, look for inauspicious beginnings: the youngest son, the smallest seed, the refugee child lying in a manger because there’s no room in the inn. Watch such beginnings to see how they grow. This is the part we’re likely to be comfortable with, because we live in a society that idolizes the large. We drive huge SUVs to Big Box stores and fast-food outlets selling Supersized meals. We watch modest older homes being razed to make way for McMansions. Our economy relies, often dangerously, on perpetual growth, mass markets and gigafactories. We’re fascinated by fame, wealth, and celebrity.

But not all large things deserve our reverence, and today’s readings give us specific instructions about the Godly uses of growth. Do the massive institutions we’re being asked to trust guide and protect us? Are they committed to abundance, to feeding and including everyone, or do they keep us paralyzed with threats of scarcity? Do they offer welcome and shelter? In other words, do they behave like loving fathers? If they don’t, they aren’t ordained by God.

These readings remind us, first and foremost, of the promise of little things. Many of my friends have told me that they’re feeling helpless and hopeless right now. The world’s problems seem so huge, and each of us seems so small. Every time we turn on the news or log onto Facebook, we’re buried under an avalanche of fear and suffering, no matter how many cheerful memes and cat pictures we also see. The weight of sorrow can become absolutely overwhelming. But whenever I’m tempted to use my insignificance as a reason to give up, I remember one of my favorite slogans. It was written by Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulus and later borrowed by Mexican activists. It reminds us powerfully of mustard plants, refugee children, and a certain first-century political prisoner executed and placed in a tomb. “They tried to bury us,” the slogan says. “They didn’t know we were seeds.”

Here is how to be a seed: Allow yourself to rest in darkness for a while. That’s how you’ll gain the strength to grow. Send out roots to anchor yourself to community. Embrace the gifts -- nutrients, water, shelter -- your surroundings offer you. Know where you’re going: upwards, toward the light. Remember what you’ll do when you get there: expand, embrace those who seek sanctuary in your branches, flower. Produce good fruit. Make more seeds.

There are many different kinds of seeds, in this current crisis and every other. We can pray, vote, contact our representatives, protest unjust policies, volunteer at schools and homeless shelters and refugee resettlement agencies, love our children, love other people’s children. We can donate time and money and canned soup. Everything counts, no matter how tiny. Enough small seeds can and will create gardens, meadows, forests. Every act of love is one more step towards the Best Big Thing, the loving Kingdom ordained by God.

Amen.

As I Have Loved You

Here's today's homily. The readings are Acts 10:44-48 and John 15:9-17.

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Christianity has a PR problem, and today’s readings throw it
into stark relief. In the Gospel, Jesus commands us to love
one another as he has loved us. In Acts,  Peter says, “Can
anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who
have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” These
Scriptures tell us that God loves everyone, even or
especially the other and the outcast. In that spirit, St. Paul’s
bills itself as a place of belonging for all people.

I probably don’t need to tell any of you that historically,
Christianity has not always practiced such radical
welcome. Too many Christian churches still don’t. Some
of the groups that define themselves by whom they lock
out are very loud and have made themselves very visible.
Is it any wonder that many of our neighbors fear and
avoid Christianity?

As some of you know, I converted in my late thirties.
Most of my family and friends are secular rationalists
who consider religion the realm of credulous superstition,
if not outright bigotry. When I started going to church,
many of the people who loved me were horrified. A
close friend called from Europe to ask if I needed to be
kidnapped and deprogrammed. My father had left the
Catholic Church when he was thirteen; he spent the rest
of his life as “a fundamentalist atheist,” to borrow my
sister’s memorable phrase. He was so distraught at my
conversion that a family friend tried to comfort him by

saying, “Alan, it could be worse.  She could be selling
drugs.”

I got it. A lot of churches make me squirm, too. I knew
it would take a long time to convince my loved ones
that I hadn’t been brainwashed by televangelists, that
I hadn’t suddenly become a fan of the Crusades or the
Salem Witch Trials or the Westboro Baptist Church,
and that I don’t leave my critical-thinking skills in the
offering plate every Sunday.

Because I was a professor when I started going to
church, I was especially aware of the popular

misconception that faith and intellect don’t mix. For a
long time I had a bumper sticker on my car that
read, “Christian, not Closed-Minded.” One day
I returned to my car, parked in a UNR garage, to find
that someone had used a black marker to blot out the
“not.” The sticker now read, “Christian,
Closed-Minded.” That hurt, but again, I knew
exactly where it came from. All of us have heard of
closed-minded churches. Some of us, and many of
our relatives and friends, carry the scars of having
been closed out of them.

In my role as a hospital volunteer offering spiritual
care to ER patients, I once visited a cheerful, friendly

couple who assured me that they were devout
followers of Jesus. They asked for a prayer, and
thanked me graciously for offering it. And then, as
I left the room, they said, “Wait, we want to give
you this,” and handed me a pamphlet. It was a
comic book about how gay people were an
abomination against God and were going to hell.

I felt like I’d been kicked in the teeth, and I
grieved for the couple who had handed me that
piece of hatred. I kept thinking of a story from
Episcopal preacher Barbara Brown Taylor.
During a Martin Luther King Day march in
Atlanta, she and other clergy walked past a
group of demonstrators from the Ku Klux

Klan, carrying signs that proclaimed, “Christ is
our King.” Meditating on the Body of Christ,
Taylor wrote, “I had just walked past some
members of my own body, who were as hard
for me to accept as a cancer or a blocked artery.  
And yet if I did not accept them -- if I let them
remain separate from me the way they wanted
to -- then I became one of them, one of the people
who insist that there are some people who cannot
belong to the body.”  Taylor’s words confirm one
of my deepest beliefs: when we shut out other
people, any people, we shut out God.

But how do we love the unloving? How do we
tolerate the intolerant? Is it possible to live without
any fences or walls? What do we do when our
emotional or physical survival demands that we
shut out a destructive friend or an abusive relative?

Even if we’re lucky enough to be spared those
challenges, how do we show our neighbors that
it’s possible to be Christian without being either a
bigot or a saint? I am not a patient person. I have a
temper. I can be sarcastic, and I often rub people
the wrong way. Some of those people have called
me a hypocrite. One of my deepest fears is that in
the heat of some moment, I’ll offend someone
who’ll nod and say, “Uh-huh. That’s what you
Christians are really like. I knew it!” Learning to
embody God’s love can take years, and we can
destroy all our hard work in a moment.

“Preach the Gospel without ceasing,” St. Francis
said. “Use words when necessary.” In a world
where too many churches preach judgment and
exclusion, it’s easy to fear that our small, quiet
efforts to be loving will go unnoticed. But I do
the best I can, like most of us, and over the years,
I’ve seen my family’s attitudes towards my faith
soften. My parents never believed in God or
prayer, but they approved of the work I did at St.
Stephen’s with Family Promise, helping homeless
parents and children. They approved

of my volunteer work at the hospital.

A few weeks before he died, my father was in
the VA hospital here in Reno, in a shared room. He
had the bed next to the window. I was visiting
one day when a doctor came to talk to Dad’s
roommate, who had stomach cancer. The doctor
drew the flimsy cotton curtain between the beds
for privacy, but it provided none. For half an hour,
Dad and I listened to her telling the other patient
-- very, very gently -- that he was going to die:  
very, very soon, maybe tomorrow by lunch. The
patient and his wife couldn’t hear this. They
kept changing the subject. The doctor kept
circling back to it. After at least three attempts,

she left.

When she was gone, Dad tapped my arm and
whispered, “You go talk to those people.”

“What?”

“You’re a chaplain! You go talk to those people!”

“Dad, this isn’t my hospital. I’m not authorized
to talk to patients here.”

My fundamentalist-atheist father glared at me.
“You go talk to those people!”

I desperately had to use the bathroom, which was
next to the dying patient’s bed. On my way back, I

stopped and introduced myself to him and his wife.
“My father and I couldn’t help but overhear what
your doctor said. We’re so sorry.”

They laughed and waved their hands. “We’re fine!”
We chatted a bit, and I learned that they had a

daughter in California. I asked if they’d spoken to
her recently.

The dying patient shrugged. “Oh, we’ll probably
call her next week.”

I swallowed. “If I were your daughter, I think I’d
want to hear from you tonight.”

That family needed more than their doctor, and
certainly more than I, could give them. No words of

sorrow or comfort would reach them until they could
hear and accept what was happening.  Sometimes
our efforts to help fall on stony ground, just as Jesus’
did. But to me, this is still a story about a small,
quiet miracle. After decades of railing against
religion, criticizing the church, and mocking my
faith, my father learned to trust that I was one of
the people who tried to be loving, even when
there was nothing I could do.

“Love one another as I have loved you.” This isn’t
easy.  It’s the work of a lifetime, and none of us is

perfect at it. But it’s the work we’ve been given,
and we owe our loving God nothing less.

Amen.