![The Jesus Business: Hook or Gift?]()
by Sherry Cothran | Sep 1, 2015 | faith, religion, Sherry blogs, spirituality
Once upon a time, for about a decade or so, I made my living writing and singing songs and jingles. I became rather deft at pitching products like my own rock band, The Evinrudes, and major American brands such as Ford and McDonalds. With a well-honed voice, a quick turn of the phrase and catchy tune, I became quite the pro in the hook selling business. More than a few times, I experienced the power of a popular song to bring people together, performing for large crowds, singing hooks over and into the masses, there was a power there I couldn’t explain, often a rare feeling of oneness in those moments when everybody knows the words to the song and are all singing as one, it felt spiritual, but of course, when it was over, the moment was gone.
Christ Pantocrator – Mosaïque de la Déisis – Sainte-Sophie (Istambul, Turquie)
Jesus had once again performed a miraculous deed of healing and the “whole city” was gathered at the door, pressing in to meet him (Mark 1:29-39), they couldn’t say exactly why, drawn by that feeling of Oneness they seemed to feel whenever he was around. He was gaining quite a following, the crowds and masses began gathering wherever he was and everywhere, it felt as if the Spirit were alive again and among the people, that was such a rare feeling, after all, living, as they did, in a culture of fear. Perhaps they had also feared that this feeling would never come again, this spiritual feeling, this good feeling, and they wanted to collect as much of it as they could in the moment before it disappeared.
It was so strange how the word got out because he didn’t advertise anywhere, he didn’t have a three word slogan that you could easily hashtag or get out on twitter, a Youtube video gone viral, he had not appeared on American idol or had a number one hit record, yet, still the news spread somehow and the crowds came in droves.
The temptation must have been enormous. With this new kind of power he had, that even the demons obeyed, to set up shop and make a profit off of these vulnerable masses of people, they were so very desperate for a new solution, just like us, desperate for a cure, for peace, freedom, healing, purpose in life, for someone to relieve them of the great human wound, for that elusive spiritual feeling to come again, for power.
He could have easily built his own temple, his very own stage, he was a carpenter, after all, he knew how to do that sort of thing, and begun charging admission or perhaps, like our early American clergy, charged a pew tax for his services to cover his expenses. They would have paid like people pay for a lottery ticket even when they can’t afford food because hope is worth more than a half-full belly. He could have built a fine reputation and profited greatly off of a career as a charismatic preacher, the numbers would have been off the charts, the mega church of the ancient world. The good programs he could have started would have saved the world, with overflowing ministries for the homeless, children and youth; he could have built a wonderfully resourced Christian education wing and people would come from miles around and donate lots of money to his causes if only he would stay in one place long enough to build something special, it would have been spectacular. He could have become a superstar, this Jesus that would be the Christ.
The crowds, the masses, wanted what he had but they were frustrated because it was not for sale. They couldn’t buy him or his services and it was so agitating because he was always on the move, he was a hard person to get a read on, impossible to get your hooks into him, it always seemed as if he were coming from somewhere else. Instead of staying in one place and building accolades and a popular and effective ministry, he fled to the next town, everyone wanted him to stick around but he rarely gave in, he simply said, “it’s time to go to the neighboring town so that I can proclaim the message for that is what I came out to do.” (1:38)
Jesus was a marketing person’s dream, not only was he always on message, he had “it” whatever “it” is, the power to draw a crowd, to persuade an audience, with special powers and a magnetic persona. A personal manager would have already lined up a book deal and a speaking tour with a reality show in the works, perhaps some theme about surviving the wilderness with Bear Grylls (I would definitely watch that.) It’s just how we think. Fame and prestige equal importance and influence in our world and when someone rejects the opportunity to achieve such, it is unsettling, we don’t quite have a category for it.
In our culture, the Jesus brand is a multi-gazillion dollar industry, complete with a Jesus action figure doll. We clearly know how to buy and sell Jesus, but this story in Mark’s gospel challenges us to ask ourselves the question: do we know how to proclaim the Christ? Are we aware of the difference between marketing and proclaiming? Do we know the difference between a hook and a gift? Jesus speaks of “what he came to do” here in 1:38, that is to proclaim God’s love as the one thing that is flowing in the world that is not for sale; to offer love as a gift, not a product, no strings attached. The reason it is important to keep “proclaiming” this is that it is a really, really hard thing to believe, we have a hard time trusting what we cannot buy.
I find that this elusive Spirit of Christ is not something that can be easily put into nice, neat packages or sermons or dogmas. It’s sometimes difficult for us to separate the mysterious Jesus of the ancient world with the Jesus of our hyper sales, consumerist driven culture.
If we look closely, we understand that Jesus the Christ represents something very different than a brand. For one thing, the Jesus of the ancient world simply doesn’t have the same trappings we do. In Jesus’ ministry, he was not focused on his popularity, he didn’t seem to care much about his personal ratings, his celebrity, or his career, he didn’t focus on profit or even drawing big numbers into his core group, he only had 12 disciples; he didn’t seem to worry too much about funding either, he wasn’t concerned about buildings, or multi-level platforms, he didn’t even heal everyone who desired it, he simply said, “I must do what I came to do” which is to proclaim the message of God’s love as saving medicine for the world and he moved on quickly. He went about proclaiming and healing, proclaiming and healing….not much of a marketing plan, it wouldn’t quite fit into all of our schemes for the quick and easy slogans of brand loyal religion, it’s just what Jesus did.
He simply remained focused on the manifestation of the Spirit in the world, and it spread like wildfire. Everyone he healed went about proclaiming and in their proclaiming, others would find healing and it became a cycle. There really was no formula for this other than his continuous message that he could do nothing except through God, that he and God were One and so he prayed also, that we would participate in this Oneness as his final, earthly prayer.
It seems as if there is a lot of pressure on the church to have the answers to the world’s problems and yet all we really have to offer is a simple love that heals and makes whole. To quote N.T. Niles, “the gospel is just one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.” If we offer this, it is enough.
If we embody Christ, the Christ that emerges from the ancient world, not the brand Jesus we’ve created here in America, but the humble One who refused prestige and glory, if we really have this Christ in us, then the answer to what we focus on becomes simple, it is love. Love that compels the sharing of the news that God heals and restores us to wholeness. This is full time work, by the way, in whatever occupation we are in, love undergirds our inspiration and creative instincts.
Jesus, in his work and mission, tells us a different story about ourselves, a story of how the Spirit works in us and in the world, it is the work of the soul’s life, the work of transformation that occurs primarily at the spiritual level, in the depths of soul. This is a gift that cannot be marketed, bought or sold, it is freely given in hearts that will embrace it, full of love and grace and compassion and truth. God does the rest, we simply give ourselves over to this path and become converted, transformed souls, willing to mine the depths within ourselves and give out of our souls that which God has placed there, pure love. Perhaps the soul that is born of the Spirit is the one, indestructible thing left in this world simply because it is connected to the eternal source of Divine love, God. This is not a message that can be marketed, only proclaimed, it cannot be sold, only given.
As you come to be embraced by this kind of love, you begin to feel the hooks coming out of you, no longer possessed by the frenetic forces that drive you to consume or be consumed. You begin to comprehend love as a gift, not a product, and you become more like love, less like a performer. As you come to know the true essence of your soul, which is love, you feel freer to let go of the other attachments, the ways of being you have learned to survive in a world that conditions you to believe you are a merely a performer, put here to produce goods and services for others and the marketplace. You begin to understand that your worth is connected to your soul, your true worth and true self belong to God’s love, it is not something that can be evaluated by measures such as performance or production. Buying and selling are not even categories in the soul’s realm. As you move closer to Christ in you, you begin to gain clarity about “what you came to do” and realize the source of your true identity is always love, calling you from this ancient story, calling from the center of your being, calling from your heart, “you must do what you came here to do,” giving your self over to the love that is freely given.
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by Sherry Cothran | Jun 30, 2015 | faith, Native American, religion, Sherry blogs, spirituality, Wild Woman Archetype
A young Cherokee woman in traditional dress points toward the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, Nov. 30, 1942, which is considered a sacred site by the Cherokees. The unidentified woman is a graduate of a conventional school and the granddaughter of a chief. (AP Photo)
I am only one drop of blood Cherokee, 1/16th to be exact, not enough to claim membership in the Eastern or Western Band and most would say, not enough to matter. But, underestimate the power of the blood of the fire people and you do so at your own risk. Like a small dash of red pepper mixed up in a dish of otherwise bland food, that fire within has a way of capturing one’s imagination even in the smallest of doses, until the whole of your very self takes on its finest properties, particularly when it comes to the story of Cherokee women.
It’s a story that we all kind of know in fragments and pieces, like the story of Moses or Paul Revere or Sacajawea, it’s woven into the DNA of the body collectively called nation. But although the plot, like framework, makes up our history, we seem to have lost our connection to the larger story. Somewhere along the way we became convinced that the characters we’ve become are not connected one to the other in the grand web of life, and, as mythologist Michael Meade so beautifully states, “we’ve fallen out of the story.”
He’s talking about the big story, the story told in museums through timelines that read in sequence, “Paleo, Archaic, Woodland, Mississippian,” stretching from 11,000 BC into the modern day. Much like the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, NC that holds, seemingly benign artifacts, evidence that things were not always like they seem to us today. Strangely comforting and explosive evidence like the giant molar and vertebrae of a mastadon found with a mate, not too far from my hometown in West Tennessee, revealed, one day, as the mud receded on island number 35 of the Mississippi River. Explosive evidence presented calmly in small, neatly produced, sage green placards set beautifully in recessed lighting against a clay red backdrop that reads “The Role of Cherokee Women” with statements such as these (in paraphrase):
The role of women in Cherokee society changed greatly as a result of European contact. In the traditional matrilineal kinship system… clan was passed from mother to child. When a woman married, it was her decision, marriage was a partnership of equals and while there was a ceremony, there was no lifetime commitment.
And this…
A Cherokee woman decided when and with whom to mate, she had the same sexual freedom as men. Cherokee women were not dependant on men, women owned the crops, the property, the land. When British traders wanted corn or food, they were surprised to find themselves dealing with women. The British were amazed that elder or honored women could represent their clans in council meetings, while the British referred to these women as a “petticoat government” the Cherokee called them “Beloved Women.”
Recently, I made my way to this museum tucked in the heart of the land known as the Qualla boundary in the Appalachian Range of North Carolina, commonly called the Cherokee Reservation. Getting the package deal, I attended the outdoor, historical drama, walked through the living history village, the museum, had a flat tire and so spent some time in the local tire and auto shop reading the local paper, Cherokee One Feather, where I learned from the page 2 spread that the rate of domestic violence and sexual abuse toward women on the Cherokee reservation, a place that some approximately 8000 plus Cherokee occupy, is 2.5 times the national rate. Whatever ideas the museum puts in your head become quickly filtered through the lens of reality. But, things were not always this way. It is a mantra that bears repeating, one that even the bones will cry out if we remain silent.
In the fragments of the bones of the past in the living history village of the Cherokee, our young, 20 something male tour guides seemed to be captivated by this message as well. Often as an aside, while standing in front of some strange mask with a long stinger or holding up the turtle shells that women would wear attached to leather ties under their long skirts to hide them in forbidden rituals, they would say unscripted things, things they seemed to be proud of, seemingly to ancient spirits they were trying to conjure from the bone piles and ashes of the past.
“The men dress up to attract the women, we don’t expect women to dress up for us, we think they are beautiful the way they are because they have the power to give life.”
And “there weren’t gender specific roles, women could hunt or become warriors just as men could learn to weave baskets if they desired, no one thought much about it, we didn’t have those kinds of rules for men and women before America became America.”
Like the mud receding from the bones of the mastadon on island 35, the times they are a changin’. As major paradigm shifts in our world uncover the bones of the past, we discover that just because the past no longer roams the land in physical form doesn’t mean it is without voice, the bones can speak from silence and reconstitute in our world, it has happened before, in the valley of dry bones, it can happen again.
The bones of the past are revealing themselves and pointing us to a new future, one that refuses to suppress, dominate or limit the freedom of the other, if we can only grasp it. A future that embraces all beings, particularly the feminine and all those formerly oppressed as sacred. Perhaps this is the true new world Columbus was seeking when he first encountered the strange tribes who let their women roam free.
Europeans were astonished to see that Cherokee women were the equals of men—politically, economically and theologically. “Women had autonomy and sexual freedom, could obtain divorce easily, rarely experienced rape or domestic violence, worked as producers/farmers, owned their own homes and fields, possessed a cosmology that contains female supernatural figures, and had significant political and economic power,” Carolyn Johnston writes. “Cherokee women’s close association with nature, as mothers and producers, served as a basis of their power within the tribe, not as a basis of oppression. Their position as ‘the other’ led to gender equivalence, not hierarchy.” (Indian Country Today Media Network, 1/10/2011, The Power of Cherokee Women)
Perhaps it is the women of the fire people who can lead us to a true New World and teach us to conjure the phoenix from the ashes and the bones.
by Sherry Cothran | Mar 3, 2015 | Sherry blogs
Sermon on Mark 6:1-13
He left that place and came to his home town, and his disciples followed him. On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, ‘Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And they took offence at him. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Prophets are not without honor, except in their home town, and among their own kin, and in their own house.’ And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief.
Then he went about among the villages teaching. He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics. He said to them, ‘Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.’ So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.
For those of us who are fortunate enough to have a place we call “hometown,” I’m sure this passage evokes all kinds of feelings. One of the best and worst things about growing up in a small town is that everybody knows you, for good or ill. The familiar is not a bad thing, in fact it can be quite comforting. However, you often find out just how difficult it is to change, grow or, God forbid, innovate, if you are the one trying to introduce a new idea into an overly familiar system. The process itself can often overwhelm the system’s ability to receive new information and wreak havoc on relationships, shutting down any new thing altogether or simply becoming mired in process. So, we can feel Jesus’ pain when he makes the frustrated statement, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.” Ouch! It hurts because it’s true.
Church systems often function much like hometowns. A group of people that have often been together a long time and identify around a very familiar set of rules and regulations, denominational polity or whatever, and tend to rely upon the familiar as framework, an entire reference of being. Without it, without our Sunday morning services complete with bulletin and PowerPoint, our regular preacher, or the regular rituals that we’ve become accustomed to practicing, and in perfect order, our fragile system that we like to think of as an absolute just becomes overwhelmed, uncomfortable, threatened and often begins to reject any new thing. Often, the energy of new things becomes mired in the collective consciousness, otherwise known here as the system, that is dominated by the fear of change. Yet history and science warn us that any system that loses its ability to adapt is in danger of extinction.
That is why prophecy has always been a tradition that speaks subversively to the established order, calling it to embrace its collective fears and overcome the dangers of stagnation. Prophecy works this way because much is at stake, the growth of the soul of the individual through relationship with God, the path to healing and wholeness, and the community’s call to justice for the oppressed, the two are inextricably linked and we call it the gospel. The cry is always to “come out of her my people,” come out of mindset of the entrapment that institutionalization can often bring, clinging to the comforts of stratified social and economic structures that have become more important than the mission itself. The challenge is not necessarily to de-institutionalize, but to learn what it means to defect in place. To quote Richard Rohr, to be the community of Christ is to be willing to say, “Thy kingdom come and my kingdom go.” To learn to channel the Divine in human structures is always the challenge, sometimes we get mired indefinitely.
The gospel deconstructs the worlds we build, our precious towers to God, it always has. The gospel is and has always been good news for the poor. It is also a kingdom on the move, unsettled, restive, traveling light, with the keys to the handcuffs of injustice dangling on its belt, at the ready. This radical message is one that is often rejected by those who prefer the comfort and predictability of the established order over the call to the radical hospitality of the gospel. So Jesus tells us in this passage, in no uncertain terms, that if anyone rejects this gospel, the followers of Christ are to shake the dust off their feet and keep moving.
This all reminds me of a time in my tradition, Methodism, in the 18th and 19th centuries, when preachers, men and women, rode horseback through the woods, shaking the dust off their feet and clothes whenever they arrived in gathering places all across the newly forming nation with a message from God: “Repent and believe the gospel!” Powerful stuff.
My grandfather’s parents were what he called “fire brand Methodist” and the country church that held his family’s loyalty was spilling over at the brim every Sunday, he recalled, in his childhood days. Converted to Baptist as an adult, he would say of his childhood church, whenever we passed it down the dusty, gravel road, looking forlorn, “There was a time when the Methodists had Spirit.” He became Baptist when they lost it, as his story went, sometime around the 1950’s. He never understood the Baptist practice of searching for pastors. Baptists perform a search and call for pastors while Methodists appoint them through a Bishop. He would often exclaim in his frustrated, latecomer Baptist state whenever his church lost a pastor, “Well, just go out in the woods and catch one, the woods is full of preachers.”
He had a point.
Jesus sent his followers out without supplies, telling them to take no extra clothes, no food, no water, no money. At some point, we are to understand that this discipleship thing is not about money or possessions. I’m certain the early circuit riding preachers understood this fully, often having to overnight in the woods, living for long stretches without supplies, the passion of the gospel driving them to crank the wheels of the Methodist machine, the bottom man, and a few brave women, on the totem pole of organized religion, those preachers in the woods.
I’m sure my grandfather never imagined that I would follow in their footsteps, though I always had an affinity for the woods and horses. I often thought he harbored suspicion towards the settled clergy, for all those who gave up on the traveling church, opting for the comfortable rituals of the established order.
He would have agreed with Alexis de’ Toqueville’s famous observation, made as traveled through America in the early 1800’s, that wherever he met a preacher he would also encounter (in the same person) a politician. Perhaps this is what my grandfather sensed in those same keen hunter senses that fed his family on wild game, traveling, as he did from woods to woods, from sharecropper to carpenter, from shop keeper to farmer, man of his own authority, that church and politics were like heaven and hell, they came as a set, regardless of what the founding fathers said.
Today, I serve in what feels like, at times, the haunted woods of old time religion. In these woods, I hear the footsteps of women and men shuffling restively around the ghosts in the pews that far outnumber them. While the circuit riders often played to overflowing crowds where the Spirit roamed freely, often reporting miraculous wonders of healing among the people, their ears still full of the dust of the trail, we are lucky to have the faithful few on Sunday morning, sans the ghosts, of course. It’s confusing that the same church with this firebrand history now seems to be having an identity crisis in the new, new world, and has for decades, now.
I suppose the question for all of those who follow Christ at this confusing time in the evolution of Christianity is “what do we do now?” From our story today, we know what Jesus would tell us, “follow your feet.”
Though the U.S. Census officially eliminated “frontier” as a category in 1890, well into the 21st century, we are surrounded by a new kind of wilderness. It is much like what Mark describes here in chapter 6, the invasion of the prophetic into the overly familiar and stagnant religious establishment. The true gospel always feels like a wild thing in our midst, calling us back to the story beneath the story, the world behind the world, an in depth encounter with God. Calling us out of our comforts.
Whenever we seem to have lost our way, our identity, our connection with our gospel, all we need to do is climb back into our story, it is like a map through the wilderness, it points the way. We see in our story today that we are in a sort of parallel situation. Jesus tries to do some very Jesus like things in his hometown, like being prophetic and healing people, a couple of areas where he shines as the best in his field. But everyone there is so familiar with him that they can’t seem to get on board with what he’s doing and they withdraw their support from him. Their over familiarity prevents them from seeing anything new, it blinds them, in fact, to the very truth that is right before their eyes. Jesus was hurt by this reaction, but what’s more is that their lack of support actually prevented him from doing any deed of power there. Their disbelief stopped him from doing his work! Instead of doing a great work, Mark tells us, he was only able to help a few people and then, making a quick assessment of the what the problem was, he realized, a bit heartbroken, that he couldn’t do anything there, he had to move on. No new thing could ever happen there because they were so devoted to the old thing.
Jesus realized that if any new thing was going to happen, he was going to have to set out on a wilderness journey, the success of the gospel would depend on its ability to shock people out of their comfort zones, the gospel itself would have to be the new frontier, a radical message of freedom for those rejected by the comfortable, overly familiar religious circles. Which, as it turns out, was most of the general populace. The gospel would turn the order upside down and in doing so, many would be set free.
Jesus knew that the principal of how the Spirit does its work is rarely about more but less. In other words, comfort and over familiarity are often things that prevent us from experiencing the wonder and awe of the transformation of the Spirit. In order to find any path to wholeness, we realize it becomes more about subtraction than addition. The willingness to lose our lives so that we might find them, the passage through the narrow gate, the needle’s eye, requires a shedding, not a packing on.
The question the gospel poses to us today is about what we need to lose. Is it fear of the unknown or clinging to the comforts of familiarity that keep us from embracing the gospel? It is only when we are willing to have faith and step out into a kind of wilderness journey, an encounter with the true nature of God and of our very selves, that we learn to trust a deeper instinct and get in touch with what really gives our lives meaning and purpose. In order to take our soul’s journey, the real journey that we’re on here, we have to be willing to subtract the things that are familiar and comfortable, the things that blind us to the truth and often keep us from loving what is dear to God. God calls us from a co-dependence, an unhealthy addiction to comfort and familiarity to a healthy dependence on God’s sustaining presence. Repent and believe the gospel, for the kingdom of God is near.
by Sherry Cothran | Jul 28, 2014 | faith, religion
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
13:31 He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field;
13:32 it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”
13:33 He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”
13:44 “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
13:45 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls;
13:46 on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.
13:47 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind;
13:48 when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad.
13:49 So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous
13:50 and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
13:51 “Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.”
13:52 And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”
“Have you understood all of this? “ Jesus said.
They answered, “yes.” We don’t know if it was an affirmative yes! Or maybe a tentatively uttered… yes?
It’s rather counter-intuitive, you would think that Jesus would want everyone to know, up front, what they were getting into….what this kingdom of Heaven was all about. After all, he had committed his life to it and was willing to die for it, you would think he would have had the first century equivalent to graphs and charts. You know, the number of people within the demographic of Palestine that would be effected by the Kingdom, the number of people that would join up, diversity statistics, giving units, etc. Some kind of investment forecast for how the kingdom would pay off in the long run. How else can we do church growth without such aids?
Instead, it’s just the opposite. Jesus says before and during this series of parables, comparison stories about what the kingdom of Heaven is like, that the meaning of the way of life that he would die for is not apparent but hidden.
Hidden. Hid. Buried.
“It is difficult for us to understand Jesus, he does not work around a philosophy of progress.” (Richard Rohr, “Jesus Plan for a New World” p. 41) We have been raised to orient our lives and worldview around progress and goals. And so we are loaded with expectation from the word go, if we cannot measure our output, we often are left puzzled about how things are going in our lives and in our religious world. (Richard Rohr, “Jesus Plan for a New World” p. 41)
Yet, Jesus doesn’t give us this, instead, he walks around in this Kingdom which is his very life and creates a new world order, a new reality for us to follow him into. He states clearly that he has come to do a new thing that is not like the old thing, it is a different way of thinking about power and authority and love.
He reveals where true power lies and points us there to find it, it is within, hidden, and when believed, it is revealed in us and in the world.
The stories are the path.
But we feel so powerless. What kind of power is he talking about, how do we access it and if it’s hidden, how do we find it?
The mustard seed.
The mustard seed is known in the ancient, Mediterranean world as having medicinal qualities but it is also a plant that is to be avoided if you want to cultivate other plants because it tends to take over a garden, kind of like our kudzu, it grows fast and wild of its own accord and takes over, it is a weed that cannot be stopped.
So, the kingdom of Heaven is like this weed, this seed, it is therapeutic but it cannot be stopped. It is like a virus that spreads. Things like unconditional love, non-violence, compassion, forgiveness and hope, these things are like something that grows stubbornly in the heart and becomes a healing balm for the world.
Of course, it is not without opposition. Jesus points out that the birds of the air will come and partake of the seeds of that stubborn mustard seed weed as it grows and grows to the size of a large bush. We all know we don’t want birds in our garden, they ruin the yield of our good plants. But the kingdom is going to grow despite opposition, that is the message, because it is a different kind of power than what seems to dominate the world. Even the birds will spread the healing seeds of the kingdom. Things are different than they seem, that is the hidden message of the kingdom. (Richard Rohr, “Jesus Plan for a New World” p. 41,42)
The old world order into which Jesus appears is one of corruption, even religious corruption. 90% of the people were poor, Palestine was built around a peasant society, its sole source of income was subsistence farming by peasant landholders. Jesus was speaking to a people who were struggling to have any surplus income left over to take care of themselves and their families after high taxation, fees required by the government to produce food, kind of like today’s monopoly industries setting impossible standards for the private farmer and on and on. We might think of it kind of like our version of the sharecropper, a system that still exists even in America. They were, in many ways, what we would call an “occupied” people, most of their freedoms were simply dominated by a nearly impossible system.
How can we understand such a world? In America, we have our problems, but it is nothing like what we see in the rest of the world. We live in a confusing time. The massive gap between freedom and outright despair exists in front of our eyes. We feel powerless to change it, our church life is diminishing in America, too. Our work lives leave us exhausted, we do well just to do the maintenance of our own lives.
Yet, Jesus has the audacity to invite us into rest, into a different kind of freedom. He says, in the midst of our despair, confusion, fatigue and guilt, he says to us, you can live in this reality now, this new kind of order, follow me, my yoke is easy and my burden is light, this way of life cannot be compromised by a deceptive and corrupt system, for it grows in the midst of it and transforms because its true power is harnessed to God. His next parable gets at the heart of this….
The kingdom is like yeast in the bread, it works of its own accord, those of us who have made bread understand this miracle as the bread rises to three or four times its original size. The yeast works of its own power, hidden in the dough, until there is more than enough yield.
It is like a hidden treasure, a pearl of great price, the prize fish that no one ever thought they would catch, it is all given, not earned or bought or sold.
Sometimes these parables leave us scratching our heads, just like those disciples and followers who might have said “yes, we understand” when what they really meant was, “no, we have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”
Jesus also said that it’s harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of Heaven than it is for a camel to pass through eye of a needle. It’s no joke. It is simply hard to let go of all that we know.
The kingdom is about the realm where we learn to love without conditions or certain outcomes. We learn to drop our ideas of success and measurement and we let go of control and a new type of power grows in us that is not of us, but of God.
It’s a paradox that we feel so powerless even as we are grasping desperately for power to control our world. We are so disenfranchised in our world today because there’s so much hate. Hate is like the humidity in the air, it just makes it hard to breathe, hard to move about, it’s thick. Hate is what makes us feel like we can’t change anything, it paralyzes us and leads us to despair. Yet, if we learn to let go and surrender to a higher love, we see that there is real power in this kingdom stuff, in the seed of it which is love, because only this kind of love has the ability to abolish hate, which is where all these violent actions in the world come from. Love is the most powerful force in the universe, it is even stronger than the grave, our Scriptures tell us; it’s the mustard seed, the yeast in the bread, the treasure in the field, the pearl, the big fish. Once you’ve experienced it, it changes you from the inside out, like the yeast in the bread, it has a power of its own, and you begin to see the world differently, you begin to rise in the power of love.
And yet, even in the midst of our chaotic world, if you’re looking for evidence of the Kingdom of Heaven, it can be found, anywhere love rules in such a way as to promote gentleness, kindness, compassion, patience, virtue, forgiveness, honesty, these are the fruits of love and God is love (1 John 4:8)
The kingdom often happens in insignificant places, kind of like that nasty little mustard weed growing in cracks of the broken sidewalks in the undesirable neighborhoods.
Let me give you an example right here among us.
Under one roof, one church roof with a regular average attendance of about 35 -45 people, much evidence of this kingdom abides.
At West Nashville UMC, we house and partner with agencies that do the work of the kingdom. All Christian, faith based agencies, these three non-profits feed, house, clothe, employ, educate and re-settle the strangers, the homeless, the poor, the children and families of prisoners.
Want numbers? Our ministry footprint in the community, if you were to run one organization that paid for all of this, would cost around $450,000 per year.
160 people receive fresh produce and canned goods each Saturday, including many children and families through the pantry. Many of these people receive assistance with finding housing, social security cards, food stamps, household goods and supplies, medical assistance and other needs through the large partnering and volunteer programs. (The Little Pantry That Could)
25 children and youth from families of refugees throughout the world receive education, computer skills training and more through the Nations outreach program this summer. Hundreds of refugees will receive job training, citizenship classes, resettlement assistance, and much more through the Nations refugee program. Youth groups from churches all over the US will connect with the program through mission trips and a few of them each year will decide to do something different with their lives.
Each week, youth who are the children of incarcerated parents will be engaged in a counseling and skill set building program through Reconciliation Family Center. Prisoners will go through a 4-month course before they are released designed to give them psychological coaching for re-entering the world and becoming valuable citizens again. And much more.
Through our own church’s feeding program, we give away hot meals to about 30-60 people once a week and with that provide a haven of hope and a place where relationships of trust can be built.
Under one roof, with one small church and limited resources, we provide a large shelter for the evidence of the kingdom of heaven at work. To the world we are somewhat hidden, and yet, it doesn’t matter because we are not in charge of our present and our future. It is God who does the work in us and through us and causes us to believe, again and again, that this work is not only necessary but vital in our community; that we are vital because of it.
I write this not to boast, but to tell you that it is possible with little resources to do big, big work for the kingdom of Heaven if only you make a decision to do it and you are willing to let go of your preconceived notions of what it should look like and enter in to what it is. If only you are willing to let go of precious control and enter in.
Jesus said, simply, follow me and you will see wonder, you will experience love like you’ve never known it before. He did not say riches, wealth, fame, importance, even success as we view it.
He was trying to tell us that the treasures we find in God’s kingdom, the kingdom of the heart, the soul, which is more real than this nightmare we seem to be living in, those treasures, once you find them, once they have seized you in the gut, are more valuable than anything you could possibly imagine. We who have given our lives to this kingdom and have been moved by this truth, this love, have discovered a power that enables us to do immeasurably more than we could ever perceive or imagine. (Eph. 3:20)
In much of our church culture and in our very lives we fail to thrive because we fail to seek that which is truly the kingdom. Perhaps it is something we have longed for but never really known, living on the mere vapor of the spirit at work in the world.
There is a fuller life ahead if you embrace it and walk towards it.
I am simply to here to invite you into it, to say, “come and follow Jesus.”
Take some risk, come and be a part of what God is doing in the world.
God does not ask you for your ability, only your availability and your willingness to let go of the things that bind you.
Into this world we say come and find a life boat, come and find rest, come and find purpose, come and find love. We, the church, came into being for times like these, we are what the pope called the “triage hospital on the front lines of the world’s pain.”
We are those scribes Jesus was talking about who have been specially trained for this purpose. It is time for us to reach into our treasure and give it to God, trusting that something new can grow from something old.
You are probably familiar with friendship bread. The idea is that the dough has been passed along from friend to friend for so long that the original starter dough is still a part of each loaf. It’s a beautiful concept. The church is like this friendship bread, we grow and grow from an original seed, the same truth is passed along and it grows and rises and creates more treasure for more people. We just keep passing it along, tending it for a time and then giving it away to grow and to be what is needed for the present day.
I want to leave you with a question today, you may have an answer or it may take some time to ponder. If you were to write your own story about what the kingdom of heaven is like, what would it be?
by Sherry Cothran | Mar 25, 2014 | Sherry blogs
Sherry’s official website: www.sherrycothran.com
I thought I had her all wrapped up, the woman at the well, the Samaritan who comes to an extraordinary well for regular old water and finds out about a water called living. You may know the story in John 4 where she drinks of this mysterious water with no utensil known to human kind there in that loop of strangeness between two souls, also known as an experience of pure love. Sunday morning, she spoke to us in that giant, open space of creaky pine floors circa 1889 sanctuary where less than the 200 intended recipients heard from her (much less.) Still, we were authentically gathered and that is such a rare thing. This morning, like a holy backlash, she came at me again.
Something about wonder, the wonder of you, this is what he, the one she recognized as a prophet, kept pointing out, the wonder in those he encountered, it’s so hard for us to see it in ourselves, it has to be pointed out by someone who has found living water, someone who knows the way there.
Like the Samaritan woman, we may have looked for that sparkling wonder in so many other places or people or things. She did, in five husbands and one lover and in a small town, no less. You know what happens to women in small towns who have married five men and kept one lover…..scandalous, she’s a home wrecker, no good for anything or anyone. We still claim her, yes, she’s one of us, always will be, but we won’t invite her into our homes, we will just freeze her there in time as an unchangeable disaster and that is what will be carved on her tombstone at the edge of the town cemetery, she will never outlive her own failures. Yet, Jesus calls her wonderful, and that is what will be carved on her heart, granite is so unforgiving.
It is this woman who gets to meet the man who calls her worthy, valuable, even wonderful. It wasn’t so much that she believed in him, it was more so that she believed in what was happening in her because of him. She believed, all of the sudden, in the wonder of her. For she had scraped up and saved in her heart a tiny sliver of intuition, locked it away there and protected it fiercely in hopes of a day when someone would offer her a gift that didn’t cost her things like sex and dignity. She lived close to that thirst, that hurt, that longing, that hope, it was all the same thing. She was looking for the right man to spend it on and when he said the word “gift” it turned the key inside of her heart and what flowed out was wonder.
This cosmic event of living water changed her entire chemistry, she glowed, it was the alchemy of Heaven. She knew she was glowing for she had met her wonder and she went out and told everyone, “come meet this man who has told me everything about my life and has claimed the disaster for pure wonder.” It’s not magic, it’s a gift, how rare, she knew it in her heart.
She went out and told everyone, the town disaster, the outcast, and what is spectacular is that they listened and followed her. That’s how wonder works when you begin to grasp it. It compels you to acts of solidarity with the love inside of you. You finally understand what it means to love yourself for you have met God there, inside, in the heart and your only response is pure wonder and wonder is contagious. It makes you simply want to give up all the other substitutes.
This morning, she just wouldn’t let me go without compelling me to tell you about the wonder of you.
