A tiny sprig, a lofty cedar

Sunday, 16 June - Trinity 3: Ezekiel 17:22-end, 2 Corinthians 5:6-17 and Mark 4:26-34

At the heart of our church yard is a cedar of lebanon. 

It has been rooted there since sometime in the 18th century - apparently one of a number planted by the botanist Peter Collinson - a Quaker who traded in textiles and shared knowledge of science and horticulture. 

Our remaining cedar is a striking tree - with its dramatic silhouette and evergreen leaves. 

The cedar in St Mary's Churchyard from 'find a grave' website

A cedar’s imposing stature is said to represent strength and resilience. The prophet Ezekiel uses it in a vision of God’s desire to restore a community, to bring healing out of despair and new life out of devastation. 

It is through this metaphor that Ezekeiel speaks of God’s faithfulness - not only to the ancient covenant with Abraham, Sarah and their descendants, but also the promise of blessing to all nations. 

A tiny sprig becomes a lofty cedar. 

Such a tree provides shelter to winged creatures of every kind; a promise of the inclusivity of God’s promise to restore and protect; a sign of the universality of God’s love for creation. 

Cedars offer shelter - they point to survival and renewal, blessing and fruitfulness. The safety of those aromatic branches is a sign of God’s life-giving grace to all the earth. 

God takes something small and brings from it hope and the power to restore. God reverses all our assumptions about power. Whether in the face of personal loss or collective worry, Ezekiel reminds of God’s enduring love. 

No wonder then that Jesus picks up this image of how tiny shoots or tiny seeds become places of hospitality. Hope and renewal, protection and blessing start with what looks insignificant. They grow into living places - home to all sorts of life. 

The stories that Jessu tells are intended to stretch our imaginations - prompting questions and opening up our hearts to God's ways with the world; ways of blessing and justice, safety and renewal;  to what in shorthand we call the ‘kingdom of God’. 

Today, he doesn’t just speak of seeds, trees and birds; but also a sleeping gardener and the life giving mystery of soil.  There’s something curious about the way Jesus tells that first story.

Whether you have an allotment, garden, window box - or even some cress seeds on tissue paper - gardeners and growers keep a watchful eye on their plants: weeding and watering, pruning and protecting from hungry caterpillars.

The gardener in the parabel scatters the seed - and then sleeps. The seeds are hidden in the soil - as the earth produces of itself the ripening grain to be harvested.  

The gardener trusts the soil and seeds to the mysterious cycle of weather and seasons. It might sound counter intuitive and even frustrating - especially when June feels quite untypical, and a million miles away from the heatwave of a couple of years ago.

But remember, Jesus is leading out imaginations into thinking about God’s ways: reminding us of the working of grace and love under the surface of things; the hidden, fruitful process of bringing forth life. 

Oftentimes it feels as if we are living in between the time of planting and the harvest: so much uncertainty surrounding the impact of our plans, hoding onto our own expansive hopes; nurturing the potential and planting the seeds of ideas. Beginning. And waiting. Trusting in the long haul that love will build up, restore and strengthen us - individually and together. Not just for the sake of the church - but a kingdom of justice and mercy. 

Our lives and our hopes, our work and our desires so often seem to be skating along the surface of the unknown; dancing on the edge of mystery; trusting, if not sleeping!

We plant our prayers and our plans like seeds. Sometimes we have to allow them the space to germinate; trusting others with next steps; faithfully waiting on God’s care, on God’s will to restore and bless. 

This first parable tips into an echo of Ezekiel’s vision: this time a seed rather than a sprig, a bush rather than a tree. But still, smallness is growing into a place of shelter for birds of all kinds. 

We are taken from the realm of the majestic cedar into that of an unruly, fast spreading plant of the sort often dreaded by gardeners - perhaps like the inability to contain mint for instance.  The mustard plant might not have the structural splendour of a cedar, and yet Jesus uses it to say something about God’s kingdom. 

Perhaps part of what Jesus is reminding us is of the importance of the small and seemingly insignificant - the potential of those tiny seeds, the fragility of the sprigs of new life. 

What does it say about the life of the kingdom if it is like a mustard plant: not something that we can control from the centre, but something which runs through our community, threaded through our lives?  What seems to count in God’s economy - or God’s household - are those places of blessing and safety, connection and hospitality. 

Perhaps Jesus is pointing to himself too. He comes to dwell amongst us - God’s word of love in human flesh. Born like us. Living amidst the tensions of power and worldly empires. Growing up to be indiscriminate in his friendships and conversations - a woman at a well, a tax collector in a tree; at dinner with leaders and out on the lake with fishermen. 

He includes us too: the retiree and self-employed, the manager and carer, journalist and doctor, the musician and scientist, the baker and the administrator, the volunteer and community leader, the student and the teacher, the writer and the gardener.

It really is the case that the working out of God’s ways of love runs through our lives too. We are invited to sleep and rest in God’s care - but also to welcome others into this network of inclusion. Sheltering and welcoming those seeking rest and peace, the curious and the sceptical; the lonely and the extravert; attracting rather than blocking, offering hospitality not demanding productivity. 

Such a vision wreaks havoc with strategic plans and the priorities we thought we had decided on. This isn’t a work of our own effort - though it demands our careful attention; this isn’t about reducing people to data - though it is about noticing what we and others need, and where our dreams of blessing lead. 

This is perhaps why Paul reminds the Corinthians to walk by faith and not by sight, persuading others out of love of the Lord rather than boasting in himself. 

He reminds us that it is the love of God which urges us on - like a seed dying in the ground bringing forth life, Jesus died for all that we might live.  That changes how we are to see each other - no longer from the point of view of human judgements and prejudices but as new creations. 

We are new creations. We share in the slow and mysterious life of God’s kingdom - of welcome and blessing, of safety and hospitality, of what is justice and merciful, reflecting God’s loving kindness. 

Sometimes there will be fallow periods - and times of rejoicing. Sometimes we have to rest and wait - like the gardener taking a nap! There will be small things that surprise us with the life they bring. there will be clamouring birds finding space alongside us. 

This is good news, but also challenging news: for us to trust the mysterious working of God’s love among us; for us to seek God in the small things, embracing the unexpected things; planting the sprigs or sheltering in the branches of a cedar. 

We are invited to live within this countercultural kingdom - we are invited to the fruit of the harvest, sharing bread and wine and blessing, those signs of Jesus’ presence with us. We are notice the Spirit creating and renewing, prompting and disrupting….

© Julie Gittoes 2024

Barbenheimer

 Sunday, 30 July: 1 Kings 3:5-1-12, Romans 8:26-39 and Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

This has been a fascinating week in cinema with the simultaneous release of two films which appear to have absolutely nothing in common.

On the one hand, cinema-goers dressed in pink queued to see Barbie:  “life in plastic, it's fantastic”.

On the other, entering into the world of theoretical physics and the atomic bomb in Oppenheimer: “death destroyer of worlds”. 

Image from the Metro

To do the “Barbenheimer” - seeing both movies in one day or even one week - is intense, but not wholly contradictory. Rather, considering how they interact with one another reveals common threads.

Both deal with human frailty, potential and corruptibility; the legacies that haunt us or the problems we thought were solved.  both make us consider the kind of worlds we inhabit, imagine and create. 

As directors both Chistopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig explore power and patriarchy, ambition and arrogance, fragility and feminism, remorse and repentance. 

The sheer cheeriness of Barbieland’s candy-pink utopia only amplifies the bleakness of Oppenheimer’s dystopia of something not understood or feared until it was used.  

Barbie brings a party dancing to disco-pop to a halt as she asks “do you guys ever think about dying”; Oppenheimer, as he walks away from Einstein, knows he will never stop thinking about anything else.

There are layers of complexity in and beyond Oppenheimer the movie and Oppenheimer the man: from the clearance of Native Americans and Hispanos and Los Alamos to the unseen destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; from the suspicion of the McCarthy era to chain reaction of an arms race and Cold War; from the personal betrayals to the weight of depression and responsibility  as campaigning becomes the pursuit of some sort of absolution.

As this plays out in screen one, in screen two we hear of a different sort of breach of stability; a different sort of fear. A membrane has ruptured, between Barbie World and reality.  The weight of human anxiety and depression, disappointment and longing for some sort of absolution seeps into the naivety of a pink plastic domain revealing a blond fragility. 

Stereotypical Barbie begins to experience the discomfort and tensions of the real world: whilst she tries to put things ‘right’, Barbie World is itself breached by Ken’s discovery of horses and patriarchy and a quest for respect which diminishes others. Neither world is ordered to enable the flourishing of all; power still operates out of the shadows. 

Yet there is a longing for liberation: not just in the acceptance of emotions but in acknowledging that we are enough, or "Kenough" as Ken puts it. But neither Barbie World nor “Kendom” are the answer - it is more complex than that.

There is a breach between the real world and the world as we long for it to be - as God calls it to be. It is a breach that Barbie cannot repair despite her longing to move from being made to making meaning.  It is a breach that God longs to repair - by not withholding his Son: for God so loved the world that he sent his Son, not to condemn but to bring hope of healing.

This is the mystery of the incarnation: God’s word made flesh, dwelling with us amidst the real tensions of human life with its power imbalances, burdens of guilt and exploitation and our longing for forgiveness; life with all the risk of intimacy, the struggle for self-acceptance and our place within systems we are subject to.

God comes into our world not through Barbie cars and roller blades, but through the labour pains of birth.  As Jesus enters adulthood, he is present at lakesides and in synagogues, on the road and at the table. He asks those whom he meets what they are looking for; breathing words of challenge, peace and dignity.

The breach between worlds is overcome in him - by his life, teaching us ways of healing; by his death, in bearing with our pain, separation and brokenness; in his resurrection, by revealing the power of love which wins, binding up hearts and gathering up lives.

In Jesus, we do not suddenly escape the contingency and complexity of our world; but we are given signs and markers of what life oriented to God’s ways might look like. 

In his parables Jesus speaks of a Kingdom - not a "Kendom" or any other humanely constructed realm. This Kingdom breaches the realms of earth and heaven, by bringing something of God’s reign to earth. 

If we listen to the words and images he uses, we notice several things. 

Image here

The first is that the stuff of this reign is small: a mustard seed, a grain of yeast. What is hidden away and barely visible will grow, changing and enriching what is around it. As a plant grows or a loaf rises, so we see the gradual process akin to the working out of God’s purposes.

We need to be patient and expectant; not losing heart or feeling disappointed. We are to trust the process that in our midst something is taking root and rising up which is beyond our expectations; hearts changing and movements of justice and mercy rising.

Such change and growth is not just for our sake, but for the sake of the world. A mustard seed produces a large enough shrub to provide nesting space for birds. Space to abide and make a home; to be safe and flourish. Yeast when combined with a proportion of flour - the most dough someone can knead - produces bread not just for some but for hundreds. It is a sign of feasting, sharing and hospitality.  

The next thing we notice is that a kingdom based on God’s ways with the world is worth everything we have: a treasure or a pearl for which we will gladly sell what we have in exchange for it. 

The parables describe a whole-hearted human response to this gift of love and grace - something we seek after and find, something we dig out and uncover.  There is risk and cost and joy to this quest - but it also brings to birth a newness, a set of possibilities, which redirect our priorities. 

Finally, this kingdom is like a dragnet - drawing in everything in its path; gathering up all kinds of people and lives. In part this echos Jesus’ own way of being in the world - time spent with a wedding couple and a grieving mother; daring to touch the leper and being touched by the haemorrhaging woman;  honouring the widow and embracing the child; debating with centurions, pharisees and samaritans. 

All those lives and stories belong to God - as do the theoretical physicist and doll creator, the campaigner and the fragile, the activist and the brokenhearted. On the one hand this kingdom does not demand rash judgement or a move to exclude or cut others off. On the other hand, to hold open the possibility of hope for all does mean living with complexity and uncertainty - it does demand wisdom to seek a way forward.

This is precisely what Solomon asked for when confronted with what it meant to lead a people chosen and yet rebellious. 

He recognises that to decide between good and evil, particular actions and their consequences demanded not wealth or trappings of power. It demands a mind that could discern - discover, seek after, uncover - what is right.

As we pray for our leaders, and for ourselves, that request remains the same: the pursuit of knowledge and peace, the seeking after justice and a sustainable future, all this demands a depth of wisdom beyond our human minds. It demands that we look to an ordering of the world in God’s ways - seeking to reconcile rather than divide.

Neither Oppenheimer nor Barbie are able to put things right. Yet they do point us to ideals and opportunities, they name the cost of ideology and the possibility of change or allowing space for others - seeking the purity of love which makes hatred cease.

Nor can we put things right in our own strength. The great hope of the climax of Romans 8 is that the Spirit helps us in our weakness - praying in and through and for us. The Spirit that searches the heart of God and our human hearts. There are echoes of mercy, whispers of love: our blessed assurance.

A Spirit that seeks to work all things for God’s good purposes. Paul ends with a resounding hope in the face of death - in the face of the questions of Oppenheimer and Barbie: Nothing - not hardship, distress, rulers or powers, not death or life, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

God is love: enfolding all the world in one embrace. We need to lean into that hope - a loving kindness that holds and guides us even when sin, brokenness, hurt, death and fragility haunt us.

Love is the final triumph. Meanwhile, we touch and taste and see that love in the ultimate fragility of broken bread.

Let us pray: Strengthen for service, Lord the hands that have taken holy things; may the ears which have heard your word be deaf to clamour and dispute; may the tongues which have sung your praise be free from deceit; may the eyes which have seen the tokens of your love shine with the light of hope; and may the bodies which have been fed with your body be refreshed with the fullness of your life; glory to you for ever. Amen.

[Common Worship post-communion prayer, proper 12]

© Julie Gittoes 2023