The Rev. Dr. Austin Leininger
Sermon of the 4th Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 6, Father’s Day
17 June 2018
Readings:
Ezekiel 17:22-24
Psalm 92:1-4,11-14
2 Corinthians 5:6-10,[11-13],14-17
Mark 4:26-34
Much like on Mother’s Day—and for the same reason (that I am working today)—yesterday, my family started our celebration of Father’s Day. I got to start out the day by going back to sleep from 8-9:45—a lovely gift in and of itself. After we had breakfast, the six of us, including Jane’s Mom, Sandy, who is visiting from Fort Collins, Colorado, piled into our Highlander and headed up to San Mateo, where friends of ours had two separate booths at the San Mateo Pride Celebration. After a couple hours of celebration that included Anthony literally bouncing in the bounce house for two hours while Marie made tie dye shirts and Luke learned how to juggle, we moved our festivities to Coyote Point Recreation Area, stopping at In N Out for the kids’ lunch on the way, and played on a huge playground for a couple more hours before going in search of dinner and heading home.
Taking the alternate route from Bear Creek Road up to Summit Road to avoid two accidents on Highway 17 that would have taken us an hour and twenty minutes to get past, according to Siri, we wended our way through the hills until a rumbling sound caused Jane to turn off the radio and ask for quiet. Either it was thunder, she said, or something was wrong with the car. Stopping, she got out and found that our back driver’s side tire was as flat as a pancake.
So I spent the next forty minutes emptying the trunk so I could access the tools to change the tire; learning how to use the internal winch that keeps the spare in place under the back of the car to lower the replacement wheel out of its storage and down to the ground, and avoiding cars on the one lane road on which we were stopped, so I could successfully change the tire… in the rain. Which, as we know, is only necessary in June if you have a flat tire on a one-lane mountain road, at which point to not have rain would just be a huge disappointment to everyone involved.
Successfully back in the car, we made the rest of the drive home without incident, arriving approximately at the same time we’d have arrived had we stayed on 17, excepting that we’d still have had to change a flat tire. All in all, we felt the semi-quiet one lane mountain road was preferable.
Today’s readings speak to the experience of the divine in unexpected times and places.
In Ezekiel, we have the historical political reality of Israel’s kings seeking to navigate through a world of competing super powers as its people were carried off into Babylonian captivity. Overlaid was Ezekiel’s prophecy—the promise of God’s providence and God’s sovereignty to bring new life and to call all of God’s creation into God’s fruitful work.
Our Psalm echoes the theme with a song of praise in thanksgiving for God’s providence, steadfast care, and goodness. Reminding its singers also that when we root ourselves in God’s goodness, we also find ourselves bearing the fruit of God’s love.
This theme of living into the work of God’s love, and shining it to others carries us into the second reading as Paul exhorts his listeners to living an upright life. For Paul it isn’t just a moral imperative based on God’s prophecies, but based on being changed in his heart of hearts by putting on Christ and seeking to become more Christ like in his life and work. Also echoing today’s reading from Ezekiel, in one of his most quoted statements, he says “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: Everything old has passed away; see everything has been made new.”
This theme of transformation is completed in today’s gospel reading. Transformation from the tiniest seed into the greatest of shrubs has long been viewed as the kernel of faith that is sown in our hearts and that grows into a flourishing and fruitful ministry… but it can also be viewed from the opposite side as the smallest gestures we might make out of faith making a huge and life-changing impact on another person’s life… We’re not asked to change the world, but we are called to reach out to make a difference in someone else’s life, to bring the manifestation of God’s love to life in the world. And when enough of us do what we can, the little things do actually add up to making the world a better place. As we hear in the first parable, we don’t know how it happens or how others are transformed by a simple act of our kindness, attention, or effort—it is God who does the work of transformation.
We remember also that the parable is about the kingdom of God/God’s reign/the manifestation of God’s love, not about God’s self. Our participation in God’s kingdom is part of it’s breaking through into the here and now of our world just as it was in Christ’s world. The parable is the mustard seed once sown—it is a parable in action just as Ezekiel’s cedar sprig becomes a mighty new creation through the act of its being broken off and replanted. The mustard seed is part, but only in the sowing does it transform from the tiniest grain into such abundance that it’s breadth shelters and houses the birds of the air. We also remember that the individual isn’t addressed here, but in a world with a community mindset, the kingdom work is the work of the whole community where the blessing of the cooperative work of many individuals comes together to manifest God’s love and generativity in communities that grow and transform by their very participation in God’s work of loving and sowing the tiny kernels of hope that they can sow.
And this brings us back full circle to the first reading for today—and to our flat tire on a single lane mountain road in the rain. The transformation of the world into a community of God’s care, love, providence, and healing is what God makes of our efforts to live into God’s love. Israel had no say in being conquered by the Babylonians and having their people carried off into captivity—but their response was to continue in the knowledge that they were to be a blessing to the world, and to live as God’s children in captivity or otherwise. From our own much simpler and blessedly temporary situation, we had no control over our tire going flat. Elsewhere in our community, our state, our country, and around the world, we hear countless examples of injustice that raise cries from our lips and spark us into action to do whatever we can to help those in need. We may have no control over what happens to us either by chance or by the will of others, but what we do have control over is how we respond to the world.
In Paul’s words, in Christ, we are a new creation. We have been made new. As the cedar in the first reading, as the fruit in the Psalm, in Christ God’s new thing is us—should we take up the call and follow it. Not only are we the new thing God is doing, but we are to see each other no longer for our humanness, but as we each reflect the divine as God’s children. The dignity of each and every human child of God demands no less. This would tie well into Christ’s exhortation that we love one another as Christ loved us—as God loves us. Sight through faith shows us the value God places on each of us rather than the dismissive divisions we put on one another to justify our systems of oppression, domination, discrimination, inequality, and indifference.
And in a world where so many Fathers and Mothers are separated from their children on Father’s Day, the blessing of being a family that could spend a day together at pride celebrating our diversity rather than living in fear of it, the blessing of spending a day together at the park, well fed and carefree, can become also the blessing of being a family that sings songs and plays silly games to pass the time in the car while mom and dad change a flat tire. So yes; the kingdom of God is also like a flat tire on a one-lane mountain road in the rain. The blessing is in the act of community that makes of it a song of praise to God rather than a lament in toil and fear.
My children have grown into people of whom I’m incredibly proud. They are creative, confident, brilliant, and constantly amaze us with their ability to adapt as well as to transform our lives and our experience of the world.
May we remember that even the tiniest of beginnings can change the world—if only we have the faith to sow our mustard seeds and nurture them with God’s love, only God knows what we can accomplish together!
May this father’s day be a day to celebrate those who have served as father figures in our lives, as well as to celebrate what God’s love can accomplish in our families and beyond.
Amen.
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