Stephen R. Shaver
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Berkeley, CA
07/27/2014
Proper 12, Year A, Revised Common Lectionary
Genesis 29:15-28
Psalm 105:1-11, 45b or Psalm 128
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

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Last weekend I was at a family wedding in South Carolina. As soon as I stepped out of the airport I was struck by the climate, by the overall feeling of things: the heat. The humidity. The chirping crickets. And all around, the green, green, green. So different from the golds and greens of our California hills and evergreen forests: there it was deciduous trees, and vines growing on the deciduous trees, and more vines growing on those vines. Driving down the freeway was like being in a tunnel between two walls of solid vegetation. So much of that, of course, is thanks to just one plant: kudzu. It started as an ornamental plant and ground cover crop imported from Asia. Well, it covered the ground, all right. It’s been called “the vine that ate the South.” It spread to become one of the most successful invasive species ever.

Now we don’t have kudzu here in California. But we do have invasive plants of our own. When I go running on the Bay Trail or the Ohlone Greenway I see big bushes of thorny blackberry and wild fennel. Those are both plants that people cultivate, and that produce delicious things to eat; but they also easily escape and grow wild and take over all kinds of places where they’re not wanted.

It’s hard to contain an invasive species.

a wild, weedy fennel plant

a brambly blackberry bush

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field,” says Jesus. And we nod our heads, having heard this parable before, perhaps, most of us: the tiny seed becomes a big tree, God can make great things out of little things, very inspiring, next parable please. We in our place and time can so easily miss what Jesus’ hearers would have noticed right away: the utter strangeness of this example.

For one thing, it’s not the most impressive of examples. A mustard plant grows to be something like a big bush. You could charitably describe it as a tree, maybe. In this version of the parable Jesus does that, but he hedges his bets by also calling it “the greatest of all shrubs”—a phrase that always makes me smile in its modesty, sort of like the slogan of my former hometown of Reno: “the biggest little city in the world.” But Jesus had plenty of other symbolic possibilities to choose from. In fact, he seems to be intentionally reworking an image from the Old Testament books of Daniel and Ezekiel in which a nation like Assyria or Babylon or Israel itself is compared to a cedar of Lebanon: a towering, vertical giant in which the birds of the air find shelter. So Jesus is ignoring the image of the cedar, an image as obviously available to him in his place and time as a giant redwood would be in ours, and instead comparing God’s kingdom to something like a really big blackberry bush.

And just like that blackberry bush, mustard is extremely prolific, to the point of being invasive—even of being basically a weed. You might choose to cultivate it, but if you did, you’d put it in a plot by itself, carefully segregated away from the rest of your garden. To sow it on purpose in the middle of your field, as Jesus is apparently suggesting the person in this story does, would be to invite disaster as it starts to grow all over everything, transgressing your neatly planned rows and crop boundaries, growing through and around all your other plants in a big, bushy mess. The greatest of all shrubs, indeed.

In Godly Play, that wonderful way of telling sacred stories to children, the materials for parable stories are always kept inside wooden boxes that are closed with lids. That’s because a parable isn’t always easy to get into. Sometimes, no matter which way we turn it, we can’t find our way in, and we just have to come back another time. And even when we do find our way inside a parable, there is always more there waiting for us to come back and discover it.

Sometimes in Godly Play children will call a parable a “terrible.” And there’s wisdom in that too, because there is something transgressive about a good parable. It’s like that with the next one too: the woman takes three pecks of flour—a huge amount of flour, about fifty pounds—and mixes in yeast, which throughout scripture is almost always used as a symbol of impurity. What does it mean, this yeast of impurity, working its way invisibly through the flour until all of it is leavened? And what of the sneakiness of the person who finds treasure in a field and, instead of telling the owner, rehides it for just long enough to go and buy the field at market price?

Today’s gospel reading has things to teach us about how God makes big things out of little ones, yes. But there’s another dimension to these parables: they are about slowness and imperceptibility, but also about contamination. Jesus in these terribles is telling us that the kingdom of heaven is not at all what we might have expected. It’s not like a cedar of Lebanon, not a superpower like Assyria or Rome or the superpowers of our own day. Nor is it a well-behaved garden plant that grows in its proper compartment. It is like an invasive weed that grows unpredictably, messing up our carefully planned boundaries and rules; sometimes seeming to do nothing for a long time, then bursting out with new shoots in a new direction; sometimes growing close to the ground and hidden, sometimes stretching towards the sky for all to see.

It grows from the smallest of seeds: a single man on a cross, rejected, ignored, and impure. And from that seed it has been growing for thousands of years, and it is still growing today. Our call is to become branches of this invasive kingdom, to take part in this contamination of love that is spreading through God’s world. You might say the kingdom of heaven is going viral. You might not always know it is there. But it is growing wherever people are proclaiming good news and doing the work of love.

This week again shells are falling in Gaza and rockets in Israel. On both sides are many who believe that peace can only come through violence and the eradication of the other, or else through creating firm and unbreakable boundaries between Palestinians and Israelis—and I am thinking here of spiritual boundaries, even more than the physical ones which also exist: spiritual boundaries that keep relationships from forming so that people know one another only as enemies and not as human beings. But there are also those people on both sides who are working to create peace as an invasive species.

Twelve years ago the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem and the Middle East began a program called Kids 4Peace. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim kids from Palestine and Israel come together to build friendships and travel together to attend summer camp, along with American kids, in the United States. They do arts and crafts and activities and all the things that kids do at summer camp; they have fun together, learn about one another’s families and traditions, and learn the skills of dialogue and peacemaking. Right now there are 400 young people involved in the program. Many of them tell stories of the friendships they’ve made across boundaries and the ways their lives have been changed. One young Palestinian who participated and later became a counselor in the program said, “I consider us farmers, planting peace seeds in the kids’ hearts.” It’s a small kind of thing, so far: a shrub, not a cedar. But you never know what will happen when the kingdom of heaven starts to break out in somebody’s field. What birds will it shelter? What boundaries will it cross?

fennel in greatest-of-all-shrubs size?

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Kids4Peace is a great organization; my friend Josh Thomas is the Executive Director and many people I admire are directly involved as officers, board members, and staff. Do go and check out their web page to learn more about their work, and please consider supporting their mission with your donations as well as your prayers.

Stephen R. Shaver
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Berkeley, CA
10/13/2013
Year C, Proper 23, Revised Common Lectionary
2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c
Psalm 111
2 Timothy 2:8-15
Luke 17:11-19

“The saying is sure,” Paul says.

He’s an old man, imprisoned for the sake of Jesus Christ: held tight in chains of iron, looking ahead to the day of his martyrdom, looking back on his ministry, holding tight to what he knows to be more firm and more true than any chain. Maybe he quotes a fragment of praise they are used to singing in one of his churches: or maybe he simply coins these lines himself: either way, he knows the saying is sure. “If we have died with him, we will also live with him. If we endure, we will also reign with him.” For everything that we suffer in Christ, there will be a far more glorious reward. The parallelism of the poetry leads him onward: two lines on the promise of reward: and so now he turns to the consequences of failure. “If we deny him, he will deny us.” And then a surprise: “If we are faithless, he remains faithful: for he cannot deny himself.”

Hear this stunning, astonishing contradiction: from one line to the next everything has changed. Paul starts with reward, moves to punishment—but then is unable to stay there as the joy, the effervescence, of God’s unquenchable love wells up and overflows in him.

I imagine him, there, in his cell, dictating: starting the line, perhaps, intending the parallelism—then being surprised himself at what comes out of his mouth: “If we are faithless—he remains faithful!

“For he cannot deny himself.”

We are so deeply connected to God in Jesus Christ that we are actually part of his very self. Yes, as Christians when we are baptized we are grafted into the very life of Jesus Christ and become part of him, part of his body. And his love for us surges through every cell of that body and cannot, will not let us go.

What kind of God is this who holds on tight to us in spite of our faithlessness?

This is the God we meet in the story of the prodigal son: the story of a father who showers an inheritance on his child, watches with longing as his child rejects his love, wanders far off and squanders all the gifts so richly given, and then waits with eager yearning, ready to welcome the faithless child back with love and honor and lavish feasting the minute he comes back within sight. This is a God who gives gifts freely, who cares not a bit for dignity, whose concern is not for his son to perform good behavior but simply for his son’s presence, the child he yearns for, in whom he takes delight.

We need to hear that yearning in Jesus’ voice in our gospel today as he asks, wistfully, longingly: were not ten lepers healed? And where are the other nine? Did only one come back to give thanks and praise to God?

It is so easy to come to this story, shaped by our culture and our experiences, and to read it as a moralistic fable about giving thanks as an example of good behavior. Maybe we were taught to write thank you notes when we were children for gifts that didn’t particularly excite us—or for gifts that did excite us, so much so that it was much more appealing to be somewhere off playing with the gift than to sit down with a pen and paper and diligently produce the required token of gratitude. Now thank-you notes are a good and lovely thing. And it is right and it is important to teach children to be polite and considerate. But this is not a fable about our need to write thank-you notes to God. This is not a lesson teaching us that we had better say our proper prayers of gratitude when God gives us something or else God will probably not be in the mood to give us something next time. This is a story of the overflowing love of God, that depends not one whit on our own merits but simply on the fact that we are God’s children on whom God delights to shower an inheritance. All ten of the lepers are healed. The gift is given with no strings attached. In fact, the other nine are just doing what Jesus told them to do: go and show themselves to the priests. But one, this Samaritan foreigner, finds something else happening within himself: that overflowing love of God is welling up into a desire of his own, an answering love that has to be expressed in praise. And that answering love is what you and I were created for. The Samaritan has begun to be fully human.

Alexander Schmemann, the great Russian Orthodox theologian, wrote that human beings were created to be the priests of creation.[1] Our vocation is to be the voice of everything that God has made: to offer it all back to God in thanksgiving and praise.

J and I share our home with a small calico cat named C. She is a good cat, and much beloved by us: and I think she also loves us in the way of loving that is proper to a cat. She can curl up with us and purr. She can meow at us conversationally; and she can ask, in her own way, with great insistence, to be fed. One thing she cannot do, though, is give thanks: at least not on her own. A cat doesn’t have words or language. It takes a human being to be the articulator of the thanksgiving that we offer on behalf of the whole creation: sun and moon, land and sea, plants and animals and all that is. This is what we will do here in a few minutes, when we offer the Great Thanksgiving: because of course that is what the Greek word eucharist means: thanksgiving. We are created to be eucharistic beings. And as Father Schmemann says, none of us succeeds: like Eve and Adam, we all fall away from our priestly calling to live lives that are an offering of thanks and praise. But in Jesus God has done what we could not.[2]

Jesus has become the first of all humanity to be truly eucharistic. In his birth, ministry, healings, eating and drinking with sinners, voluntary suffering and death, and glorious resurrection and ascension, Jesus’ entire life is one mighty offering of thanksgiving and praise. Into that offering we have been incorporated as bodily members of the living Jesus Christ: and in him we begin to offer his own sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving in our own lives. We do it haltingly, stumbling and falling away, but even when we are faithless he remains faithful: for he cannot deny his own self. If we let it, his abundant life within us will overflow in ways we can only imagine. It will transform how we live: how we treat our brothers and sisters, how we spend our money, how we use our time, who we understand ourselves to be.

We are here to celebrate Eucharist. We are here to offer thanksgiving. We are here to be transformed, like the Samaritan, to become truly human. Glory and praise to this lavish God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: who yearns for us with an overflowing love.

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[1] See, among many other places in his writings, For the Life of the World, 2^nd ed. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s, 1973), 92-94.

[2] For the Life of the World, 37.

Stephen R. Shaver
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Berkeley, CA
St. Mary the Virgin
Isaiah 61:10-11
Galatians 4:4-7
Luke 1:46-55
Psalm 34 or 34:1-9

Hail Mary, full of grace: the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

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Back in 2005, when The Simpsons had just recently become the country’s longest-ever-running sitcom, there aired an episode in which Homer and Bart Simpson decide to convert to Roman Catholicism—lured in by pancake suppers, bingo, and an engaging young priest voiced by Liam Neeson.

Shocked at this development, Marge Simpson has a vision of an afterlife in which she’s sent to Protestant Heaven: a bland place where upper-crust WASPs with sweaters slung across their shoulders play croquet and badminton, sip gin and tonics, and address one another with names like Buffy and Dash. Looking off in the general direction of Catholic Heaven—set far across an impassable gulf—they shrug their shoulders and say, “Not our sort, dear.” Squinting into the distance, Marge sees a rollicking land of fiestas, piñatas, spaghetti feasts, Irish dancing, food and drink bursting off of every table—and in the thick of it, living it up, are Homer and Bart.

Marge is so upset at not being with her family that she demands to speak to Jesus. But tough luck, the anemic-looking preppies with her tell her, pointing over towards Catholic Heaven. “I’m afraid he’s gone native.”[1]

Now we Episcopalians occupy the strange, beautiful, and somewhat unique position within Christianity of being able to claim to be Protestant and Catholic at the same time. Within North American culture we have sometimes been seen—and have sometimes functioned—as a church with just that elitist, upper-crust identity The Simpsons skewers. But at our best, we are heirs to the rich tradition of incarnational Christianity that knows food and feast and dance and play can be sacramental encounters with the God who made the material universe and called it good. The sociologist and priest Andrew Greeley wrote about the “Catholic imagination,” in which God is seen not as distant from the world but as pervading the creation, the glorious presence animating the whole universe: so that saints and statues and candles and holy water and stained glass are just part of the multiplicity of the ways God reaches out to human beings in our bodies as well as our spirits.[2] It’s not as simple as a split between Protestants and Catholics, though: for there are Protestant mystics and Catholic puritans. It’s about a way of being Christian that recognizes the brokenness and sin in the world, but also believes that God’s yes is stronger than the world’s no; that human beings and all of creation still reflect the divine glory in whose image we were made; and that in Christ all things are being redeemed and transformed into fullness of life. At our best, Episcopalians share that sense that there is “a splendor burning at the heart of things” that lets us offer a robust affirmation of the messy and beautiful created world.[3]

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Mary, blessed virgin mother of our Lord Jesus Christ; beloved of Catholic Christians, both Roman and otherwise. And some of the ways in which Mary has been venerated down through the centuries can seem more than a little unworldly: lily-white statuary, flowers, songs whose texts emphasize concepts like purity and perpetual virginity and meekness. Puritan Mary: ethereal, unearthly, unangry, unsexual, unsullied by the messiness of life.

But there is another Mary. This is Mary the Theotokos: the God-bearer, that title given her to emphasize her role in the incarnation of the living God. Mary is the saint of incarnation: the saint of the flesh, the very one who lends her own fleshly humanity to the eternal Word. And this is the Mary we meet in scripture: Mary the fierce upholder of God acting in this messy world. Brave Mary, consenting to an unlikely pregnancy and the likely social scandal that would attend it. Resourceful Mary, traveling poor with her husband, having her baby where the world would let her. Angry Mary, reprimanding her twelve-year-old messianic adolescent for disappearing in Jerusalem and scaring his family sick. Insistent Mary, coming to Jesus at the wedding at Cana to get him to keep the party going by replenishing the supply of wine. Concerned Mary, showing up with Jesus’ brothers to try to get him to come home when his ministry seemed to be getting out of hand. Brave Mary, again: standing at the cross, loving her son to the last. And then, in the first chapter of Acts, the last time we see her in scripture: Mary the disciple, there at the birth of the church, witness to her resurrected son and Savior.

Today in our Gospel we hear Mary in her own words. The pregnant Mary has gone to visit her cousin Elizabeth, herself pregnant with John the Baptist: and in her exultation Mary pours forth this revolutionary song, the Magnificat, which has become the church’s song at Evening Prayer. “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior: for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant. . . . He has scattered the proud in their conceit; he has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.” The nineteenth-century Christian Socialist Thomas Hancock called Mary’s song “the Marseillaise of humanity,” the hymn of God’s liberation for the poor.[4]

One of Hancock’s contemporaries was Stewart Headlam, a thoroughly incarnational character from our tradition’s history. Headlam was an Anglican vicar of radical politics and Anglo-Catholic piety—both of which made him a significant headache for his respectable Evangelical bishop, and had a great deal to do with the fact that he was assigned to parishes in the slums of London. But according to his biographer, John Orens, what seemed most blasphemous to Headlam’s more conventional fellow clergy was neither his politics nor his churchmanship: it was his support for the theatres and music halls that made life worth living for the working poor whom he served. In Headlam’s time, even the legitimate theater was seen as morally questionable: as the Buffys and Dashes of that time and place would have said, “Not our sort, dear.” The music halls of the working class were thought of as scurrilous dens of sin: places where copious alcohol and illicit sex were both easily available, and where the human body was shamelessly displayed moving and flowing in dance. For Stewart Headlam, on the other hand, the music hall had a great deal in common with the mass. The potential for misbehavior was outweighed by the fact that the music hall also offered the potential for joy in the midst of the dismal environment of the sweatshops. The God who was the source of all joy and beauty, and who was encountered in stained glass and statues and incense, was also the ultimate source of the beauty of music and dance, and of the human form itself.

Now Stewart Headlam had a passionate devotion to Mary. Indeed, when the suspicious bishop asked his vicar whether Headlam believed in the divinity of Jesus, the vicar’s jesting answer was: “Of course he does, and I think he believes in the divinity of Our Lady also!”[5] But his devotion was not to Puritan Mary, but to the Mary of the incarnation. Once an angry opponent asked him whether he thought St. Paul would ever have set foot in a music hall. “I do not know what St. Paul would have done,” said Headlam. “But I do know that our Lord would have gone; and taken his blessed Mother with him.”[6]

Today we at St. Mark’s, Berkeley, celebrate the Mother of God incarnate. And she has things to say to us, here in this parish that so deeply values beauty. We are in many ways heirs to that Catholic revival of the 1800s, with our rich tradition of music and our beautiful space and vesture and liturgy. And we are here in this amazing city of Berkeley: a place of theater, and music, and counterculture: a place of great wealth and great poverty: a place of messiness and of incarnation.

Here and now, God is looking with favor on servants, showing strength with his arm, scattering the proud, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty. Our vocation is to join in.

May Mary’s song call us ever more deeply into that vocation, today and always.