June 13th Sermon by The Reverend Loree Reed

Lord, may we hear your voice in the words spoken in your name. Amen.

This morning our Old Testament reading, our Psalm and our Epistle all celebrate the hidden things the Lord accomplishes, the unexpected things God does – instead of the more ordinary signs the world is watching for.  So against all odds, God raises up the low tree and puts down the high and lofty one.  Or the Psalmist tells us that even in old age the righteous will still produce fruit, because the Lord is hidden within them like sap rising up in a green tree.  And the apostle Paul reminds believers at Corinth not to look on the outward appearance of the people who come to them, but to watch instead for the new creation God is building up in those who are now in Christ.
But maybe the most surprising example of the Lord using something lowly to build up the Kingdom of God comes in Jesus’ parable of the mustard seed.  For in those days in Judea, if anyone mentioned a mustard seed everyone knew he was using it as an example of the least significant thing anyone could think of.¹  For mustard was a weed – and an invasive weed at that.  No one planted mustard in their field – for fear it would soon take over the entire field, the bushes eventually growing as big as houses.  Maybe birds did appreciate its cover and its little black seeds.  But no one else did.  And yet. . . Jesus uses the example of a mustard seed in a parable to surprise his hearers with the strange way God can use something small and ordinary to produce something quite wonderful in his sight.
And isn’t that just like our God who, scientists tell us, created the whole universe out of something quite small – maybe something about the size of a marble.  They tell us it all happened about thirteen or fourteen billion years ago – as we think of time now.  But this small thing was there even before there really was time, even before there was space.  But some time in there – in about a trillionth of a second – God must have said, “Let there be . . . ” – and that very small thing, that thing no larger than a marble, suddenly grew, suddenly expanded to a volume larger than all the space in the universe.  That’s what scientists say, anyway, about the birth of the universe in the twinkling of God’s eye² – and since I don’t have a better idea of the way he did it, I believe them.  So why wouldn’t I believe God could use something as small and unlikely as a mustard seed to effect some huge change in my life?  I can believe he would because I’ve seen him do it more times than I can count.  Let me tell you about one of those times, one of those mustard seed experiences in my life.
In high school, in Wilmington, Delaware, I went to Friends School, where our Quaker teachers encouraged us to get involved in social service projects.  So one bitter cold Friday evening in January a couple of us travelled together to a big old red brick church in inner city Philadelphia where we were to participate in a weekend work camp.  We’d all been instructed to bring sleeping bags, and that night, after we had met one another and heard words of welcome from the young Quaker service director, we unrolled our sleeping bags on the bare, splintery boards of the upper floor of the parish house and tried to sleep.  But the wind that night was cold and gusty, and I remember being awakened several times by the sound of the big old single pane windows rattling in their sashes.  It was one of those nights when you just waited, uneasily, for morning to come.
When morning did come, after a sparse breakfast of oatmeal – oatmeal served without milk, I seem to remember – we were dropped off in groups at our service projects.  My project, which I shared with three or four other kids, was to paint the kitchen of an elderly black lady named Ms. Williams.  Ms. Williams lived in a basement.  Not a finished basement like most of us had in our affluent homes, but a basement with cement floors underfoot, asbestos–covered pipes overhead, and some tattered mismatched furniture that must have been dragged in from the curb many years before.  We were given big cans of chromium yellow paint, drop cloths and brushes – and asked to finish painting Ms. Williams’ kitchen by four o’clock that afternoon.
The problem was that the walls were dirty and dusty, and the pipes ’ I guess because she had cooked in that kitchen for many years without a vent – were dirty and greasy.  But we didn’t have buckets of hot soapy water to wash anything, so we had to paint on top of all that dust and grease.  So added to my horror at the kind of living conditions I was seeing – a horror I tried hard not to show – was my growing sense that I was doing an incredibly poor job of covering over that grease and grime.  We were supposed to be making a positive difference for this lady.  But I couldn’t see that anything positive was happening.
Sometime around noon Ms. Williams shuffled slowly out of her bedroom and asked if we would like to take a break.  We gathered around her as she took a big shiny can of Hi–C fruit drink from the refrigerator and poured the bright red juice into battered plastic cups.  In that moment I think we all realized that that can of juice had cost her something, something she could barely afford.  And, honored by her gift, we said politely, “Thank you Ms. Williams” – and we meant it.
But just as she started to hand out the cups of juice a large roach dove – it didn’t fall, it positively dove – swan dive — from a pipe overhead – straight into one of those cups.  I have to admit I had never seen a roach before, and I was horrified.  In fact, we all froze, unsure what to say or do.  But Ms. Williams, in a moment of consummate grace and dignity, quietly poured the cup, roach and all, down the drain, and then – after rinsing it – poured more juice into the cup.  We drank our juice in silence.  There simply were no words.
Very early the next morning, Sunday morning, we were awakened before the sun had risen.  Then we walked in the gusty wind and bitter cold from the church to the Municipal Court, several blocks away.  And there, at seven o’clock on Sunday morning, we watched people who’d been arrested the night before arraigned before a judge – for public drunkenness, for prostitution, for theft, for simple battery.  We’d been warned not to say a word – and we didn’t.  But our teenage eyes were as big as saucers.
Did I learn something that weekend?  You know I did.  In the course of that weekend I came face to face with a depth of poverty I’d never seen before.  But I also began to realize that where there is poverty of any kind – any emptiness, any need, any achingly poor space – there is room for God.  In the space that weekend carved out in me the Lord planted a seed of compassion.  I think it might have been a mustard seed – because I’ve never been able to forget it.
Amen.
¹ Nibs Stroupe Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 3 (David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds. Westminster
  John Knox Press; 2009) p.145.
² Martha Sterne “A Day of Small Things” Sermon given on June 18, 2006, Day 1.org
 
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