Sermon

Up Close and Personal

 Matthew 13: 31-33, 44-52

Preaching has never been easy for me. As a matter of fact, I tried for years to avoid the ministry because I could not imagine trying to get up every Sunday and have something worthwhile to say knowing that people come to church to hear some word of God. But try as I might, I could not avoid the call to ministry and now, after all these years, I still struggle each week trying to discern God’s word in passages of scripture and how to speak that word so that others can hear it. It is a time-old dilemma for preachers, I think – namely, how does the preacher get out of the way to allow God to speak.

I am the type of person who has to let things roll around in my head for awhile. So, I try to read the scriptures from the lectionary on Monday and then let them just sort of “hang” in my mind until sometime between Thursday and Saturday evening when things start to gel and a sermon begins to emerge. Sometimes decent, too often mediocre.

This scripture in Matthew was unusually difficult because it is just short sentences strung together about the realm of God. It is as though you are thumbing through a picture album and seeing snapshots of different ways the realm of God is revealed to people. The short parables in Matthew 13 have to do with being able to find the larger truth within the smallest outward manifestations:

A mustard seed, the smallest among seeds, but it will grow into a plant so large birds can nest in the branches.

Yeast, which when mixed with flour, will leaven the flour and make dough rise.

A treasure hidden in a field is found and is of such value the finder sells everything to own the field that hid the treasure.

A pearl, found by a merchant, is of such great value the merchant will sell everything else for this pearl.

Fish, caught in a net, divided between the good fish and those too bad to keep and how life is that way - made up of those who are righteous and those who are, in scripture’s words, evil.

These short parables all imply or you can infer that God’s activity in each instance dramatically changed things. The seed grows into a large plant; the yeast rises; the item found in the field turns out to be of great value; the pearl found by the merchant is a genuine pearl; and when you bring up a large net of fish a distinction is made between the good fish and the bad.

When I first read this scripture to prepare for today, it was on a Thursday morning a few weeks ago. I was going to drive to North Carolina later that afternoon and so I read the scriptures for a couple of the Sundays so that I could start thinking about sermons, knowing that the coming weeks were going to be hectic. In effect, I “preached” to myself as I drove. But nothing I said to myself hung together the way I wanted it to do.

I had an early Friday morning eye appointment and then spent the rest of Friday and until mid-afternoon Saturday visiting family. Among those I visited were three aunts who are my father’s sisters – one is 99, one is 95 and the baby is 85. I also visited some first cousins. All of them are Southern Baptists.

When I got home a few days later, I still did not have a sense of “sermon.” During those days in North Carolina I experienced again how important family has been in my life. But I also saw some new things, perhaps because I do not live there day to day and have the advantage of distance and some objectivity when I listened. I learned a lot about the complexities of relationships within a large family as we grow older and lead very different lives.

In my family there is genuine, very deep love for each other and equally there are genuine and very deep differences. I thought about my aunts and cousins - how they were so diverse and yet they are each so loved and cherished in our family.

When I sat down to re-read today’s scriptures I realized that those family members I had just visited “embodied” in some way something so valuable that our family cannot just dismiss one another. In fact, we have new understandings because we know and love each other over many years. I realized that I had been allowed to see some of those “snapshots” of the realm of God in some of the conversations.

For example, among my cousins there is the full gamut of political expression – John McCain, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, George Bush. One cousin wondered how we could have the same grandparents, our fathers were brothers, and yet be so different in our view of the world. One cousin said he is not really able to discuss politics or the war with another because they are so different. But smack dab in the middle of this family “mish-mash” of politics is the reality that one of my cousin’s has a son about to be sent back to Iraq for his third time.

Suddenly things look differently. McCain, Obama, Clinton, Bush – it doesn’t matter which one. What matters is that whoever is the commander in chief will realize that, for our family and many others, there are pearls of great price going to Iraq and we would sell all that we own to protect the great treasure in our family and, equally, the great treasures of the other families. Freedom isn’t free. It comes at great cost. We know, because the price of freedom is embodied in someone we love dearly. Those of you who have served in the armed services or have had loved ones who served, understand what I am saying.

More importantly, for me, was the realization that the way we value the pearl or the yeast or the mustard seed is a microcosm to the way the world values pearls and yeast and mustard seeds in other places and other situations and other cultures.

My 95-year-old aunt is now too weak to care for herself. She has three sons, all with their own families, and she herself is a great-grandmother. The three sons are all at an age of having their own children and grandchildren. Her sons, my cousins, are taking turns on a weekly basis staying with their mother and caring for her as best they can. The reality is they are not able to give her the total care she needs and each day a nursing home reality looms closer.

But she has been the leaven in the family. Her oldest son is 74 and he and my other two cousins cannot imagine putting their mother into a nursing home. Genuine care for the elders in our society is embodied in the way our family ultimately takes care of this aunt. No longer are nursing homes something in the abstract, now we need to know all about them and how they will care for this person who is so loved and of such value that we can even say we, at times, see a picture of the realm of God in her generous spirit and loving ways.

Friday evening I went to dinner with my 85-year-old aunt. She is, believe it or not, a hostess at a Cracker Barrel Restaurant. We went to Cracker Barrel to eat and I saw her get younger before my eyes. She is so loved by the staff. They told me how fortunate I am to have her in my family (which I already knew) and they treated her with such touching respect and admiration.

This aunt is probably the most devout member of the family. She still teaches a Sunday School class at the Baptist church she has belonged to all of her life. I have often told about the fact that a few years ago when her church (our family’s home church) asked an Hispanic congregation to move because the church members were upset about various things, she went with them and for two years every Sunday night she prepared refreshments for the Hispanic congregation – still teaching Sunday School in the Southern Baptist church on Sunday mornings and preparing refreshments for the Hispanic congregation on Sunday evenings. When you ask her why she did that she responds, “I was repenting for my church because we treated the Hispanic people so bad.”

Picture the big net that is cast out and it brings in good Caucasian Southern Baptists and good Hispanic Pentecostals. But in the mixture there is also the bad. The battles were classic stories of power over powerlessness, of keeping peace at the expense of justice, and, I am sure, a dose of racism. “Those people” messed up the church kitchen. “Those people” did not clean up properly.

In this country church, sitting out in tobacco and corn and cotton fields, I discovered a treasure in that field. I was actually sort of taken aback when I realized she said, “because we treated” them badly – not “because they treated them badly. “I was repenting for my church because we treated the Hispanic people so bad.”

At dinner we talked briefly about how close she and my 95-year-old aunt are. They used to go every Friday to get their hair fixed. This aunt always took the other one out to ride or to eat. She is very sad watching her sister get weaker and knowing that she needs more care than she can receive at home. We talked about how she could help encourage my 95-year-old aunt to make the move to nursing care as easy as possible under the circumstances. Also, we talked a little about the pain of the three sons and how they also needed a different kind of care in this transition. She prays for them daily.

My grandmother Bell died when this aunt was a small child. However, the lasting memory my aunt has of my grandmother is seeing her sit by the window every day to read her Bible. When she was 14 she had a vision or a dream and saw her mother holding that Bible. And then she said she saw Jesus and he told her that her mother is safe and at home. That gave her great peace, she said.

She then talked about praying with a young woman one evening at Cracker Barrel because this young woman was in love with another young woman. But the young woman believed such love is wrong and she was terribly conflicted. My aunt also believes that and so she and the young woman prayed. She does not know what became of the young woman, but she hopes her prayer was helpful.

Keep that young woman in mind for just a minute. I want to tell you about my 99-year-old aunt. While the 85-year-old aunt is the most devout of the aunts, the 99-year-old aunt is also a strong believer and questions about faith and God and Jesus are all either “yes” or “no.” For her there is no ambiguity in scripture.

At 99 she is very spry, her mind is clear; she is, to use a cliché, “sharp as a tack.” She does, however, use a walker and at times has trouble with routine-type things, and needs someone in the house with her. She knows so many family stories which we are trying to capture on tape to preserve.

For the past twenty years or so my cousin, her son, has taken care of her and lived with her. Her three daughters live fairly close by and visit her often. But it is her son who takes care of her. Her son – and his partner of nearly 40 years.

They have completely remodeled the house so that it is totally accessible for her. My cousin is 64. His partner manages a wine distribution company. My cousin is a horticulturalist and works with all sorts of plants and flowers and trees in his own garden. He has developed a hybrid chrysanthemum which is now sold nationally through nurseries and which he named after my aunt.

Deep down her religious belief is that her son, my cousin, is going to hell when he dies. Because she is a “real, Bible-believing Christian” she does not know how to reconcile the generous and loving treatment she receives from my cousin and his partner and her belief they are going to hell. So, she has chosen to pretend they do not have a relationship and she refuses to talk with them about it.

Here is the problem: my aunt genuinely loves her son. The other aunt, the one who prayed for the young woman, also genuinely loves her nephew (my cousin). Neither aunt knows what to do with their religious up-bringing that has taught them that my cousin is an abomination before God. They cannot reconcile their religious belief with the embodiment of love in a son and nephew when they see him take such good care of his mother and live monogamously with someone for nearly 40 years. But, they have no doubt, he will go to hell.

My cousin sees the pain and despair in his mother. He now totally rejects God and the church. He is so bitter that he says that if his mother’s funeral is held at church he will not attend because he will not go into a place that has taught his mother that her son is an abomination and going to hell.

I wish my aunt would read the Matthew verses and think of my cousin: Jesus said, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.” And, “whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple – truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”

I wish my cousin knew the Jesus who told these parables read this morning and could understand that perhaps he is (to his mother and those who love him) the treasure found in the field, the pearl of great price.

As I was driving home that Saturday all of these family concerns were going through my mind. When I opened the Bible to work on this sermon it seemed all of their names were stamped on the pages. As I re-read the scriptures I saw once again how God is the glue that holds our family and our fragile humanity together. The composition of that glue is the most basic definition of love. “Now abides faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love.”

I don’t think my family is unusual. Probably many families have the same “mish mash” contradictory and confusing make-up as my family. So, perhaps, for me at least, “witnessing” and “testifying” – two much used terms in my Baptist side of the family – begin right in the family. Witnessing and testifying that God is so much more than we can ever think or imagine. Witnessing and testifying that God welcomes and embraces all the children of earth; that God’s ways are not our ways and God’s thoughts certainly much more loving than our thoughts.

Being immersed, embraced and trusted in that family in North Carolina during those few days gave me renewed hope. Because if that family - my family - can stay glued together with the love of God, there is the possibility of a ripple effect that others can stay glued together also. I re-learned during those days how true it is that love can overcome the world.

I also have come to see once more how human the parables are. Just think, each of us can be, and hopefully we are, a living picture of God’s realm to someone from time to time. Scripture takes on life and breath when we realize it is as much about us as about the people of ancient times. Even our small faith may be the mustard seed someone needs to see. We may be like yeast in someone’s life at a critical time. Perhaps someone even considers us a treasure because we are open and accepting and loving. Scripture embodied in us; Christ living in the world through us. That is a high and lofty goal, but with God all things are possible.

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather sums it up: “Where there is great love there are always miracles.”

So, let’s go out that door and be one of the pictures of God’s realm to someone. Let’s perform miracles simply by showing great love.

Amen.

Jim Bell

7-27-08