Sermon

St. Philip's Episcopal Church, Durham, NC

July 27, 2008 - Proper 12 (A)

The Rev. M. Jonah Kendall

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-49

The parable of the Mustard Seed.  Some preachers say that getting such a passage is like hitting the jackpot.  It’s all teed up and ready to go.  Well, I’m not so sure.

The other night I was talking to the Olives.  Kathryn told a story in which something small ended up having tremendous repercussions.  When she finished, Bruce turned to me and said, “It’s like the mustard seed.”  To which I, who is always working on a sermon, said something like, “Great connection, Bruce,” while thinking, “Yeah, great … There goes that sermon!”

And so I’m going to take a different tact.  And I want to start by uplifting something Albert Schweitzer witnessed.

As you may know in the mid-twentieth century, Albert Schweitzer founded a remote hospital in the African jungle.  One of the things that amazed him most was the power that words had over the indigenous people living there.

Apparently there were witch doctors who pronounced curses on people.  And once the word of the curse was uttered from their lips it could bring down a young man in the prime of his life, even, in some cases, leaving them dead by the end of the day.

Sticks and stones might break your bones but words will never hurt me.  I’m not so sure about that.

Now, alright that is pretty extreme, but still.

Consider for a moment whether any of these everyday words have had any influence on you, affected your life, your self-understanding in some way:  success, successful, wealth, right, wrong, failure, perfection.  How about this: half-off?  Weak, ugly, recession, terrorism, deficit, downsizing.  You see where I’m going? Words can have quite an effect.

And so I want to take us down today, down from the high vault of heaven.  Well, I did already preach on our ceiling, down from the saintly lives people have lived, or not lived, down from the altar, down from the font, down to the smallest thing before us, the very words on the pages we read and hear each Sunday as we gather together to be church.

You see, I’m not so sure we really place much emphasis on the actual words we hear.  I think we contemplate the sacraments, I think we mull over a sermon.  There’s no doubt we think about our hang-ups and sins, not to mention our dreams, the nature of discipleship, and how we can make a contribution.  But I wonder to what degree we consider the power of God at work in the words we uplift, words like love, grace, peace, hope, community, justice, equality.

I’m serious here.  To what degree do we focus on the words of our faith, hold them before us and really seek to understand what Christ means when he uses them and so in turn what Christ’s understandings of these words might mean that might mean for us and the world in which we live.

Yeah, I know we all know these words already.  I know we all use them, even aspire to live into them, but how many of us have ever considered mediating on one of these words as a spiritual practice.

It seems like a small thing. I know it hardly seems worthy of a sermon, but let me tell you it can have an incredible impact.  Consider Martin Luther.  He began the entire Protestant Reformation as a result of coming to grips with one biblical word: justification.  This is even attested to in his great hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” in which he stated that one little word can fell the darkness of the earth.

In a BBC interview, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth was once asked whether the church still had any authority in the modern world.  He answered, “The Church will have as much authority as it allows the Word of God to have authority over itself.”

And then later on in the same interview and touching on the same point, he said – and I’m paraphrasing here – Go down to the United Nations.  You’ll hear great words, peace, love, equality, great words, but the thing is we can use these words all we want, but we’ll never fully understand them, ascertain their full potential until God reveals their true meaning to us.

I mean just consider how long it’s taken for us as a nation to figure out what equality means.  And I still don’t think we’ve got it.

Let me share this with you in another way.

A few months ago on the NPR program, “This I Believe,” a woman named Kim Phuc told her story.  You actually probably know her as the girl in the photo.  She was the little naked girl with arms outstretched made famous in a picture taken of several Vietnamese children running down a road after being bombed by napalm.  It was a moment that changed her life forever and sowed seeds of anger that took years to undo.

She said it all set the moment after being struck when her first thought was that she would now be ugly and so treated in a different way.  And then later, after receiving medical attention, she still continued to suffer from chronic pain, itchiness, and headaches that bother her to this day.

And if this weren’t bad enough, after resolving to be a doctor herself so that she could help others as she had been helped, the government denied her the opportunity, choosing to use her instead as a symbol of the state.  As a result she was filled with bitterness and hate over what her life had become.  “My hate,” she said, “was as high as a mountain.”

But then she began going to the library to read religious books in order to find some meaning and purpose in her life.  In the end, she got captivated with the Bible.  In particular, with the way Christ used the word forgiveness.  And she saw something in that that became a way out.

As she said, “[Forgiveness] was the most difficult of all lessons. It didn’t happen in a day and it wasn’t easy.  But I finally got it.  Forgiveness made me free from hatred. I still have many scars on my body and severe pain most days but my heart is cleansed.  Napalm is very powerful but faith, forgiveness, and love are much more powerful.”

Then she said, “We would not have war at all if everyone could learn how to live with true love, hope and forgiveness.”  

With true love, hope and forgiveness.

My friends, Christ, the Word Incarnate, came to show us the true meaning of words and if we let them take root in us they can powerfully affect the way we understand ourselves and the lives we are living.

And so I want to give you a spiritual practice today, I want you to pick a word, one word, and since we’re Episcopalians it can be from the Prayer Book, but pick one word like forgiveness, or faith, or compassion, or simplicity, and meditate on it.

You can do this for a day, a week, or even a lifetime.  But I want you to open yourself to it, hold it over yourself and begin to live into it.  I’ve picked the word humility.  And in the last six months I can say I couldn’t have chosen a more fitting word to engage what with all my changes, my move, new job, parenthood, new surroundings. 

So pick a word, a relevant word, and let that word be your seed.  Your life, the bush it becomes as it takes root within you.

© 2006, Saint Philip's Episcopal Church
Mailing Address: P.O. Box 218, Durham, NC 27702
Telephone 919-682-5708, Fax 919-683-1857

Webmasters: Jack Mitchell, David Smith