Charles Marion Russel, Corps of Discovery Meet Chinooks on the Lower Columbia, October 1805
The title of my sermon comes from a book that I’m reading, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory. The guiding metaphor for this book is the Lewis and Clark expedition. Lewis and Clark were looking for a water route to the Pacific Ocean. They paddled canoes upstream along the Missouri River. When they got to the Rocky Mountains, they found that they were not equipped for the rest of their journey. Read on, to find out how this relates to Jesus' parables about the kingdom of heaven.
Sermon
Good morning. Last Sunday we examined the parable of the
wheat and the weeds. In my sermon, I said that we’re not always able to tell
the difference between the wheat and the weeds and it’s not our job to sort
them—we’re called to tend to all the plants in the field, so that they are
ready for the harvest, in God’s time.
That is our mission: we are called to get out of the church and care for all of
God’s people, all of creation. In fact, I’ve said this in a lot of my sermons.
I’ve also noted how the world has changed, and we have to change, too.
Last week, I put all of that in a larger historical
context: the shift to a post-Christendom world. For those of you who weren’t
here last Sunday, Christendom is defined as the period from the time in which
the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its official religion until just
recently; Christendom lasted about 1,700 years. During that time, the Church
enjoyed a place of prominence within Western societies. Don’t worry, there won’t
be a quiz after worship. This is a quick review. The problem that we face now,
in the Church, is that all of our church leaders were trained to function in
the structures of Christendom, structures that are crumbling away. Our
challenge is to adapt to this new, post-Christendom reality.
After worship last Sunday, as I was shaking hands with
everyone, someone said to me, “Are you going to be teaching us how to do this?”
That is, how to adapt to the new reality. The short answer is, yes, but it’s
not that simple. There’s no easy way to do this. Sure, you might be able to go
to Amazon.com and find a book called 10
Easy Steps to Church Revitalization, but if the steps are really easy, it’s
probably not going to work.
The title of my sermon comes from a book that I’m reading, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership
in Uncharted Territory. It’s a great book; I can’t put it down. The author,
Tod Bolsinger, was the senior pastor of a large congregation in Orange County,
in Southern California, and he now serves as an administrator at Fuller
Seminary.
The guiding metaphor for this book is the Lewis and Clark
expedition. Now I know that a lot of you already know what I’m talking about,
but let me do a quick review, to make sure we’re all on the same page. In 1803,
the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France. This purchase
nearly doubled the land area of the United States; it includes all of Arkansas,
Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, large portions of Colorado,
Louisiana, Montana, North and South Dakota, and Wyoming, and small sections of
Minnesota, New Mexico, and Texas. It was huge!
If you were born in the 1970s, you probably learned this piece of history from Schoolhouse Rock.
In 1804, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned an
expedition to explore this territory. The explorers were called the Corps of
Discovery and they were led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Jefferson
wanted to map this new territory and find a water route to the Pacific Ocean.
This would secure the United States’ claim on the Louisiana Territory and also
give America claim to lands on the Pacific coast that weren’t part of the land
purchased from France.
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
Lewis and Clark began this expedition just north of St.
Louis. They built boats and paddled upstream along the Missouri River. They
figured, quite simply, that they would find the origin of that river, carry
their boats over dry land a short way, and then find another river, perhaps the
Columbia River, and float all the way to the Pacific. They were wrong! Lewis
and Clark believed, “like everyone else before them, that the unexplored west
was exactly the same geography as the familiar east.”[1]
Lewis and Clark expected to find rolling hills, or maybe
low mountains like the Alleghenies; they found themselves face-to-face with the
Rocky Mountains. They had canoes. They had never seen anything like the Rockies
before. Bolsinger believes that this is the same challenge that the Church
faces in the post-Christendom world. We are in uncharted territory and we don’t
know how to function as the Church when our familiar solutions are no longer
effective.
Right now, you’re probably thinking, “that’s really
interesting, Pastor Alan, but what does this have to do with this morning’s
Gospel lesson?”
Jesus is the in breaking of God’s kingdom, the kingdom of
heaven, come to Earth. God enters the world in the person of Jesus to remake
and recreate the world. To do this, the structures of the world must be
subverted. The might of the Roman Empire was not met with a sword, it was met
with a savior.
A savior who calls the people to repent.
A savior who challenges established religious leaders and
practices.
A savior who leads through personal relationships.
A savior who teaches through strange stories; through
parables that are not always straightforward or easy to understand:
The parables… rouse our
creativity from the patterns imposed by normal expectations, especially
religious ones. Jesus’ parables make us consider life and our place in it
differently. They make us dream of outcasts getting seats at lavish banquets,
and the trouble this can cause.[2]
We certainly have some curious parables in this morning’s
lesson from the Gospel of Matthew. I find the parables of the mustard seed and
the yeast are both rather stunning, even subversive. The mustard seed, as the
parable tells us, is a tiny seed that can grow into a big plant. In fact, that
plant is an invasive species. It will take over a productive field and make it
unproductive.
Think about that for a moment. Jesus is preaching to people
whose lives are tied to the land. If you don’t grow enough food, you don’t eat.
It’s that simple. So, Jesus is saying that the Kingdom of God is like an
invasive plant that will take over a productive field and render it unfit to
grow the crops that sustain life. Wait! What?!? What is Jesus talking about?
Parable of the Mustard Seed
And when we think of yeast, we think of an ingredient that
makes bread rise; we think of it as something that makes the finished product
better. We’re missing some of the meaning. The Greek word for mixed actually
suggests that the woman hid the yeast
in the flour. The yeast actually corrupts the flour—it’s no longer kosher.
Also, three measures of flour are about fifty pounds, but it only takes a
little bit of yeast to corrupt all that flour. That’s what the kingdom of
heaven is like. How is that good?
By Jesus’ time, the Roman Empire was the greatest power the
world had ever seen; its dominance was unquestionable. The religious
authorities in Jerusalem decided it was best to cooperate with the Romans, even
if the Jewish people suffered, at least the Romans wouldn’t crush them with the
might of the legions. Instead of leading a revolt, Jesus calls for people to
repent—to change their ways—and he tells them these stories of subversion.
The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, an invasive
plant.
The kingdom of heaven is like a little bit of yeast, hidden
away inside of fifty pounds of flour.
These are images of corruption and subversion. The kingdom
of heaven is so great that it will subvert the mightiest structures in the
world; it will change the reality and bring down structures that most people
think are indestructible. And yet, if we look at the history of the Church,
this is exactly what happened. Christianity began as a movement within Judaism.
Then it became a distinct religion and it was officially persecuted by the
Roman Empire. And then it became the official religion of the Empire. And
Christendom became the thing that nobody thought would ever change.
In his earthly ministry, Jesus came to God’s chosen people,
Israel. Jesus came with a message of repentance, a message of change. Through
that change, the world could be remade into the world as God would have it—even
though it seemed like the powers of the world were too great to overcome.
It seems to me that this is our challenge, too. The world
around us changed. As I pointed out last Sunday, none of us have been trained
to operate in this new, post-Christendom reality. This wasn’t what any of us
expected; we’re like Lewis and Clark, confronted with the reality of the Rocky
Mountains, and we’re busy carrying our canoes.
When Lewis and Clark saw the Rockies, they had three
options. First, they could stay there on the western edge of the great plains,
wring their hands, and say, “we’re not prepared for this new challenge!” But
that wasn’t really an option. Realistically, they could have turned around and
said to Jefferson, “the mountains were too tall and we weren’t equipped to
cross them,” and perhaps another expedition would have been sent out, one that was
prepared for a different reality. Instead, the expedition continued moving
westward. The men of the Corps of Discovery adapted to their new environment
and moved on.
To adapt in our post-Christendom reality, we need to commit
to learning new skills and trying new tasks. This will include easy tasks, like
learning new hymns, but it will also require us to face our fears and work
together in new ways. New leaders must step forward and we must all look for
ways to become more missional and relational.
Now it’s probably not fair for me to uncork two big
buzzwords like missional and relational toward the end of my sermon.
But I think they’re good words and I bet you already have a sense of what they
mean. To be missional is to get outside of these walls and live as the Body of
Christ in the world. To be relational is to enter into partnerships with the
people whom we serve. That is, instead of being a charitable organization that
does things for other people, we must
be a missional congregation that does things with the people outside of the church, as partners in God’s work of
recreating the world and building the Kingdom of God. May the Holy Spirit guide
us as we enter into this new space. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Benediction
Now, beloved, as you depart from this place, remember that
we are called to be the Church, the body of Christ in the world. Go forth and
be instruments of God’s love and peace and reconciliation. Do not return evil
for evil to any person, but know that we are all loved by God, and that we are
called to reflect that love to everyone we meet. Go forth and be the salt of
the earth and the light of the world. Go forth and gather in fish of every kind.
In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, let all God’s children say, Amen!
[1] Tod
Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains:
Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books
(2015), p. 13.
[2]
Matthew L. Skinner, “The Parables: Understanding Jesus’ Strange Good News,”
retrieved from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-l-skinner/good-but-really-strange-n_b_826226.html
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