Andrew Boyle               Pentecost 2                          14 June 2009

1 Samuel 15. 34 – 16. 13   Mark 4. 26-34

Are you one of those people who often doesn’t understand the punch line of a joke – and unwittingly asks for the joke to be explained; only to become
the butt of the next joke. Do not fear; because while we continue to tell the parables of Jesus, and people have continued to do so for 2000 years,
most of us don’t really get them. They defy understanding -  at least with our rational minds. But they do continue to attract us and provoke us and
unsettle us; giving us some sense of the life of God in our midst.

As those who seek to conclusively prove or disprove the existence of God engage in a futile task so those who wish to pin down what a parable means
are the ones for whom a parable will never disclose its meaning.

The parables of Jesus, many of them very brief, sometimes just one-liners, are what some scholars consider to be the most original words of Jesus.
Because we know that the four gospels were written between 40 and 70 years after Jesus’ death, and given people’s short life-span in the first century,
we know that the gospels are not first hand accounts of what Jesus did and said; rather they are theological narratives about Jesus.
But the most common thread in Matthew, Mark and Luke are the parables. They also appear in much the same form in the Gospel of Thomas,
discovered only about 60 years ago; a gospel which is essentially a collection of sayings without a storyline connecting them.

One of the greatest traps of the religious life is the temptation to hunker down in certainty. Maybe this is what the myth in Genesis 2 is seeking to explore
as Adama, the man of dust, and his partner, Eve, eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; trying to sate our desire for certainty.

Well if the parables are the most authentic words of Jesus we can see that at heart Jesus is trying to unsettle people’s certainties about God and the nature
of God’s reign. The kingdom of God is as if: or With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?
There are no words which adequately describe it. Jesus’ suggestion is that we can only use metaphors or similes. And the closest thing we can use to
describe it are things in the natural world, organic things, growing things. We know how they behave; maybe the kingdom of God is like this.

So Jesus suggests the image of a seed. Maybe it’s like something which appears to have no life in it but from which we know life is supposed to come.
So we bury it; with a sense of hope, but with no certainty that it will germinate and grow, and whether there will be enough rain, or too much,
and whether it will survive the birds and the frost and the sun;  and all we can do is leave it alone; but it grows and it thrives and it bears grain which will
sustain. But its life is hidden, unseen and a bit of mystery really. You know that feeling of joy and surprise when seed you have sown sprouts,
or bulbs poke up there heads yet again, or a dormant branches form buds.

Or maybe we could compare the kingdom of God to a mustard seed. Maybe we could compare it to that.  But this parable makes no sense
at all – its images are all over the place. Mustard is not the smallest of seeds; in fact it’s not very small at all; and it doesn’t grow into a shrub;
it’s just a rather messy annual and it certainly doesn’t grow into a tree – a big tree at that. Altogether this parable’s a bit of a muddle.

It appears that mustard was considered to be a weed in Jesus’ time. If it was planted, and certainly it probably was, because it’s an important
ingredient in Middle Eastern cooking, you didn’t plant it in the vegetable garden because when it seeds it spreads its seed everywhere so next season
the whole garden would be infested with it.  But maybe this was what Jesus was trying to say. You sow a little bit of the seed of the kingdom and
you can’t get rid of it; it just keeps on coming up everywhere; growing up amongst all of the other plants; and the birds come and feed on it and it
sustains them; and they like being there.

In the practice of Godly Play, the biblical storytelling method developed by the American Episcopalian priest Jerome Berryman, parables form the bulk
of the stories told. Each story begins with a reminder of the nature of parables. As the parable box, the container for the elements of the story, is placed
in the centre of the group all are reminded that parables are like gold; like presents which have already been given to us and which cannot be taken away.
And as the Godly Play story is told the hearers are invited to wonder about the elements of the story; about how a grain of wheat sown in the ground,
or how a mustard seed, might hint at the nature of the reign of God. No answer is given; no meaning is applied but people are invited to wonder.
The wondering is the gift of the parable. These puzzles are at the heart of what Jesus had to say about the presence of the eternal in the midst of the
temporal; the kairos time in the midst of chronos time.

The trouble is that all of this inconclusiveness and uncertainty runs a bit contrary to the little addition at the end of what we have heard today.  
  Mark tells us that: he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples..
The implication is that the disciples have the knowledge. And by implication: those who will follow them. But when we look at the whole sweep
of the gospel it becomes patently clear that the disciples didn’t understand – repeatedly in Mark especially.

As we reflect on the future of the Uniting Church in Manningham and how the future church may be different from the church we have known
we need to face the question: what might a different church look like. How might a future church connect with where people are? Both those who choose
to be part of the church but also those with whom the church seeks to connect.

The church of the past was a church of clear answers; decrees about what God was like and how we should be. But the essence of the parables;
puzzles about the nature of God and God’s reign is that the answers are not clear – and in fact – if we look at Jesus’ ministry he was far from concerned
about definitive answers. We have lived through a time when the church was pretty much monumental, institutional, monolithic. A pesky mustard seed
asserting itself in the garden doesn’t look like this. Neither does a seed falling to the ground and dying. My sense is that we need to get in touch with the uncertainty, the wondering. We need to begin to be able to see and hear the spirit blowing where it will bringing the life of God into places where people long for healing and wholeness.

I really don’t know what the church of the future will look like. It’s really up to each community of faith to work out their future. To faithfully seek to discern
the work of the spirit in their midst and respond in authentic and passionate ways. We carry the inheritance of a large and well-endowed institution.
But it’s weighing us down at the moment and at time cobbles us.  Sure, more than likely, we can’t get away from our institutional identity.
But we can wear it lightly; being more concerned that the spirit of our church communities reflect the paradox and ambiguity and liveliness of the images
of the reign of God that Jesus gives us in the parables. Where we are responding to these little signs of growth there is the joy and sense that the life
of the divine spirit is present. May God give us the freedom and clarity of vision to follow these things and so find the life of the spirit together in our midst.

Andrew Boyle