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The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost
O Lord, we beseech thee, make us to have a perpetual fear and love of thy holy Name, for thou never failest to help and govern those whom thou hast set upon the sure foundation of thy loving-kindness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Proper 7)
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The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Ezekiel 17:22-24; Mark 4:26-34
A Sermon by
The Rev. Canon Carl Turner
on
Ezekiel 17:22-24; Mark 4:26-34
✛
Small is beautiful.
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Ernesto, the church gardener, wanted to find a job for his friend Kamal, who was unemployed, but he knew that the priest was very strict on one point: All the staff at the church had to be Episcopalian. Unfortunately, Kamal was not an Episcopalian. So, Ernesto has an idea;
“Kamal, let’s say you converted several years ago to our religion.”
“That’s nice,” said Kamal, “but I don’t know anything about the Episcopal Church.”
“Don’t worry,” said Ernesto, “the Rector always asks the same questions, so I’ll mark the answers on the lawn mower, so you can just read them!”
Kamal was hired. On the first day, while he was mowing the lawn, the Rector approached him:
“Ah! So you the new gardener? Are you an Episcopalian?”
“Yes sir,” said Kamal, “I converted.”
“Good, good!” said the Rector. “Do you know what the mother of Jesus was called?”
Kamal leaned over the mower and said, “Why, Mary!”
“And the father of Jesus?”
Kamal looked back at the mower and said, “Joseph!”
“Excellent!” said the Rector. “Could you give me the names of the two thieves who were crucified on either side of Jesus?”
Kamal leaned back over the lawn mower, raised his head with a big smile and said, “Of course! Black and Decker!”
Do you know what was the most popular television program during the pandemic lockdown in 2020? You might think it was Fox News or CNN News or the news on MSNBC. In actual fact it was BBC Gardeners’ World! Yes, it seems that American couldn’t get enough of watching gardening during the lockdown. I have to say, I still watch it every week. At the moment, one of the presenters is showing us how to stock a whole garden for free by sowing seeds and, last week, by taking cuttings. Now, there are correct ways and unsuccessful ways to take cuttings, and first lesson today, from the prophecy of Ezekiel, written during the exile in Babylon, starts with a gardening tip that is quite correct. Ezekiel knew that a woody cutting from a cedar tree would not grow. Instead, it needed to be a fresh, green, tender young shoot. That shoot, said Ezekiel, would become a huge tree in which birds would make their nests. Similarly, in the Gospel reading today, Jesus compared the Kingdom of God to a tiny mustard seed that will grow into a huge shrub in which the birds will also make their homes.
Jesus regularly used smallness to describe the greatness of God’s power.
They say that small is beautiful. Well, it was actually British economist E. F. Schumacher who used a favourite phrase of his teacher when he published a set of essays in the early 1970’s – “Small is beautiful – economics as if people mattered”. For 20 years he worked as economic advisor to the UK National Coal Board which may give us an insight into why he began to think a lot about the de-humanizing aspects of work only valued by measuring outputs and excessive profit for the few. Schumacher proposed the idea of “smallness within bigness” – a specific form of decentralization. According to his theory, for a large organization to work it must behave like a related group of small organizations.
That is also true of the Church. As we heard in today’s Gospel, it is important to discover this truth. Jesus revealed this in many other ways too; by setting a child in the midst of his disciples who were arguing about greatness; by washing his disciples’ feet; by carrying his own cross.
So, Jesus said “The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs.”
Commenting in the Guardian newspaper a few years ago, Madeleine Bunting recalled Schumacher’s ideals but reflected on it in relation to the domination of globalisation over economic and political policy.
It is true that some businesses have tried to ‘be small’ in a big world – Body Shop, even Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream – there are lots of examples of ‘small is beautiful’ but, sadly, many more examples of small businesses being gobbled up by larger ones who even use the term for their own ends. Bunting writes: “Small became cool but only as part of a branding strategy which masked the ongoing concentration of political and economic power. Gigantism has triumphed.” (The Guardian Thursday 10 November 2011).
Years later, and this seems even more true. We are living in an age when, once again, bigger is better; power means everything; and conformity the norm.
But the mustard seed is small – and Jesus deliberately chooses an example that reminds his hearers of his own poverty rather than his own greatness. We must also remember that, in the bible, the opposite of poverty is not riches but, rather, power; and it is the use and abuse of power that still causes misery, war, genocide and the perpetuation of poverty. The Church, grown from the mustard seed which could also be a symbol of the love of God in Jesus Christ sometimes seems to bear little relation to that from which it originated. Of course, the Church is not the same as the kingdom of God – but is part of its emergence.
Small is beautiful – and that means getting back to the heart of what our faith is about. As God the creative Word made himself small in the tiny space that was Mary’s womb, so we are also called to be small first; humble first; in order to discover true greatness.
My dear friends, Jesus has planted within us that seed of his love. Remember another gardening fact; the tiny seed contains within itself everything required for it to become something quite remarkable and beautiful. The seed that is the Lord’s love can only grow to full maturity if we allow ourselves to be rooted in him and not in others, and certainly not by living up to other people’s expectations or assumptions. It means that all that we do and especially the small things, are done with love and generosity at their heart – done differently to the world would have them done.
It was Mother Teresa of Calcutta who used to talk about the Gospel on five fingers: reflecting on Chapter 25 of Matthew’s Gospel, and the parable of the sheep and the goats, she would hold up her hand and remember the words of the King – the words of Jesus when the righteous were puzzled as to why they were being praised for good works that they did not remember even doing: “You – did – it – to – me.”
Perhaps that is why she also said that not everyone can do great things, but we can all do small things with great love.
Doing the small things beautifully and doing them out of love can be transformative; it reminds us of the tiny, tender cedar tree cutting, or the smallest of mustard seeds.
Someone once asked Mother Teresa, “Aren’t you just doing social work?” And Mother Teresa replied in this way:
Because we cannot see Christ, we cannot express our love to him, but our neighbors we can always see, and we can do to them what if we saw him we would like to do to Christ and that is where the love and the devotion come in, that we do it to Christ and that is why we try to do it as beautifully as possible. It is the same contact that we have in the mass – there we have Jesus in the appearance of bread, but here in the slums, in the broken body, in the children, we see Christ and we touch him. (From ‘Something beautiful for God’)
