A Sermon Delivered by Rev. Marlin Lavanhar, Senior Minister
At All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, OK
on September 9, 2007
Did I ever tell you I used to be a cartoonist? When I lived in Japan in the early 90’s,
I
had a cartoon strip in an English-language newspaper. I’m telling you this because over the summer
I found myself doodling some cartoons again.
I think it coincided with the sudden death of Tulsa World cartoonist
Doug Marlette, who died in an auto accident a few months ago. I greatly miss his comic strip preacher Rev.
Will B. Dunn from Kudzu.
I started drawing a cartoon for this month's church newsletter
on the theme of vision, but
I
couldn't get it done in time. The
cartoon I was working on had a huge crowd of people walking like zombies toward
a group of tall billboards. The
billboards displayed products like cigarettes and beer and soda pop. What the people couldn't see, as they walked transfixed
by the billboards and their starry promises, was that the billboards were set on
the edge of a cliff. These sleepwalking
people were falling over the edge one after the other, seemingly unaware of
what they were doing. In the foreground
of the drawing was a white church with a tall pointed steeple. My cartoon character could be seen hanging
firmly by one arm off the top of the steeple, staring through a pair of
binoculars over the tops of the billboards, watching what was happening. The caption read: “Got vision?”
The point being, if we don't know who we are and
what’s important to us, and we don’t have a vision of what we want to do with
our lives, and if we don't teach our children to have such vision, there are many
influences out there that would be glad to steer us in the direction of the
visions they want for our lives. I can't remember exactly how many thousands
of advertisements they say each American sees every day and every week of our
lives, but it's a lot. And these
advertisements are created with the expressed intention of getting us to think
or feel that what they're selling is what we need.
And if you think about it, here we are, living in one
of the richest, most powerful nations, in a day and age when we have more
knowledge, more information, and more options than any people have ever had in
the history of humanity. And what do we
find the vast majority of people doing with their unrivaled freedom and
possibility and their one precious life?
Too many are working long hours in unsatisfying jobs to pay off debt
they’ve accumulated buying things that they don't really need. Others are spending their time watching
reality shows on TV. Or getting obsessed
about Britney Spears or Paris Hilton’s latest crisis. Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong
with a little materialism comfort, or watching a bit of mindless TV or taking an
occasional glance at a People magazine.
But when the values presented by these things become central to people’s
lives there is something seriously
wrong.
How is it that so many people in the wealthiest, most
well educated and most free nation in the world are wasting away their lives and
opportunities on meaningless and material things?
In
part, it comes down to a lack of vision.
Without a sense of who we are and what we want and what is important to
us, we are at the whims of others.
The other night, when I heard our guest story-teller
Dan Lemonnier talking about his mother, I was reminded of a man I knew when I
lived in New York,
named Jim. Jim was a short little man in
his late 70s. I remember he wore hearing
aids in both ears. His back was stiff
and he was a little hunched over when he walked. But Jim was one of the most joyful,
passionate men I've ever met. When I
told him I wanted to become a minister, he questioned me, “Is that really what
you want to do?”
I was a little taken aback, but I said, “Yes, I've
given it a lot of thought.” He said “Good! Then you should do it. Don't do what I did. I always wanted to be a teacher, but my
parents made me think that that was an inferior career. They told me I could not make enough money
being a teacher to support a family. So
I followed their idea of who I should be and became an engineer and I was
miserable in my job for almost 30 years.
It wasn't until I was 50,” he explained, “that I decided to finally become
a teacher. And that was the best
decision I've ever made.”
It was clear to me that Jim had found his life’s passion
in teaching. And being around him, and
hearing his stories, I knew that he must have inspired many students to see and
believe in their own passions. Jim may have
been a short little man with short little arms – I doubt his arms were even long
enough to reach the top of the blackboard – but I tell you, they were long
enough to reach into the next generation.
When you and I live in such a way that our reach extends
beyond our own life, and positively touches the future, we know we have made a
life worth living.
The reason I drew my cartoon character hanging from a
church steeple is to show that we must cultivate our inner-life, what we call the
spiritual aspects of who we are, if we are going to rise above the trends and
powerful forces that constantly try to lure us away from what is central and most
important. One thing that church does is
give us a weekly reference point. It
reminds us of what we truly value, while also challenging us to think beyond
conventional wisdom and the norms of culture and society. There are a lot of very seductive forces constantly
singing us back to sleep. And
cultivating our spirit is about being awake.
The problem is, that spirituality and religion can be just as misleading
as other forces. People get lulled to
sleep by religion at least as often as they get lulled to sleep by culture.
One purpose of the parables, and one of the reasons
Jesus used parables, was that they are meant to shock us out of our routines and
make us think in new ways. And so this
month as we talk about vision, we also talk about the parable of the mustard
seed from the Christian Bible.
In the parable, when Jesus is asked, “With what shall
we compare the Kingdom
of God?” he compares it
to a tiny mustard seed. It’s hard for us
today to imagine how radical that was. In
Jesus’ time the notion of the Kingdom
of God on Earth was thought
to be a new era of power and triumph and righteousness in which there would be
universal peace and justice, and God’s chosen people would be at the head of all
the nations. This idea of the Kingdom of God,
or Kingdom of Heaven on Earth as it is also called, was
a vision that was central to the Jewish religion and identity in its time.
However, by the era when Jesus lived, the glory days
of Israel’s
national power were over.
Since
the reign of the great kings like David and Solomon, Israel’s
power and prestige had been in major decline.
The Israelites had been conquered many times and their nation occupied. But there was still a sense that one day a
great Jewish king would arrive in a blaze of glory and usher in the Kingdom of God on Earth. According to Catholic Priest and theologian Thomas
Keating, in order to understand why the parable of the mustard seed was so
subversive when Jesus told it, one needs to know that a common symbol in Jesus’
time, for the Kingdom
of God was the great
Cedar of Lebanon. Keating tells us:
“Cedars
of Lebanon were like the enormous redwood trees of California. The kingdom
of God as a nation would
be the greatest of all nations just as the great cedar of Lebanon was the
greatest of all trees.”
However, Jesus proposed in his parable that the Kingdom of God is really like a mustard seed – described
as the smallest and most insignificant of all seeds – that someone took and
sowed in his garden. A mustard seed produces
a common, fast-spreading plant, which only grows to about four feet in height. Basically, it’s an ordinary bush that grows
like a weed. So, with this parable,
Jesus is ridiculing the image of the Kingdom
of God as a giant towering
Cedar of Lebanon. Instead he is
proposing the Kingdom
of God as something as small
and common as a mustard seed.
Keep in mind that the Israelites’ expectation of the Kingdom of God was that it would come as a final
triumph of God in history, and would be ushered in by a long-awaited messiah in
an apocalyptic fury. In other words, the
Kingdom was a vision of something that would come at some point in the future. But through his parable, Jesus offers us a radically
different vision of the Kingdom
of God. His is not one that comes in the future as a
towering reign of power. Instead, Jesus
teaches of a kingdom that is in the here-and-now. It is a holy kingdom that is made manifest in
small everyday things. In other words, he
tells us that we do not have to wait for an apocalyptic deliverance. That we should not spend our lives waiting
for a great messiah to come and usher in a time of justice and peace, but
rather we need to do some planting every day in our own gardens in our own
lives if such a time will ever come.
According to Father Keating,
“[This
parable] suggests that God's greatest works are not done on a grandiose level. The kingdom is in everyday life with its ups and
downs, and above all, in its insignificance.
The kingdom
of God [even] manifests
itself in modest changes in our attitudes and in little improvements in our
behavior that no one may notice.
These
are the mighty works of God, not great external accomplishments. To what
shall I liken the kingdom
of God? Jesus asked. The kingdom is manifested in ordinary daily
life and how we live it. If we can
[accept such a vision], then we can enjoy the kingdom here and now, without
having to wait for an apocalypse or someone to deliver us from our
difficulties.”
And these are the words of a well-known Catholic
priest!
Just like the teachings of Father Keating, ours is a
religion that takes this life seriously.
A religion that focuses on what you and I can do, here and now. Every time we choose kindness,
every
time we choose to love, every time we choose hope and generosity,
we are building the Kingdom
of Heaven on Earth. And if you can catch that vision – welcome home!
Amen.