Pastor Peg's Sermon on Mark 4:26-34  Second Sunday of Pentecost

It is good to be back among you after several weeks in Sweden visiting relatives! And we are finally back on California time!  We spent much of our time visiting my Swedish relatives who received us with heartwarming hospitality and friendship for which we are so very grateful.  My relatives there include a young doctor and her family; a retired University of Gothenberg professor who served as an advisor to the United Nations Development Program for Disabled People in Africa and Asia whose wife is Botswanan; and three elderly siblings: Elna, Inge and Ingevar, who still live on the old family farm!

Also important in our journey was visiting the churches.  We had known that attendance at worship in European countries is even lower than in the United States – especially in the Scandinavian countries where the church has been supported by the government.  But a few years ago the Swedish Parliament voted to discontinue the State religion practice with the Lutheran church.   Taxes are still gathered for churches, but people can now choose where they want their church tax to go.  Rather than this change being seen as a bad thing, many see it as a breath of the Spirit.  Some are beginning to invest anew in church life because they want church to be ministry not a museum.  

And it is humble – the churches struggle, even as churches struggle in the US , but on Pentecost in Gothenberg, there were young faces – even teenagers in worship. They too wore red and celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit.  And they are working to make their massive state-built Lutheran cathedrals user friendly.  I delighted in some of the ways they are making their large sanctuaries welcoming, especially to children. 

I was also pleased to see their work with the Lutheran World Federation.  This brochure could have been of our Synod with its pictures of outreach to Africa – the difference being this is in Swedish.  The one sign I can read says Lutheran World Federation. 

My reflection on this was fed by the book I read during the waiting hours at airports and on planes: Douglas John Hall’s The Cross in our Context.  Hall explains that in the early years of Christianity people were preoccupied with the crisis of death. Plagues abounded.  People died young.  Christian faith assured fearful people God that would meet them in death with eternal life.  We rejoice in that promise today, but the crisis of death is not a primary preoccupation in Europe , the US or Canada where life is not in daily peril.  

After the Middle Ages, Hall suggests the crisis sifted from death to guilt.  God was seen as a demanding God who exacted much. Luther spearheaded a changed view – from a God of judgment to a God of grace.  The church’s focus became freeing people from the fear of an angry God and the crisis over guilt.  Today, we still need forgiveness and grace, but the crisis of guilt rarely brings people to faith.  Our contemporary world is not so disturbed – some barely recognize – the realities of sin and the need of salvation.   

Finally, Hall offers that the overarching crisis today is neither death nor sin, but a crisis of meaninglessness.  With longer lives and so many opportunities in the West and in Europe a dominate question is, “What am I here for?”  “What is the meaning of my life?”  There is a hunger to be a part of something larger than ourselves that captures our imagination.

What we saw in the Swedish churches and what we are seeking to be about here at Faith Lutheran, is to touch into this hunger – this yearning not just to be entertained or to gather the most toys (though those are not all bad).  Entertainment is good and has a healthy role in life, but if that’s all there is it doesn’t go deep enough for our real yearnings.  The Gospel message calls us also to lives of service and love – reaching beyond ourselves to the world God loves.  We are created to enjoy God, says the Westminster Catechism, but also to be vessels through which God’s glory shines on the world. 

As the pastor in Gothenberg said in his Pentecost sermon: (which I got a copy of in Swedish and had one of my relatives translate for me), we are meant not to be building towers to help us reach God, but rather to be building houses here – to witness to God’s love for the world.  I’m excited to be a part of a church that wants to be about such mission – being vessels for God’s shining – wherever God calls us to shine. 

And, the theology of the cross teaches us – as we see in the life of Jesus – that God doesn’t usually call us to where the world might think it logical to go.  Jesus attended to lepers and children, to the poor and the outcast.  The world may not understand our connection to a mission in Mexico .  But Jesus understands.  And we welcome back all those who spent two weeks helping at the Santa Marta Mission.  Your work is part of God’s larger work of love.

Jesus also understands the call to cooking meals for the Torres Homeless Shelter here in Chico .  And I understand there are 8 nights out of the month that do not have sponsors.  What’s to keep us, as a congregation, from cooking another night a month?  We cook now every fourth Monday of the month.  To take on another dinner would mean doubling our participation and our monetary support.  Can we do it?  It might mean giving a night of our already overly busy lives. But it might be a most meaningful thing to do.   

I think Jesus also understands our connection with Pastor Elidard and the people of the Lutheran Synod of Rwanda.  It is far away, and it is going to take Bishop Mullen and his delegation about 29 hours (including layovers) to get there and back.  If I thought jet lag from Sweden was difficult!   How blessed I was the other day by the comment that this might be one of the most important things we can do – become a global congregation where it’s not us over here and them over there – but they are us and we are them.  

This is living out the theology of the cross which we saw lived out by Jesus.  It’s also what Mark is speaking of in today’s parable of the mustard seed.  It’s not a palm or cedar tree to which Jesus likens the kingdom of God .  Jesus says the reign of God is like a mustard bush – a shrub that lives close to the ground and close to the people – and sometimes even irritates the people with its pollens and blossoms.  When describing God’s ways among us, Jesus pointed to a mustard shrub, not a grand oak tree.

I am grateful to be a part of a church that understands the importance of prayer and Bible Study and worship not as ends in themselves, but as ways of nurturing lively connection with the movements of the Holy Spirit.  We pray not just to tell God what we need, but also to listen to God and let God’s love be formed in us.  Prayer makes us new.

Bible Study is important too, not just so we’ll know the Bible, but even more radically so the Bible will be in us, guiding us, shaping us into God’s faithful people.  To try to be about social action in the world without prayer and Bible Study is to limit our action to what we want to do rather than allowing us to be an extension of God’s unexpected, extra-ordinary heart of love.

And worship is the heart of our life together.  It is when we worship well that we begin to breathe most fully into what really matters – that Christ is raised and dies no more and that we can participate in this risen life even now.  Church Historian, Jaroslav Pelikan, died a month ago.  Martin Marty wrote about him in a recent Christian Century saying that he was told that at the end of Pelikan’s life he said something like: “If Christ is risen, nothing else matters.  If Christ is not risen, nothing else matters.” 

We are here today to re-enact the drama of Christ’s risen presence.  What we do together here matters because it forms a habit in us of drawing our life from Christ, the source of true life.  And the risen Christ is on the look out for people who will carry on his risen life in the world.  It is a mustard seed mission of being in the midst of the lowly and suffering of the world – even if it makes us sneeze and wheeze and whine a bit.  But the joy of the Lord is our motivation!  Where Christ is, there is no better place to be!

In closing, Reg and I want to make a presentation.  One of the many surprises on our trip was arriving at our final destination and finding a huge – 30 feet by 30 feet picture of the hand of Jesus on the side of the Van Gogh Museum .  I recognized the painting – a favorite of mine for many years.  It’s the Emmaus Supper by Caravaggio. 

It seemed half of Europe was flocking to see this exhibit comparing Caravaggio with Rembrandt.  And when you purchased things from the book store you walked out with a picture of the hand of Jesus on the bag.  Secular Europe was carrying around Jesus without knowing it.  God has God’s ways of getting under our skin.  Reg and I wanted us to have a visual reminder of this hand of Jesus who invites us to follow him.  Come see it in our Parish Hall.  May it encourage us in our journey of following Jesus’ risen presence in the world!    

                                                                                   Amen.

+Pastor Peg Schultz-Akerson, to the glory of God
Faith Lutheran Church, Chico, California