1 Samuel 15:34-16:13
Psalm 20
2 Corinthians 5:6-10, 14-17
Mark 4:26-34
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen
[1]Storytelling of any sort, amusing anecdotes or tragic tales, is an unrepeatable art form. The variety of people listening, the inflections in voice, the mood of the day, the color of the sky—they all combine to create a one-time-only atmosphere for the spoken word. A story may bring a tear or a smile at one telling, and yet, the very next listener experiences the same words in a completely different way.
Mark’s gospel tells us that Jesus chose to speak in parables. Some people find that very annoying. Why didn’t Jesus come right out and say what he meant? Why did he leave behind all these cryptic sayings, loaded with innuendo, destined to be interpreted and reinterpreted, instead of a crisp code of laws or a stack of essays with titles like “How to Be a Good Disciple,” “A Brief Definition of the Kingdom of God” or “Seven Key Features of the Coming Kingdom and What This Means to You.”
Instead we have this culturally ancient, cross-eyed, cryptic, incomplete, awkward, and at times seemingly absurd yet eternally true collection of sayings known as Jesus’ parables.
A list of rules never changes, never adapts. Written essays are like insects encased in amber—beautiful and precisely formed, but no longer vital and alive. According to pastor and author Barbara Brown Taylor, even sermons, the Word of God proclaimed, have the shelf life of homemade mayonnaise.[2] It takes the fluid format of a story—a tale that can never quite be told the same way twice—to keep breathing mysterious and glorious new life into the Good News.
If you still think Jesus would have gotten his points across better with hard and fast rules, I ask you to try remembering the last time you sat down and really enjoyed reading Leviticus or the first few chapters of Numbers.
Consider this; if the hard and fast rules and customs of family status and inheritance were followed in our reading from the Old Testament, the Call of David would never have happened. If Samuel had just anointed the eldest son as tradition dictated, Jesse’s eldest, the boy whose name means “God is Father,” Eliab[3], would have become king. Instead, the Lord is in charge and Samuel follows. He anoints the eighth and youngest son of Jesse. The rules were broken, but it worked out pretty well in this case.
Despite these shortcomings, people still try to develop rules based on scripture. Only now we call them creeds, catechisms, and confessions. The earliest forms of the earliest of the confession, The Apostles’ Creed, were spawned about 150 years after the death and resurrection of Christ while the most recent of the particularly Presbyterian Creeds, A Brief Statement of Faith, isn’t even thirty years old.[4] From the first to the twenty-first century, we never really change how we try to replace mystery and glory with interpretation and legalism.
Without the easy ability Jesus’ parables have to engage us and entice us into their world, even God’s Word becomes a hard read. How these stories which are foreign to our lives become the fabric of our earthly life and heavenly salvation is wonderful and glorious.
But the process of how these stories are still vital 2,000 years after they were first told, with their many interpretations, is far more illusive and mysterious than hard and fast rules.
We come to know that by preaching to his followers in parables, Jesus lets us make the Good News become our own story, our own experience. As we are swept up in the story, we ourselves become part of a new parable—the parable of our lives. Taken all together, our individual experiences of the kingdom, our personal stories of God’s work and witness in our lives, end up creating a new gospel.
We are mistaken if we think our tradition stems from only the four gospels of the scriptural canon. As well as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; the church has two millennia of other gospels to celebrate; the books of Augustine and Aquinas, Luther and Calvin, Bonhoeffer and Barth. These “gospels” have become vital parts of our tradition because of their eternal reliance on the power of God and the reconciling work of Christ.
There are still other gospels that may not be quite so well-known, but have tremendous influence in our lives in this part of the body of Christ. We must remember that the personal parable stories that make up “The Gospel According to Grandma;” or “The Gospel of Pastor Mark, the Reverend Doctor Hal, and Pastor Pam;” or “The Gospel According to That Kid at Camp Whose Name I Can’t Even Remember;” have affected our lives dramatically.
All of us are in the process of writing our own gospels—our own accounts of experiencing the Good News of the coming kingdom in our midst. Writing a gospel through the very act of living is part of being a disciple of Christ. Sharing our gospel through the very act of living is also part of being a disciple of Christ. It is why Jesus gave the power of the parable to all those listening to his words. Storytelling is one of the most basic practices common to all human communities.
Stories connect us to one another, to our ancestors, to our world and to our Lord. In this week’s gospel text, Mark notes that when Jesus spoke to the crowds around him, he “spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables.” Jesus knew that only parables had the ability to make the Good News of the kingdom a potent reality for every listening ear.
The mystery of how this works is glorious. People want proofs, rules, and standards; and Jesus gives us parables. William Sloane Coffin, creating a godly monologue, shared these words in a 1980 Advent sermon:
These creatures of mine are very clever. They are always looking for evidence to make intelligently selfish decisions. That’s why their evangelists, instead of the freedom they need, give them all the proofs they want. I have told these evangelists there are no proofs for my existence, only witnesses. Nevertheless they go on proving one ineffable mystery after another with all the ardor of orthodoxy stamping out heresy. But I am the Lord God, and will not seek to overcome selfishness by appealing to selfish motives. So, as the prophet promised, I will send my people a son. I will seek to captivate their hearts, not conquer them. I will seek to open their minds, not crack their skulls. They, of course, will continue to fight me as they always have, but the contest between us will not be one of power—only of endurance. I will show them that true conquerors are not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most. I will show them that love never ends.[5]
Demonstrating this power of witness, Andrew Young, former American ambassador to the United Nations, tells this story,[6] this parable of power, grace, and reconciliation; about an experience he had in South Africa when he was visiting at the invitation of Nelson Mandela. For years Mandela was a leading opponent of apartheid, South Africa’s official policy of racial segregation. In 1964, the white establishment locked him up for life. But as his legend grew, so did the worldwide campaign to set him free. He was released in 1990. When apartheid was abolished, and South Africa held its first democratic elections in the spring of 1994, Nelson Mandela was elected president.
Thirteen months later, Mandela invited Andy Young to be his guest when South Africa hosted the Rugby World Cup Tournament. Now rugby is a white man’s game. The South African team, like most rugby teams, is entirely white. And South Africa is about 80 percent black. So, even though the world championship was being played right there in Johannesburg, there was a deliberate absence of support for the team.
As the tournament approached, a heated debate broke out about the South African team symbol -- a leaping gazelle called a “springbok.” Most of the white Afrikaners said, “The springbok has been the symbol of every rugby team we’ve ever had.” Most black South Africans said, “Exactly! It reminds us of South Africa’s racist history, and we want it changed.” It was an explosive situation.
Now, Nelson Mandela has impeccable political sensibilities. More importantly, he understands the saving power of grace. A few days before the opening game, Mandela visited the South African team. After the visit, he called a press conference. Mandela showed up wearing a rugby jersey and an athletic cap with the team mascot, a springbok, on it. The newspaper and TV reporters were there and recorded it all. Mandela said that until the elections, he and most other black people in South Africa had always supported whoever was playing against the Springboks. “But regardless of the past,” he said, “these are our boys now. They may all be white, but they’re our boys, and we must get behind them and support them in this tournament.”
The next day, the Springboks’ coach sent word for his players not to show up in their practice gear. He told them to wear their suits and ties. He took them out to Robben Island, to the prison where Nelson Mandela had spent nearly three decades of his life behind bars. The coach and every player on the team walked into Mandela’s cell.
As they stood there, the coach said, “This is the cell where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned. He was kept here for 27 years by the racist policies of our government. We Afrikaners tolerated his imprisonment for all those years, and yet he has backed us publicly. We can’t let him down.”
The tournament opened, and the Springboks played above their heads. To everyone’s surprise, they won their first game. In fact, they made it into the final game against New Zealand, a perennial power in rugby. It was like Arkansas State playing USC. And yet, at the end of regulation, the game was tied.
President Mandela was in the stands, wearing a Springbok jersey. During the timeout, he brought a South African children’s choir out of the stands. They sang an old African miners’ song which to them is sort of like Swing Low, Sweet Chariot was to the slaves in this country. Within minutes, 65,000 people in the stadium were standing and singing this black African miners’ song. Andy said, “I don’t know anything about rugby, and I don’t understand the words of the song, but I was in tears.”
When the Springboks took the field, they were unstoppable. They won the World Rugby Championship. And for the next 24 hours, whites danced with blacks in the streets of South Africa. One of the most divided nations on the planet was united by something some people consider insignificant—a rugby match. But God used it to help heal a nation.
What was in the minds of black South Africans when they saw Nelson Mandela take the podium in a Springbok jersey and cap? What was in the minds of the Springboks when they were standing in Mandela’s cell? We may never know. That is the mystery of this story is how these two earthly symbols of division became symbols of racial reconciliation.
The story begins with the work of reconciliation between God and all creation begun by our Lord Jesus Christ. It is extended by a man who was a prisoner of national sin for twenty-seven years; and a prisoner of Afrikaner culture long before his incarceration. It is received by a grateful nation. It is celebrated by dancing in the streets.
What is it about games that can make us the best people we can be, physically and spiritually? How is it that the stories of a Jewish carpenter recorded so long ago resonate so clearly now? How is it that God walked the earth as we do still today? If I knew, that would be the end of the mystery, wouldn’t it?
[1] This is an edited version of this sermon idea from HomileticsOnline.com, http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/btl_display.asp?installment_id=2711, retrieved June 8, 2009.
[2] Reported by Sallie Watson in the Presbytery of Arkansas newsletter, June 2009, link found at http://presbyteryofarkansas.org/frmNewsletter.aspx, retrieved June 9, 2009.
[3] Brown, F.. Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, The. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2001, page 45.
[4] PC (USA) Office of the General Assembly, “The Book of Confessions, Study Edition.” Louisville: Geneva Press, 1996.
[5] Coffin, William Sloane, The Collected Sermons of William Sloane Coffin, The Riverside Years, Vol. 1, Louisville, Westminster-John Knox Press, 2008, page 387.
[6] As told by Bishop Bevel Jones in a sermon before the 1996 United Methodist General Conference in Denver, HomileticsOnline.com, http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/illustrations_for_installment.asp?installment_id=2711, retrieved June 8, 2009.
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