George Hermanson

Wide Open Hearts

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
June 24, 2012
Dominion Chalmers United Church
2 Corinthians 6: 1-13 The Rev. Suzanne E. Sykes
Psalm 9 (VU p.732-733) suzanne@stoneisland.ca
Mark 4: 35-41
Wide Open Hearts
For three summers when I was young my father rented a cruiser to take us down the Trent-
Severn and Rideau Canals. My parents loved boating and they thought their children should
experience a bit of Ontario’s - and Canada’s - unique history and heritage. We did a different
section each year. Those trips were spectacular. I remember them with great fondness. And
some of the parts I remember best are the times when it wasn’t smooth sailing.
As we crossed Georgian Bay on a particularly windy, stormy day, my sister and I were standing
in the bow, using the deck as a springboard. As the boat rose over a 10 foot high swell we
jumped right as it crested, getting a little extra lift and feeling the force of the wind against our
bodies - it felt like flying. I can still hear my mother’s voice, “Donald! Make those girls come
inside!” My father’s nonchalant response? “They have their life jackets on.”

On Friday night at the Jazz Festival, we were treated to great jazz by the Fellowship band.
Their name is no accident - their set was like being in a church service - a great worship service
that followed the cadence, the rhythm of liturgy. The opening piece started quietly then grew
in intensity and volume until the saxes were screaming and you felt sure that something or
someone would break. It drove a few people out of the park. But if you could stay with it and
wait you heard the calm musical answer to that frightful, fearful noise. To me it was a call to
worship. My soul cries out to God - and God answers.

So, if you have sense of the sound of wailing saxophones and a picture of stormy Georgian Bay
in your mind’s eye you can hear and see the problem that the disciples had all those years ago.
Their small boat is being slammed around in the swells, tossed this way and that. The howling
wind is deafening. Waves are crashing over the bow. And where is Jesus? Sound asleep in the
stern. No wonder the disciples were a little perturbed. How can anyone sleep at a time like
this?
When the disciples, quite rightly, point out that it looks like Jesus doesn’t care that they all
might capsize and drown, Jesus response, like my father’s, seems less than sympathetic. In
some ways, “have you no faith” is a little like saying “they’ve got their lifejackets on”.
In each case the speaker seems, at least from the questioners point of view, not to have fully
grasped the seriousness, the truly dangerous nature of the situation. Neither response seems
to come from the same place of concern and worry and genuine fear that the question did. It
just doesn’t seem to match up. It leaves us with what is called in psychology - cognitive
dissonance.
Paul in his letter to the Corinthians creates his own kind of cognitive dissonance. He speaks of
the trouble he has experienced as a distributor of the good news - the gospel. And its quite an
extensive list: endurance, afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots,
labours, sleepless nights, hunger.

I think it is reasonable to think that anyone who experienced this as a regular thing would be
entitled to be hesitant, cautious, even afraid. That would be only prudent. Yet what is Paul’s
response? Does it make any sense? Does it seem wise? Is it the response of someone who
has a good grasp of the situation? No, that is not the case at all. Paul greets all threats and
dangers in a spirit of calm welcome - as he says - by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness,
holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech and all the power of God.
Cognitive dissonance. The response does not match up with the real peril in the situations he
frequently finds himself in. So what is Paul’s perspective?

It is the perspective of faith. Faith meaning that since Paul is a member of the kingdom of God
he doesn’t have to sweat the small stuff - and for him, all of these hardships are small stuff. Paul
already lives in the realm of God’s shalom, the reign of God’s peace and justice so he doesn’t
worry about what life throws at him. He frequently claims in his letters that although he is
Jewish by birth and a Roman by citizenship, his true identity is as a subject in God’s realm,
God’s commonwealth of peace and justice and abundance.

From that perspective - the perspective of everlasting goodness and beauty and abundance -
what obstacle can the world throw at him that he cannot meet with grace, patience, genuine
interest and welcome? Being a citizen in God’s kingdom frees Paul to greet the world and
everything and everyone in it with a wide open heart.

We too are citizens in God’s kingdom, God’s paradise. It’s not somewhere we hope to enter
when we die. We live in God’s kingdom now. We became members at our baptism. Like
Paul, we already live in God’s realm. And with Paul, we too are called to greet the world and
everyone and everything in it with grace and patience, genuine interest and above all, wide open
hearts.

Like my father on that stormy day, we too are called to greet whatever life throws at us with
abandon. I will always be grateful that he did not let fear and worry prevail. He met that storm
head on with exuberance and zest and he taught his daughters to do the same. He encouraged
us to ride it out - literally - like a bucking bronco - and revel in it while it lasted.
It’s what the Fellowship band was telling us musically, on Friday. Persevere through the
auditory dissonance and you will hear the still small voice of God. And it’s what Paul tells the
Corinthians. Don’t worry about what life dishes out, he reminds us. Don’t let that define you.
For we are defined by the love of a gracious God. We are defined by our relationship with
God. We are defined by an open heart that welcomes and invites everyone we meet into this
same relation of abundant life. We are freed to meet what life brings with abandon and zest,
no matter what. We don’t have to be afraid of the storm. We can leap and dance in time to
the wind and the waves with wide open hearts. Amen.

Mustard Seed

June 17, 2012        Mustard Seed                   George Hermanson
Mark 4: 26 - 34     ST. PAUL'S-EASTERN UNITED CHURCH


I love these parables.  The hearing of them makes us scratch our heads.  Ask, what is going on?  If we pay attention they stop us in our tracks and makes us examine our taken for granted views about life.  They ask of us periods of self-reflection and self-criticism. Now such a stance is not always welcomed in our culture.  We prefer to be left alone, warmed by our beliefs  that reinforce the status quo of privilege  We don’t probe too deeply the taken for granted of “this is natural” or “how things are”  or “given” .

As a teaching method, the parables were used by Jesus to challenge the taken for granted nature of how we see the world.  They asked us to see life as a relational reality, to reject purely instrumental views of life.  They caught the listener in mid stride and say “take another look”, probe your views.  They say the kingdom of God is like - and all prior understandings of how things are, be they religious or secular are questioned.  In the questioning we see all the ways we organize our personal and social lives and they demand justification in the competing market of values.  How does what we do value up life?  Help us attain the common good rather than what is the good for my group?

The responses to the parables was, and is , this cannot be.  This is not our conventional view of God or nature or reality. They give a different picture which then shakes our foundations so a novel experience can slide in... in them we actual are opened to the experience of the living God, in this moment, in this now.

Take the mustard seed for one.  It appears like another story about weeds.  Like weeds the mustard seed silently takes over and becomes dominate. Pliny the Elder, a first century Roman scholar who wrote 37 books on natural history and died in 79 AD while investigating the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, had this to say about mustard:  It grows entirely wild, though it is improved by being transplanted: but on the other hand when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once.

That does not fit well with our control needs, so over time we have spoken about having faith - small seeds lead to big outcomes.  That view is only part of the story, for it is not about us, but about God.  The aim of God is sometimes hidden and is at work unseen, and it springs out in unexpected places. It is to have eyes of faith to see the activity of God who works within all reality beyond our control.

When we understand the context, the parable becomes a satire. We know that mustard is both a weed and a plant - it is small - it could not have birds nesting in it.  Yet there they are, the birds taking shade in the mustard tree.  This image suggests  how it was understood in Jesus time. They knew mustard as weeds and small and yet the birds nest in them.    Yet here in the parable God’s kingdom is like a weed. So they would have got it as a joke

The point, in other words, is not just that the mustard plant starts as a proverbially small seed and grows into a shrub of three or four feet, or even higher, it is that it tends to take over where it is not wanted, that it tends to get out of control, and that it tends to attract birds within cultivated areas where they are not particularly desired. And that, said Jesus, was what the Kingdom was like:  not quite like a common weed, like a pungent shrub with dangerous takeover properties. Something you would want in only small and carefully controlled doses-if you could control it. It is also a challenge to all empire thinking.

There is a wildness to the Kingdom - it is out of control.  Now that is disconcerting for we like religion that is controlled and controlling.    We like to control life.  We like to control others for we get uncomfortable with too much enthusiasm. 

But control has it down side. In reaction we can turn to events and ideas that push the edges.  Those edges can push us beyond our comfort zone and we can be too wild.  So we move between extremes in our society - too controlling - too out of control. 

The role of the church is help us be uncontrolled in ways that issues in a more beautiful reality.  Yet, in the church we get comfortable with things as they are.  Tradition becomes traditionalism, as if this is how it always has been.  Tradition is a living organism, changing and responding to new hints of an uncontrollable God.  We domesticated the gospel as a blessing rather than a call to bless others. This ought to leave us a bit uneasy with what we call our good fortune. Possessions are not God’s blessing and goodness, but the opportunities of service which God entrusts to us. God doesn’t bless some to the exclusion of others, but rather God blesses some for the benefit of others.  So, being blessed isn’t simply a privilege: it’s a responsibility. It is to find the outbreaks of beauty and life coming through the cracks in the cosmos. To join a movement that seeks to heal our global crises.  It is to understand that to be a moral leader is to call the strong to take care of their hurting brothers and sisters.  This is to be both a political and religious task.

Yet too much rationalism, which is control, allows us to live with realities that are not good for society.  We see nature not as a living reality but instrumentally so we can  manipulate it rationally and technically for profit.  From an ecological and religious point of view nature is alive and thus, if not something holy, then something that ought to be the object of great and abiding care.  We are in a relationship, and each part of that relationship has intrinsic worth, meaning for itself as well as subjective relationship with others

In the end the hearer is left with a challenge.  We are to be different from the world’s greed, uncaring ideologies, to move from  self-centredness to other concern, to move from exclusions and violence to sharing.  This is the purpose of the church, to nurture us in this journey  Our participation is vital to endowing the community with a sense of letting loose love. It is an act of communal responsibility inspired by the realization that we are part of something greater than ourselves. It is to join with that uncontrollable God whose love continues to spring up like a weed.