ឧំំˊំ
ḍᵗᶦᵍᵃᶦᵃᶦᵃᵃᵃᵃ ᶦᶦᵃᵃᵃ ᶦᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᶦᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃ�
ᶦᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃ ᶦᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃ ᶦᵃᵃᵃᵃ ᵖᶦᵃᵃᵃᶯᶦᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᶦᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᶦ ᶦᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃ ᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃ ᵍᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᶦᵃ �
Let us come before God in a spirit of prayer.
Gracious and loving God, Father and Mother of us all, hear our prayer.
We ask first of all that you bless this service of worship today.
Bless each one who leads worship with scripture, sermon, song or prayer.
Bless our hearts, hands, minds and voices that you may be glorified in all that we say and do.
Bless all of us who join in worship with glad heart.
Our lives are filled with distractions. Some excite us and give us pleasure.
Filling us with joy of anticipation, others seem great burdens and fears.
And we look forward with dread.
Help us set aside both the exciting and the frightening for a few moments.
Enable us to concentrate on you and you alone with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.
Help us hear your word with fresh ears.
May we seek with open mind new learning you may have for us
about your holy character, new insight about our own lives
or inspiration to see and follow your will for us with greater wisdom and courage.
We know that you are great and holy beyond understanding.
We hear the authors of scripture stretching their imagination and vocabulary
trying to find a way to describe you.
Our hearts are filled with gratitude as we consider your creative power,
the gift of life you have given us, the marvelous world in which we live.
Bless our attempts to be faithful stewards of that world
and forgive us we pray when we fail at that task.
Your son Jesus wept over your people because they did not know the way to peace.
We struggle even today unable to find that path.
We pray for our brothers and sisters both near and far away,
your children all whose lives are touched by the tragedy of conflict.
Turn our hearts and the hearts of our leaders to reconciliation and peace.
Strengthen those who heal the wounded and feed the starving.
May your own majestic healing power be felt where it is most needed.
In our church we have promised to welcome all to our table of fellowship,
your holy table of salvation.
Keep us ever faithful to that promise.
We pray in the name of your holy son, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
Hear us as we pray together the prayer that He prayed.
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,
thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread, and ever give us our gifts,
as we give our gifts.
And lead us not into temptation, but to deliver us from evil.
For by this kingdom and in power and in the glory of our Father.
Amen.
I'm reading from the Gospel of Mark chapter 4 verses 26 through 34.
The parable of the growing seed.
He also said, this is what the kingdom of God is like.
A man scatters seed on the ground.
Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows,
though he does not know how.
All by itself the soil produces grain.
First the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head.
As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it because the harvest has come.
The parable of the mustard seed.
Again he said, what shall we say the kingdom of God is like,
or what parable shall we use to describe it?
It's like a mustard seed, which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground.
Yet when planted it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants,
with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade.
With many similar parables, Jesus spoke the word to them as much as they could understand.
He did not say anything to them without using a parable.
But when he was alone with his own disciples, he explained everything.
There's a spring that waits to be, a renewal until the season, something God alone can see.
There's a song in every silence, singing word and melody.
There's a dawn in every darkness, bringing hope to you and me.
From the past above the future, what it holds a mystery.
A renewal until the season, something God alone can see.
In our endless of beginning, in our time in busy,
in our doubt there is believing, in our high eternity,
in our death or resurrection, at the last of victory.
A renewal until the season, something God alone can see.
All is a new creation in Christ.
I love the lectionary at this time of year.
It's so full of poetry about creation and growing things.
Rain and warmth has allowed trees and flowers to blossom earlier than usual here in Indiana.
In fact, as I began putting my thoughts down, I could hear my neighbor mowing her grass.
Earlier I noticed another neighbor laying some new topsoil.
We've just returned from two weeks of immersion in creation in Europe,
where we noticed beautiful living things everywhere, the flowering plants and the hospitable people.
The reading we offer from chapter 17 of Ezekiel is a compact version of his chapter 31,
which is a broader treatment of the prophet's theme of God's power.
Both tell a story about a metaphorical cedar tree.
In beautiful images God speaks through Ezekiel, describing how he will take the vulnerable people of Israel,
and help the weak among them become strong.
A spring from the top of the tree will be planted on top of the mountain,
where it will grow into a massive cedar that will provide shade and protection for the birds and the people of Israel.
The Lord's paradox is that His alone is the power to bring low the high tree or make high the low tree,
to dry up the tree's life or provide what it needs to flourish.
The psalm that reflects on this reading today is Psalm 92.
It's an exuberant outburst of thanksgiving for God's love and faithfulness.
Here's a bit of it.
It is good to give thanks to the Lord to sing praises to your name almost high,
to declare your steadfast love in the morning and your faithfulness by night,
to the music of the lute and the harp, to the melody of the lyre.
For you, O Lord, have made me glad by your work, at the work of your hands.
I sing for joy.
Now later the verses of the Psalm employ the image of the palm tree
to describe people who are righteous, who grow in faith like the fabled cedar of Lebanon.
Then these people who live under the umbrella or tree of gratitude will continue to bear fruit
because they are always green and full of sap.
I take that to mean that people who are open to hearing God's word in their lives,
that word will perhaps lead to changes that will keep the faithful vital and youthful
throughout their lives, even in old age.
Now sometimes it's a stretch to connect all the electionary readings,
but this week there are common threads that not only make it possible,
but may enhance our understanding.
While in the reading from the first testament Ezekiel and the Psalmist used the image of the cedar tree,
in his fifth chapter in II Corinthians the apostle Paul introduces the analogy of a tent
as an earthly home or protective covering away from being home with God.
But the idea is for us to live our lives as though we're always in the presence of God,
who has given us the spirit as a guarantee of our home with God.
We should always live in a way that will be pleasing to God.
Although we cannot reach out and press the flesh of the divine,
Paul hints strongly that we walk by faith and not by sight, always accompanied by God's spirit.
On our faith walk we connect the stops on our journey with today's gospel reading
from chapter 4 of Mark's account, which is the earliest known gospel rendition of Jesus' ministry.
One of the teaching tools Jesus used with great frequency was the parable.
Biblical scholar Diane Bergant describes the concepts of parables well.
She considers them brain teasers in that when they are employed they may work like this.
Two different realities play one on the other to get to a deeper meaning.
When Jesus used parables or images of different kinds,
he wanted his hearers to open their minds and hearts
so that they would consider making connections between images and metaphors they might not have noticed before.
Remember how Nicodemus was stuck on the concept of being born again?
He took everything literally.
He needed and probably received some private lessons from Jesus.
More practice in the eastern wisdom tradition of teaching with story and image.
Jesus knew all about taking words literally.
He confronted that stumbling block frequently.
We know that children under a certain age and without much life experience
take everything we say literally.
For example, my oldest grandson at eight and a half years old will challenge everything we say,
especially if it requires a shift from literal to symbolic.
Jesus used some words and images that were confusing in his time
and we have some difficulty in understanding them as well.
For example, even Jesus' listeners knew that the mustard seed is not the smallest seed
nor is the shrub that grows from that seed very grand.
The logic of parables may seem convoluted,
but their use was a popular way of expressing ideas in the Greek and Jewish cultures of the time.
It's helpful to relate the parable of the mustard seed to the Ezekiel reading
where God speaks of establishing David's dynasty and the future of Israel
from a sprig that will grow into a noble cedar
that will be planted and rooted on a high and lofty mountain.
Both Ezekiel and Mark are describing the kingdom of God evolving in the midst of the people.
They both see the coming of God's reign in terms of reversals
where the small becomes great and the great becomes small.
This was not just a perspective of Jesus,
but a biblical concept that trends through both testaments.
I believe that God wants us to experience the fullness of the spiritual life
with every verbal and sensory dimension we have available to us
that can assist us to understand and explain the teachings of Jesus,
his ideas about God and our relationship with God,
plus all the wisdom figures we have admired.
It takes some maturity to go deeper into a concept
explaining parables and visual images.
It's different than being told and blindly accepting that something is the truth
and we must believe it.
Within the parable stories,
we have the opportunity to ask questions and explore possibilities.
A theological idea told in parables is one that unfolds gradually
and offers plenty of space for pondering.
For example, the phenomenon of the mustard seed wasn't a miracle story.
The parable begins as a story of a tiny mustard seed
that grew cold in the soil and developed into a mature shrub.
Over time, it could reach the height of nine feet.
It's a little engine that could.
Jesus tells the parable to help his disciples understand
how the kingdom of God was also something that needed to be planted,
nurtured, pruned and encouraged to grow.
Within the kingdom of God,
with the commentary so present in the teachings of Jesus,
the expectation was for the disciples to grow in their understanding and faith
and spread the teachings like seeds.
Human aspirations often begin with visions of what might be in the future.
Being servants in the kingdom of God requires attentiveness
to the process and unfolds as we invite the spirit to lead us.
In God's time, just as this harvest of seed or a palm or the mustard seed
requires patience, work and perseverance,
the kingdom of God spreads and flourishes from the raw materials of ourselves,
our dedication and the generous use of our gifts.
So, if we should ponder the parables more deeply,
what does it mean that seed fell on the ground in four different ways?
How are we like the different sowers?
Can we compare ourselves to the sowers
and see our lives as a reflection of one of them?
Or perhaps we've been all of them at one time or another.
The parable of the mustard seed projects hope
that from the humblest of beginnings great beings can evolve.
But it should also remind us that it is God
who will make the small and vulnerable mighty.
Whether it's a bullied child or a sickly sapling.
Within his vision of the kingdom of God,
which dominates the teachings of Jesus,
the expectation was for the disciples to grow in understanding and faith
and become branches of the spiritual tree spreading Jesus' teachings.
Human aspirations often begin with visions of what could be.
Jesus could envision the perfection of the kingdom of God on earth.
And into that vision he dropped in everything about the kingdom or realm of God
that embodies love of neighbor, love and respect for the environment,
a vision that pays tribute to the cosmos,
the physical and spiritual origins of the world.
The life force of the universe is so mysterious
that all we can understand is what is reflected back to us
through our relationship with God, the spirit of all life.
Amen.
Jesus is calling.
Calling for you and for me.
See on the portals he's waiting and watching.
Watching for you and for me.
Come home, come home.
You are really come home.
You are really come home.
You are really come home.
Come home, come home.
You are really come home.
You are really come home.
You are really come home.
Come home, come home.
You are really come home.
Jesus is calling.
Calling for you and for me.
You are really come home.
It was at this table where we are reminded
that we are a new creation with the Lord
because it was Jesus who went to the cross
so that we all can have a brand new start in life.
Let us pray.
Father, we come before you, O God,
asking you to bless this bread and bless this cup
so that all of us, when we come to this table,
we understand that it was your broken body
and your shed blood that made us one with one another.
As we become one with one another,
we understand that we are new creatures in Christ.
In Jesus' name we pray, amen.
It was the night that Jesus Christ was betrayed.
He took the bread
and He blessed it and He broke it
and said, this is my body broken for you.
Eat and rememberance of me.
Likewise, He took the cup
and said, this is my shed blood,
the new covenant.
Often as you drink of this,
you show forth my death and suffering
until I come again.
You are all welcome.
Let us pray.
Let us pray.
Let us pray.
Let us pray.
Let us pray.
Let us pray.
Let us pray.
Let us pray.
Brothers and sisters,
all is a new creation,
all of us.
We are wrapped in the love of Jesus Christ
and so we go forth now to love and to serve the world.
Thanks be to God.
Thank you.
