Living Parables (Sermon)

“Living Parables”

Mark 4:26-34

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

6/28/15

         The fourth chapter of Mark is all about parables. To me, working with parables is like walking along a beach at sunrise. At daybreak, light and dark balance in the firmament. Night and day kiss. In Luke 8 Jesus says, “Nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed nor is anything secret that will not…come to light.” Parables hide holy truth in the long shadows of plain sight, and at dawn, truth comes to light.

Jesus spends much time on the shores of seas, lakes, and rivers, doesn’t he? As a place where land and water meet, the seashore is a metaphor for the numinous seam where the unconscious, the deep Mystery within creation, reaches up to caress and to give shape to the conscious world. Where all is illuminated and tangible, we discover wonderful things we never knew. As shorelines between the dunes, forests, meadows, and crags of our conscious lives and the churning depths of our unconscious, parables become thresholds of discovery, places where we learn a bewildering truth: There are wonderful things within us that we didn’t know we knew.

         Using wave after wave of earthy images, Jesus teaches in parables. He compares the kingdom of God to someone who scatters seeds on the ground. He leaves them in the care of earth, sun, and rain. Then he goes home. When he returns, the seeds have sprouted! No human intelligence or creativity can make that happen. Mystery has taken over.

         The kingdom of God is also like a mustard seed. It is the tiniest of seeds, but again, earth, sun, and rain transform it into a magnificent shrub. When the shrub is grown, bird nests appear in its branches. That which was once too small even to make a meal for a bird, has become a home for many birds. And the Mystery grows.

These stories tease us into the surf. They invite us to recognize the presence of God’s kingdom in the ordinary experiences of life so that we look back and say to ourselves, “You know, that really didn’t seem like much at the time. It was just an evening on the porch listening to cicadas and watching fireflies, or a chance conversation at the farmers’ market. But while we were there, were not our hearts burning within us?

         Every-day experiences can become portals into the fathomless, sometimes chaotic mystery of God. The key to discovering their holiness lies in contemplation. When we reflect on our own mustard-seed lives, they often become living parables.

         Some years ago I served on a presbytery committee charged with helping a small, rural congregation through a very painful experience. One Sunday afternoon, the committee and a few members of the church gathered in the fellowship hall for a particularly trying meeting. During the conversation, some of the lingering hurt, bitterness, and distrust stormed in from offshore. It battered the room with rising voices and gale-force emotions. As soon as the meeting adjourned, I left.

         Someone had told me that the dirt road beside the church would lead back to the main highway that would take me back home. Since I really do like the crunch and bump of such byways, I turned down that old dirt road, hoping to find not only my way home, but a few minutes of healing peace on a secluded path.

         Around the first bend in the road, I came to a fork. I remembered being told about the fork, but I did not remember which way to go. Having a decent sense of direction, I knew that in all likelihood the right fork was the correct choice. I also knew that the spacious beauty of countryside is a balm for almost any weariness. So, I opened my window to the fresh air and turned left. It was the better choice.

As I drove this evening back road in western North Carolina, daybreak seashore was all around me. Pines and hardwoods lined the tops of high ditches. Fire pink, Queen Anne’s Lace, and daisies decorated the roadsides and meadows. Even where it sat next to the road, the butterfly weed glowed brilliant orange, testifying to the twin blessings of abundant rain and scarce traffic.

I lost count of the rabbits who would sit in the road until, at the last moment, they bounced their little cottontails out of the way.

The lane snaked through shady hollows, then climbed up to ridge tops, some swaddled in thick stands of timber, others opened up by hayfields.

I do not know which came first, gratitude or awe, but together they began to lift the misty pall of sadness and futility.

         My side trip paused at a STOP sign. A blacktop road headed up a hill to my right, and behind the hill, beyond the dark green Appalachian foothills, the sunset burned as bright as the butterfly weed. To my left, the road wound downward past pine trees, hayfields, and waist-high corn planted in neat rows. I sat there for a moment – watching, listening, feeling the creation and my place in it. That’s when I heard it.

Bob-white!

         Some would have heard just another bird call, but to me, on that evening, of the first day of the week, it was pure grace. The storied call of a Bob White quail returns me to long-gone voices and forever-changed places. Call it schmaltzy if you like, but those voices and places re-orient me. They give me peace.

The Bob White called, again. Renewed and satisfied, I turned my car around, ready to experience the road from the opposite perspective. That’s when I saw it. A female quail bolted across the road and into a dense thicket. I laughed out loud. Very few quail are left, but if given enough room, they will thrive.

         As I drove back down the road, I realized something that I didn’t know that I knew: While the place I had just seen for the first time was not my address, it is my home. I live there.

To you, that back road might have been the tiniest of mustard seeds. But to me it was a great and glorious shrub, a place where wild quail still nested and sang. It was the kind of place the Cherokee Indians would have called a “thin” place – a coastline between time and eternity.

         The Spirit calls the church – and this church – to be such a place. A parable. A kind of crease in time and space where Kingdom and creation meet. The Spirit calls and equips us to be a place where parables are a way of life, where they connect us more deeply and intimately to our own lives and to each other. Even here and now, in a world reeling with poverty, violence, and snowballing changes, seeds are taking root and new growth is happening beyond our power to make it happen. Even now, Mystery is at work redeeming and renewing.

Through the grace of that holy Mystery, we begin to write our own parables. One of mine begins, ‘The Kingdom of God is like an evening drive down an old dirt road…’