Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Ezekiel 17:22-24
Thus says the Lord GOD: I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of a cedar; I will set it out. I will break off a tender one from the topmost of its young twigs; I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain.
On the mountain height of Israel I will plant it, in order that it may produce boughs and bear fruit, and become a noble cedar. Under it every kind of bird will live; in the shade of its branches will nest winged creatures of every kind.
All the trees of the field shall know that I am the LORD. I bring low the high tree, I make high the low tree; I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish. I the LORD have spoken; I will accomplish it.
Mark 4:30-32
He also said, "With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade."
Visitors to the famous Tower of London are treated to what might be called a "home on the range" displays of English history... because, while you will see the Crown Jewels and many historical artifacts, "seldom is heard a discouraging word" about England. Twenty years ago, when I first visited the Tower of London, which had been used as a prison during the 16th and 17th centuries, they were displaying a rather more honest depiction of what it had been like to be a prisoner in this above ground dungeon.
The torture devices where shocking. Iron skull masks with spikes pointed inward that could be screwed tighter and tighter to kill a prisoner over months of agonizing pain. There were racks and whips and weapons that, frankly, made me mild suspicious of everyone with an English accent.
But now, if you see a commercial with someone with an English accent on TV, you can bet that they are trying to sell you something that is either terribly over priced or that it absolutely does not work. For some reason, in spite of having had to fight a very bloody war to gain independence from England, Americans are still so smitten with the Brits that we will believe almost any manner of hogwash delivered to us with an English accent.
Growing up in the former British colonies, we were reared on movies like Mary Poppins, and nearly every Disney animated cartoon from Peter Pan to 101 Dalmatians, to view the English as being terribly sophisticated and the authors of modern civilized behavior. This is, of course, nothing but deceptive propaganda.
Every nation creates a narrative for itself in which they can narcissistically put themselves on a pedestal and declare that their nation is the greatest nation in the world. If you remember the comedy film released a few years ago, Borat, this sense of absurd self-worship was especially on display as he sang a fictitious version of the national anthem of Kazakhstan. It gets too ribald for me to repeat here towards the end but it starts out saying:
"Kazakhstan greatest country in the world - all other countries are run by little girls. Kazakhstan number one exporter of potassium! Other countries have inferior potassium...... Kazakhstan, friend of all except Uzbekistan, they very nosey people with bone in their brain."
Of course, Borat, was an entirely fictional comedy but, you know, laughter is, psychologically speaking, a pleasant reaction to surprise. That is why you don't laugh at old jokes.... If there is no surprise, generally speaking, it isn't really funny anymore.
But even though Borat is trying to be funny by being so absurd, think about some of the nationalistic claims nations really do make that no longer surprise us.
Christians and Jews treasure an ancient book in which Jews three thousand years ago wrote about themselves that they are God's chosen people and that God gave them a land that was, ironically, already entirely occupied by another nation. Now, if you think about it..... that's more absurd than saying that your potassium is better than everyone else's potassium and that the people in Uzbekistan are nosey and have a bone in their brains..... and yet,
Thousands of years later, we have American preachers standing up in pulpits announcing that the Jews are God's chosen people and God have Israel to the Jews without ever noticing how very ironically convenient it is that a book they wrote gives them clear title to a land they stole by killing its inhabitants and swearing that God told them to do it.
And no less a person than Abraham Lincoln used this imagery to describe the United States of America as "God's almost chosen people," and claimed that the Almighty was using him to accomplish the Divine goal of making America a new promised land that was established by killing the people who lived here and taking their land. We don't laugh at these claims only because we grew up being taught to believe that such outrageous claims were true.
We still celebrate Columbus Day as a national holiday in America even though we know that Columbus landed on Caribbean islands and led in a wholesale genocidal slaughter of the natives he found there and led in enslaving the survivors.
Europeans began importing captured African slaves to work on those island plantations, only after they had worked the indigenous people into extinction. Please forgive me if it seems that I am belaboring this point but I wanted to set the context for these two passages of scripture we are looking at today.
Our first text is from that confident and self-laudatory passage in Ezekiel in which the prophet poetically says that God is going to take a little sprig of cedar (representing the tiny nation of Judah) and will make it grow to be the tallest tree in the forest and all of the birds of the air will come and build their nests in its branches..... a very poetic way of saying that they will one day dominate all of their other nations of the world.
Our second lesson is from the gospel of Mark where Jesus makes fun of Ezekiel's image of Judah as a dominant nation. Jesus says, "With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade."
In spite of the way that text was read to us in Sunday School, let me invite you to hear the subtle joke that Jesus is telling.
The mustard plant was not the tallest plant in the garden... it only grows to be about 18 inches tall. It is not a strong plant.... It dies in the first frost... and no bird that valued its own survival would build a nest in a plant so close to the ground. In fact, in spite of how much nutritionists tell us today, people in Jesus' day only fed mustard greens to their cattle. Kale, spinach and mustard greens only became edible when non-Jews realized that when you cook them with bacon that they are actually quite tasty, though decidedly not kosher.
Jesus was making the nationalism of his peers sound more like a scene in Borat than a passage of sacred scripture...which might help to explain why they killed him. Jesus was not a politician who said things to appeal to his base... he tried to help his own people to be self critical, to think about the absurdity of domination.
When our Declaration of Independence was published, it talked about the high ideals of liberty and justice but we know that in 1776 the majority of people were not afforded either liberty or justice.... Certainly not black African slaves, not indentured servants, not the Indians and Mexicans we were killing to take their land, and even the majority of the population, meaning all women, were not afforded the justice or liberty of full citizenship.
America has not become a great nation because God chose us as Divine favorites or because this is an economic promised land.... We become great when we ended slavery, when we extended the right to vote to women, when we paid reparations to the Japanese who were interred and robbed of their property and businesses. And we have the potential to be more exceptional when we get real about immigration laws, especially when it applies to Latinos who are living in lands that we stole from them. And we will have nationalistic bragging rights when we finally find the morality to bring an end to poverty.... A task which we can easily accomplish whenever we decide that we are willing to stop currying favor with the rich and start to treat the poor as if they were our brothers and sisters.
May I take just a moment to remind you that each of those very real and substantive steps towards justice did not come about through legislative decree... they happened when Americans decided to set aside the propaganda and to deal courageously with the truth. Congress didn't provide the moral leadership, it was radicals who suffered abuse and imprisonment.... People like Dorothy Day, like Black Elk, like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.
Listen to our political rhetoric today.... Jeb Bush can say that single mothers should be publicly shamed in order to prevent irresponsible behavior... but he is not called a radical. Rick Santorum can say that gay couples are the moral equivalent of man on dog sexual relationships and he is not thought of as being crazy. Marco Rubio can deny all of the scientific evidence that points to human causation of global climate change and yet he is called the savior of the Republican Party.
But let Ron Paul suggest that using drones to kill thousands of innocent civilians should be stopped and he is described as being unelectable. Elizabeth Warren says that we should stop making money off of student loans to struggling lower and middle class families and refinance those loans at the same rate we charge banks and corporations to borrow money and she is said to be an extremist. Bernie Sanders points out that income disparity is killing the American economy and driving the middle class into extinction and he is called a radical who is too far off the scale to be a serious candidate.
Clear, incontrovertible, scientific and mathematical facts are being labeled as crazy, while militaristic, classist, misogynistic anti-poor, anti-immigrant, and totally irrational religious claims are passively accepted and go unchallenged by our corporate owned media.
What this church is trying to do is to speak a word of sane, rational, and critical thinking reality to a nation that wants to be exceptional but can't quite stand the light of reality....we're just trying to do when Jesus did when he talked about mustard seeds... most of the religious universe thinks we crazy which only means that we need to be louder and more persistent.
Winston Churchill famously said that you can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else. Well, my fellow Americans.... I think that we can now officially say that we have tried everything else and now it is time for us to do the right thing.
