And the generous dream of God
Proper 6B | Mark 4:26-34
It is an odd development—to go from Kings are a terrible idea to I know his heart in just a few chapters. We might be lulled by the excitement for David—and his stature within tradition. Lulled by a sense of exception. That he is exceptional, perhaps. Or that God has given the people this exception. Or perhaps, then, that we (or our ancestors) might be excepted.
How quickly did God offer Saul as suitable—and then how quick was God to declare him unfit. A mere six chapters?
But Saul is no exception. And neither is David. They are, after all, what kings are. Nor do their hearts remain unchanged.
The boy that God loves becomes a man that God continues to love. Then he becomes a man who God keeps a promise to. He doesn’t die the beautiful, pure boy picked among the more suitable brothers. He was a complex man bringing an end to war through war and holding power as men do. And whose blind love for one of his usurper sons almost destroyed the kingdom.
There is terror and there is promise in all of it. Like growing up. Like parenthood. And growing old. Facing our own mortality. Trying new things. Leaping into the unknown.
All of it is potential.
And we are in the business of finding out. We mess around and find out. Or we stay behind, living someone else’s dream for us. We live and grow. And all of that potential that was there in our youth or there in that grand move across the country—it has to bear the light of day.
Of course, sometimes we hide it away. Potentials, like all unrealized dreams, are perfect in the mind. The versions of Waiting for Godot or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that exist in my mind are always better than any production could be. But they aren’t lived. They lose that opportunity to know the human experience, in a room with real people played by real people.
Yet these dreams are, indeed, real. There is something to their pristine character; our profound devotion, too. But I am not served only by my mind palace. Nor are plays only for our imagining.
Like movies based on novels, they are never as good. Ever. But they aren’t supposed to be. They offer something else. They force us to deal with reality.
It isn’t just that a young Daniel Radcliffe persists as Harry Potter now. It is also that comic book costumes don’t work in movies, let alone reality. Why they look incredibly cool on the page and like cheap spandex on humans.
The perfect boy David has no chance in reality. No chance to be a perfect king. He simply came the closest. And his inevitable failure is no more tragic than that.
The Parables
I suppose we are to connect the surprise of God’s choosing a boy, the smallest in the family, to be king with Jesus’s parable of the mustard seed. To see the generous possibility that accompanies God in all things.
I worry, though, that this undersells the actual beauty and power of that potential.
It is inspiring, isn’t it? To think of the tiniest faith growing to be so great. This becomes the image: the mustard seed. People latch onto it when we feel small or hopeless or when improbable things happen. We think of the mustard seed.
And yet we lose sight of this when Jesus says to others “you of little faith”. When he seems to condemn some for the size of their faith. We lose sight of the idea that Jesus sees potential in even the worst of us. And so rarely condemns us for our falling short of it.
I think the problem we make is that we think faith is something outside of us. We disembody that mustard seed faith, externalize it, objectify it, make it not be us. It does the work! We say that the faith is the difference maker here, not us. The ones offering the faith.
No, we are all people of little faith, full of profound potential. And that is enough to grow into the greatest of shrubs. That is what would allow us to throw a mountain into the sea, as he says elsewhere.
It isn’t something special from outside. It is us. Our embodied faith. Lived and breathed and dreamed and made real in our world. We birth the potential when we be the children of God, with all the fear and anticipation that comes with it.
This is what it is like.
God’s dream for creation is like a farmer who sows seeds and reaps the harvest. Because God does the work in between.
God’s dream for creation is like a mustard seed that grows into the greatest shrub.
We must think through that one, because it is just too cool.
This one tiny seed grows into a shrub. And that shrub grows. And grows. It grows so tall that it eclipses the trees.
It is not a tree. It’s a shrub. The decorative plants we use in gardens. It isn’t a redwood or a giant white pine. It’s a shrub.
This isn’t just a crazy math equation, where a tiny seed grows exponentially. It is a crazy terraforming promise of God’s potential to transform our very environment. That shrubs can grow greater than any trees so that birds nest in them instead.
Much like the promise that if we’re not up to the task of proclaiming the Good News, God will give the job to rocks on the ground.
Compared to these, God’s dream isn’t crazy or impossible. It is the most reasonable option of all.
If we want love to be the way of the world, then loving the world makes sense. Far more sense than what we’re doing now.
Dreams, those things we belittle and avoid, coddling their perfection, or winnowing down in the pursuit of perfection, are way too precious to treat the way we do.
For we are our dreams.
We become our faith. And love. As David Dark eloquently describes it, “we become what we normalize.”
This is us. Who we are. There is no space between. Our dreams for the world, married to God’s, cannot be separated from us. And therefore, cannot be achieved outside of us.
We cannot sit and pretend that they happen without our own conviction, our own action. They exist because we do this together.
We might sit here and pine for better times. Or for a great leader to show up and fix our lot. But this does not reflect the Kingdom in any way. God’s dream is not like us wishing things were different!
In the verses immediately preceding, Jesus asks if a lamp is intended to be placed under a bushel basket. Is that where it goes?
When we other the dream (and other our own authority!) how can we expect it to be our world now?
We become what we normalize. The hate and dysfunction, fear and resentment, desires for power and control. We become these things when we don’t choose to become different.
Let us become different.
Siblings in Christ, God has made each of us and all of us for beautiful things. To create and love and enjoy and share. To be caretakers of the Dream. Like the first human commanded to care for creation, we too bear the same responsibility. To our planet and its inhabitants. To our neighbors and to ourselves.
Treat yourselves with care in this season. Feel the sunlight on your skin. Move your bodies, knowing any bit of life in these things, these vessels, is worth celebrating. And eat food with people.
Become people who live and love. Who bring the life-giving grace of God into every room with us. Let light radiate out of us, rather than the darkness of disappointment or perfectionism.
Become the children God knows we are. For God delights in our joy and love, our commitment to sharing and giving. Offering grace and redeeming.
Let us become that. And grow into a kind of greatness that can outgrow any tree of power and offer shelter to any bird or living thing who can enjoy the grace of God in our midst.
Let us normalize love and grace and hope. As people, working together, living the dream.