Today’s gospel reading opens with a parable about a faith the size of a small seed transplanting a mulberry tree into the sea and it is important to understand that the parable is not about reversing the laws of nature. We know that even though massive logging machinery can’t pull up fully grown trees there is nothing that can make the trees grow in the sea. Certainly, we have witnessed massive storms wash trees down rivers, sweep away bridges and flow out to sea. But they are more likely to end up bleached and beached on the shoreline than growing in the water.
Replanting trees in the sea would need the combined wizardry of Peter Jackson, James Cameron and Weta Workshop. Furthermore, like all of us those wizards of cinematic magic had small beginnings. My neighbour in Hamilton grew up in Pukerua Bay. She remembered, a young Peter Jackson, playing on the beach with a paper mâché severed head and a movie camera.
The reality is with rising sea levels and climate change many low-lying Pacific Islands are losing important arable land because sea water is seeping in and killing food crops.
What this parable does call us to understand is that even a small amount of faith will find some way of solving, even such terrifying life-threatening problems as global warming and rising sea level and the collapse of democracy.
History tells us that humanity is a fantastically resilient species. We are a species that has migrated right across the globe and survived huge disasters and plagues that threatened to eradicate entire populations.
For instance, in the years 1348 to 1350 it is estimated the Black Death killed 30 to 60% of Europe’s population and reduced the world’s population from an estimated 450 million to between 350 and 375 million.[1]
Total deaths in the First World War are estimated at over sixty-five million [2] and in Mathew 24 verse 6 Jesus says that ‘you will hear of wars and rumours of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place but the end is not yet’.
Furthermore, our reading from lamentations deals with the utter devastation of Jerusalem after the Babylonian invasion so it appears that humanity has survived its own destructiveness for a very long time. Now the news shows Jerusalem destroying Palestine. Furthermore, the evening news not only shows our self-destruction through violence and economic disasters but regularly shows the loss of life in earthquakes and other natural disasters around the globe.
Not only does history and contemporary news testify to human resilience but it is also witness to the truth contained in Jesus’ statement that ‘All this is but the beginning of the birth-pangs.’(Matthew 24:8)
With Luke’s benefit of hindsight, he portrays the disciples looking for a faith in the face of impending disaster at the loss of their leader. They are trying to imagine the faith needed to face the awesome challenge of spreading the Jesus message out into the world. That faith is indeed what we all need to face the everyday calamities that confront our day to day lives.
However, the parable of the mustard seed calls us to an even greater faith, a faith that claims that things do not always have to be the same. This parable of the mustard seed is about encouraging seemingly impossible visions; it is a call to think outside the square.
We so easily and so often accept longstanding injustice and hardship as the natural way of the world. But the parable of the mustard seed reminds us that things do not always have to be the way they are. Change is always possible even when faced with what appears to be overwhelming odds.[3]
The Lamentation’s text gives us a very distressing view of the world of its author, but we must also remember that everything we know about Jesus and his effect on the world we know, grew out of that world of the author of Lamentations. The Exodus Saga is certainly one of the foundation stories of Hebrew culture. But the destruction of Jerusalem, the Exile and the rebuilding of the city under Nehemiah and the spiritual renewal under Ezra, are seen as a reflection of the Exodus journey. Along with all the other sacred stories these accounts formed the tradition that nurtured Jesus to adulthood and formed the unique human being. Jesus was the man with special spiritual insight that has given countless human beings over two millennia an image of a divine presence beyond themselves.
In the Roman world of his time, which indeed was part of an even wider world than the first century perceived, Jesus was a very tiny faith seed indeed. Jesus was an insignificant Jew, an executed troublemaker from a subject people of the greatest civilisation the world had ever known. To describe him as a single mustard seed in that great Greco-Roman culture of his time would probably be grossly exaggerating his importance among the great personalities of his age.
But it was Jesus’ faith that was significant, that tiny seed of faith he encouraged his apostles to hold.Through those apostles we are encouraged to also reach out and grasp such faith for ourselves. A faith in God certainly, and we could equally claim, as good Trinitarian Christians, a faith that Jesus is the Christ, a human image of the divine being.
However, this mustard seed size Jesus faith can in fact be simplified and purified beyond the ecclesiastic language of the Christian community.
Jesus had a faith that ‘things do not have to be the way they are, an assertion that even against what appears to be overwhelming odds, change is possible’[4].
That is the faith that took Jesus to the cross and that is the faith that changed the course of human history.
Through faith Jesus plucked the very complex and evolved tree of Hebrew spiritual culture from the Jerusalem temple. Using skilled rabbinic exegesis and the expounding of scripture Jesus carefully pruned and shaped that tree to his unique design and purpose. Then through his apostles, he cast that metaphorical faith tree into the eternal sea of time that flowed through his world into ours.
It was indeed, mission impossible, the temple Judaism of his day was very much a hothouse plant unsuited for the competition of conflicting creeds that flowed like swirling currents through the Roman world. Such a spiritual tree is certainly not the sort of plant that logic could understand would survive the cold chilled waters of the European dark ages that followed the collapse of Roman Civilisation.
Yet here we are, perhaps the struggling remnant of the Christian faith drowning in the smothering secular sea.
Or are we in fact the ripened fruit of two thousand years of growth of the Jesus tree about to plant ourselves in a new age of spiritual awareness?
There is plenty that we can lament about as we look back at the glory of our Christian past. We can look at the church of today and quite freely say:
How lonely sits the church that once was filled with People! How like a widow she has become’ (Lamentations 1:1).
Many of us can remember the vibrant past life of the congregations that we have worshiped in. We have also lived though, the hope of new beginnings that did not happen. But the fact that we are meeting here this morning is a sign that we still have mustard seed potential. We are people who dare to dream of a revitalised congregation and the rebirth of the Christian faith in a new world.
Surely all logic must tell us that we are hopeless dreamers, sinners pouring precious oil on the feet of a condemned Jesus. (John 12:1-8). The world’s logic must cry out that surely these building could be sold and the money given to the poor or the homeless or both. Parts of the church have demanded that remnant parishes that are only staying open through income from invested property money must be closed, and their money given to vibrant growing parishes with sound mission plans.
But across that sea of clambering, covetous, voices come the clear voice of the Jesus of Luke’s Gospel ‘if you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree ‘be uprooted and planted in the sea’ and it would obey you’ (Luke 17:6). If you continue to have faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this wonderful, revitalised church building ‘be uprooted and planted in the sea of tomorrow’s spirituality, and it would obey you.
We can hear that call through the Gospel pages not just because it is a message about our church buildings, but also because it is a message about the ripple of Christianity passing into the future in our part of the world. Furthermore, we can still acknowledge that whatever we achieve in our apostolic quest to be involved in community facing mission St Martins may not be grand enough to be described as a tree grown in the ocean of secularism and disbelief.
But the effort we make may well be the mustard seed of faith that calls others to uproot the Kauri Tree of truly indigenous, inclusive, multi-cultural belief and plant it in a future rising tide of Aotearoa Christianity.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death
[2] http://www.pbs.org/greatwar/resources/casdeath_pop.html
[3] http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/LkPentecost20.htm
[4] ibid.
