All Things Dim and Ugly, The Lord God Made Them All
Exodus 12:15-17, Luke 13:20-21
A
Sermon Preached by
University
Congregational United
Parables break open my heart.
Sometimes, they make me cry.
Often, they make me angry.
Always, they make me see how tightly I hold onto
MY image of God,
MY experience of God.
In his parables, Jesus takes ordinary, everyday experiences and turns them on their head in order to make us experience God in a new way.
Jesus does that in today’s parable when he uses leaven or yeast and a woman to talk of his experience of God.
What you have to know is this:
Yeast is the stuff that makes
bread rise. Bread made without yeast is
called unleavened bread. And for a Jew
like Jesus unleavened bread is holy bread.
It reminded Jews of the central story of who they were – God brought
them out of slavery in
Unleavened bread is the holy bread that reminds Jews of this holy story.
Leavened or yeast bread is what everyone else eats – it is ordinary, everyday, and certainly not holy bread.
You also need to know in Jesus’ day that men held all the big, important positions in society. The emperor was male, the governors were male, the priests were male. Even in the home, women had to obey their husbands or fathers. Men were special, did the holy, important work in the world. No one talked about ordinary, everyday women and women’s work being anything special and certainly not holy.
And look what Jesus does.
Jesus says, my experience of God is like yeast that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour until the whole mass was leavened – until there is one huge, puffy mound of dough to make bread with.
Jesus compares his experience of God to things that people would say have NOTHING to do with God –
Yeast
A Woman
A “woman’s” work in making bread.
How might Jesus tell this parable today in everyday, ordinary language from our lives?
Biblical scholar Bernard Brandon Scott is a member of the Jesus’ Seminar, spoke here at church several months ago and was one of my teachers at Yale Divinity School. He opened up for me a way to read the parables in a whole new way. A student in one of his classes translated Jesus’ parable of the leaven in this way:
“God’s overwhelming love is like cancer that invaded a woman’s breast until it
had consumed all of her, even in here Sunday finery.”
What?!!!! That is so GROSS! So AWFUL! How could GOD have ANYTHING to do with CANCER!!!!!
For us today, it is just as difficult to imagine God’s love being like breast cancer as it was for Jesus’ audience to imagine God’s love as yeast.
But the student who wrote this translation of Jesus’ parable found great hope and comfort in this parable of Jesus that she applied to her own life and situation.
The student was dying of breast cancer. Imagining the parable in this way allowed her to see that God’s unimaginable love was in her and around her and being proclaimed through her. Even as she was living with and dying from breast cancer.
This is NOT easy to believe.
When something awful happens to us or to those we love – like cancer – many of us say:
God doesn’t care.
God has left me.
God is powerless.
God is irrelevant.
Forget God.
We want to get better, feel good – then and only then can we imagine “experiencing” God.
But NO, Jesus says. Right THERE – in the midst of experiences you say have NOTHING to do with God, God is THERE.
As one friend of mine put it, “When we feel God is nowhere to be found, we need to remember God isn’t the one who moved.”
It is WE who move. Move away from God because our God is too small or our imaginations too small to find God.
But the amazing Good News of this Parable is that there is NO PLACE where God is not present.
There is no reality where God is not present.
The reality of cancer is not an excuse to reject God.
The reality of war is not an excuse to reject God.
The reality of things in the world we do not like is not an excuse to reject God.
There is no reality where God is not present.
I love God, right up here when life is good, bright and beautiful. I “get” God, understand God, and sometimes even experience God when life is going well.
But oh, how I HATE the
experiences when all around me seems DIM and
“No”, Jesus says, “Right here, in this mess, this sadness, this grief, this cancer, this dying, God is”.
Hold out your hand.
Open your heart.
Let flow your tears.
I am here.
I haven’t moved.
My love is BIG ENOUGH to be even HERE.
BIG ENOUGH for YOU.
Karl Barth was probably the greatest theologian of the 20th century. He risked his life to organize Protestants in Germany to resist Hitler. He wrote very long and complicated books on God.
Once he was asked to sum up his theology. The questioner, expecting a very long and involved response was stunned when Barth replied,
“Jesus loves me this I know. For the Bible tells me so.”
I invite us to reach down. To reach down and touch the broken, hurting, ugly, dying parts of our lives and our world. For some of us, we don’t have to reach very far. To reach down and touch those places where we feel and know that God cannot be.
And I invite us to sing, to sing to those broken, ugly, hurting places of our lives a lullaby. To sing the hope, the Good News of this parable that even here God is.
Jesus
loves me this I know.
For
the Bible tells me so.
Little
ones to him belong.
They
are weak but he is strong.
Yes,
Jesus loves me.
Yes,
Jesus loves me.
Yes,
Jesus loves me.
The
Bible tells me so.
Amen.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Sources:
Teresa Berger, “Living by the
Word”, The Christian Century,
Bernard Brandon Scott, Re-imagine the World, chapter 3.
Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable.