Our Job as Mustard Seeds

  There are those, maybe even all of us from time to time, that have a deadly fear of change.  This fear makes us cling to various traditions and habits that give us a sense of security.  The issue can be as big as a mosque in downtown Manhattan, same-sex marriage and going back to the gold standard or as little as what pray for illumination should be used, the temperature the thermostat should be set at in the church or the date of yearly fundraiser.  Any alteration to these traditions threatens the stability of our seemingly secure foundations.  

On the other side, we have those, and I know I’m one from time to time, that have a fear of traditional understandings as some sort of prison or limitation.  Those of us who are victims of this can be blamed to measure everything by its congeniality with our own experience. Prayers of confession are outmoded because they make people feel guilty. Any text that speaks of God in masculine language is patriarchal and inherently oppresses women.  The church's historic creeds do not speak for me and my experience, so I shall edit them as I go along or not read them at all.  This fear forces us to reinvent faith for every individual and in every circumstance, fearful that the past might exert some constraint on the present.

So, we find ourselves in the modern world struggling between these two extremes with people battling for either maintaining the past or changing the future.  To be sure, even though the right blessed by the state legislature of same-sex couples to marry starts today and the battle for New York seems won, the supporters of traditional marriage are seeking repeal.  The struggle will continue.

In our first reading we actually have the story of two different biblically traditional marriages.  Though the story is a little too traditional for many people.  It starts off with Laban, Jacob’s Uncle, asking Jacob if it is far to just give him one of his daughters for free just because he is his nephew.  Jacob agrees that women should not be freely given and agrees to pay for his wife.  But Laban is a true match for Jacob.  Up until this point in the story of Jacob, Jacob has been the deceiver by stealing birthrights and blessings from God and his father.  Jacob’s name literally means deceiver in Hebrew.  Instead of giving Jacob his cousin Rachel in exchange for his 7 years of work, he switches the sisters out and puts Leah, who’s name literally means cow and is described in Hebrew as having weak eyes, into Jacob’s marriage bed and it isn’t until the morning that Jacob discovers the deception. Jacob demands and explanation from his Uncle and Laban’s response is that in traditional marriage, the younger daughter cannot be married before the elder daughter.  Jacob still wants to marry Rachel, so he finished off the traditional 1-week wedding ceremony with Leah, keeps her as a wife, and then marries Rachel as prepayment for working another 7 years on his Uncles’ farm.  So, in this story of traditional marriage in the bible, we have Jacob entering into a polygamous marriage relationship with his two first cousins, Leah and Rachael, in exchange for wages he earned working on his Uncles’ farm.  The women have no say in the matter and in fact are treated as mere property in a game of deception and bargaining.  As the story continues past what we have read today, the sisters get into a breeding war and by the end of it Jacob is married to four women, has twelve children and steals his Uncle’s livestock and possessions all with God’s blessing.  In fact God protects Jacob from Laban after he steals all his stuff.  It makes me want to throw my bible out the window.

In the modern western world, this story is obviously not one to be used as a model for treating women or marriage and I don’t want to spend any time trying to interpret away the misogyny in the story because frankly I don’t think you can.  Ancient Israel was a patriarchal society which treated women as mere property to be used for the purposes of breeding and fulfilling a man’s lustful desires.  It is wrong and sinful to treat women this way.

So, what is the virtue in keeping this traditional biblical story in our lectionary reading?  The reader of these Jacob stories is actually suppose to be appalled at the actions of Jacob.  Whereas the ancient reader would have been appalled at the deception practiced by everyone in the story, we just add a layer of being appalled at how women are treated and how marriage is formed.  The author of these stories is more concerned with telling the story of God’s covenantal promise and how God is so faithful that God is willing to bless and use creeps like Jacob to fulfill the covenant.  Jacob is blinded by his own ambitions, by his own lust for Rachel, by his patriarchal society to not be able to see what we see but he keeps his end of the bargain with God and God is faithful to fulfill the promise in the covenant.  

We ourselves, right this very minute, are blinded by our own stories and our own societal pressures.  While it’s easy for me to point out that people pushing for “traditional biblical marriage” would be hard pressed to find a nuclear family in the bible and the injustice of denying another human being their right to exist as God created them, it’s hard for me to see the plank in my own eye.  How am I blinded to the world around me?  Maybe in 1000 years people will look back at us and wonder why we fought so hard for merely two people to marry instead of allowing women to have multiple husbands and/or wives.  Maybe there won’t be anything like marriage in the future as we become more and more individualized and self-sufficient in our technology.  It’s a distressing fog to be in not knowing what is right and what is wrong.  We merely hope and guess as what justice is.  This is the exact place that we find Paul in our reading for today.  He says, “[T]he Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”

Paul himself discovered the biblical truth that we have no clue what we are doing when it comes to doing the right thing.  We know something is wrong.  We know things could be better.  Yet we don’t know what most of the time and the best we can do in the deepest part of our being is groan and sigh.  These groans and sighs are understood by God even without our words.  God works in our lives no matter how blinded we are or how unknowingly messed up it is.  As Paul puts it, “we know that all things work together for good.”  So, even though Jacob lied, cheated and stole his way through life, God still blessed him and through his son Joseph was able to save Israel from starvation and complete annihilation.  In the same way, God hears our cries for justice and groans for peace and works in our lives to express the unconditional love that God has for us.

This is what Jesus means when he describes the mustard seed and yeast being like the kingdom of heaven.  When Jesus was telling these stories to his disciples, the mustard plant was a weed that grew everywhere and wasn’t of much use.  There were no great farms of mustard shrubs.  It would be like Jesus saying the kingdom of God is like the dandelion seed.  Sure you can eat dandelions but they are an invasive weed.  Because of this parable, we have made mustard plants into these great and holy plants in our modern world and by doing so we miss the point.  The kingdom of heaven is like the mustard seed in that it is everywhere and no matter where it grows God is able to use it to protect God’s creation and allow them to create a home in God’s love.  The same thing has happened with the story of the woman and the yeast.  For the disciples, yeast was a dirty and disgusting thing to put into flour.  That’s why on Passover all yeast needs to be removed from a home.  It is an unclean and disgusting item to have in a house, not a standard baking product.  When we think of yeast, we think of the nice little 2 oz packets of dried dust that slowly bubbles when we put it in water.  When Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is like putting yeast into flour, he meant that this woman took some old, soggy, moldy, leftover bread and put it into enough flour to feed 100 people.  If Jesus were to tell this story today, he might use more scientific language and say the kingdom of heaven is like a baker putting microscopic creatures into flour that fart and urinate all throughout the dough but in time make enough delicious bread to feed millions.  

The overarching narrative here is that God is able to use both good and bad, height and depth, life and death, angels and demons, things present or things to come to express God’s love for all of creation.  God can work with the weeds to create beautiful shelters.  God can take something that seems disgusting at first and turn it into the most delicious form of food that can sustain and satisfy hunger.  God doesn’t change what these things are but rather changes their purpose so that they are able to create a more loving and peaceful community of God.  Both the old and the new are used for God’s good purpose.  As Jesus says in our reading today, “Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”  In our never-ending battle between tradition and progress, we know that the kingdom of heaven is able to use them all.  Not every new wind in the church is a Nor’easter set to destroy the church’s foundation nor is every stone in the foundation the makings of a prison.  Imagine the New Testament stripped of all references to the Hebrew bible.  There would be no way to tell the story.  Imagine the New Testament without any mention of things outside the Hebrew Bible.  There would be no gospel.  

The old revels the new and the new exists only because of the old.  God works in everything to bring about God’s love.  God is continually removing our blindness through struggles with tradition and reaffirmation of tradition, through discoveries of new ways of justice and realization that God is everything.  Our struggles are not with things outside of ourselves but with our blindness in seeing God’s transforming purpose for all things around us.  And so we are left in our lives with a simple prayer of: “God Help Me!” and it is our job as mustard seeds to allow ourselves to be helped and to grow and turned into a means by which all of God’s creation can find rest.