2nd Sunday after Pentecost - 14 June 2009

2nd Sunday after Pentecost - 14 June 2009 - Proper 6 B
1 Samuel 15:34-16:13; 2 Corinthians 5:6-10 [11-13] 14-17; Mark 4:26-34
James V. Stockton

“Our lives are lived at warp speed.” So claims author Mark Thornton in his book titled Meditation in a New York Minute. He goes on to note that: “Our hectic schedules are crammed with crises, to-do lists, issues marked urgent and overflowing in trays, unpaid bills, a sea of unread email, and deadlines with due dates close to last Christmas.” I hear this and I think that somehow this fellow must be following me around. “Our agendas,” he writes, “have everything [written] in them but [the word], ‘relax’.” I daresay many people would identify with the author’s observations if only they had time to read them. So, because we are here this morning, let us breathe deeply and meditate upon that calmness of God that surpasses all distress.

An elderly and experienced priest with whose ministry I was blessed for a time as my spiritual director once suggested to me that “Inner Peace is over-rated.” And I wholeheartedly agree. The Inner Peace that has become an industry of self-indulgence for the economic middle and upper-middle class has, I suggest, little to do with the Peace of God which is often the calm in the midst of the storm, but never intended as an escape from it altogether. After all, how can Inner Peace become constant in one who is constantly seeking it?


There is a time for listening rather than speaking, for receiving rather than searching, for leaving oneself open rather than forcing open a door, an opportunity, a heart that is closed for now, maybe forever. There is a time for being still, for breathing deeply, slowly, and finding one’s deep-down inner contentment in the knowledge that God is God. It seems almost irreverent to comment upon the horrible murder that took place last week at the National Holocaust Memorial Museum. This murder of Security Guard Stephen T. Johns, combines with that of Pfc. William Long and that of Dr. George Tiller, both just two weeks ago, to remind us all that bigotry is an evil, identifiable as such because it is born of ignorance and fear and because it leads to people killing one another. There is not an easy answer to addressing either the injustices of these events, nor their causes. And though it may be difficult for people to accept, this is as it should be; for God would not have people seek escape from the knowledge that something has gone wrong. Instead, God would have people turn with that knowledge to the further knowledge that God is God, and to the calm that they can find therein.

The prophet Samuel, perhaps the first major prophetic figure in scripture, is in the midst of a storm. As we hear in the reading from the Old Testament today, Samuel is upset because Saul, the King of Israel, is proving to be a disaster of unfaithfulness. As the scripture says, even God regrets having given the throne to Saul. Being a prophet, Samuel had warned the people not to demand that God provide for them a king. But the people ignored the prophet’s counsel and Samuel appointed for them the obvious favorite. Saul is taller and bigger than the average man, more handsome, it is said, and someone with a commanding presence about him. But King Saul has repeatedly ignored the advice of the prophet, often doing precisely what Samuel tells him God wants him to avoid.

Now Samuel is ‘grieving,’ as scripture puts it, grieving that death of his hopes for Saul, grieving his own participation in putting Saul into power, grieving what seems to be the futility of his own work and prayers. As is true for most prophets, Samuel struggles to find calm within. Then, he hears from God. ‘I come peaceably,’ Samuel assures the leaders of the city. Now is he able to hope again. Now is he able to believe that better than this is still possible. Now is he able to come in Peace.

Here in the setting of praying to God and praising God with fellow faithful people, Samuel is able to put away is former assumptions and discern the true king. Once he thought that the ruler of Israel must surely be a man big and burly. Now God opens Samuel’s mind, his heart, his soul to recognize God’s choice in the least regal, in a mere boy, the youngest and the runt of the litter. If Samuel is surprised, so must David be also. Not looking for greatness, yet having it thrust upon him, as the saying goes, David’s agenda is suddenly more full than it has ever been. It is no accident, perhaps, that David will be the one to record God’s call to be still and know that God is God.

In his book title Crazy Busy, Dr. Edward M. Hallowell writes of a recent encounter he had on vacation with an old-style rotary telephone. For those too young to recognize what this is, first, it’s a land-line; second, it’s a phone with a dial on the front where you are accustomed to finding buttons to push. To call someone’s number, one puts a fingertip into the hole on the dial that is over the number one wishes to punch in, spinning the dial once for each numeral in the phone number. Dr. Hallowell writes, “By the time I had laboriously cranked out the entire number, I was in a total snit. ‘How could anyone still own such a slow phone?’ I fumed. ‘What a stupid phone! How backward! How dumb!’ But then I caught myself,” he goes on. “This was absurd. …I felt embarrassed at my automatic impatience. ….As the vacation move along, I changed. I made friends with that old rotary phone. …I came to think of it as a wise counsel, ensconced on its end table like a wise Buddha cautioning me to take my time and enjoy, while they lasted, the summer, the childhood of my kids, the ripening of my marriage, and these best years of my life.”

I wonder if there is something like an old rotary phone, an object or a space, set aside and sanctified, in your home or mine, that can remind us to take the time to let God be God and find the calm therein. I wonder what there was for the disciples to remind them of the same.

In this season following Pentecost, you and I are invited to hear the Gospels now as the disciples surely did also, from the other side of Jesus’ ministry with them. He has ascended to heaven and left them with the responsibility of carrying the Good News of God among humanity, of God’s Love for all, into the world around them. And though Jesus has sent to them the Holy Spirit to equip and encourage them, their agendas have just become full of urgencies, deadlines, and crises.

With no telephone of any kind what remains to remind the disciples of the calm available to them in the knowledge that God is God, and so they need not try to be? Today, we may assume that they remember two parables that Jesus told, which we hear in the Gospel read for today. Each tells the disciples the same thing: that the Kingdom of God is a seed for them to plant; that God’s sovereignty in the world is realized not because they, or even Jesus, declare it to be so. Rather, that God reigns in the world wherever the seeds of God’s Kingdom, of God’s presence, God’s Love, are planted. And that God’s presence and Love are planted only by the presence and love of God’s people.

So, if the urgency of their new agenda of serving as the presence and love of God to the four corners of the world now seems to overwhelm them, here are Jesus’ stories, his own words, reminding them that the Kingdom of God does grow, and they need not assume that it is all up to them to make this happen.

‘Plant your seeds,’ Jesus is saying to them, and to you and to me. ‘Plant your seeds of love; be present with one another, with friends, better yet, with people whom you barely know. Plant you seeds of patience with the kind, yes, and with the cranky, too, and with the simply inept, who, it seems, will never get it. Plant your seeds where you think they may never grow, where every sign, every human response, persuades you that you have wasted your time, for that where seeds of my Kingdom are needed most.

Then remember that your agenda includes a call from me to rest from schedules crammed with crises, with lists of ‘to-do’s in the name of the Lord,’ with issues of holy urgency; ‘a call to rest, so that especially when you do not see it, when you do not hear of it, when you do not experience it, nevertheless, you may be still and know that where you are, there my Kingdom grows.’
And now may Almighty God, who gives to us that hope which streams from everlasting life, grant that we may know the Peace of God’s Presence in the company of one another, that we may praise God boldly, and faithfully do Gods’ will, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and for ever. Amen.

© 2009, James V. Stockton