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Green Blades Preaching Roundtable

5th Sunday after Pentecost

Year B
June 23, 2024
Pastor Kristin Foster

Job 38:1-11
Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32
2 Corinthians 6:1-13
Mark 4:35-41

Last Sunday we were caught in the weeds of Jesus’ parables of the kingdom, a farmer scattering seed, an unwelcome mustard tree providing sanctuary for some unwelcome birds. This Sunday we are caught in an unwelcome storm on the sea, where even the fishing professionals otherwise known as disciples are scared out of their minds. Nature has its own mind, we are reminded.

The transition between these two passages, as is Mark’s wont, disturbs us with its abruptness. I’m not gonna explain this, says Mark.  Gospel is an encounter, not an explanation. A God encounter.  The Big Mystery. A life-altering one. A reverberant Question.

So.

From parable to miracle, from land to sea, we find ourselves in a territory of disproportion and dislocation. In the mustard seed parable, we encounter the disproportion of “the smallest of all the seeds on earth” becoming “the greatest of all shrubs”.  Oh, how familiar and continually forgotten this is! God’s power in the powerless, God’s greatness in the smallest. And how dislocating of the Teacher to celebrate the worth of the worthless, the value of the unwanted.

Think pollinators and all those churches creating sanctuaries for them, even ripping up those nice smooth lawns.

Now this coming Sunday we move from seeds to sea, from unwanted plants to unwanted weather, from parables of the kingdom (aka holy workings of God) to a performance of that holy working. 

From land to sea, from parable to performance, we continue this Sunday in this place of dislocation and disproportion. Here on the sea of Galilee, the boat is familiar territory for the fisher-disciples, but the place where the boat is going is not.  Jesus has directed them to “go to the other side”, an unknown place, a land of the Gerasenes.  They move from undesirable mustard bushes to undesirable (Gentile) people and their swine. Jesus is deliberately dislocating them, just as he did with the mustard seed parable. When the wind whips the sea into a dangerous frenzy, they face a power utterly disproportionate to their own. Their response of fear was entirely appropriate.

We are so there, aren’t we? Nature has been dislocated, disrupted, by human systems of extractive domination. We are just beginning to feel the full force of that fury.  Deluded by our dreams of omnipotence, some of us are beginning to recognize that nature is not controllable. The boat is swamping. In fact, we could be drowning. The power of this storm is utterly disproportionate to the powers within our scope to resolve it. We cannot count on God to extricate us from this storm of human caused climate breakdown.  Or the storm of democracy breakdown. 


My reflections are unfinished, as is my sermon for this Sunday, so I end with some questions. Perhaps one of them, or one I do not ask, will reverberate for you.

·      Even in the storm, the disciples call Jesus, not Lord or Savior, but Teacher. How is Jesus our Teacher in the storms at hand, even as he teaches us through the mustard seed?

·      Jesus is in the same boat with us. This boat.  Where we are right now?  How does that feel to you to know that you are, that we are, not alone? 

·      The storm did not stop them from getting to the “other side”. Will the storm stop us in our journey?  What is that other side now?

·      Other boats are with him. When Jesus stills the storm, all the boats are saved. We, the disciple community, are not in this storm alone. All people, all creation, is in it. Could knowing this change everything?  

·      What was Jesus’ authority with the wind and the waves?  Was it power over them, like a divine form of human domination?  Or was it a different authority, an authority of an undamaged relationship with the full scope of Creation? Could this be like a person who has such a bond with a frightened, raging animal that the animal can be calmed?

·      Mustard trees and stormy seas. We are not in control of either of them, are we? How do they put us in a new place?  A place where we can act in hope?  A place where those who still have no faith can glimpse the holy workings of God?

 

 

 

Pastor Kristin Foster
Pastor Kristin Foster
Cook, MN

Kristin Foster, long term pastor on the Mesabi Iron Range of northern Minnesota, now retired from parish ministry, is the co-chair of the Northeastern Minnesota Synod’s EcoFaith Network and editor of the Green Blades Preaching Roundtable. Over four decades of ministry, including fifteen years as internship supervisor, she has written, preached, and worked for the rights of organized labor, the full inclusion of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities, and the empowerment of small communities. As pastor of Messiah Lutheran Church in Mountain Iron, she was also the founding chairperson of the Iron Range Partnership for Sustainability. She lives outside Cook, Minnesota with her husband, Frank Davis, on an old Swede-Finn farmstead. They take every available opportunity to spend time with their two daughters, their partners, and their three grandchildren.

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