Living Parables - 6-17-2018

    Sermon preached at Hope Lutheran Church based on the gospel, Mark 4.  Have you ever tried to retell a funny story or joke that before split the sides of your audience --- only to see it fall flat as a pancake the second time around? The same setup, the same characters, the same punch line that left some of my friends holding their sides and wiping their eyes, leave the men’s breakfast yawning as they sip their coffee.
    I don’t know about you, but I have some standard phrases that I can turn to when that happens: “I guess you just had to be there.” “It loses something in translation.” Or the old fall back…. “You just don't get it.”
    But the fact is, storytelling of any sort, amusing sketches or tragic tales, or sharing a joke is an art form. Good storytelling is sensitive to the variety of people listening, the inflections in our voice, the mood of the day, the color of the sky --- they all combine to create a one-time-only atmosphere for the words we speak. A story may bring a tear or a smile at one telling, and yet, the very next audience experiences the same words in a completely different way.
    Today, Mark's gospel tells us that Jesus chose to speak in parables. Over the years that I have been a pastor, some people have shared how they find that very annoying, even a bit dishonest of Jesus. Why didn't Jesus come right out and say what he meant? Why did he leave behind all these cryptic sayings, loaded with innuendo, instead of a crisp code of laws or a stack of essays with titles like “How to Be a Good Disciple,” “An Abundant Life,” “Your best life begins in the morning,” “A Brief Definition of the Kingdom of God” or “Seven Key Features of the Coming Kingdom and What This Means to You?”
    But no. Instead we have this cross-eyed, cryptic, incomplete, awkward, and at times seemingly absurd collection of sayings known as “Jesus'    parables.”
    Somehow Jesus must have missed the memo that a list of rules never changes --- but Jesus knew that rules never adapt. Or Jesus must not have had time sit down at the key board to write essays beautiful and precisely formed, or he realized that in short order essays can feel no longer vital or alive.
Instead Jesus chose to take the fluid format of a story --- a tale that can never quite be told the same way twice, retold in medieval castles, or under African skies --- to keep breathing new life into the Good News. If you still think Jesus would have gotten his points across better with hard and fast rules, try remembering the last time you sat down and really enjoyed reading Leviticus or the first few chapters of Numbers. Maybe a bored Jesus at 12 at another day of Hebrew school thought to himself, “no rules out of my mouth!” Without the ability of story --- Jesus' parables --- engage us and entice us into their world, even God's Word becomes a hard read.
    Thankfully however, by preaching to his followers in parables, Jesus let each listener make the Good News become their own story, their own experience. As we are swept up in the story, we ourselves become part of a new parable --- the parable of our lives. In other words, taken all together, our individual experiences of the kingdom, our personal stories of God's work and witness in our lives, end up creating --- a “new” gospel.
    You see, we are greatly mistaken if we think our tradition, the traditions found at Hope, stems from only four canonical gospels. As well as “The Gospel According to Matthew,” “The Gospel According to Mark,” “The Gospel According to Luke” and “The Gospel According to John,” the church has almost 2,000 years' worth of other gospel books to celebrate. "The Gospel of Augustine," “The Gospel of Martin Luther,” “The Gospel of Thomas Merton,” “The Gospel of John Wesley.” All these “gospels,” these testimonials have remained vital parts of our tradition because of their eternally rechargeable parable power. Because Jesus is all about talking about the mystery of the Kingdom of God (4:11). And, the “Kingdom of God,” is not about going to heaven when you die. It is about living in the “reign of God” right now. It is about the establishment of “the way” ---God's way --- on earth.
    So, all those other gospels may not be quite so well-known, but they work just as persuasively in our lives. How many of us know that the personal parable stories making up “The Gospel According to Grandma,” or “The Gospel According to Aunt Mary,” or “The Gospel According to Pastor Bill,” or “The Gospel According to That Kid at Camp Whose Name I Can't Even Remember,” have affected our lives dramatically?
    The point for today is simple. We constantly need a reminder, “All of us are in the process of writing our own gospels -- our own accounts of experiencing the Good News of the coming kingdom in our midst.” All of us are writing a gospel through the very act of living is part of being a disciple of Christ. It is why Jesus gave the power of the parable to all those listening to his words. Storytelling is one of the most basic practices common to all human communities. Stories connect us to one another, to our ancestors, to our world and to our God. Because according to the author of Mark stories increase and yield “thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.” From small beginnings --- even secret beginnings --- the way of God will, inevitably and ultimately, “come to light.”
    That is way as we read, in this week's gospel text, Mark notes that when Jesus spoke to the crowds around him, he “spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it …” Jesus knew that only parable power had the ability to make the Good News of the kingdom a potent reality for our listening ears.
    If you don’t believe me, what chapter did we add to our gospel this week? How did the parables act out in our life witness to the Good News? Do any of these titles remind you of this week's additions to our work in progress? The Parable of the Crabby Boss and the Lutheran Coworker. The Parable of the Kids Who Won't Clean Up Their Rooms and the Mother Who Is Threatening to Ground Them for Life. The Parable of the Flat Tire and the New Suit. The Parable of the School That Doesn't Feel Safe and the Kids Who Must Attend There. The Parable of the Emperor and the children at the border. The Parable of the Empty Cupboard and the Overflowing "Bills to Pay" Slot.
    You see, we are not too worry if these, or the parable stories we experienced this week, didn't seem to have any grand significance, any definitive “gospel” quality to them, as we lived through them. We are not to be concerned that somehow those life parables didn’t seem religious enough? Or with the right words, or the right length.
    Rather, the power of a parable is partly its ability to stand up to scrutiny and self-examination later --- and there to reveal its true meaning, its gospel heart. Because as we need to be reminded repeatedly, Jesus spoke in parables to the crowds. And only later did Jesus explain to his own disciples the kingdom kernel that lived within his stories. Likewise, only later do we find a kernel of the kingdom in our stories through grace.
    So here we are at another week of worship, gathered to praise God, see how fast children grow as we celebrate with them their first communion, give thanks or not for those father figures in our life as well as struggle to hear the still, small voice of God in our world. Meaning, that it is the job of all of us, as Jesus' disciples, to come together and plug into the parable power running through each other's lives. Because we have an inkling to the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John --- the gospels of Augustine, Aquinas, Abelard and Avila -- the gospels of Luther, Calvin, Wesley and Edwards --- the gospels of grandpa, our Sunday school teacher, Cousin Emilio and our little sister --- we, as a Christ-body community of faith, work together to discern in what new direction each week's parable power has taken us.
    Our final duty, then? We are to return to the world Monday morning and tell the parables of our lives not because they are pretty, neat rules or fantastic essays, rather it is this way we become living gospels of Jesus Christ. A gospel lived through the sowing of seeds of truth, love, and mercy by words and deeds. Amen.