Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
June 16, 2024 – 10:30 AM
Saint Cecilia Catholic Community
Rev. David Justin Lynch
Ezekiel 17:22-24 | Psalm 92:2-3;13-16
II Corinthians 5:6-10 | Mark 4:26-34
+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, AMEN.
In the early days of Saint Cecilia Catholic Community, among our parishioners was a retired Roman Catholic Priest named Dick Matgen. I recall that he wrote a blog. In one of his posts, he spoke glowingly of Saint Cecilia Catholic Community. But he described us as, a “tiny” church.
Upon reading that, I was initially somewhat taken aback, as I’ve never thought of us as “tiny” in the sense of insignificance, but I understood his perspective: he had retired as pastor of a huge Roman Catholic parish of nine thousand people with ten Masses every weekend. So yes, in the grand scheme of churches worldwide, we are still tiny, even though we are now larger than when Father Dick Matgen was among us before moving to San Francisco with his husband after about two years with us.
But to use an analogy from today’s Gospel, we are, by God’s grace, still growing. The seeds that were planted nine years ago are growing in the soil fertilized by God’s abundant and unconditional love that does, or at least should, characterize our community.
Today’s Gospel contains two parables. Both are agrarian; that is, they relate to agriculture. Jesus chose that kind of parable to make sense to the people to whom he was communicating. That was no surprise; he lived in agrarian society, where a sizable number of people made a living raising things that grow. Jesus was doing what every preacher should be doing: he spoke to people in terms of everyday life situations to which they can relate.
The first parable concerns a farmer who plants seeds and waits for the plants to grow before harvesting them. But the farmer does not know how that growing process happened. He can see it, but he cannot explain it. In this parable, Jesus gives us a powerful insight about God. So much of what God does we cannot explain. Of course, using today’s laboratory tools, some plants from the field could be periodically pulled from the ground and examined microscopically. While that process could show us what the plants looked like in their various development stages, and perhaps show a continuing division of cells, scientists will never be able to explain what makes the growth process continue to its natural conclusion of a fully formed plant, ready to be harvested an processed to feed humans and/or animals.
Chicken-and-egg analyses can only be carried back so far until a penultimate ending occurs. At that point, we are left with one inescapable conclusion that it is God that makes the plant grow. I love to play this game with ardent atheists and watch them squirm when they are forced to admit the limitations of the end of what they think is a logical chain of events. Ultimately, they reach the same conclusion as I do: that what is behind the growth process is, in the final analysis, a mystery.
Applied to Saint Cecilia Catholic Community, the mystery that is God has enabled us continue to grow, despite the challenges we’ve experienced. Bishop Armando has told me time and time again that the best way to grow a church is by word of mouth, and to that end, our Office Minister, Sadrac, has constructed, and continues to maintain, a database of the people in the local area, and I am in the process of developing a program to communicate with the people who’ve come to church here to stimulate their further involvement with us. If any of you have any ideas as to how we might best do that, please let me know.
But compared to the vast cathedrals of the world, we are still a tiny mustard seed. Have you ever seen a mustard seed? I have. It is black and about one millimeter in diameter. Look at a ruler with metric markings and you will see how tiny that is. We are still in the process of growth into a mustard shrub. To give you a point of reference, a mustard shrub is huge, about two meters wide and about three and a half meters tall, more than six thousand times the size of the seed from which it came.
The physical characteristics of the mustard seed consist in part of the blueprint that God gave it when God created it. That blueprint is what makes it grow over six thousand times its size to its maturity. What kind of seed must Saint Cecilia Catholic Community be to grow?
Today’s Psalm gives us some ideas. We should want to flourish like a palm tree, exemplify the solidity of a cedar tree, vigorous and sturdy, bearing fruit even in old age. The fruits which we bear here are not only great music, which is very important, but more importantly, we are bearer of God’s abundant and unconditional love by offering all sacraments to everyone, that is, “todos sacramentos para todos.”
Today’s Gospel describes the mustard shrub as having branches on which birds find rest in its shade. The world can count on Saint Cecilia Catholic Community to be the kind of tree described in today’s First Reading from Ezekiel. The context of that snippet of scripture was a prophecy about the re-establishment of the people of Israel in their land after they are freed from the Babylonian captivity perpetrated by the evil king Nebuchadnezzar. Here at Saint Cecilia Catholic Community, we are born anew, freed from the captivity that goes with being part of a large ecclesiastical institution like the Episcopal Church or the Roman Catholic Church.
In our First Reading, the prophet Ezekiel uses the metaphorical image of a tree that will start out as a tender shoot from a large tree that will grow branches and bear fruit to provide a place where birds and other wildlife can live under its shade. As you well know, here in the Desert, shade is a blessing in our triple digit temperatures. However, we live in a world where people are oppressed with heat of hate.
One of the world’s worst forms of hate, along with sexism and racism, is homophobia, which means the dislike of persons based on their being same sex attracted. Saint Cecilia Catholic Community will always be a place where people with same sex attraction are protected and loved as the person God made them to be.
To paraphrase today’s Second Reading, we will always be courageous in our profound disagreement with the characterization of same sex relationships by the Roman church as “disordered.” Our position is, unequivocally, that homophobia is what is “disordered,” not same sex relationships.
Here, we practice what we preach. The blessing that we use every Sunday at this Mass is based on the Chorister’s Prayer of the Royal School of Church Music, which reads in part, “…grant that what we sing with our lips we may believe in our hearts, and what we believe in our hearts we may show forth in our lives.” In other words, what we do here is not just make beautiful music, but that what we sing here helps us improve the everyday world in which we live.
As you leave here today, you will be seeds scattered and sown, to quote the refrain of today’s Offertory Song. The willingness of Jesus to go where He was needed to plant seeds of change must encourages us to embrace new opportunities and spread goodness wherever we go.
Ask yourself, “What kind of seed are you?” What characteristics do you have that will enable you to grow to reach your full potential? Jesus displayed compassion, humility, wisdom, and perseverance. These traits serve as a model for us to cultivate similar qualities, which will enable us to grow and fulfill our God’s dream for us. The clarity of purpose, and identity of Jesus, are what inspires us to seek and become a light to the world as we fulfill our Baptismal Covenant to seek and serve Christ in all persons and respect the dignity of everyone.
Ask yourself, what is God’s blueprint on your heart? Be like that mustard seed by increasing the love in your heart over six thousand times so that you, too, can become a bush where others rest in the shade of your protection of them from the heated evils of hate. Just as you find our community a place of rest for all, you, too, can become a place of rest for others. AMEN.