Good morning good afternoon or
good evening whatever time it is you
have joined us i'm glad you're here i'm
the Reverend Sheryl Butler
and this is Journey Road Ministries
where we seek
to do justice love kindness
and walk humbly with our God
so the scripture from the gospel today
is from matthew chapter 13
31-33 and 44
to 52 if you would like to read
along
in your Bible. He put before them another
parable
the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard
seed
that someone took and sowed in the in
this field
it is the smallest of all the seeds
but when it has grown it is the greatest
shrubs and becomes
a tree so that the birds of the air come
and make a nest in its branches
he told them another parable the kingdom
of heaven is like
the yeast that a woman took and mixed
in with three measures of flour until it
was all leavened
the kingdom of heaven is like treasure
hidden in a field
which someone found and hid and in his
joy
he goes and sells all that he has and
buys.
again the kingdom of heaven is like a
merchant
in search of fine pearls
on finding one pearl of great value
he went and sold all that he had
and bought it. Again the kingdom of
heaven
is like a net that was thrown into sea
and caught fish of every kind
when it was full they drew it ashore
sat down and put the good into baskets
but threw out the bad. so it will be at
the end of the age
the angels will come out and separate
the evil from the righteous
and throw them
into the furnace of fire where there
will be a weeping and gnashing
of teeth. have you understood all this?
they answered yes and he said to them
therefore 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
may God bless the reading and the
hearing
of the word.
now we have the Reverend Mary Dyer who
will share
with us today
her thoughts of the kingdom.
Today i have titled this homily
Naked Athena. i hope that captures your
interest in curiosity. the gospel today
is a series
of the kingdom of God is like
images .we have the mustard seed the
yeast rising
the pearl, the treasure, the net.
The first two we must have seen
seemingly inevitably growing into a
large plant that could shelter
many things and the baker woman kneading
the bread
seeing very sure and certain
Plant a see and it grows to maturity.
make bread it rises perfectly
the other three the the selling of
everything to hopefully buy
up for the great price the merchant
doing the same to buy
a field in which he helped lay a
treasure chest full of
jewels and the fisherman casting a net
into the sea to pull it up
and not until then knowing whether or
not he had a catch
they seem to carry a bit more of
uncertainty about the results
and yet i'm a gardener
and i know that not every seed that i
plant
is going to germinate or
is going to grow to maturity or is not
going to be attacked by
an animal or some sort of disease or
virus
or even trampled on an inadvertently
i also know having made bread
that the yeast doesn't always rise the
way i wanted it to
and the bran doesn't taste as heavenly
as i had initially imagined
so i want to plump those five together
greatly
in that we understand that there is an
element
of risk and leaving
something to get something better even
in planting a seed and
kneading the dough
so we need to figure out what we do
when we are in that in between time or
something
that has happened and something that we
want to happen
and so i do want to focus primarily on
the seed however
as you know we're still in a perfect
storm of covinds
and blm and unemployment
it's so easy just to get overwhelmed
where do we put our energies do we even
have
any energy left will it even make
a difference haven't we all
wondered these things sometimes
i feel like just staying in bed or not
watching the news and going la la la la
la because i i certainly can't take it
anymore
and so let's talk a little bit about
this kingdom
that jesus promises
actually i prefer the word kingdom
rather than kingdom and it has become
popular among many clergy and
theologians
kingdom even the kingdom of god
applies to hierarchy you know somebody's
lower somebody's higher and that stays
but kingdom talks more about the
community of all of us
together working together praying
together and living together
and so that is
what we pray for when we pray the lord's
prayer
thy kingdom come or thy kingdom come
thy will be done on earth
as it is in heaven so we can't escape
and
stay in bed every day or put our hands
over our ears every day
because we are commanded by the prayer
that virtually any christian knows by
heart
to be part of this kingdom on earth
and so getting back to the gardening
metaphor i'm a
master gardener and had my own
landscaping business for a few years and
have a
actually have a horticultural
certificate and
i learned there that there are two kinds
of seeds one's called the angiosperm
and one called the gymnosperm
the angiosperm is the one that has a
seed inside a protective covering so
that
it is much less likely to be
broken open or eaten or devoured or
die before it's actually founded in
german aids
the other one i find more interesting is
called the gymnosperm
which is greek for a naked
seed that seed has nothing to protect it
or cover it simply its own self its own
kernel waiting
to spring open so
i think of us as gymnosperms that
we can't walk around wrapped up and
coconut unprotected this is time to
to be open to be vulnerable to confront
the forces of evil the forces of power
with our true naked selves unadorned
with anything
that we may have accrued that is not
necessary to building the kingdom
of god no artificial protections no
weapons
no armor just open arms hands
outstretched
to face all those powers of destruction
that are in full body armor literally
with loaded guns and tear gas
to look at the future with new eyes new
hearts
new social structures and human
connections
although i now live in iowa i am from
oregon
so i've been following closely the news
of the protests that have been happening
in portland the city that is very dear
to my heart
the protests that were initiated and
sparked by the
murder of george floyd they have been
primarily peaceful but every day and
every night
people come out in unison to gather
together to protest
this kind of violence
focused primarily on on the uh the black
community
and so there's there has been some
vandalism i'm not going to deny that but
99 of the people that have come out are
peaceful
that come out with no weapons with hands
open and with hearts open and with eyes
open
so even the mayor and the governor had
asked the white house to take away its
hired troops
the private army that has no insignia or
name tags
and they're fully armed with rifles and
shields and face masks
and tear too as the department of
homeland security says
proactively subdue the crowd
they started arbitrarily advancing on
peaceful protesters
knocking them down beating them gassing
them
grabbing someone shoving them into
unmarked valves to take them to
undisclosed locations with no specific
charges leveled against them
both the governor and the mayor have
asked trump to pull back
these gestapo alike
troops that are rampaging through
portland in the
way of keeping peace when they're
actually agitating
so some portland moms finally
being horrified at this horrendous
and unconstitutional abuse of power
decided to
step up and step in
and they formed a line of mothers with
masks
because not to hide their identity but
because of the coronavirus so they're
trying to be together while not
communicating a possibly fatal disease
and with signs and with lint arms
to stand between the other protesters
and this new american gestapo
they were tear gassed but they keep
coming back
stronger every night to continue their
protests against
police violence
then on july 18th an unidentified woman
pushed her way into the front of the
crowd
she proceeded to sit down on the curb
in front of the crowd and facing the
line
of the gestapo she was wearing a mask
so no one could tell who she was
and a stocking cap and that was all
she was totally naked
i expect your first reaction might be
shock
maybe even judgment or condemnation
she was sitting down legs fed
arms apart hands outstretched
to this line of thugs that were heavily
armed
it is a very provocative
picture it both mimics
the act the generative act itself
and also the act of giving
birth a beautiful younger woman
naked in front of armed men
and yet wouldn't it be more fitting to
have the reaction to the
unnamed armed forces with their riot
shields and their pepper spray and their
gas masks and rifles and batons
and she stayed there for a while just
simply
staring at them immobile her arms
outstretched and then still naked of
course she stood up and danced
gracefully
purposefully powerfully
and all their armor all their bullets
all their pepper gas were
totally useless this beautiful woman
showing what true power
is and after she finished
she disappeared unnamed still
unidentified as far as i know
into the crowd soon the press started
calling her
the naked athena her photo has
gone around the world just type in naked
athena in your google search and you
will see her
and the press dubbed her athena because
athena was the roman goddess of war
as this photo of her statue shows
what a difference this statue shows us
what a true warrior looks like
battle dress spear
sword helmet even an eagle sitting on
our shoulder the royal ego
or is it
our faith comes from our following jesus
it's easy to think of him as an infant
you know being held
lovingly in his mother's arm
nursing him in a stable in bethlehem
it's also easy to think of him on the
morning of the resurrection
breaking the bonds of death and
descending later into heaven
where he waits for us also with loving
arms
but it's really not very easy
to look at the depictions some very
realistic
of jesus hanging on the cross
exposed for all to see
so hard in fact that for millennia
artists were afraid to show him as he
actually
as the following painting will
illustrate
he was more exposed in fact
then in virtually all the other artistic
representations of him
he like other prisoners hanging on the
roman cross
was totally naked
no loincloth just as naked
as the day he was born it was the
ultimate
humiliation the roman government
could inflict on a prisoner to take away
any shred of dignity including the
loincloth
that appeared in representations
because that truth of his vulnerability
and nudity was being too hard for us to
witness even in artistic works
and yet with the addition of a loincloth
we hang the crucifix itself
in many churches proclaim that it was
the ultimate acceptance and
vulnerability
that led to resurrection in a new form
that no earthly power could separate him
or
us from the love and power of god
with new friends in kenya i've been
reading the autobiography of wenger and
mathi
the kenyan woman who won the nobel peace
prize in 1994.
she is probably mostly known for
beginning the greenbelt movement
working with other kenyan women to
reforest kenya
the access of western development
and greed having over harvested large
sections
of the countryside and yet she was
also awarded this coveted prize for
working for democracy
peace and the advancement of women's
rights
in 1993 she stood
with any other grandmothers
who after being repressed by the moi
regime
in their quest to have their political
christmas tree
their sons and grandsons most of them
finally decided
to raise the stakes and protest
naked
this willingly stripping has been
long a work of those that are really
open to putting everything on the line
for what they believe in
although i do expect that the shock of
seeing a naked
kenyan grandmother is a bit less than
the first one that i showed you
the first was a very beautiful much
younger woman
and here we see the grandmothers
and yet the message is the same true
power is not found in arms and bullets
and shields and force
but being open and vulnerable and
exposed
all of us together ready for a new
creation
renee brown summarized this task before
us this year
and these challenging times in an
earlier statement
of hurdles
a one's jewish rabbi thousands of years
ago
said much the same thing as she much
later did
no one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth
on an old garment for the patch will
pull away
from the garment making the tear worse
you may have heard of him
his name is jesus so it is
coming time to close
one last quote then a children's song
that expresses how we work together
generation to generation to generations
and seeds
of hope and power
and manifesto the mad former liberation
front written by
wendell berry one of my favorite
american poets
these lines begged to be written
aloud here expect
the end of the world laughs
laughter is immeasurable
being joyful though you have considered
all the facts and now
let us end
i spent a long time running i never knew
then what i know i know now
that the fruits they always come in but
you can't go around just knocking them
down it takes a long time to show in
we plant the seeds then and we look at
them now
but the roots are always growing no
matter if i'm there or never around
whatever grows will grow whatever
dies will die whatever works will
work whatever flies will fly
whatever fails will fail what's meant to
soar
it's like your whole life you've been
training for this moment and when the
time comes you just disown it meaning
you just surrendered don't control it
not interested in the clay pots and
moldings sitting next to the path
trying to unfold it or waiting for the
fruits to fall down toward you let it go
and now you're flowing feeling quite
gorgeous so you take steps away instead
of towards it what a rush feeling
freedom with nothing to hold we've been
taught that what you touch will always
turn to gold and now we're learning when
we let it go it overflows with no credit
to take cause no
credit is home a higher power working
deeper where the seeds are sold and when
the seeds are true
then there's seeds of gold but the real
gold is joy when life starts to flow and
when it does you just smile cause now
you know
i spent a long time running i never knew
then what i know i know now
let the fruits they always come in but
you can't go around just knocking them
down
it takes a long time to show in we plant
the seeds then and we look at them now
but the roots are always growing no
matter if i'm there or never around
whatever flies
and when it dies it dies come on if it
works
when it works
nothing more
my
when it
nothing more
you know when you smile you just give
help someone to know that they
cared about and that you love them
you
