PROPER 6, YEAR B

June 13, 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N.J.

Ezekiel 17:22-24; Psalm 92; 

II Corinthians 5:6-10; Mark 4:26-34

Today’s Epistle reading from Saint Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians includes the rather intriguing statement: “While we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith and not by sight.”

The implication is that in this life many things remain hidden from our view that will be revealed to us only when we finally arrive in the fullness of God’s kingdom. In the meantime, we may never completely comprehend all that God is doing in our lives, in the lives of those around us, or in the life of the wider world. Still, we trust that God desires only our good, and that even if his ways remain to some degree hidden from us, he’s nonetheless leading us through this present world to an infinitely better destination. So we do our best to follow, even if we don’t fully understand why he’s taking us by this particular route. (Sometimes I don’t understand why my GPS is taking me by this particular route, but I’ve learned through bitter experience that it’s usually best to follow its directions.) That’s what it means to walk (or drive) by faith and not by sight.

The other readings illustrate this principle with vivid images of God acting in often mysterious and hidden ways, but with powerful results. We begin with Ezekiel’s vision of the cedar tree. To understand this prophecy, it helps to have some background on what was going on at the time.

Things were going really badly for Israel. The mighty Babylonian Empire had conquered Judah and had taken its young king captive into exile. While the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple still remained about five years in the future, it was nonetheless a dark and hopeless time in the Jewish people’s history, and understandably so.

Against this gloomy background, Ezekiel conveys a message of hope from the Lord: “I will take a sprig from the lofty top of the cedar …” The key to the vision is that this tall cedar from which the sprig is taken is the old Kingdom of Judah, now doomed to destruction.

God then foretells that he will plant the sprig upon “a high and lofty mountain, the mountain height of Israel.” This almost certainly refers to Mount Zion in Jerusalem, the location of the Jewish Temple. There, the sprig taken from the cedar will grow into a great new noble cedar; under it will dwell all kinds of beasts; in the shade of its branches birds of every sort will nest. According to many interpreters, these beasts and birds represent the Gentiles, all the world’s nations and peoples, who’ll come to worship the Lord in Jerusalem.

So, the tender sprig taken from the old cedar is the faithful remnant that God will bring back to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon to begin again and start over. The prophecy concludes: “I the Lord bring low the high tree, and make high the low tree …” In other words, even when all seems lost, God is nonetheless working in and through the present devastation to bring about a brighter future than any of the glories of the past.

The parables of Jesus in today’s Gospel develop similar themes in fascinating ways. The kingdom of God, Our Lord says, is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground. Then, as he sleeps and rises day and night, the seed sprouts and grows, he knows not how. The earth produces of itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. At least part of the point is that once the farmer has done his part, he has no option but to wait for God to do God’s part. And while God’s part remains largely hidden and mysterious, it nonetheless brings about an amazingly abundant harvest.

The parable of the mustard bush not only alludes back deliberately to Ezekiel’s cedar tree, with the birds of the air making their nests in its shade, but also makes the crucial point that in the building of his kingdom, God often obtains the most spectacular results from beginnings so tiny as to be almost imperceptible. That observation encourages all of us who build ambitious projects upon necessarily small foundations!

So, the question that these readings challenge us to ponder is how we’re being called to walk by faith and not by sight at this time in our life together as the Church. It’s a particularly urgent question, I think, during a period of declining attendance and shrinking membership, not just here at St. Uriel’s but across the entire American religious landscape. (In fact, St. Uriel’s is doing significantly better than many parishes and congregations, both in the Episcopal Church and in other communions and denominations.) We’re just beginning to recover from an enormously disruptive pandemic, and we’re still not sure what the reconstructed future is going to look like. So, I invite everyone here today to take that question away, and reflect and pray on it: How is God calling us in this situation to walk by faith and not by sight? That’s your homework for the coming week.

Part of the answer has to be that just as the farmer in the parable did his part by scattering the seeds, so we do our part and rely on God to do God’s part. Today’s Collect suggests what doing our part might look like: “Keep, O Lord, thy household the Church in thy steadfast faith and love, that by the help of thy grace we may proclaim the truth with boldness, and minister thy justice with compassion …”

According to the Collect, then, our part has two components: faith and love, made possible by God’s grace alone. The component of faith is to speak God’s truth with boldness, and the component of love is to minister God’s justice with compassion. But how exactly we’re called to do those two things is up to each of us to discern. So, there’s another bit of homework for the coming week. Reflect and pray on what it might mean in your life to speak God’s truth with boldness and to minister his justice with compassion.

The reassurance of today’s readings is that if we do our part, in faith and in love, then we can certainly rely on God to do God’s part—often working in deeply hidden and mysterious ways to bring great things from small beginnings, and to transform present misfortune and calamity into greater glory than we can even begin to imagine.