A sermon on Genesis 29:15-28 & Matthew 13:31-33 by Nathan Nettleton

One of the challenges of trying to follow Jesus and live by the values of the new culture that he sought to inaugurate is that doing so is frequently at odds with the accepted social conventions of the world around us, and so to live in this way can be seen by others as socially disruptive, disrespectful, and even sinful and evil. What complicates it further is that the Christian religion has so often been co-opted by the dominant culture and twisted to become not only a part of that culture but a justification for it and a defender of it, so that to actually try to follow Jesus can be seen as anti-Christian.

A couple of tonight’s readings toss up some expressions of this difficulty. In our Genesis reading we heard another story of Jacob. Jacob was someone who was frequently struggling with issues to do with the accepted social conventions of his society, especially the conventions around social status related to birth order. He lived in an era where it was conventional, and therefore believed to be good and right and divinely sanctioned, for the firstborn to inherit all the privileges and the younger siblings to receive very little. Last week we heard the story of how Jacob employed some underhand trickery to reverse the order and receive the rights that would have otherwise fallen to his older brother. In tonight’s story, Jacob gets some of his own back when he is tricked into marrying the older Leah rather than the younger woman of his dreams, Rachel. In this case, the trickery is employed in the cause of maintaining the social customs, rather than inverting them, but it is still an illustration of Jacob’s struggle with the system. But it is noteworthy that you could search the Bible in vain looking for evidence of God condemning Jacob’s struggle or even his swindles. God is willing to be identified as the God of Jacob; the God of Jacob the swindler, the God of Jacob who fought to invert the socially accepted natural order. We are not hearing of a God who sides with the social endorsed privileges of the firstborn few, but a God who sides with those who buck against the systems that disenfranchise the many.

Our gospel reading also points to some social disruption. It is a strange little collection of parables. The first compares the new culture of God to a tree growing from a mustard seed. Like the tomato bush in the paraphrase we heard, mustard bushes do not grow to be trees. At best they grow to be shrub, a little taller than me. So the comparison that Jesus is making is not to something small that can be expected to grow into something big, but to something small which breaks out beyond anything that could be expected and overturns the natural order of things.

And then there is the parable of the yeast, or in the paraphrase we heard, the vodka. The paraphrase did that because otherwise we forget that in scripture yeast always symbolises something corrupt or morally dubious. So Jesus is warning us that the growth of the culture of God might not only be as pervasive as yeast in a big batch of flour, but that it might be regarded as being as morally shady as spiking the punch at a party.

I saw another angle on some of this last night. Margie and I went out and saw the stage musical “Wicked” that is on in town at present. In some ways it was just another in the line of big-budget musical spectaculars in the tradition of Cats, Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, etc, with nothing in the music or the staging to really set it apart. Some people have a passion for these, but to me they sometimes feel a bit like ‘seen one, seen em all’. This one though, I recommend, and if you can’t stand the stage musical genre, then read the novel which is probably better.

What “Wicked” does is play with the idea that there is always a social approved version of reality on offer, and most people are keen to accept it, but that often there is another story which might invert all the social certainties of the official version. And in playing with these ideas, “Wicked” succeeds in being a quite insightful piece of sociology and even theology. What makes it so playful is that it plays with these questions through the story of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. As one of the producers says, it is a bit like moving a camera around to show an unexpected alternative angle on a story we thought we knew. And so, instead of focussing on Dorothy, it focusses on the Wicked Witch of the West and on Glenda the Good, and asks whether the constructions of wickedness and goodness are really accurate portrayals, or are the social constructs designed to reinforce and preserve a status quo. And from this new angle, we find that things are not as they seemed. Rather than being some sort of pure evil, the Wicked Witch was, at least in initially, a rebel for good who saw an injustice and tried to expose it and overturn it. But the injustice she has seen is actually part of a social scapegoating mechanism where a society, in this case the land of Oz, strengthens its social cohesion by uniting against a common enemy. Therefore the whole society is caught up in perpetrating the injustice, and so rather than respond to her call to side with the victims, they rally around a scapegoating of her, and she is branded “the Wicked Witch of the West” and vilified and hunted. The most disturbing scene is when the citizens of Oz are all menacingly brandishing pitchforks and torture implements while singing “Wickedness must be punished”, and it is clear that they have turned into a crazed lynch mob, and all the concepts of good and evil have been inverted and scrambled. As a follower of a messiah who was lynched by a crazed mob and strung up for being a threat to the accepted social order and the unity of “us” as opposed to “them”, I recognised that story as a familiar one, though not as one I was expecting to encounter when I went out rather unknowingly last night.

Now, what has all this got to do with us, or to say to us? There are probably any number of angles, but let me touch on just a couple.

As a congregation, we are currently dealing with our own internal social crisis, and it is the kind of crisis that can often fracture the unity of a group. It is almost an elemental law of the universe that when the unity of a social group is under threat, it will instinctively look for a scapegoat. The scapegoat becomes the focus of the blame, and in the communal act of sacrificing the blamed scapegoat, we find a renewed unity. But this not only unifies the community, it also gives the community a way of avoiding the hard questions about itself. What is it about us that enabled this to happen without our knowing anything about it? How is our present culture responsible for what happened? Scapegoating is so universal because it works — project all responsibility for the problem onto one person or minority group, and purge them from our midst — but we are followers of the one who offered himself as the ultimate scapegoat in order that the world might be saved from its need to keep scapegoating, and therefore we need to keep a very close eye on ourselves to make sure that we do not fall into perpetuating such a corrupt form of social unification.

And secondly, as followers of Jesus, we need to look suspiciously on all the accepted and social endorsed hierarchies. And we need to note that there are layers and layers of these. The Jacob stories clearly raise questions about the hierarchy that prioritised the interests of the firstborn over the younger siblings. To us, the obvious prioritising of the interests of men over those of women in the story is grating and offensive, and yet to many generations of hearers of this story, it wouldn’t have even been noticed. The women are simply possessions being exchanged among the men, and to most hearers, that was simply the way things were and supposedly the way they had always been. Jesus teaches us to keep questioning those things. Any time a group is assumed to be less important, let alone when they are labelled as the scapegoat, Jesus calls us to ask questions, to dare to rethink the possibilities, to ask whether the call to love all without reserve might be a call to rethink the diminished status of this group. So, for example, why do we assume that we have to find a way to cater for the kids around a worship service that is oriented primarily to the desires of adults? What would happen if we allowed the tomato seed to grow into a tree and we began to think about it the other way around? And it is never about simply inverting in favour of one group and against another, so how, once we’ve begun to think about it the other way around, how might we get the two perspectives to dialogue with one another so that a completely new perspective might emerge, a perspective where young and old alike are all valued and the new culture of the kingdom of God is made visible in practice.

The approach of the the kingdom, the new culture of God, always seems threatening to those who are benefiting from the way things are and the way they have always been, but if we will have the courage to surrender ourselves to it, it is never a net loss. Yes, we might lose some privileges, but the gains in peace, hope, joy, love and grace will far outweigh the losses. We follow a God whose upending of social conventions and niceties is not confined by the limits of our imagination. The God who can grow a mighty tree out of a tomato seed can grow a tree with wonderful fruits for all.