Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship · June 25, 2006

Third Sunday After Pentecost

Prayer of the Day

Dear God, we thank you for the beauty of creation around us and within us.  By your love and power we ask that you grow us as your people of faith and as followers of Jesus Christ.  Amen.

Scripture

Mark 4:26-30

Jesus also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground and then would sleep and rise, night and day.  The seed would sprout and grow; yet the farmer does not know how.  The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.  But when the grain is ripe, at once that one goes in with the sickle, because the harvest has come.”

Jesus also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God?  Or what parable will we use for it?”

Message

Word: Spoken – Written – Lived

Kim Ryan

I don’t know about you, but I have never seen anything quite like it:  the hoopla, the controversy, the interest, the anger, the opposition to the book and now the movie, The Da Vinci Code.  You know… Ministers rarely can say everyone has heard of “whatever” in any given sermon.  But I feel very safe that I can say this morning, “Everyone has heard of The Da Vinci Code.  Whether we have read it, or watched it, or not, we probably have some opinion about it.  The question is, “Why?” 

Why all of the hoopla, and the controversy, and the interest, and the anger, and the opposition to this book and now this movie?  After all, it is just a story.  After all, it is found in the fiction section of the bookstore.  After all, it seems that the lines between what is fact and what is not have been blurred in some ways that some have called irresponsible artistic license.  After all, it is just words on paper.  Is it not?

Matt Lauer talked about it on “The Today Show” the week leading up to the movie’s premier.  He referred to the points of controversy as “nuclear buttons,” because certainly people’s buttons have been pushed around this book and this story.

Why the brouhaha?  Why the accusations of blasphemy, which was in an editorial in the “USA Today” newspaper this past week?  Is it the premise that Jesus might have been married and might have fathered a child?  Is the possibility that the institutional, patriarchal Church of Western Christianity has had some rather ruthless, protective, and power-hungry persons in its history?  Is it that the place of women in the early Church has been so compromised and so oppressed and found in the character and the person of Mary Magdalene, whom scholars agree, began her Christian walk as one of the key leaders in the earliest of the Christian community.  Then it took about 300, 400, or 500 years for her reputation to be recast to that of a shameful prostitute?  Is it the challenge that Christianity’s past, itself, has been shaped and hammered by politics and culture, and the possibility that our present and our future might be being shaped by politics and culture?  Or is it that revelation that there are more than just four gospels that circulated in the earliest of Christian days?

I happened to catch an interview with Dan Brown in which he was asked, “Did you have any idea the reaction your book would get when you wrote it?”

He said, “Absolutely not!”

So, what is it?  What is going on with the underbelly of The Da Vinci Code beast?  Well, I suspect that deep down, underneath the swirl of all the controversy that Dan Brown’s book has surfaced for us – the conversation, the debate, the disgust, the delight – is something really rather simple and yet deeply profound.  I think what is really going on has a great deal to do with the power of story.

Story is never just words on a page.  In our very fact-driven age of over-information, it is fascinating that a mere story has captured our collective attention, and many can respond to this story.  So what?  But we know in our heads and in our hearts that a story is never just a story.

A good story, a really good story, will lead us to ask the question, “What if?”  A good story will invite us to wonder, and once we ask that question, “What if,” then we open the door of our life, even if it is just a crack, to fresh air and to different scenery, and to an invitation to challenge and maybe change the way we think, and even the way we live.

The truth is, most of us, most of the time, find ourselves just breathing the same manufactured air we always breathe, and looking out at the same familiar landscape from our tightly-closed windows, and avoiding the discomfort of new ideas and thoughts.  If nothing else, The Da Vinci Code certainly cracked a few doors, and raised a few windows, and offered a slightly different landscape upon which to gaze.

OK.  Now I’m going to make that “preacher-shift.”  You know the one.  It’s the one about, “And this has to do with the church today, because…”  You know that shift?  Well, this has to do with the church today, because it is curious to note that a similar kind of swirl, and controversy, and discussion, and criticism, and anger, and affirmation, and opposition, and accusation of blasphemy accompanied Jesus Christ in his ministry and his message.

Now, please, do not leave here and go out to say, “She said Dan Brown and Jesus Christ were just alike!”  No. No!  NO!  NO!  However, it is curious to note that a great deal of the reason for the controversy, the discussion, the criticism, the anger, the affirmation, the opposition, the accusation of blasphemy that followed Jesus was because Jesus told stories!  Good stories!  Not history lessons.  Not science lessons based in a factual truth.  That never would have even occurred to him at that point and time in history, but he told lessons in Truth, with a capital “T.”  Those stories are partly what got him in Trouble, with a capital “T.”

He told stories that cracked open the door, with the possibility of fresh air filling stagnant, religious practices and stagnant religious lies.  The stories he told opened the windows to new vistas and new horizons of understanding.  The stories he told invited listeners to ask, “What if?”  His stories invited people to say, “I wonder…” and then to step toward a change in the way they thought, and in the way they lived, and the way they connected with God.

We know these stories from the Bible as parables – the parables of Jesus.  We read them in the New Testament works of Matthew, and Mark, and Luke.  Mark 4, the Scripture we read, was a short parable.  I’ll just tell you.  That was an easy one!  Most of the time with the parables, they’re just not that easy.  The disciples rarely got them at first telling.  You’ll find Jesus trying to explain the parables to his closest of followers.

Daniel Day Davis has written a book called The Parables of Matthew.  One of our small groups has been studying that book.  It has been a wonderful and enlightening study about what a parable really is and what it teaches.

One of my favorite Christian authors, Frederick Buechner, says, “a parable is a small story with a large point.”  I like that:  “A small story with a large point.”  Jesus’ small stories with large points all point to trying to describe the kingdom of God.  That is what they are about.   They are trying to give glimpses into the realm of the sacred, the dreams of God, the revelation of the Holy, the party, the dance, the hope of God.  Parables ask, “What if the kingdom of God is like…?”  Then we ask, “What if?” and we wonder.

Edward Hayes, another favorite author of mine, writes wonderful, wonderful devotional books.  He happens to be a Catholic priest.  In his recent book, The Ladder, he says, “Jesus, along with the desert mothers and fathers of the Christian faith, along with the Zen masters, the mystical rabbis, the Sufi teachers, and the Great Spirit guides have always pointed us toward the promised land of what can be.  The teachers often told parables – stories – to break open the crust of conventional thinking that keeps us in the woeful world of what is.”

I like that.  Such a great phrasing of words that Edward Hayes has given us.  “To break open the crust of conventional thinking that keeps us in the woeful world of what is.”

Then someone this week gave me this story about parable.  I almost can’t tell it, because the first word in the story is “naked,” [editor’s note: produced “necked” by Kim].  I know I never say that word right.  So just know, I’m not pronouncing that word correctly.  It is Texas coming out in me.  Pay no attention to the mispronunciation.

“Necked [naked] truth came into town, and people grabbed their families and shut themselves up in their homes, locking their doors, and closing their shutters.  No one could see the necked [naked] truth.  Parable came out, wrapped a cloak around necked [naked] truth.  People opened their shutters, their doors, and walked out into the village, because they could face truth when wrapped in the story cloak of parable.”

I had an opportunity this week to visit with one of the members of that small group who had studied the parables this past year in their small group time.  I asked, “What surprised you about the parables?”

He responded, “Parables are not easy to hear.  They take our understanding of the world, and God, and ourselves, and stretch them out of shape.  Parables challenge us with a reality and a truth that God is unlimited and unconstrained.  We are not always comfortable with that.  We become constrained by the written word.  Parables push against our rigidity.”

And then one of the most interesting things this student of the parables noted: “Parables, I learned, are stories to be shared, and we need to study them and share them in a group, because it was in the group that the wonder of the rich meanings and the different perspectives of the story came to light.”

I love it when people talk like that, because it gives me an opportunity to say small groups and adult Sunday School will be shaping up in August, getting ready for the fall.  So start thinking now about that.  The best place – the best way – to study the parables or any book or passage of Scripture is in a group.

The Scriptures were remembered by a group.  They were held together by a group.  They were written by a group, for a group, and the riches of the Scripture comes to us out of that sense of community gathering and understanding around the Word.  Community is also how we best discover our own story, how we put our stories into words, how we learn to live beyond the words of others that we have read or we have heard, and give voice to the story that is ours.

There is an interesting thing going on this summer for our teenagers.  You may have noticed it in the newsletter, or you may be totally unaware of what is happening.  First of all, we are having Sunday School in the summer for our teens.  All summer: that is new for us.  I don’t remember that happening before.  Of course, they have that fabulous, renovated youth center, The Loft.  Why wouldn’t they want to come to Sunday School?  It is wonderful!

Secondly, what is happening is that I’ve asked ten speakers to go each Sunday of summer, one a Sunday, and to talk with our teens for only ten minutes about one question.  Here is the question: “What do you wish you had known, or what do you wish someone had told you when you were a teenager about faith, about God, about Jesus, about the Holy Spirit, about the Church?  What do you wish someone had told you, or that you had known when you were a teenager?”

Now, interestingly enough, this has been the easiest “ask” I have ever done.  In my work here at Broadway, I do a lot of asking, and the warning is already out there: “Don’t go to lunch with Kim.  And whatever you do, be careful if you are asked to lunch by Rick and Kim.  And heaven forbid if Rick, Kim, and Jacob should ask you to go to lunch with all three of them!”

I do a lot of asking, but this has been the easiest “ask” I have ever made.  I have more speakers than I have Sunday’s that need to be filled.  People are saying “yes” to what we are referring to in these summer lessons as “The Lofty Lessons of Life.”  (I really like that.  I came up with that.  Nobody likes it as well as I do!  Get it?  The “Lofty Lessons of Life” in “The Loft.”  I love it!)

They can talk about whatever they wish.  Here is what those who have gone so far have been talking about.

Gil Gibbons and Gage Ryan, two of our 19-year-olds, spoke the first Sunday about how they wished they had known how important this community of faith was to them, before they left, because it was only after they left – one to Springfield and one to Brazil – that they really understood how much you meant to them.

Roger and Dixie Fisher spoke about how they wished they had known, when they were teenagers, just how significant and meaningful being a part of a church was going to be.  They didn’t discover that until later in their lives, how rich and important it has been to them to be part of a church.

Randy Coil, last Sunday, spoke about how his understanding of God expanded and changed when he began to understand the Holy Spirit.  He told them how he learned the Holy Spirit is that part of God that lives within him and within each one of us. 

Rick Frost is speaking with them this morning.  God only knows what that senior minister is saying!

Here is what I think is happening.  I think that stories are being shared with our children and our teens.  They are good stories of real and living faith.  What I suspect and what I hope is happening is that doors are being cracked open and fresh air is moving through the Loft and through the hearts and the minds of those young people.  I think the crust of conventional thinking that keeps them in the world of what is, is flaking open towards a promised land of what can be, and that our teenagers are hearing the lived words of faith that can impact their relationship with God.  Now, I don’t know that the ten speakers know that is what is happening in there, but that is what we are about as a church.

One last story…

I was at a social gathering Friday evening, and I did something I rarely do at a party.  I invited someone to visit our church.  You know… It’s a little bit of a ministerial cliché to say, “Hi.  I’m Kim Ryan, and I’m the minister of a church.  Do you want to visit?”  That cuts down on your party invitations!  But I just couldn’t avoid it.  This woman was sharing with me.  She’s been in Columbia for a year.  She has been looking for a church, but she hasn’t found one.  So I asked her to come visit us at Broadway Christian Church.

She said, “I have to ask you one question.  Is there going to be a lot of talk about hell, and sin, and damnation?”

I could safely say, “Not this Sunday!”  I didn’t tell her we were going to talk about The Da Vinci Code.  I always find it so hard to describe us in 30 seconds, which is about how long you have at a party.  And thank God, Belinda Davis was standing right there next to me, and she did a beautiful job.  I thought of what I wished I had said about 12 hours later, which is usually the way it works for me.  Here is what I wish I had said: “I think you will find Broadway Christian Church as a place of open doors and fresh air, a place that offers new horizons and a willingness to say ‘what it?’  It is a place to read, and hear, and study the stories of Jesus Christ, and let those stories become a part of the lived story of your life toward God’s promised land of what can be.”

I hope she comes to visit, but even more, I hope for open doors, and fresh air, and new horizons, and stories so deep and true they compel us as followers of Jesus Christ.

And we say together… “Amen.”

Benediction

Master Storyteller, you weave your truth around us in the gentlest of ways that we might listen and understand.  Help us to open up the many layers of your mysteries that we might really see you and celebrate your Kingdom now and your Kingdom to come!  Amen.