Sermon afterthoughts: Who you callin' a weed???

 I am not a gardener, and I never will be. 

I have not nearly enough patience for that. I'm pretty strongly opposed to being out in direct sunlight for that long with no hope of shade. I'm clumsy. There are a lot of reasons for it. 

One of them, though, is I've gotten to be uncomfortable with the whole idea of how exactly one defines a "weed."

All of this comes on the heels of dealing with Mark 4:26-34, today's gospel reading in the lectionary, and in particular the seemingly familiar Parable of the Mustard Seed. We know that one, right? It's the tiniest seed in seed-dom, and yet it grows into this massive growth that produces large branches in which birds can build their nests and take shelter. We have, in the church-popular imagination, made that into a parable about how what seems small and insignificant can become great and mighty, or something like that. 

That really isn't the point.

After all, the parable is introduced with Jesus's words, "With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?" (NRSV) Jesus's words make the link explicit: "It is like a mustard seed...". The point of the parable isn't to tell a small or frail child that they can grow up to be big and strong, or that whatever endeavor we've decided to take up will blossom and flourish like that tiny seed. The point of the parable is that the kingdom of God is like that shrub that spreads out and grows and has the big branches to nest in.

And then there's that word "shrub." (Ed.-Allow me a moment for a Monty Python reference that won't go away...)

(There, that's better.)

Jesus calls it a shrub, as the NRSV translates it. Am I wrong, or is that a word that doesn't necessarily conjure up grand and mighty? I mean, it's the root of the above Monty Python joke, or how Molly Ivins brought George Bush the Younger down to size. It ain't the cedars of Lebanon, that's for sure. 

Furthermore (as noted in today's sermon), this particular shrub wasn't exactly super-desirable. It did have some medicinal properties, but that wasn't a thing you went and cultivated that shrub to get - there was plenty of it available in the wild. Worse was that if this shrub got into whatever you were cultivating, your harvest was quite likely in some trouble. It wasn't perhaps quite as pernicious as kudzu - the Vine That Ate the South - but it did invade and crowd out other plants in its path. You wanted it to stay out in the wild, not in your fields. 

Oh, and those branches that birds can nest in? The same birds that were plucking away the seed scattered by the sower earlier in that chapter, in Mark 4:4? 

And this is what Jesus chose to compare with the kingdom of God?

Yeah, it fits. The stuff that grows into our lives and crowds out our neatly laid-out plans and boundaries we'd just as soon stay out in the wild, right? We're not keen to see our best-laid plans disrupted or uprooted in any way. We don't like it, and we want to root it out and toss it in the trash. 

This gives me pause. In the face of such a passage, I am charged to wonder what God sees in a thing I might regard in the way Jesus's audience likely viewed that mustard-seed shrub. Is there some redeeming quality in that thing that is getting castigated as a "weed" that I'm not seeing? Or let's get more directly spiritualized about it: am I going to fail to recognize the moving, spreading, in-crashing kingdom of God because it looks like an invasive shrub messing up my just-so life-garden? 

This comic also comes to mind:

Image credit unknown, which is too bad because this is really good.

To abstract some point out of all of this, we are (I fear) too often or too easily conditioned to equate the good (or dare I say the holy?) with the pretty. We also tend to want to equate the good with the orderly, despite how often and how readily order (even "law and" order) becomes an excuse to perpetuate all manner of evils upon those not like us. When we let the quest for the pretty and orderly and beautiful-by-human-standards take over all of our perception, we are flat-out going to miss the in-crashing, invasive kingdom of God. What we call a weed or an invasive species may well be where the Spirit is moving. At this stage of my life, I really don't want to cultivate any habits that might make me miss that.

Thanks be to God, I think.

Sermon afterthoughts: Disney/Pixar family values

 The latest reincarnatin of this blog that will never die: an occasional place for sermon thoughts to go when they don't quite make it into the sermon.

So today's sermon, on Mark 3:20-35, tries to grapple with one of those sayings of Jesus which we'd prefer Jesus hadn't actually said. His family has come to get him, and not necessarily with peaceful intent, and when the crowds tell Jesus that they're outside calling for him, Jesus drops this backhanded bombshell on them: 

Who are my mother and my brothers?

Here are my mother and my brothers! 

Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.

*Smack*.

We don't really handle this one very well, even failing to realize that in many cases this rejoinder is good news, for those for whom what our society worships as the "nuclear family" is not at all a place of refuge or safety. The reasons can be more numerous than the stars: abuse of many different kinds from physical to emotional, of every horrifying type; parental or familial rejection for such "sins" as having the gall to come out or to vote for a Democrat or to choose to take a job far away from the old home place (I have known people who have suffered all of the above, fwiw); parents incapacitated by drug abuse or alcohol abuse or mental illness or again, a wide variety of things, and simply incapable of caring for a child; fights or disputes over a girl or a job or a house or who knows what; the list can be frankly endless of things that can irreparably split a family. For a person caught in any of those forced isolations, Jesus's declaration is a message of hope indeed.

Still, the rest of this particular society doesn't particularly warm to this bit of instruction. To be sure, enough politicized verbiage over "family values" has been shoveled upon us over many decades now, and it would be hard to blame anyone for feeling that, contra Jesus's words, "nothing's more important than family."

Hmm. I've heard that phrase, but not from a politician. Actually, I heard it from Coco.

Coco, in this case, is the 2017 Disney/Pixar animated film about a young boy, wanting to be a musician but ferociously opposed by his family, who blunders into the land of the dead of Mexican tradtion to seek the great-great-grandfather who is his musical inspiration/aspiration. Miguel finds out things were not what he thought, but suffice to say that in the grand tradition of such animated fare everything does work out in the end, despite his family threatening his music even as it is the only thing that can prompt his great-grandmother, the titular Mama Coco, to remember that great-great-grandfather and thus preserve his existence in the land of the dead. (The power of music to affect memory is, of course, something any good music therapist could have suggested.)

And it is in such a context that Miguel utters the line noted above, "nothing's more important than family." Even as his family (in both the realms of the dead and the living) are doing all in their power to prevent him from learning and setting right the wrongs of their family's past, "nothing's more important than family."

Don't get me wrong, I love this movie, and its dramatic climax as he finally plays for Mama Coco was literally breathtaking - I actually forgot to breathe during it, in the midst of all the ugly-crying and nose-running. But that line is grating on me more and more every time I hear it.

This is a fairly recent example of a strong tendency in this particular animated tradition (others can talk up the live-action films like the various Mary Poppinses), taking in both classic Disney animation and more recent Disney and Pixar contributions to the genre. Perhaps one of the most extreme examples might be Cinderella (in whichever version), which draws on an old fable to play up the horrors visited upon the title character when she loses her parents and is forced to live with the prototype wicked stepmother and stepsisters. This bit of suffering from lack of family is only fixed (as is so often in these things) by Cinderella's rescue by a hansome, charming prince, which opens up a whole other can of worms. 

To be honest, the phenomenon of missing mothers (or sometimes fathers) in especially the classic Disney animated fare is awfully prolific. Think of orphans or otherwise parentless figures such as all those Lost Boys in Peter Pan, Arthur in The Sword in the Stone, Penny in The Rescuers. Add those who are prominently missing one parent; Belle in Beauty and the Beast, Nemo in Finding Nemo, even Pinocchio being "raised" by the "single parent" Geppetto. Throw in those actually lose parents as part of the film; Tod in The Fox and the Hound, Mowgli's mother in The Jungle Book, Quasimodo's mother in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mufasa in The Lion King, and both of Elsa and Anna's parents in Frozen (and Kristoff is somehow an orphan too). Plus, do I even need to mention Bambi's mother?

Throw in wicked stepmothers and -others (besides Cinderella, you can also point to the Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Mother Gothel, Rapunzel's kidnapper-cum-"mother" in Tangled) and you've got a long list. Source material in fairy tales and fables contributes to this a great deal, of course, but you know, you could look at other sources after a while. Even then, though, the single-parent theme seems awfully persistent: Tiana's father was a WWI casualty in The Princess and the Frog, and where is Andy's father in the Toy Story movies? Coco is almost an outlier for having such a prolifically present family. 

Rescue by a handsome prince still crops up an awful lot in such cases where princes make any sense; even as late a contribution as The Princess and the Frog throws in a handsome, charming playboy prince, and of course princes abound in the classic fare. Rapunzel is ultimately restored to her parents in Tangled; Mowgli gets adopted in a Jungle Book sequel; Simba mates with Nala in The Lion King. 

In short, there aren't many such movies in which some form of family restoration (either marriage or finding parents or adoption) is not the ultimate solution. Frozen can count as one, although Frozen II suggests that Anna and Kristoff do finally get together. Marlin and Nemo muddle through in Finding Nemo. I think the ultimate example of family resilience, as opposed to family restoration, in the Disney corpus is probably the least Disney-ish Disney animated film of all: Lilo & Stitch.

When the destructive little alien Stitch crash-lands on one of the Hawaiian islands and gets "adopted" by young Lilo, much against older sister Nani's wishes, a family, however unwitting, is "made," even if it takes a while to set in. Stitch (originally no name, just Experiment 626) has no real capacity for anything like "family" relationship - the only purpose built into him was to destroy. Lilo and Nani are orphans; their parents' death is described by Lilo barely in passing - "it was raining, they went for a drive." Nani, only a teenager herself, is losing her grip as Lilo's guardian, constantly on the verge of losing her to state guardianship. Yet after many misadventures (no point in spoiling the film), the three are finally a family, as claimed by Stitch himself as he is about to be taken into intergalactic custody: 

Grand Councilwoman: Who are you?

Stitch: This is my...family. I found it,...all on my own. 

It's little...and...broken...but, still good. Yeah. Still good.

Folks, that'll preach. 

Finding a family, when there's no such thing as family, must feel like a miracle. When Jesus turns to the motley crowd in Mark 3 and says "these are my mother and brothers!", who knows what kind of flabbergasted and amazed reactions that received - not from the disdainful biological mother and brothers or the bullying religious authorities, but from the crowd itself. The level of grace in such a claim overwhelms. There is the following statement that "whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother." 

Respect those families made from grace, when all hope for that place of belonging seems lost. Respect those families made from struggling together. Respect those families that are made, the way Jesus made one.