Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

It's always a fascinating thing to me to see how language changes. And it really does. And surprisingly quickly. Not only do words move in and out of popular usage, so does the body of meaning, the emotional weight that words carry. A good example of just such a shift is the word "radical". Not too terribly many years ago, a homilist who wanted to be given a tolerant hearing had to be very careful about using that word. I learned that by experience. One Sunday in Wahpeton, in the late sixties, I remember, I spoke about the radical moral stance demanded by Christ of His people. It was not a wise choice of words. I was quickly accused of being everything from a draft-dodger to a communist, to a hippie. None of those, of course, were true. Well, draft-dodger maybe.

But in any case, those were the people who had, for the time, pre-empted the use of the word "radical". It was with such that the meaning of the word was associated. And that was too bad, really, because it's a good word, one closely associated with Christianity, very descriptive of being Christian. Luckily that atmosphere has changed. You may remember that last Sunday I used the word a couple of times in talking about the Eucharist, and the ethic that sacrament imposes on us. And indeed it does. The morality of love is easily and readily practiced as long as it is presented in terms of a love of one's friends, one's neighbors, those who have a claim on us, a relationship to us. But Christ in the Eucharist radicalized the morality of love, presented it as calling from us a love of our enemies, of those who do us harm, have no claim, no hold on our concern at all.

And that is a good example of what it means to radicalize... It means to purify, literally to go to the root of a thing. To embrace an idea, a value, fully, without compromise or reservation or conditions. And Christ certainly does ask that of us. He asks of us a radical faith, a radical love, a radical discipleship.

And these readings this weekend present us with another example of just that, I think, Another example of the radical virtue that must mark the disciples of Christ. And again, this virtue this weekend shares in all of the drawbacks that always seem to characterize radical virtue. They seem so extreme. They just don't make sense, they are not reasonable. They are the sort of thing to which we are always tempered to respond, "Well, Christ didn't really mean that".

And this time the virtue which the Gospel pictures as being an element of a radical faith is the virtue of simplicity. Simplicity is an easy virtue to describe, really. It means clarity. It means purifying one's original vision, one's central values, and seeing to it that anything else that come's into one's life, demands one's attention, drains one's energies, flows from that vision, pursues that value. Or at least doesn't counter it. So simplicity will most likely mean shedding, from time to time. Just getting rid of stuff, physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. Anything that might be for us a sidetrack, a deterrent in the pursuit of value.

It is easy for us, deceptively so, really, to think of simplicity in terms of a measureable life-style, and the shedding that must be done in terms of the things that we have, or use, as though the vow of poverty were a guarantor of simplicity. It's not. It is a symbol of simplicity, but not a substitute for it. The simplicity to which the Gospel calls us is much more radical than that. It is a simplicity of heart, a simple, clear, uncluttered view of the world, what it means, what is important in it, what is my role in it. And in order to achieve that, we have to shed a great deal more than things.

As I said, easy to describe, but exasperatingly difficult to do. There is just so much so much in our immediate experience that seems to militate against the notion of a simple response, a simple stance as anything but self-destructive and foolish. After all, we live in a world in which big problems, mystifyingly complex challenges seem to be the order of the day. Nuclear destruction. World starvation. Political polarization. The virtual collapse of the family system as the basis of a stable society. More, as Christians, we propose for ourselves a goal every bit as mystifying, complex and challenging. Nothing less than the elimination of all of those evils, and the establishment in their place of the Kingdom of God, a universal peoplehood of justice and peace. Well, nothing very simple sounding about any of that. All of that is undeniably real, and undeniably complex.

And that is the danger of it, really. In the face of all that, the temptation is to measure our response against our experience of the challenge. The temptation is to equate "real", and "important", and "effective", with "complex". And as is always the case, to give in to a temptation is to leave reality behind. No virtue in that.

Well, what is the reality? What should be our response in the face of all those challenges? Mark lays it out for us in this Gospel passage this morning. And he does so with images, two of Christ's parables of the Kingdom. The role of the farmer, in producing food, is simply to throw out some seed. To do that, certainly, as well, as skillfully as he can, but simply to do that. Everything else in that complex and mystifying process is beyond his control. So in Mark's imagery, the farmer's first and most immediate challenge is not to produce a crop, but rather to let the crop produce itself, or better, from the second parable, let God produce it, in His way, on His terms. The farmer's real challenge then is to simplify his view of himself, to shed his need for control, his need to manipulate, engineer that growth on his own terms. In the production of even something as large and complex as a mustard tree, the only real useful role for the farmer is to plant a very small and insignificant looking seed. It is interesting that it is only Mark, the first to write his Gospel, who includes this image of the farmer. Perhaps that says something about the human nature of even the Gospel authors. Perhaps by the time they wrote, the complexity of the problems faced by the early Church had already begun to make that notion seem just a little foolish.

Well, we too have an awfully hard time doing that, most of us. We have an awfully hard time accepting Christ's word for the fact that the seeds that work could possibly be simple, small, and insignificant looking. We too give in to the temptation to believe that complex challenges demand a complex response. And to the extent that we do, we must simplify.

What can I do about world hunger? Very simple. I can feed the next hungry person I see. Whether that person be physically hungry, emotionally hungry, intellectually or spiritually hungry, I can give him something. What is the connection between that and starvation in Africa? I don't know. But then it's not important that I know what the connection is. All that matters is that I know there is one. What can I do about the evils of warfare and violence? Very simple. I can look at the person sitting next to me here this morning, or in the lunch room, or met on the street downtown, and make up my mind that there are no conditions under which I will ever hurt that person. What can I do about political, ideological polarization, the kind of thing that spawns the madmen who in the noblest of causes hijack planes, terrorize and kill innocent passengers? Very simple. I can look at the person sitting next to me here, or in the lunch room, or met on the street downtown, and tell myself that that person has every right in the world to be, to believe, anything he or she pleases, and I have no right at all to define difference, disagreement, as enmity, as right or wrong, good or bad. I can make up my mind to be kind, or at least polite, to people I don't like, who don't like me. Simple indeed. radically simple. But it works, and the Gospel tells us, it is the only thing that does.

So. To simplify. A radical demand of a radical Gospel. To surrender our need for control over issues, over other people, over society, and to assume control over ourselves. Both equally difficult. It's worth reminding ourselves that simple does not mean powerless. In the face of the challenges, the goals Christ poses for us, we ought not in any sense be passive. The farmer in Mark's imagery, after all, had a role to play, and a great deal depended on his playing it as well, and as faithfully as he could. So too for us. Simplicity perhaps means something more like focused, being sure that we bring to bear our skills, our power on that which we are really being asked by the circumstances of our lives to do, even if there sometimes doesn't seem to be a very obvious connection between that and what we hope to see accomplished. In the radical virtue of the Gospel we make our own Paul's words in the second reading. "We continue to be confident". And with good reason. As long as the simplest of seeds are faithfully sown, the Kingdom will grow to completion.

Readings: Ezekiel 17:22-24; 2 Corinthians 5:6-10; Mark 4:26-34. The homily was preached on Sunday, June 12, 1994.