The Acting Chaplain at Canterbury House (University of Michigan) Speaks at St. Clare’s
(Sunday, June 17)
After a week’s absence from Michigan I was surprised to find a bearded, long-haired priest seated behind the lectern at St. Clare’s Episcopal Church Sunday morning. Rev. Matthew Lukens looked like a college chaplain out of the 1970’s when I was in graduate school, hair significantly longer than the publicity photo above. When he read the Gospel of Mark, he seized the book, held it high, and spoke to the dome of the sanctuary. When he preached, he moved back and forth across the platform, returning occasionally to the lectern to consult his notes. He spoke passionately and looked for a reaction when he referred to the Parable of the Mustard Seed: “Does anyone else wonder what Jesus meant by ‘the greatest of all shrubs?’ Does anything about a shrub sound ‘great’?”
He considered the parable from Mark 4, which compared the kingdom of God to a mustard seed, “which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade” (4: 31-32).
He cited the Apostle Paul as the commentator who defined the “kingdom of God” as the agency of “justice, peace and joy in the Spirit.” Probably not what the messianic Jews of the first century had envisioned, when they longed for a liberating hero to overthrow the tyranny of Rome. Rather a community of hearts and minds changed through “peace and joy in the Spirit.”
Then he told us about his journey from a Southern Baptist upbringing in Birmingham, Alabama to Yale Divinity School to Vicar of Emmanuel Church in the Diocese of Hawai’i. He was drawn to campus ministry by an interest in the fringe movements of Christianity [the kind of spiritual community Phyllis Tickle has called “Emergence Christianity.”*] He proceeded to tell how the mustard shrub suggested the kind of church Jesus was envisioning in this parable.
Matthew recalled his internship with a house church in Birmingham, where he witnessed both the social outreach and the intimate community of a small, but vital fellowship of believers. While he worked for the outreach agency of the church, which provided food and health services to the needy, he was most impressed by the openness and vulnerability of the people of the house churches themselves, how they acknowledged their personal struggles and successes and encouraged each other to grow in faith. This kind of community had become his model of what a vibrant church would look like. “It is a safe place to build a home, a nest.”
Apologetically Matthew returned to the image of the mustard shrub, realizing he had forgotten the crucial feature Jesus described, “so that the birds in the air can make nests in its shade” (Mark 4:32). He contrasted this description with the immense cedars of the Holy Land from which the pillars of the Temple were constructed, an impressive and majestic church. Jesus’ vision, by contrast, was a shrub, “a safe place to build a home, a nest.” The campus chaplain let this image settle in our minds, as he concluded his sermon.
I was touched by Rev Lukas’ exegesis of the Parable of the Mustard Seed. It was the kind of community I longed for, one emerging in St. Clare’s. The church was people, not a building; it was about personal growth, not construction. But deeper still was his message about how the church grows.
“The agency of the Kingdom is in God’s grace,” he said at the outset. I had never heard that word “agency” connected with “grace” before. Agency has been associated with individual empowerment, how we restore influence to those marginalized by our society. What would “grace” have to do with this?
The growth of the seed is not always up to us, he argued, it comes from a life within the seed. We can encourage and promote all we want, but the final impetus is from God. If we do not accept the critical role of grace, we may be in for disillusionment. This is vulnerable talk for a young chaplain just beginning a ministry. I admired it.
The final words of the closing hymn (Lord Christ, when first thou came to earth) resonated with the Rev Lukens’ prophetic challenge and my hopes:
O wounded hands of Jesus build in us thy new creation.
Our pride is dust; our vaunt is stilled, we wait thy revelation:
O love that triumphs over loss, we bring our hearts before thy cross
To finish thy salvation.
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*“Probably the largest reformation of all times in Church history is in full swing. It is a combination of a threefold current initiative of God: moving from church to Kingdom as our legal base; moving from pastoral teacher-based and evangelistic to apostolic and prophetic foundations; departing from a market-based behavior to a kingdom-shaped economy” (Stimson, Wolfgang. The Starfish Manifesto, at www.starfishportal.net, 2009, qtd in Tickle, Phyllis. Emergence Christianity: What It Is, Where It Is Going, and Why It Matters. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, p. 139)