I had read a description of adulthood a while ago that has stuck with me. They said becoming an adult is like walking into a cocktail party where there are many conversations happening that have already been going on for a long time. As a new person walking in alone, you don’t know the people involved, their points of view, their history, or hopes. You don’t know the context of disagreements. There is a lot going on that will fly right over your head, whether or not you know this is true.  

This imaginary cocktail party is sort of what it’s like to read the Bible. There is a lot going on in our scriptures that’s easy to not know anything about.

So, to help us understand our text today on a deeper level we need to get a little nerdy about the Bible for a bit. Let’s pretend that the people at our cocktail party are themselves all different books of the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament all in the same room, talking about God, Christ, how we are to live, etc. Got the idea? So, now pretend you walk into this cocktail party. What’s the feeling in the room? How are the various books of the Bible interacting?  

In my humble opinion, this would not be a simple cocktail party where everyone agrees, respects one another, or even understands the “rules of life” the same way. The fights would not simply be between Old and New Testaments either. It would be one big family mash up with the occasional fist being thrown.

Before going to seminary, I was mostly unaware of the tensions in the Bible. I just knew I liked certain parts more than I liked other parts. I didn’t understand that the Bible is more of a library than a book, since it is a collection of books by different authors across expanses of time. None of us would expect a library to hold only one point of view on life, God, love, and all the rest. Libraries hold multiplicities of ideas and the Bible is no different.

So when it comes to big questions like:

• Who is God?
• What does God do?

…the Bible has different points of view, even between the different gospel accounts. Why is this so? In part, the differences have to do with who the gospels were written for and how they needed to hear the story for them to embrace it. This is a caring thing humans do.

We adjust how we tell stories, based on who we are talking to, right? So almost right away, the story of Jesus’ life was already being “culturally translated” as they were being written down.

Mark is the earliest gospel written and the audience for this gospel was largely Jewish. So, God in the gospel of Mark is going to more reflect the ancient Jewish understanding of God. Now, the other gospels, and some of the letters, often portray God and Jesus differently than Mark. We have talked about how the Gospel of Mark is written for people living through war and destruction. But, other differences also reflect the cultural differences between the primary audiences of the gospels.  

The new Christian communities throughout the Roman Empire were the primary audience for the gospels written after Mark. These folks were converting not from Judaism, but from the Roman state religion of Zeus and the pantheon of Roman gods. Culturally, the people of the Roman Empire had very different ideas about the 5 W’s of God –who God is, where God is, what God does, why God does it, when God does whatever God does, and the bonus question of how God does what he does.

In the Roman world, the spiritual realm was unchanging, separate from physical reality, perfect, and controlled. So, you will find in the New Testament a fair amount of this understanding of God. While Christianity spread like wildfire in the Roman Empire, that didn’t mean these folks’ cultural baggage was immediately transformed. They didn’t become culturally Jewish, for example. They stayed culturally Roman and with that comes complicated conversations about many things, including the nature of God.

This isn’t criticism. It’s just something to know about how humans incorporate new information and implement new beliefs, even when our conversions are profound and life altering. The universality and reality of Christ means that people around the world see themselves in the Christian story. But that doesn’t mean that they are going to automatically like organ music and hymns written by Bach or Luther. That’s what Christianity looks like in a European cultural context. Christianity looks and sounds different in different places, which is so beautiful yet complicated.  

All of our conversions are a work in progress. All cultures, including ours, are full of not-so-great ideas that we struggle to set aside. The early Roman citizen converts were the same, even as they wrote the various books of the New Testament. And so we hear the struggle about God in the Bible, which is both inspired by God and smudged with human fingerprints, as Rachel Held-Evans tells us in her book on the Bible, Inspired.

This is important to keep in mind when you’re reading the Bible or listening to scriptures. In our scriptures, you’ll hear ideas about God that make you think the real world of God is not here, that we need to escape this world to really experience the Kingdom of God. You’ll also hear ideas about God being here, closer than our breath and that the Kingdom is present if we have eyes to see and the ears to hear.  

This conflict matters because these fights happen still today. Some Christians think we don’t need to worry about caring for our planet, for example, because the righteous will be raptured away. For a fair number of folks, whether we’re going to heaven is the only real question. While for others, life here and now is where Jesus is. He came to be with us – to save, teach, love, heal, and save us here and now. All of these ideas seem supported by scripture. If we wanted to fight about this, we could all find scripture to prove our points.

It seems to me basic debate is about where God is. Is God up there where we need to strive to reach? Or does God come down from somewhere out there to be with us, meeting us where we are at? Or is God everywhere; below us, above us, in us, around us, all the time infusing our lives with presence and beauty, even when it doesn’t seem like anything is happening?

I love the imagery of God in our texts today. God is growing the trees, moving and being in trees that creates shade and shelter. The Ezekiel reading and the gospel reading both paint images of God being in the very creation of the world that is ongoing, always unfolding in ways that are loving and supportive. This is not an image of top-down control, but rather an unfolding embrace in the midst of a world that also has chaos, pain, and injustice.  

This understanding of where God is might help us to answer the question, we Christian folks like to ask: “Where is God in this?” We could similarly ask, “Where is new life emerging in your life? Where is the energy? Where is there growth in you and around you?” Because where there is new life, new energy, there is God. God does not control, like a puppet master, but he is in us, around us, under our feet, emerging in new life like the mustard seed, emerging like a change in perspective, emerging like fresh hope in the face of devastation.  

Roman ideas about God – separate from us, unchanging, judging, and controlling everything – can and does seep into our ideas about God. The question about who God is in our lives is very relevant. Mostly when I hear someone say they don’t believe in God, what they are really saying is they don’t believe in Zeus. They don’t believe in white dude with a big beard, zapping people for bad behavior. I agree with them.

That’s why seeing the struggle in the Bible is important, because paying attention to our lives and watching for the action of God is important. God’s action may not make everything perfect, like a benevolent top-down dictator might do for us. God makes our lives new just as he grows the mustard tree and the cedar, slowly and yet powerfully, creating generous spaces for us and for the many beings in our lives. God turns us into places of safety, like the mustard tree, that support the lives of many, often through our struggles and deaths.

I wonder about those among us who are places of safety, like an ecosystem, supporting the life and vitality of all they come in contact with. Is this a way to understand the life Jesus is inviting us into?  I encourage you to pay attention. Notice how God is talked about by others or yourself. And consider that in the image of the mustard seed and the cedar, we are given a glimpse of what the Kingdom is, how it grows, what it means, and how we can enter into that reality with our hearts open to growth, change, and life itself.

AMEN