Mark 5: 1-20
On my way up here, I was going to pull a
Jennifer Lawrence and see if you’d cut me some extra slack while I preach today.
Show of hands, how many of you got
that reference? Now keep your hands up, if you got that reference from
seeing the Oscars live. Ah, many of you didn't see that live. For
those of you who didn't get it, the winner of this year's best actress Oscar
was the lovely and talented and very young Jennifer Lawrence. On her way
up the steps to the stage to accept her award, she tripped and fell on her dress.
Embarrassing, to be sure, but the old adage in Hollywood is that there is
no such thing as 'bad' press. In fact, it's possibly the most talked
about moment of the evening. And for those of you who didn't see it live,
myself included, you knew about it anyways. And now, all of you do.
Millions tuned into the Oscars and about 5
million more watched YouTube clips of her fall in the following days. Far
fewer people saw the miracles of Jesus and while first century YouTube
statistics are unreliable at best, we can assume few people caught the replay.
Everyone heard about his miraculous deeds by word of mouth. And by
and large, Jesus seemed unconcerned with bad press either. And Jesus
couldn't count on reliable PR, at least not to begin with. His first
agents were not really his disciples. His first agents... were the
recipients of his miracles and the witnesses thereof.
Everyone who witnessed the incident with the
demon-possessed man immediately began to recount to others what had occurred.
And then when the now-healed man tries to follow Jesus, he sends him out
to tell others his own account. And there's a natural human compulsion to
tell others the amazing things we've seen. And on this compulsion, Jesus
relies heavily to spread the good news. How frustrated I imagine he is
then when the busyness of our lives drowns out the miracles we witness every
day. When we don't share the buzz with our neighbors, with those we love
and those we are called to love, we suppress what built the Church in its first
days and what could grow it now.
And buzz is exactly what it was. In fact,
one of the earliest symbols of Christianity is the honeybee. The imagery
goes as far back as the Old Testament and lands of milk and honey. Many
monks were beekeepers. Bees adorn paintings and art throughout the
Church, even the altar in the Vatican and the robes of the Pope. But for
the early Church, and more recently, the bee has represented resurrection.
Bees hibernate and are reborn. The beehive is full of bees with
many different jobs, much like the metaphors of the body of Christ and the many
functions we all perform. The honeybee is actually an excellent example
for us as Christians.
When Jesus is tempted in the desert to make
stones into bread, he responds that man does not live on bread alone but on
every word from the mouth of God. The food God provides for honeybees...
is pollen. But a bee's job is not merely to gather pollen and consume it,
or even to gather and share it with the hive. A bee does far more.
And it is the more that makes the honeybee what it is. Bees take
the pollen God provides and carry it from flower to flower. That pollen
provides life and growth. And does some pollen naturally spread by the
wind, by sheer proximity of one flower being near another? Certainly.
But honeybees provide the means to spread that pollen far and wide in
great quantity. Apple orchards, even the small one in my parents'
backyard, suffered greatly a few years ago because small bee mites were
attacking honeybees. A lack of honeybees led to a lack of pollination and
apple trees did not yield their usual crop.
And honeybees do more than encourage that
growth, flowers and apples and all we can see. Honeybees make... ______.
Honey. Right. Honeybees take the raw gifts from God and they
digest them. Then those bees gather and regurgitate that pollen.
Honey. Honey... is bee vomit. We think very negatively of
regurgitating. As humans, it’s an indication of illness at best, and of a
lack of creativity at worst, in its academic sense. In nature though,
it’s typically an act of nourishment. Mothers digest and regurgitate
because their young cannot gather or consume the raw sustenance themselves.
Regurgitating is in fact a creative and sacrificial act that requires emptying
one’s self for another repeatedly. The product of this creativity and sacrifice
for the bee is the honey. And honey is
the first natural sweetener. From honey, we get the first fermented
beverage ever created... mead. Scientists and physicians still tout the healing
properties of honey, even though they do not fully understand them. Honey is a miracle in and of itself.
Bees take the pollen... the gift of God, their
food... and they spread it, they digest it, and they regur... share it as a
community... creating the honeycomb. What could we learn from the example
of bees? What does God provide us? God gives us his Word, his
scripture, his prophets and teachers, his Son. God gives us salvation,
the good news we learn in Sunday school and as children from our parents and
elders. Those people in our life, do what honeybees do. Honey Bees
return to the hive and do a dance to show the other bees where they found their
pollen, the source of what they bear. Holly, and her team of teachers
don't just share the gospel with our kids. They give them Bibles, they
show the books, they teach them to pray. They do the dance that shows our
children how to find the source.
Bees carry pollen on their legs. What
falls off is what is spread to others flowers as they travel. The bees
may never know what a gift it is that they visited a flower, the gift of life
they leave behind just by being there. As Christians, perhaps we too can
bring life with us when we visit those in need.
And perhaps, most importantly, and so very
exciting for us as Presbyterian, deep-thinking-theologically-pondering
Presbyterians... is the concept of digesting and regurgitating. For few
of us would be interested in the honeycomb if it were merely a depository of
collected pollen. You can get that by sweeping your car off in the
spring. The treasure of the honeycomb is what the bees make as a
community of what God provides. At our best, we take the words and wisdom
and experience of the Gospel in the scriptures and our lives and we digest them
and share the result as a community of believers. We come together in
church, in Bible studies, in Sunday school, Lenten studies, seminaries, in our
homes, on the streets of our communities... and we share what God has put on
our hearts and what our minds, our intellects, our imaginations, which God has
given us... and we see what they have yielded. We regurgitate the Gospel.
We regurgitate the hope and the love God gives to us in its most raw and
pure form.
I’ll resist the urge to leave you with some
punny command like “Bee the change you wish to see in the world,” or “share the
buzz,” or “bee-hive like the disciples and comb your neighborhood and make
bee-lievers in some huge sting operation.” But I will say that bees can
teach us a great deal about balancing our workload in the Church and out in the
world, about traveling far, coming home to share, to dance, to digest, and to
regurgitate. As believers, we are incomplete if we never venture out, or
never return; if we never dance for others to show them the way, the source; if
we never empty ourselves of what we’ve learned and how we’ve interpreted the
good news and made it our own; if we never venture out once more, spreading
what we gather, and gleaning from others.
It is my deep hope that as you fly from here
today, you will go far, see much, digest, and return to dance with those here
and those out there... that you will never be content to simply gather pollen,
but to make honey, and that you will share it selflessly with others as your
gift to all of creation. And that whenever you tell someone you are as busy as
a bee... you are also busy like a bee as well. Amen.
