Sunday, March 3, 2013

Regurgitated Gospel




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.

 

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