In the opening pages of her new book, Elaine Pagels tells of a crisis in her life regarding the health of her son Mark, age two and a half. Pagels is a professor of religion at Princeton University and a wife and mother. As a Biblical scholar and author of several award-winning books, her writings are read and appreciated by religious professionals as well as the general public. Her most recent is entitled Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas and it will be the basis of a two-week class series beginning next Sunday at 8:30.

On an early February Sunday morning in New York, after learning of a very serious prognosis for her young son, Pagels slipped into her shorts and t-shirt and went for a run. She found herself stepping inside the stone vestibule of an Episcopal Church called the Church of the Heavenly Rest. There, she paused to catch her breath and warm up. Worship was going on with beautiful music and prayer. Though she hadn’t been in a church for a long time, she recognized that it was where she needed to be. It was a place where she could weep without her child being aware. The community was a cross-section of people whose worship spoke of hope that, she felt, might make the possibility of death bearable.

Pagels returned to the church often over the next many months. For her, in the presence of the people gathered for worship and a smaller group that met weekdays for mutual encouragement her defenses fell away. She was able to experience both grief and hope and to gather new energy to face the future, whatever might happen with her son. In her day-to-day life, she questioned how to respond to people who said to her, "Your faith must be of great help to you." She didn’t feel that she had faith – certainly not a simple set of beliefs to repeat each Sunday. Instead, she spoke of the church gatherings by saying, "I was acutely aware that we met there driven by need and desire; yet sometimes I dared hope that such communion has the potential to transform us."¹

In a scorching personal crisis, Elaine Pagels found comforting shade in the branches of the Church of the Heavenly Rest. This woman who was a graduate of Stanford University with a doctorate from Harvard, who was a MacArthur Fellow and the wife of a theoretical physicist, needed and found a place to let her hair down, to be herself, completely and without judgment. Those branches of support wouldn’t have been there for her without a tiny seed planted soon after the Civil War on a corner in New York City. That seed needed healthy soil as God worked through people like you and me, a mixture of people from various backgrounds and careers who built and sustained a worshipping congregation and all that involved – the building, the staff, the programs inside and beyond the church walls and the generous offering of their of time and money. Over a hundred years later, members of that church were present for her, willing to be with her as she cautiously opened her heart and her life to God’s loving support. There were moments, not all the time but moments when she experienced glimpses of God’s transforming love. The story doesn’t have a "happily ever after" ending regarding her son. It is a real story about real life and real people. The people of that church community let God’s love move through them to hold and sustain her through a very difficult experience in her life. In their own personal way, they shared the transforming love that Jesus encouraged his followers to know as the Kingdom of God.

Today’s passage from Mark is usually called the Parable of the Mustard Seed but a more appropriate name might be the Parable of the Transforming Earth. Jesus said that for the seed to grow it must be "sown upon the ground." "When it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches…" Without the ground, the healthy soil, the branches would not grow and the birds would not be able to make nests in its shade. When that seed is sown, when God nudges us not with judgment but with love, when God stands in the paths of our lives and says, "Follow me," when in prayer we find ourselves listening more than talking, it is in those times that the God’s seed is planted. You and I are called to be that transforming earth, a necessary part of God’s creation. We are called to get down and dirty so the mustard seed, that kernel of God’s love will grow into the greatest of all shrubs.

This congregation started when God planted a little mustard seed almost fifty years ago. As many of you know, it was down on the Boardwalk in Tiburon in a little room over an ice cream parlor. Ruth Adrain, Martha Bigelow, Vicki Winblad, and Nancy White were all part of that early creation. Along with 80 others, they were the good rich soil that cultivated God’s love in the young Westminster Church. Several generations since then have worshipped and studied, and raised young children nurtured through the Church School and youth groups, some using railroad cars as classrooms. Members have been baptized, confirmed, married, retired. Some have moved to other communities and some have died.

In 2004, we are here. It is our generation in this time and in this place to be the stewards of that mustard seed, to be the healthy soil to grow great strong branches that reach out for birds of the air to make their nests in the shade; for children and adults in Mill Valley and Sausalito and Tiburon and Corte Madera and beyond to know that this is a safe place in times of crisis; that it is a community that talks about and seeks to live God’s love encouraging and supporting and welcoming people regardless of personal situation or income level or job title or gender or age or history. We are called to be the good soil, the healthy dirt to help God’s kingdom of love grow here in Southern Marin for each other and for the greater community. God calls us to get down and dirty for the sake each other and of our world that is being created in new ways every day.

Now, if you are curious about the Gospel of Thomas, where it came from and why it is not in our Bible, I invite you to come to the class next Sunday. For the purpose of this sermon, however, I want to tell you that Thomas presents Jesus as being more concerned about the here and now than about what happens after we die. In one passage, Jesus says, "The kingdom is within you and outside you."² In another that was read earlier, Jesus describes himself in some of the language traditionally used for wisdom. He says, "I am the light that is above everything…Split the wood and I am there. Lift up the stone and you will find me there." God’s love is in us and all around us when we let ourselves see it and recognize it, when we let it grow within us and flow through us.

In the past two weeks, our Southern Marin community has lost two young Mill Valley boys to sudden death. Members of this faith community have been present with the families and grieving friends. Children as well as adults have provided strong branches for rest and offered themselves as vehicles of God’s love as they begin the gradual transformation toward healing. When I heard the stories, I realized that it wasn’t something our members stopped to think about. They just responded with meals and love and gatherings and love and phone calls and love and notes and love and photos and love. They just followed God’s lead and let the mustard seed grow.

God’s love irrupts through us in the most surprising places. We can be having a conversation about a completely impersonal topic when suddenly there is a change. We notice it in a facial expression or in a word and, in that moment, we have the opportunity to acknowledge it and respond or to ignore it and lose the chance that God might work through us. It doesn’t matter where we are. It has happened in business offices and in hospital waiting rooms, in classrooms and on playgrounds, on Guatemala mission trips and between native American children and high school youth in Arizona. It can happen practicing the English language in a home in the Canal area or gathering with others on a soccer field, in a staff meeting and even in a church sanctuary. When we let ourselves get down and dirty and are willing to be that good soil, God’s love can truly flow through us.

In November, the Monday Book Group will be reading a book called Gracias by Henri Nouwen. He wrote from Peru that, "Community develops where we experience that something significant is taking place where we are. It is the fruit of the intimate knowledge that we are together, not because of a common need, such as learning a language, but because we are called together to help make God’s presence visible in the world."³

Here in our church community, when we let ourselves be that healthy earth, God is visible. I hear of little irruptions of God’s presence in the weekly Men’s Group and Women’s groups as the members listen to each other on Friday mornings. It happens in the relationships that develop when one congregation member offers a ride or a meal to another. We sense it in the time of worship prayers as together we remember those struggling in our community or around the world. I hear of it among the young parents of the church as they celebrate a birth or support a family in crisis.

We are this church community in this time and in the place. We aren’t perfect. We make mistakes both individually and as a community. We are a wide variety of people and we are human. Luckily, God doesn’t ask us to be flawless but just asks us to let ourselves be good healthy dirt so that seeds can grow and branches of love and support can extend from us. Today, I invite you to symbolize the branches that grow out of your life as part of this church community. When you leave today, there are ribbons available for you to tie on the branches. If you have children, I encourage you to do it together with them. Fill up the branches as we let God’s love work through our good soil sharing our lives together and offering shade to each other and the larger community.
 

1. Pagels, Elaine; Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, p. 3-5
2. Dart, John and Riegert, Ray; The Gospel of Thomas: Unearthing the Lost Words of Jesus, #3, p. 15
3. Nouwen, Henri, Gracias!, p. 66