11th Sunday in Ordinary Time

[Jesus] also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed...
~Mark 4:30-31a
 
Great storytellers and masterful artists know how to craft a piece of art that has the power to hold our attention while, at that same time, push us off kilter just enough to leave us questioning, wondering, and eager to think and talk more. As they do this, they open us up to parts of humanity, parts of being alive, that we did not see before. They open us to fuller, richer understandings of our own lives and others.
 
Jesus was a great storyteller and a masterful artist. With his parables, accessible stories of real people, he pulled his audience in while also deploying an image or a detail that would have thrown them off kilter.

• the kingdom of God is like a good Jewish father hitching up his robes to run towards his errant son.
• the kingdom of God is like yeast and a woman (a woman!!) preparing enough bread for a very big event.
• the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who paid the workers who came at the end of the day the same as those who came at the beginning.
• the kingdom of heaven is like an everyday weed that takes over to provide generous homes for sister bird in our carefully tended fields.

 
What do we expect of this “holy wisdom” in our day? Do we have more to learn and in what ways—additional knowledge or new points of view or matters of the heart…or all of this?
 
Enter into worship this Sunday.
 
Readings: 1 Samuel 15:34-16:13 † Psalm 20 † 2 Corinthians 5:6-10, 14-17 † Mark 4:26-34
 
About the Art: Gogh, Vincent van, 1853-1890. The Sower III (version 2), from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=58327 [retrieved June 12, 2024]. Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vincent_van_Gogh_-_The_sower_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg.
 
About the painting (commentary by Michael Banner): In the foreground a deeply shadowed sower in darkest blue works under a vivid yellow-green sky with pink clouds and a large lemon sun, over a violet earth. The intense, incandescent colors are meant to communicate the intensity of the moment, as the sower, with the sun forming a halo behind his head, bends to his holy task. From his right hand the sower broadcasts seed on the rough ground, and approaches a tree which, bending and twisting like the sower, dramatically divides the canvas on the diagonal.
 
The tree guides our eye into the picture, providing scale and depth, and also some visual relief from the wearying extent of ground over which the sower has to tread, reaching away to the long and low horizon. More importantly, however, the tree speaks of the aching mix of pathos and consolation which Van Gogh found in this motif. Just as the tree sharply divides the canvas, so the seed will fall into either good or bad soil, to live and bear fruit, or to die.
 
The tree is heavily pollarded, and at certain times of year, might itself seem dead, like the seed. Yet from its wounds fresh blossom springs, holding over the sower’s lowered head a sign of promise; hope and joy even as the light of the setting sun fades.

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