Sermon June 14 I Samuel 16, Mark 4:26-34

God is big, so we don’t have to be. All my life, I was interested in national government. As I learned more about it, the sheer size of its endeavors causes a lot of problems. It’s difficult for us to take in enormity. Yet, we aspire to the biggest as if it means the best, and it rarely does. The sheer size of our financial dealings brought us to the brink of ruin. I just saw that the huge Six Flags amusement park filed for bankruptcy. Large size can mean large-sized headaches.  The Catholic Church has a principle of subsidiarity, that the size that best fits an issue is the size that should have responsibility for it.

 

When I went to Seymour not long ago for a workshop on small churches, David Ray, the leader, made some good points about small churches. God often works at the small level. God doesn’t snap the divine fingers to create the kingdom of Israel, but works through one family in little Bethlehem and then picks the youngest in the family, David. God seems to delight in confounding our cherished notions of how the world should work. The normative size of the New Testament church was a house church,

 

When Jesus speaks of the kingdom of God, he means God’s way in the world. Jesus rarely picks empire-size images for getting at its nature. Jesus seems to have a bias in favor of small examples. When he uses a large example, it is often for the purpose of drawing a laugh at the fantastic size, like the parable of the talents. When Jesus is tempted by world power in the wilderness, he resists it with a biblical quotation.  Today we have good examples. They are living examples and they are small   Jesus moves to the natural world to speak of the incredible capacity of the small for growth, for life. The mustard seed is small. It does nto grow into a mighty oak, but a shrub. That shrub is just fine as it is; it provides a perfect nesting place for the birds of the air that God cares about. Jesus is determined to get through to his hearers that they matter just as much as anyone else in the kingdom of God.

 

God is so big; we don’t have to be big. If the God of the universe knows us by name, why should we scramble to try to make a bigger name for ourselves? Maybe most of our lives are just the right size. Maybe we would do well to consider the move toward simplifying the size and pace of our lives. We try to do so much with children that we crowd out time with them. The quest for more and bigger can often be a rather sad attempt to make ourselves bigger in our own eyes but trying to make ourselves bigger in the eyes of others. If we center our esteem on being equally loved by God, it makes our efforts seem a bit petty. Can we change our relative value more than being loved by God?

 

The same can apply to small churches. Some regard small churches as an anachronism, but they seem to be hardy and healthy anachronisms. Maybe we should name churches the church of the mustard seed, the pearl of great price, the church of the loaves and fish. Around 2/3 of the churches in our denomination could be considered small. Small churches fall victim to the culture and say things such as we are just a small church. The critical word there is just. It may well be that in God’s ordering of things, small churches are preferred. The God who knows our names works through places like the song in cheers, where everybody knows your name. The small church is a human=scaled place where we can be known, accepted for our quirks, and cared about.