Then Jesus said, “This is what God’s kingdom is like. It’s as though someone scatters seed on the ground, 27 then sleeps and wakes night and day. The seed sprouts and grows, but the farmer doesn’t know how. 28 The earth produces crops all by itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full head of grain. 29 Whenever the crop is ready, the farmer goes out to cut the grain because it’s harvest time.”
30 He continued, “What’s a good image for God’s kingdom? What parable can I use to explain it? 31 Consider a mustard seed. When scattered on the ground, it’s the smallest of all the seeds on the earth; 32 but when it’s planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all vegetable plants. It produces such large branches that the birds in the sky are able to nest in its shade.”
33 With many such parables he continued to give them the word, as much as they were able to hear. 34 He spoke to them only in parables, then explained everything to his disciples when he was alone with them. (Common English Bible)
“Seventy Times Seven: A Celebration and
Commission of Valley Christian Church,” Week Two
The now-fifty-one-years-old image of the teenaged Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling in agony over the body of Jeffrey Miller at Kent State is wrenching portrait of humanity that once I saw, I could not unsee. Even if my dad, who was then in 1970 coming of age as a teenager, did not speak of that photograph with near-reverence, I think I could still not help but be moved by such an image of raw, pure grief.
That picture made the career of its photographer, John Filo. He won a Pulitzer Prize for photography and went on to a long and productive career in photojournalism. The subject of that photo, Mary Ann Vecchio, was not so fortunate. She was targeted with hate mail and threats for years, and her parents even sold merchandise and got her to begin signing autographs. She developed a bittersweet at best relationship with the moment that made her famous, and she understandably rarely gave interviews.
Until this week, to the Washington Post, in a genuinely profound retelling of her life since that day. On full, vulnerable display in the article was how this teenager had come to live her life. And along the way, a funny thing had happened. After going back to get her high school diploma, she began working for the VA hospital in Miami, caring for veterans who, like her, carried mental, emotional, and spiritual scars from that era of US history. She described this work to the Post in religious terms, saying, “I had to make a connection (with them) on a spiritual level (and put myself) in the vets’ shoes.”
And I was just deeply touched by that bit of her story. The Vietnam War was a mass traumatic event not only there but here—and how could it not be, when over 58,000 of the people we sent there never returned, and hundreds of thousands who did return came back in terrible physical, emotional, spiritual, even existential pain? And here was this woman who had unwillingly become a historical icon, telling all of us of how she grew beyond the image, to be a full person, and along the way ministering to some of the people acutely in need of her—and our—help today.
What a vivid illustration of evolution, of us more fully growing into ourselves over time.
This is a new sermon series to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the planting of Valley Christian Church by Birmingham First Christian Church, and especially as a new minister, having been in Birmingham for scarcely eight months, I am especially grateful to follow the words of my immediate predecessor in this office, Rev. Gary Edge.
In April 1951, seventy to eighty members of Birmingham First were, with the congregation’s blessing in the form of seed money and a sterling silver communion set, sent forth to establish Valley as the latest Disciples of Christ congregation in the Birmingham area. Valley’s charter membership would swell to over one hundred twenty, and the records of the congregation’s founding have been meticulously kept in our archives.
Not long after I began as Valley’s seventh minister, I planted myself in the church library, where a shelf full of our archives are kept, to commence a crash course on Valley’s history—many years of cramming for exams in college and God School prepared me well for such an exercise—and while I was digging around, I came across an otherwise unremarkable newsletter from 1972. It contained an update of Valley’s finances then, with stuff you would expect to see—current cash-on-hand, obligations met, and so on.
But then came an item that got the most space of all—a capital campaign for our siblings in Christ at Macedonia Christian Church, who had bought a school building and had issued a request for donations to help defray the cost. And while Valley had raised the equivalent of about $175.00 to give to Macedonia, the newsletter article essentially says, “They are our fellow churchgoers, part of our brotherhood, the closest Disciples congregation to us, and what we have raised so far is not good enough.” The paragraph concludes with, “Surely others will make contributions, however small.”
And that too just really made me pause and consider the life-changing qualities of evolution. A lot has changed in the United States since 1951, and we have come some way since the time when only one white pastor in all of Montgomery supported the Civil Rights Movement’s bus boycott, and when the group of white, mostly Christian, clergy in Birmingham wrote an open letter to Martin Luther King Jr. calling him an outsider and instructing Black Birmingham residents to reject him.
But it took a long time for the effects of such hard-won victories to take, because resistance and backlash to those victories was visceral and intense. And in 1972, that backlash was still very much ongoing. But in that context comes this newsletter article exhorting us to do more, and to do better, by one of our denomination’s historically Black congregations. And our progression continues apace, with the establishment of Building Valley-Macedonia in 1993 and our latest expression of that relationship in our joint Maundy Thursday worship service in 2021. Our relationship continues to evolve.
Here, in Mark 4, is perhaps Jesus’s most famous teaching on the nature of our own evolution in the kingdom of God. We, as co-laborers of this kingdom, are likened to the tiniest of items—mustard seeds. But these seeds, over time and given the proper circumstances, flourish into trees colossal and steadfast enough to provide other beings with shade and shelter. The kingdom of God we work toward will be big enough, and strong enough, to use our own traits and qualities to care for others.
This, Scripture teaches us repeatedly and at length, is at the very heart of having faith. James, the brother of the Lord, asks in his epistle, “How can I see your faith apart from your actions?” And Jesus famously preaches in the Sermon on the Mount to let people “see the good things you do and praise your Father, who is in heaven.”
We are expected by our Lord and Savior to take our own abilities, our own qualities that have been given by God and honed by us, over time and through experience, to care for others. That is our evolution as Christians, to grow as the mustard seed does so that we cannot say we are simply incapable of positive change, or creating positive change. Transformation over time—evolution—is the key to the kingdom of God.
We spent last week talking about our origin story, not only as Valley but as humanity. And those origin stories are often compelling—the first installment of a trilogy, the first novel of a series, they are creation and inspiration combined, but then comes the sequel, the evolution narrative, which may not be as flashy, but Jesus tells us can create something truly compelling. We love a good born-again story, but our testimonies cannot then neglect the spiritual labor which follows. The origin story is the mustard seed. The evolution is the tree whose shade we relax under, whose branches we climb as children, and whose beauty we capture in our photographs.
After all, the Bible does not stop at Genesis. John’s Gospel does not end after the first chapter. We spent a lot of time last week unpacking those two as creation stories, but God does not stop speaking to humanity after those stories have concluded. God does not become an absentee landlord or a Disneyland dad. Through the Holy Spirit, God continues to direct us, individually and collectively, to continue our evolution into deeper, more mature faith, one day at a time.
So, what do we do? How do we evolve next? Valley is entering its eighth decade, with its seventh minister, and we are emerging from two circumstances that are able to throw even the most stable congregation into crisis: the retirement, and subsequent replacement, of a beloved longtime minister; and a once-in-a-century public health crisis that I guarantee you will include at least some congregations in addition to the millions of human lives on its final casualty list.
The emergence from such circumstances can be a time for flourishing. After the widespread devastation of the bubonic plague in Europe came the Renaissance and the Reformation. In the ancient Near East, after the destruction wrought by the Sea Peoples—the Philistines—came the Iron Age and, in ancient Israel specifically, the unified kingdom under David and Solomon.
We can emerge from this time intent on flourishing as well. I think we took a big step in that direction yesterday with our extremely well-received Earth Day event to a full house. To me, that is a casting of a die, the laying down of a gauntlet: we are saying that we are prepared to be community space for our neighborhood, a place of enrichment and refuge to the people of Birmingham, and a sanctuary in which you can safely discern God’s will for you in this moment.
We have come such a long way in seventy years, and we have such a long way to go. Our evolution is nowhere near complete, and ideally will never be complete. Christ says in the Sermon on the Mount to be perfect, as our God in heaven is perfect. May we always be striving, always be seeking, always be attempting to evolve into that impossible goal. Knowing that we will never reach it in this lifetime because perfection is the province of divinity should not discourage us, it should empower us to try new things, to build new relationships, to not be afraid to not get it right the first time—to accept some momentary and temporary failures en route to larger, wider, deeper perfection in the kingdom of God.
And when we do arrive at that perfection, it will make our evolution along the way all the sweeter.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
April 28, 2021