Mark tells us that Jesus did not speak to the disciples except in parables. It was a good plan then and it’s a good plan now. So here’s a modern parable.
Over the White Mountains in eastern Arizona, near our family cabin, a thundercloud forms, carrying moisture from the Gulf a Mexico. As it drifts over a ridge near the summit, it drops it payload, sending rain to the forest below. Some of the rain falls just north of a ridgeline, the water droplets collecting and becoming the headwaters of a small stream which comes to be known as the East Fork of the Little Colorado River. This stream soon joins the West Fork, which then joins the South Fork and becomes the Little Colorado River. After a north bound journey of a couple hundred miles through the high desert of the Navajo Indian Reservation, this river, carrying the droplets of that cloud, plunges over a waterfall and joins the main Colorado River itself, just upstream from the Grand Canyon. Several hundred miles and several lakes later, this water arrives in Yuma, Arizona, and if it was not used for crops, would wind up in the Gulf of Baja California.
Now, rain from this cloud that happened to fall just an inch to the south of that ridge line flows down to form the West Fork of the Black River, and begins an entirely different journey. The West Fork meets the East Fork and the Black River proper is born – a really great trout stream, by the way. Twenty-some miles later, it meets the White River, draining the Apache Indian Reservation, forming the Salt River, which flows west, meeting the Gila River near Phoenix, and, finally, after a couple of hundred miles through the desert, arrives in Yuma...meeting up at last with the Colorado, and some of the same droplets from that original cloud.
Two droplets could begin their journeys to earth together like twins separated at birth, only to reunite after very different lives.
And now another parable, courtesy of Tim Tutt, formerly on the staff of Briggs Church. In the the first decade of the 1600s, in Gainsborough, England, a group of "Separatist" Anglican Christians thought the church should be free of state control, and began to meet in their own congregation.
Among these Separatists in Gainsborough, were several leaders: John Smyth, Thomas Helwys, John Robinson, William Brewster, and William Bradford.
Being a "Separatist" was dangerous since King James I has promised to run them out of England unless they rejoined the Church of England. Because of the threats and persecution, they had to meet in secret. Their group grew too big to meet together safely, so they split in two. One half was led by Smyth & Helwys, the other half was led by Robinson, Brewster & Bradford. Both groups eventually fled to Holland for safety. The Smyth & Helwys congregation developed new ideas, including moving from practicing infant baptism to baptism of adult believers. They became Baptists and returned to England in 1611.
In 1620, the Robinson/Brewster/Bradford group bought tickets on a little boat called the "Mayflower." They were the pilgrims who became the Congregationalists, who in 1957 became the United Church of Christ.
And so, 400 years later, like drops of water from a single cloud, separated when they fell on a high mountain ridge, only to come together again after very different journeys, here we are!
Now, there’s more to these parables. The journeys of the water droplets down the rivers of separation and re-unification are not as simple or straightforward as they sound. In the desert Southwest, water is life and is a precious resource, and the philosophy was not to let any of it escape into the ocean if at all possible. And so damns were built, and the water was used and re-used, sometimes as many as 15 or 20 times, recycled and reclaimed, in farms and cities, and most of the time it actually never makes it to the point of reunification.
Such has been our history as well. There have been diversions along the way, and times when we have not acted like we were even meant to be together.
Perhaps you know the history of how Baptists began in America, and the story of Roger Williams. During the 17th century, many people besides the Pilgrims left England to escape religious persecution. Williams was one of those, a defender of religious liberty. Ordained to the ministry in the Church of England, Williams discovered Puritanism, a reform movement that developed within the Church of England, during his first parish duty. He converted. Soon after, he was asked to be a minister in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Leaving behind the religious intolerance that still persisted under England's King Charles I, he and his wife journeyed across the ocean to join the "American Experiment" in Boston in 1631. At first, Williams just wanted to reform the Church of England; but soon, he sought separation completely.
Many of Williams's parishioners did not agree with his idea to separate from the Church of England. So he moved on to become minister in Salem. There, his ideas also proved too radical. He went to Plymouth but again fell into disfavor. Williams insisted that land must be purchased from the Indians, rather than taken from them forcefully, in order to claim title to it. He again went to Salem and was eventually put on trial in 1635 for his views. It turns out the religious freedom our spiritual ancestors sought was mostly for themselves, and they didn’t really intend it for others. So they banished Williams. He then purchased land from the Narragansett Indians and established the settlement of Providence, Rhode Island.
Williams founded this new based upon principles of complete religious toleration, separation of church and state, and political democracy – values that the U.S. would later be founded upon, and which we hold dear to this day. It became a refuge for people persecuted for their religious beliefs – Anabaptists, Quakers, and Jews. After forming the first Baptist church in America, Williams left it to seek spirituality in different ways. He stopped preaching to his friends, the Indians, when he realized that their form of worship also fell under his principle of religious freedom. He declared, "forced worship stinks in God's nostrils." Williams's ideas were radical at the time, and unfortunately, still are in some quarters!
In my own life, I first encountered Baptists when I went to off to college in Southern California, at the University of Redlands, a “small Christian college,” we said, “founded by small Christians.” In many ways, however, they were giants, and the school maintained Baptist ties and a largely Baptist ethos - at least until I got there. But I remember on my first weekend as a freshman, being invited to worship at the First Baptist Church, and discovered it wasn’t all that different from my UCC church in Phoenix. I was a bit amused, I have to admit by the stained glass window in the church, depicting a larger-than-life Jesus with one hand over the University of Redlands chapel, and the other over the First Baptist Church. At the university itself, however, I encountered a rich legacy that went far beyond such parochialism, led by professors of religion who were all Baptists, who opened my eyes and mind to biblical criticism, and church history and theological inquiry and a greatly enlarged world view. Years later, after my graduation, the Jesus Seminar would have one of its initial formative meetings on that campus, at the invitation of my major professor, Baptist born and bred, although by then he had for some reason had joined the United Church of Christ. I didn’t know it at the time, but maybe my being there, and his religious journey were part of that cloud of water droplets, once separated but coming together at last. If I gain half as much from this new encounter as I did back then, I will be very pleased.
One of the places where Baptists and UCCer’s come together very successfully, in a way that is an inspiration, if not a model, is New York’s Riverside Church. I recently read the autobiography of its founding pastor, Harry Emerson Fosdick, (published fifty years ago) himself a Baptist, known for his progressive view of faith in taking on the budding fundamentalist movement of the 1920's. He gained quite a following, not the least of whom was John D. Rockefeller (who while wintering in Tucson, Arizona used to attend the church I served there – long before my time!) In his book, The Living of These Days, tells of the lunch at which Rockefeller proposed the creation of what was to become Riverside Church. Fosdick was about to vacate the pulpit of New York’s First Presbyterian Church, as the Presbytery found him far too liberal and he was desirous of serving in a church with much more freedom. Rockefeller asked him if he would consider taking the pulpit of his own church, Park Avenue Baptist, whose pastor was about to retire. Fosdick said, he wouldn’t think of it. When Rockefeller asked him why not, he said it was because he didn’t agree with Park Avenue’s restrictive policy of baptism only by immersion. Rockefeller said, Well, what if we remove it? Fosdick still declined, citing the posh neighborhood the church was in, saying he didn’t want to squander an opportunity to serve the larger city by becoming the private chaplain to a handful of wealthy folks. Rockefeller persisted – what if we build a new church in an area easily accessible to the whole of the city, where a great variety of human needs could be met? Since they had only built Park Avenue a few years before, Fosdick figured moving was out of the question, but Rockefeller kept pressing – and finally Fosdick admitted the real reason he didn’t want to take him up on the offer – “It’s because you have too much money, and I don’t want to be known as the minister of the richest man in the country.” Dead silence followed and then Rockefeller said, I like your frankness, but do you think more people will criticize you on account of my wealth, than will criticize me on account of your theology?” In the end, Park Ave. met all the conditions, “eliminating all sectarian restrictions on membership, thus opening the church to all Christians on equal terms, and undertaking to build a new and ample edifice equipped for community service....” As Fosdick said in a sermon while the new church was being constructed: “If we could lift some burdens and lighten some dark spots and help solve the problems of some communities, that would be wonderful. If in that new temple we simply sit together in heavenly places, that will not be wonderful, but if we also work together in unheavenly places, that will be.” I would hope as we come together as two streams blending into one that this might be our ideal as well.
In his parable, reported in this morning’s lesson from Mark, Jesus says that “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” Such is the nature of our own journeys. Like water droplets falling to earth, or seeds falling to the ground, our lives move forward in mysterious ways, taking twists and turns, growing into something previously unimagined, bearing fruit, and we don’t always know how or why. If someone had said to me three or four years ago, “What is your five year strategic plan for Westmoreland?” I would not have come up with one that included the Conservatory coming, or all of our new friends from Briggs. I think maybe God is looking out for us, because what we have is far better than what I would have projected. The kingdom, or realm of God, is taking root and growing among us in this place, and we don’t always know how. And what we do today is to plant further seeds of God’s kingdom, which will also sprout and grow in ways that we cannot always predict. Maybe we’ll be like the mustard plant – coming from a very tiny seed, growing into the greatest of all plants so that birds nest in its branches. I don’t know what we’ll look like in five years. But I do know that what we are doing is planting seeds of God’s kingdom, and if we water them and tend them well, we can trust God to give the growth.
