Cultivating the Kin-Dom to Compost Empire (Mark. 6:1-16)

This sermon was originally preached on July 7, 2024 at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN. The livestream of our service may be viewed here. 
Today's scripture text is Mark 6:1-16

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Good morning, Beloved of God. As always, it is good to be together today and it’s my hope that you were able to enjoy this week’s holiday with family and friends, on the lake or at home. But I have to admit that, for me, the day was as dispiriting as it was rainy. The truth is, it’s become increasingly difficult in recent years to celebrate the 4th of July when, as James Baldwin said, “you know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early.” To be brutally honest here -- and I mean this from the deep love and desperate hope that agitate me daily: Between climate chaos, the rising costs of living, stagnant wages, corporate greed, multiple ongoing genocides, and the impending season of political chaos that looms over everything right now here in the US, I am left with nothing but to confess I find little to celebrate. Instead, I find a deep need to gather, grieve, rage, and together in community IMAGINE SOMETHING MORE SACRED, something beautiful and liberating, that will compost this mess into life-growing gardens.  

Because -- and I will recite these words of Maya Angelou’s over and over, like a prayer and invocation, until they sink all the way into the marrow of our bones as Christ’s body in this world -- None of us are free until all of us are free. There are very few all-or-nothing truths I will plant my feet and dig my heels in on, but it is my firmest belief that all us humans, and all that lives, really, are intrinsically, inexorably, and indivisibly connected to God and each other by breath and water, and so we only get free together -- and this, we do, in the fundamentally interdependent community of the Beloved by cultivating in the here and now the upside-down Kin-dom of God that Jesus preached and the Disciples spread, and whose seeds we see planted in today’s Gospel.

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