This sermon was preached for the Feast Day of St. Mark's on Sunday, April 21, 2024 at St. Mark's, East Longmeadow. The texts for this sermon were: Ephesians 4:7-8,11-16, Mark 16:15-20, and Psalm 2:7-10.
A book from my own childhood has made it into our nightly bedtime routine a lot lately. It’s called “Rocks in My Pockets.” It’s a sort of folksy parable about a poor family who lives on the top of a very windy mountain with very rocky soil. Their grandpa tells them they must always keep rocks in their pockets at all times or else they will be blown away by the wind. The rocks have other uses, too: the resourceful family uses them as balls thrown back and forth, they rub them in their hands every night during storytime, they even warm them in the fire and use them as foot-warmers on winter nights. They are ordinary rocks pulled from the earth of their mountaintop, but over time, the rocks become smooth and shiny and beautiful.
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| Rocks in My Pockets by Marc Harshman and Bonnie Collins |
The conflict of the story is when fancy city antiquers arrive, become enamored by the rocks, buy them off the family, and start a whole shiny, smooth rock craze. First, people flock to the mountaintop to buy some for themselves, but then come the folks who want to make a quick buck. Thinking themselves clever, they grab ordinary rocks right from the mountaintop ground. Of course, those rocks aren’t ever as good as the family's ones because they haven’t been rubbed and warmed and loved the same way. The city folks think it’s all about plucking the right rock from the soil, but the family is much more wise about what makes the rocks so priceless. The rocks need time, togetherness, and love to be transformed into the precious gems everyone’s coveting.
The author of Ephesians writes, “We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way…” Each equipped part “...promot[ing] the body’s growth in building itself up in love.” Faith is a process. It’s building and growing and deepening over time.
The simplistic contrast in the folktale is between the city people, who are greedy, urgent, impatient, and deceitful, and the mountaintop family who are characterized by steadiness, commitment, and honesty. People aren’t that simple, though. All of us have both inside of us, of course. How do we resist our tendencies toward urgency and impatience and lean into the long haul work of grace? One way is to reach for our rocks: the places, objects, rituals, and people who remind us who we can choose to be, which part of ourselves we want to be true to. Groundedness and integrity is rare, precious, and you know it when you see it in someone else.
There’s another parable from my childhood, The Velveteen Rabbit. It’s about a stuffed animal who is made real by being well-loved and well-worn over the course of a childhood. People also take time and love to grow into the full stature of Christ - we start to look pretty wrinkly, achy, and beat-up by the end. Spiritual maturity, authentic wisdom, take so much time, so much intention, so much experience. They cannot be rushed and they cannot be faked.
The tension between the urgent drive to acquire and steady, slow unfolding - we come by it honestly as Christians. The Gospel we celebrate today, the one attributed to St. Mark the Evangelist, is infused with a sense of urgency. The shortest of the Gospels, Mark starts right from Jesus as an adult at his baptism and the Spirit immediately drives him out from there to his short, intense ministry. In fact, “immediately” is one of the common transition words the Gospel of Mark is known for - immediately Jesus did this and immediately the disciples did that. Mark ends with the disciples being commissioned to go out and proclaim the Good News to all the world.
You know, I often hear skeptics giving the Jesus story a lot of flack for not being written down until decades after the events depicted in it, but that’s more than a little unfair. Not only does that anachronistically impose modern standards of credibility onto an ancient community, but Jesus’ followers didn’t have the time or need to write down his teachings - the world was about to end, and in the context of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, their world really did feel like it was ending. That first couple decades, they were primarily a movement of powerful orators focused on inspiring largely illiterate peoples to prepare for the imminent return of the Messiah.
But then the world didn't end. The first generation of witnesses began to die and Christians realized they needed to begin honing the stones that would sustain the movement into new generations. So they began to write them down, pass them around, polish them smooth. The mainstream theory is that the Gospel of Mark was written first and served as one of the sources for Matthew and Luke’s accounts. What we forget often is that the letters that make up much of the rest of the New Testament were also written around the same time. They show brand-new, diverse churches grappling with what it means to live and work and be true to Jesus in communities that will last. Unlike other Epistles that are clearly addressed to a specific community from Paul, the epistle we excerpted today, Ephesians, has generalized advice that could apply to many. For this and other reasons, scholars view Ephesians as someone’s attempt to summarize Paul's teachings after his death - not quite unlike what the Gospel of Mark did with Jesus. What gems of Paul’s witness could Christians hold onto in their pockets as they faced a windy world?
We face a world infused with urgency, too. Our steadiness, our slowness can serve to set us apart - can be good news for the folks weary of being tossed to and fro. What are the rocks in your pockets? Where did they come from? What has made them precious?
The precious Good News gems of my faith that return me to earth and hold my integrity firm are sourced from my life experience, scripture, and tradition. One says, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.” One says, “All shall be well.” Another is inscribed with Jesus’ two greatest commandments to love God, love your neighbor, and love yourself. That rock has been polished and worn smooth by my worrying hands for many years because it’s the question I reach for whenever I feel tossed to and fro by different perspectives and opinions on either side. What does it mean to love God, love my neighbor, and love myself in this moment?
St. Mark’s Feast Day is a perfect time to step back and reflect on our parish community, too. St. Mark’s was founded and built relatively recently for a church, in the 1960s. But the people who founded it, who’ve funded it, who’ve made it sacred through their prayers, laughter, and tears; parish plays, potluck dinners, and craft fairs, you all, you’ve infused it with wisdom and holiness by the way you’ve loved God and one another. So many people right now who live around us are hungry for sacredness, for community, for spiritual groundedness. But those things cannot be rushed and they cannot be purchased. They are not meant to be consumed or displayed. They are grown and cultivated, with time and attention, over years.
In the Rocks in My Pockets story, the rocks are a source of stability in difficult terrain. But the rocks end up standing out to others because they are not static. They become precious because they don't just stay in pockets. They are taken out, imbued with family stories, and passed from hand to hand. They honed and polished by being used, by being shared.
To have integrity and groundedness does not mean resisting all change. Think of the great cliff faces and rock formations that have been shaped over thousands of years by water and wind. How grounded they are - not tossed to and fro by every breeze - and yet they still have allowed themselves to be carved by God's hand into even more beautiful shapes. The writer of Ephesians wants to make sure the Christian communities who read his treatise understand that this faith of ours requires growth and maturation. The faith we long for and the community of love we need doesn’t just get plucked out of the ground wholesale. You can’t purchase it or steal it - you can’t church-shop to find it. Faith is a building up in love, over years. It’s consistency, commitment, openness to being transformed. Continuous, lifelong learning is an inherently Christian value, a responsibility. It's part of loving and being loved.
In recent years, St. Mark’s has been blown about by many winds of change - I’ve been just one part of that as a new priest. External forces, like a global pandemic, cultural shifts, changes in patterns of family life, financial strains, have all buffeted this parish. So what’s kept us steady, grounded, faithful? What rocks do we carry in our collective pockets? Where do our values come from, but more importantly how do we use and refine them, pass around and share them?
We may all have different answers. We each came to this place at different times, came to this faith at different life moments. My prayer for St. Mark’s is that we can be honest, humble, and steady, in the face of blustery winds. I hope that we can see and honor spiritual maturity, integrity, and wisdom in one another - and be a part of building one another up in love.
My mother and father have been together for almost forty years. One of their favorite things to do on their many beach walks together is collect heart-shaped rocks - one of them, usually my dad, really does end up with rocks in his pockets at the end of every walk. At our wedding reception, my parents gave a heart-shaped rock from their decades-long collection to each of our wedding guests with their name on it. We got one, too. I had thought for a long time that their romantic practice was about being able to spot just the right-shaped rock along the shore. But over the five years of my own marriage, I have learned that it’s much less about the skill of rock selection: it’s all the walks together, all the patience, all the grace, all the growing together, that makes their marriage so priceless.
This building up of the body of Christ, it takes time. In a context that has us constantly assessing what's worth our time, that turns spirituality into a commodity and relationships into transactions, it is radical to say: have patience. This building up is worth the time it takes, it is worth doing steadily, worth doing well.
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