Sunday, June 16, 2024

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 6, Year B)

Ezekiel 17:22-24; Psalm 92:1-4,11-14; 2 Corinthians 5:6-10,[11-13],14-17; Mark 4:26-34

The Rev. Clint Brown

Scientists were still 200 years away from discovering that the lowly bacterium Yersinia pestis is the cause of bubonic plague when, in the year 1665, the Great Plague of London ravaged the capital. In a version of “social distancing,” people came streaming out of the urban centers into the countryside in an effort to slow the spread, and the university town of Cambridge was no exception. Among the many displaced students that year was a precocious young man named Isaac – Isaac Newton, that is – still in his early 20s. He was not yet the famous “Sir Isaac Newton” – author of the Principia, president of the Royal Society, bewigged and sitting for official state portraits – but just another college kid being sent home to keep himself occupied as best he could. But to say that he thrived in isolation would be an understatement. The year-plus that Isaac Newton spent away from school during that plague year was one of the most blazingly productive periods of any single human mind ever. In fact, we call it Newton’s annus mirabilis – his “year of wonders.” First, while working out some of the mathematical problems he had been presented with at Cambridge, he laid down the foundations of calculus. Then, as if that wasn’t revolutionary enough, he acquired a few prisms, tinkering with them in a room he specially constructed to block out ambient light, and developed his theories of optics. And standing just a few steps from the door of the house in which he was staying was an apple tree. Yes, that apple tree. And while, as far as we know, no apple ever bonked him on the head, there is the report of one of his assistants in his later years who said that Newton was apt to muse for long hours in the garden, and that one day “it came into his thought that the same power of gravity (which made the apple fall from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth but must extend much farther than was usually thought.” And so, Newton conjectured, Why not as high as the moon or the stars? And so, the theory of gravity was born.

The reason I am giving this little portrait of Newton, of this especially fruitful time in his life, is that today’s readings are all about growth. “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…first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head” (Mark 4:26-28). Growth, we are to understand, takes time and it takes care, and if to persevere in spiritual growth is what we are all called to – to enlarge and deepen our faith – I’m hard-pressed to think of a better model of persistence (or brilliance) in the application of oneself than Isaac Newton.  

We have, you see, not only an obligation to live, but also to live well. One is bound to ask from time to time, Am I doing all that can be done? Am I occupying myself with the things that truly matter? Or am I somehow wasting this precious gift of life? As Christians, we grow chiefly by four means: prayer, reading the Bible, doing works of charity, and regularly attending church. These are in no particular order, but they are the four essentials. Prayer. Bible. Service. Church. To be deficient in any one means that we are not growing as we should. God has told us both who we are and what we are to do. In the first case, God has told us that we belong to Him and owe Him everything. In the second case, God has given us both a written Word, in the Bible, and a Living Word in the face of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the book we read to know how to live, and if we accept this – the posture of being a disciple of Christ – we save ourselves an enormous amount of frustration trying to figure everything out on our own. We do not have to reinvent the wheel. We can live in the assurance that “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17), and that we will be growing in the right direction if we are growing in Christ.  

The Hebrew word for “soul” – nephesh – imagines something quite different from the Greek psyche. We are used to conceiving of the soul as a nonphysical, immortal essence that is somehow trapped within us, but that is not what the Hebrew mind imagined. “Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a nephesh” (Genesis 2:7) A nephesh is a compound – an indivisible unit of body amalgamated with soul– and so personhood, to the Hebrew, is less like a geyser, bubbling up from mysterious sources below, as it is a bucket waiting to be filled from above. A nephesh is a body stretching out for what it longs for. “As the deer longs for flowing streams, so my nephesh longs for you, O God” (Psalm 42:1). If we are going to grow, if we are going to fulfill our longing, then we must turn like the flowers which turn to face the sun. And the sun is God. In the final analysis, everything depends on starting with the right premises. Just ask Isaac Newton.