She was, perhaps, one of the most UNremarkable people I'd ever met. I was living in Knoxville at the time, doing my thing as curate at a downtown parish. And she was a member.
It took people just about forever to even remember her name, a name so plain on a person so plain that I was always reminded of a mayonaise sandwich on white bread. She came to church on Sunday; attended Bible study on Thursday; worked at the food pantry every other Saturday. She did her thing and then left. And it was hard to even remember she had been there.
Every Lent, she would come to confession. And I can remember stopping her once and saying, “Wait. I'm having trouble figuring out what the issue is here?” She was just that unremarkable.
But every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights she would go to the community kitchen, a place only a quarter mile down the road from the church – a place I went to maybe half a dozen times. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, she would go there. She would get there for breakfast and eat with the men and women and children. And she would eat with them during lunch. And dinner.
And she would listen to them. Really listen to them. And get to know them. And remember their names, and their hopes and desires. And she would tell them that God loves them. The rest of the world may not care about them one way or another, or may care about them during Thanksgiving and Christmas, or may care about them when it's to some political or personal advantage, but she would tell them that God loves them always. That God loves them, period.
She would bring them laundry detergent, and help them fill out job applications. She would go to local hotels and motels and have them donate shampoos and soaps and towels. She would go to Walmart and Target and ask them for socks.
And she would just be present with them. She didn't stand behind a food counter, serving them that way. Instead she served these children of God by sitting WITH them, among them, during those meals. Praying with them, not for them. Being with them, not for them. And always, always, listening to their stories.
This unremarkable woman that just faded into the background at St. James.
In our reading from Samuel, we have this kid, so young and insignificant that his own father didn’t consider him worthy even to attend the sacrifice offered by the traveling prophet Samuel. Sure, he was nice enough, and he was tough, and he had some talent, but by and large everyone who knew him assumed he’d spend his days as an adult the same way he’d spent those of his childhood – tending sheep, playing with his sling, writing poetry, and playing music. Nobody spoke of him in the same breath as they did King Saul.
Yet David, the least of Jesse’s sons and the unlikeliest of leaders, was chosen by God and anointed by Samuel to be King over God’s people Israel.
And it's just like the God to do something so totally unanticipated. After all, God had chosen to redeem the world through a pair of skeptical senior citizens named Abraham and Sarah. When their descendants were enslaved and oppressed by the power the world had known, God called upon a hot-headed, inarticulate fugitive named Moses to lead them to freedom. Why should it surprise us to discover that God had chosen so unremarkable a man as David?
It is, quite simply, the way the God of Israel works: divine power made present in human weakness, divine purpose made present in the midst of human foolishness. David, whom no one expected to be God’s anointed becomes the greatest of Israel’s kings, who is destined to be the ancestor of the Son of God, the one who will usher in tiny, unremarkable mustard seed of the Kingdom of God.
God’s reign was like this smallest of seeds because God’s reign begins with insignificance. What could be a less likely indicator that a Mighty God could be at work changing the world than the anointing of a teenage shepherd as king?
What could be a less likely beginning for the establishment of God’s reign than a outcast teacher from Galilee and his rag-tag group of disciples? This is God’s Messiah? These were the people that God would use to change the world? Hardly. They were practically nothing. They were like, well, like a mustard seed.
God’s reign begins in insignificance, like a little tiny seed, and then it develops, and it grows, and it matures, and it becomes … a shrub. Just a shrub. Not a mighty oak, nor one of the famed Cedars of Lebanon, but a nice size, modest, unassuming, and a more or less unremarkable shrub.
And that, my friends, is glorious. God begins with weakness and impotence and insignificance, and God works through those things, and they become God’s salvation, even though the world is likely to continue to regard them as weak, impotent, and insignificant.
God works in the world through God’s people, and, as we learn in our stories, God’s people are seldom impressive by any standards except God’s.
God enters the world as an infant from an obscure Middle Eastern tribe. When that boy grows to become a great teacher with many followers, he suffers the most painful death imaginable – at the hands of the government. When God breaks into history and raises him from the dead, this resurrected Jesus leaves his work in the hands of the very people who abandoned him at the end of his life.
When Jesus sends the Holy Spirit to empower them to preach and live out the reality of God’s reign, they gather followers who turn out to be every bit as weak and unremarkable as anyone you can imagine. And still, God continues to work, and the Kingdom is planted, and it grows, and birds take shelter in its branches. Just a shrub. But so vital in all its shrub-ness.
There was a Sunday morning when that unremarkable woman in Knoxville was not at church. Word on the street was that she had been jumped and robbed and killed outside the homeless shelter late Friday night as she was walking to her car. As we at St. James struggled with the proper response to this, organizing liturgies, getting a psychologist to come by to talk to people trying to cope...while we did all of that, her friends, her people, those she cared for and cared ABOUT and listened to, those people silently gathered that night under the bridges of their community, and in the light of candles, stood silently in honor of this truly remarkable woman. She will never be forgotten there. Her witness will never be forgotten there. Her love of God and her love of her neighbor will never be forgotten there.
You see, David was just a kid. The mustard seed grows into just a shrub. And so many of us lead unremarkable lives by the world's standards. But you never know who you will touch when you listen. You never know who you will save when you love. You never know how many seeds you are planting by letting the world know that God loves them...period. Because I think God has us right where he wants us. It seems to me like we are the very soil for the seeds of God’s Kingdom here in our home in Central New York.
It seems to me like we are in the right place to take root and grow and offer the love and shelter of God in our branches.