It’s graduation season. And as I was thinking about what I should write for this week’s No Trifling Matter, I thought about a sermon that I preached at a commissioning ceremony seven years ago, a sermon that I’ve never shared and that still seems relevant today. Since it’s a sermon, it was written for the ear. So I thought I’d use this opportunity to do my first video post. It also caused a bit of an uproar on campus and honestly I’m not sure why. I’ll let you be the judge of that.
The Heresy of a Square Watermelon
One day a few years ago, I was goofing off on Twitter when I should have been working, and I saw several colleagues live-tweeting a gathering about African American theological education. I wanted to follow the livestream, but I had already procrastinated on work long enough and needed to get off social media. Just before I got back on task, I saw someone post that Dr. John Kinney, the former dean of the Samuel Dewitt Proctor School of Theology at Virginia Union University, was talking about square watermelons. “Is that a real thing?” I thought. Of course, I had to google it.
It turns out that square watermelons are a very real, although not natural, thing. It seems that some people have decided that watermelons are just too inconvenient. Their oblong shape makes them hard to ship. They have a habit of rolling around in refrigerators. It turns out, though, that watermelons are incredibly moldable. About 30 years ago, a Japanese farmer developed a way of growing a watermelon in a box that forces it into a cube shape that is much easier to stack for shipping and for storage. Other people have devised ways to force them to grow into heart shapes or pyramids.
Now, as a born and bred Southerner, I find this to be entirely off-putting. I like my watermelon just the way that the good Lord designed them: round and grown in Georgia soil, thank you very much. I can no more tolerate the heresy of a square watermelon than I could ingest the pale pink imposter that I was once served at a conference in the midwest.
The minute that I saw visual evidence that people force such a perfect fruit to take on an abnormal shape, I thought to myself, “Now that’ll preach all kind of ways.” So when just a week later, the dean asked me to preach the commissioning service, I already knew what my topic was. I just had to do what we teach people not to do in seminary: find a text to fit it. Immediately, one of my favorite texts leapt to mind.
This is the testimony given by John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” He confessed and did not deny it, but he confessed, “I am not the Messiah.” And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the prophet?” He answered, “No.” Then they said to him, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” He said,
“I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness,
‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ ”as the prophet Isaiah said.
Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. They asked him, “Why, then, are you baptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?”
(John 1:19-25, NRSV)
I’m going to eisegete this text for a little while to talk about the heresy of a square watermelon.
In this passage from John’s gospel, we read about an encounter between John the Baptist and the religious authorities in Jerusalem. They are at Bethany, about two miles east of Jerusalem and near the banks of the Jordan River, where John the Baptist has been baptizing. Some version of this narrative appears in each of the four Gospels. Yet it is only in John’s gospel that we see this extended conversation between John the Baptist and the religious leaders about the nature of his identity. John’s gospel is big on identity. Recall that it is this gospel that begins with a loud and clear depiction of Jesus as the Word, the Son of God who has been with God the Father from the beginning of creation. There is none of that secrecy stuff going on, with Jesus healing people and then whispering, “Tell no one,” as he does in Mark. Nor does John’s gospel depict Jesus as a wise professor who likes trick questions, asking people, “Who do you say that I am?” In John’s gospel, Jesus struts on the scene like Blue Ivy mimicking her mother’s iconic walk.
The question of identity here is not about Jesus; it’s about John the Baptizer himself. John is an odd fellow. He has spent his entire life in the wilderness. He is the son of a priest, but he is not behaving in a priestly manner. He has an ascetic lifestyle, wearing clothing made of camel’s hair and eating a diet consisting of locusts and honey (Matt. 3:4). But what’s really weird about him is that he goes about baptizing Jews and calling them to repentance. That was a sign-act of conversion that was supposed to be reserved for sinful Gentiles, not for the descendants of Abraham who were the chosen people of God.
John’s behavior is odd enough to draw the attention of the religious leaders. “Who are you?” the priests and Levites ask him when they come to confront him. Now, they know who John is. He, after all, is the son of a temple priest, and the story of his birth announcement and naming went viral throughout Judea. What they really want to know is what he is doing and by whose authority. It’s a trick question and John knows it. So he responds to their non-question with a non-answer: “I am not the Messiah.”
“Alright, then, if you aren’t the Messiah, then surely you must be Elijah.”
“Nope,” says John.
“Well, then, are you the prophet?” they ask, referring to a messianic shadow figure whom many expected to precede the liberation of Jerusalem.
“Wrong again,” John says.
At this point, the priests and Levites are getting testy. “Look, bruh, you need to explain yourself. Who are you and who authorized you?”
The real question is why John doesn’t behave as he is supposed to. He, after all, is supposed to know how to fit in with the religious elite. His father was a priest of the order of Abijah; his mother was a descendant of Aaron. But John has rejected his familial legacy of serving as a temple priest, and is instead carrying on in the wilderness. In baptizing people, he is engaging in religious leadership, but in a way that makes no sense to the religious leaders and that does not carry temple authority. In other words, John has stepped far outside the box. The good religious folk are not coming after John because they don’t know who he is; they are coming after him because he refuses to behave like a square watermelon.
So, too, as you close this chapter of your life and start a new chapter of ministry leadership, you will find yourself pressured to become a square watermelon. During your theological education, your professors have admonished you to question long-held beliefs, to try on differing scriptural hermeneutics, and to experience God beyond the boxes of white supremacist heteropatriarchal Christianity. We have challenged you to engage the unfamiliar, whether that be ancient spiritual disciplines, people from other faith traditions, or biblical translations not written in King James’ English. We have encouraged you to practice a faith that is connected to the church and that also ventures beyond its four walls to engage the pressing social concerns of our day and the unjust systems that uphold them. And hopefully, we have taught you to be self-reflective and self-loving, to drop the carefully constructed masks that so many religious leaders wear and to embrace your authentic self.
But out there, in the world beyond seminary, you may be pressured to uphold the status quo, to minister in ways that feel familiar and comfortable to good religious folk, in ways that assure bodies in the pews and money in the coffers. You may be pressured to talk, think, dress, and act like a minister is supposed to in your respective traditions, regardless of whether that way of talking, thinking, dressing, or acting is an expression of your authentic personhood, your understanding of who God is, and your understanding of how God has called you to minister in the world. You may be pressured to deny your naturally round self and to force it into the shape of a cube, much easier for shipping to a full-time ministry job, for storage in a comfortable salary with benefits, and for stacking up the ministry ladder.
Sometimes, as in John’s gospel, the pressure may come from good religious folk who, having seen nothing but square watermelons all their lives, believe that it is the only way that ministry and discipleship should look. They may be uncomfortable with the way your rounded self wobbles on the shelf, knocking into long-standing practices and beliefs about who God is and who we as the church are called to be. They may be anxious that your habit of questioning what they’ve always held to be true is an indictment against them and their faith. They may be fearful that your social activism and bold proclamations about injustice will negatively taint their reputations or scare away tithes-paying members in a time when mainline denominations appear to be dwindling away. They may be worried that your introduction of unfamiliar theology and practices might pave a slippery slope toward the very sort of apostasy that many of the religious leaders in Jesus’ day were trying to protect against.
Many times, though, the pressure will come from within. Perhaps, being afraid of being seen as an imposter, you might work so hard at perfecting the “mask of ministry” that you ignore the spiritual disciplines and self-care practices that help you to maintain sight of who God is and who you are. Perhaps being anxious about maintaining your source of income, you might shy away from taking risks or tone down your prophetic responsibility to speak truth to power so as not to upset the big donors. Or perhaps, being eager to secure your spot among the ministry elite, you might neglect your pastoral responsibilities in the mad rush to take on as many revival and conference and “Seven Last Words” invitations as you can.
Maybe, just like the good religious folk, you are uncomfortable with the way your rounded self wobbles on the shelf, rather than staying squarely put. Because maybe in our quest to get you to accept your roundness, we have provided you with more questions than answers, more mystery than certainty, and more unknown possibilities than clear pathways. Maybe the provincial faith that you entered seminary with has changed and expanded into something that is far bigger, but also far more terrifying.
But I like to think that if we have succeeded in our task – which is to teach you that the God of Esther, Ruth, and Mary of Magdala is far bigger and wider than any of our boxes can contain – then perhaps we have prepared you to follow in the footsteps of John the Baptist in rejecting the heresy of the square watermelon. Perhaps we have prepared you to know clearly who you are and who you are not, to minister in ways that are at once authentic risky and world-changing even when we are not sure why, and to point to the one who has come, is come, and will come again.
Watermelon is not meant to be square, and neither are you.
If something in this sermon resonated with you, join the conversation!
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