O God, grant us the serenity to accept the
things we cannot change; the courage to change the things that we can; and the
wisdom to know the difference ☩
in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
While
the Kingdom has come and is near to us, it’s not yet reached its culmination
when, in the words of Psalm 72, “the whole earth is filled with God’s glory.”
There’s a book about the Christian faith and life called Resident Aliens, and that title says it all. By virtue of Baptism,
our citizenship, ultimately, is heavenly; but we live as expatriates in society.
We’ve been resident aliens for so long now that it can be easy to forget what
our homeland is like. And because the Kingdom is so counter-cultural, so grace-filled,
so wonderful, we need to be jolted into seeing it anew. As I often say, the
word “repent” does not mean “to apologize” but rather “to change your mind” or
“to see things differently.” This is why the Gospel begins with the message –
repent.
The
shock that Jesus uses to get us to see the Kingdom in new ways are the
parables. It’s been said that the parables are earthly stories with heavenly
meanings. You’ll notice that parables, and particularly the ones that we have
today, are very ordinary: a mustard seed, bread making, a fishing net. One person
has noted that God comes to us disguised as our lives. Too often, we expect the
Kingdom to show up as a mountain top experience complete with goosebumps, a
voice from the clouds, and some fire for good measure. Sure, I’ve had a few of
those sort of experiences, but not many. More often than not, I’m playing with
children, or cooking dinner, or having a drink with a friend, or driving around
town. The commonness of these parables tell us that the Kingdom is revealed in
those everyday experiences precisely because the Kingdom is not something to be
explained or understood, it is something to be entered into and experienced. As
today’s collect notes, we are in the midst of things temporal, things that are
passing by. The parables though help us to see and grasp onto the things
eternal – things like faith, hope, and love.
It’s
also important for us to remember that the parables are not fables or
analogies. It is not as if, for example, that the Kingdom is like the treasure
in the field and if we can understand that metaphor then we’ll understand the
Kingdom. No, the parable is the entire story, not just a single object in it.
So the Kingdom is about finding, hiding, being joyful, selling, and buying. We
must resist simplifying the parables so that we can say “Oh, I get it.”
Instead, after hearing the parables we should be thinking “Wow, I’m not really
sure what this all means, but things are going to be different going forward.”
In
a series of short parables, Jesus shows us what life in his Kingdom is all
about. For one, it’s full of unexpected abundance. Mustard seeds are incredibly
small – usually only 1 or 2 millimeters in size. But a mustard bush, or a tree
as Jesus calls it, can grow to be well over 10 feet tall and have a spread of
double that. We see the idea of the least becoming the greatest in this
parable, which certainly is a hallmark of the Kingdom. It’s what St. Mary
proclaims in the Magnificat – My soul
proclaims the greatness of the Lord… for he has looked with favor on his lowly
servant… from this day all generations will call me blessed.” The Kingdom comes
not as an army, not as a noble warrior, but as a tiny seed or a woman baking
bread.
And
just as the Kingdom doesn’t come with might, it’s not like a Trojan Horse that
is intended to be a sneak attack and precursor to conquest. No, the Kingdom is
like a great tree that provides a home for birds to make nests in and find
security. Typically, kingdoms are thought of in terms of armies, and castles,
and kings. But this Kingdom isn’t about those kinds of power, rather this Kingdom
is a place of refuge for all sorts of people. Here, Jesus is connecting his
hearers to Ezekiel 17 and Daniel 4, which speak about how God’s salvation will
be like a noble tree that produces fruit, and nesting places, and shade so that
all creatures might find rest.
Ultimately,
this is a parable of grace. When we think about religion – is it a to-do list
of things we need to be doing, or is it an awareness of all the things God has
done for us? If religion feels like a burden or like a source of oppression
then chances are it’s a vestige of the kingdoms of this world instead of the
Kingdom of Heaven which is a place of peace for all of God’s people.
Similar
things are happening in the parable about the woman making bread, but the idea
of abundance is heightened. Where Jesus says that the woman hid some yeast in
three measures of flour, he’s trying to shock us. Three measures of flour comes
out to about 60 pounds! That’s enough to make well over 100 loaves of bread.
It’s a clear signal that the Kingdom isn’t an individual matter. Unless you
have a lot of friends that you plan on feeding, why would you need so much
bread? The Kingdom is manifest in labors that lead to nourishment for many.
And
this grandeur of the Kingdom is about sheer joy – as if you found a valuable
treasure and reordered your entire life to possess it. There are some
interesting economics going on in the parable of the treasure in the field. If
the finder sells all that they have in order to purchase the field, then it
means that they don’t have anything else, just a field and some treasure. But
the treasure was the purpose of this whole buying and selling endeavor – so you
can’t very well go out and sell the treasure that you sold everything else to
obtain. How will this person buy food? Or materials to build a house on this
newly acquired land? In the all-surpassing joy of this person, those questions
aren’t of concern.
The
Kingdom is not a means to an end. It’s not as if the Kingdom is something we
pray for or work for so that we’ll get something else like peace, or
prosperity, or blessings. No, the Kingdom itself is what we long for. And, as
I’ve alluded to, the Kingdom is not the treasure hidden in the field, the
Kingdom is the entire parable – the finding of the message of grace, the keeping
of it in a safe place, the joy in repenting and making major changes we sell
and rid ourselves of all the things that prevent us from living in that grace,
and the investing of everything we have in that grace. The Kingdom is not a
possession to have and to lose, it is a way of being under the gracious rule of
Jesus Christ. The Kingdom is a gift of grace, it’s not something that we have
to work for, but rather a gift that we are given to participate in, that we
might know the abundant life intended for us. So the verbs of this parable are
what matter – the finding, hiding, being joyful, selling, and buying. The
Kingdom reorients our actions.
The
parable of the pearl looks rather similar to the parable of the hidden
treasure. And we can read it that way. Another way to read this parable though
is through the lens of Christ; namely that Christ is the merchant. In
Philippians, St. Paul writes: “Though Christ Jesus was in the form of God… he
emptied himself, taking the form of a slave... and became obedient to the point
of death – even death on a cross.” As the prophet Isaiah says, “You shall be a
crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord,
a royal diadem in the hand of your God.” God sees us and we are precious in his
sight. In Jesus Christ, God gave up everything that we might flourish in that
love divine, all loves excelling.
And
this great love is not for the few, but for the many. It is as if a dragnet
were thrown into the sea and caught every sort of thing you could imagine –
some good fish, some not so good fish, maybe even some trash and seaweed.
That’s what so wonderful about the Kingdom, it brings people together who
ordinarily would never be together. It’s one of the things that I love so much
about the Church, and which hurts so much now because we can’t gather right now
– the great diversity of people. I know there are some wonderful friendships at
St. Luke’s, but there’s also a lot of random connections. The Church is a place
where people who have no common interests, who have different backgrounds,
different political persuasions, different tastes in food, clothing, and music,
different socio-economic statuses, and different family situations all come
together because God has brought us all here and made us brothers and sisters.
Where else in society do people gather across every other sort of boundary
lines and find beloved community? It’s an amazing thing that God has done in
casting such a wide net in the Kingdom.
And,
of course, there are all sorts of things that get collected in. As we saw in
the parable of the wheat and the weeds, the separating of the good from the bad
will be done by the angels, not by us. What this parable tells us though is
that everyone belongs in the Kingdom – there are no outsiders. It’s not our job
to be the gatekeepers of the holy. Instead, we can just enjoy the fact that
we’ve been caught by God’s love.
In
all of these parables, we see how the Kingdom is something that God has brought
to humanity, not something we have to build for ourselves. There was an English
scholar and Bishop in the last century who spoke about the fact that our hope
is not for heaven. The purpose of faith is not to get our ticket punched so
that when we die that we’ll go to heaven. Look everywhere you want in the
Bible, you simply won’t find that in there unless you force things out of their
context. Instead, what the Bible regularly speaks about is God’s Kingdom coming
to earth from heaven. Our hope is not for heaven, rather our hope is from
heaven. God intends to bring grace, love, and peace to all of Creation through
the Kingdom established in Jesus Christ.
So it really is true that the Kingdom is at hand, it’s all around us. The parables help us to repent and see this reality. And once we’re able to see ourselves as citizens of the Kingdom who are but mere resident aliens in this society, then we can find the peace and the joy of that Kingdom in which we can be “convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
