Sermon 7/27/08
Seeds of Faith: The Kingdom of God - Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
(view lectionary notes for this text)
This month, we’ve been looking at some of Jesus’ parables that focus on planting and growing. We looked at the Parable of the Sower, and talked about how the seed of good news, the seeds of God’s love, are sown indiscriminately, recklessly and extravagantly. And we learned that when God’s love is sown in this generous, abundant way, the harvest, the yield, the results of God’s love in the world will be amazing, miraculous in their return. And last week we talked about the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds. We reminded ourselves that we’re never the ones who decides who is wheat and who is weed – who is good and who is bad. Our task is to tend to our own garden, and try to live lives that bear good fruit for God.
Today, as we wrap up our focus on these parables, we’re hit with a string of mini-parables, a set of four that are just a couple of verses each. Again, we start out with seeds – this time mustard seeds – and then move on to yeast, treasure in a field, and fine pearls. In all of these parables, Jesus begins in the same way: “The kingdom of heaven is like:” Jesus wants us to get a clear message about God’s kingdom – it is so important that we understand about the kingdom of God that Jesus will tell literally story after story after story, same structure, different examples. The kingdom of heaven is like this. The kingdom of heaven is like this. The kingdom of heaven is like this.
So what is the kingdom of God? What is it like? After reading all these parables, do we know? Indeed, Jesus wondered if his disciples were getting the message too. At the close of our text today, Jesus asks them, “Have you understood all this?” They reply, simply, “Yes.” So short a response that you have to wonder if they got it or just thought they should have gotten it! So we have to ask ourselves too: Do we get what Jesus is saying here about the kingdom, or do we just think we should get it? Remember that when we started looking at these parables, I told you that Jesus’ first hearers had a bit of an advantage over us in hearing Jesus’ teaching. They were people who were connected to the land for their livelihoods in a way that we aren’t any longer, at least not most of us. Jesus’ parables would resonate deeply with them, surprise them in just the right places, cause them to ask questions as he expected his words would. Jesus used what was very ordinary to talk to them about the kingdom of God. Think about what Jesus uses in his parables: seeds, wheat which makes common foods, weeds, tiny mustard seeds, yeast. Maybe the parables about the treasure in a field or the merchant seeking pearls are a little less typical, but mostly, Jesus is talking about everyday stuff, ordinary stuff in these parables, ordinary to 1st century listeners.
Why does Jesus use such ordinary illustrations? Why not a more dramatic illustration to make his points? Well, I think the ordinary nature of the examples is the point. It is that the kingdom of God is present in the everyday of our lives that Jesus is trying to make us understand at the core. Right now, in these summer months, we’re in the liturgical season that, as I may have mentioned, used to be called “Ordinary Time,” because it was named after the ordinals – 1st Sunday, 2nd Sunday, 3rd Sunday, and so on after Pentecost Day. Now, we just call this “the season after Pentecost.” But I liked “Ordinary Time.” What’s wrong with having some ordinary time? Maybe it is easy for us to see God at work in our midst in the special times of the church year – at Christmas and Advent, during Lent and Easter, or even on days when we celebrate special things – Anniversary Sunday, or Graduations, or baptisms. But what I think Jesus gets at in his parables is that the kingdom of God happens, arrives, lives and exists for us in ordinary time – right in the everyday stuff of life. It is in our work, in our eating, in our business, in our growing – in the everyday things, we find the kingdom of God. If we can only see God at work at the holidays, we’re missing a lot of activity in the kingdom of God. Real life, the abundant life Jesus offers, isn’t about the special events that occasionally mark our time. Real life is in the time in between. It’s in the relationships that sustain us daily. It’s in the love we share and show to one another for no other reason than because we are all God’s children. These parables first and foremost remind us that the kingdom of God is in us, and around us, so pervasive that it is in everything we do – if we look for it. If we let it in. For some people, looking for God means looking for a miracle, or a supernatural event, or an event beyond our explanation. But I think perhaps God is best revealed when we understand that God is in the things that make up our everyday lives. That’s where we need to start looking for the kingdom. The kingdom of God is extraordinary because it is in the ordinary. It’s here among us, not so special that it is beyond our reach.
These parables also tell us that being part of the kingdom of God is worth everything single thing we have. Nothing we have is more important than being part of God’s kingdom, being loved by God, being counted as one of God’s precious children. The two parables about the field with treasure and the merchant seeking pearls aren’t about wealthy collectors buying another item to add to what they already have. Take note – in both parables, the person sells everything they have just to get the one single item – the treasure, the pearl. Everything for the one thing. What would you give everything you had in order to have? If you really ask yourself that question, I think and hope you’ll find that your answer isn’t a tangible item. You wouldn’t give up all you had for something you could buy in a store. But would you give up everything for a loved one? For a relationship? A family member? God? To give up everything, to “have to have” something, this something has to have extreme value – to be worth everything we have. That’s what Jesus wants to know, wants us to know for ourselves: is your relationship with God – is the kingdom of God and being part of it – worth everything that you have? Jeff Krantz and Michael Hardin from Preaching Peace give this message: [The Kingdom of Heaven,] when found, no one has to tell you to sell everything to buy the field, or the pearl, you can't help yourself. In fact, the Kingdom is something that, if you find it, you'll find that it owns you, not the other way 'round . . . If you can turn back, if you can walk away from the field, if you can walk away from the pearl, then what you've found isn't the Kingdom. What will move our congregations is the evidence that we are owned by the Kingdom we've found. That'll show them just what it is that we so treasure, and having seen it, they'll be caught, too. They'll sell everything to own the pearl that owns them.” (4)
So these parables tell us that the kingdom of God is worth all that we have, even though we can find it, the kingdom, in the ordinary. And they tell us that the kingdom is alive. Seeds and wheat and mustard and yeast and fields and pearls – these are all living things (or part of them) that grow and change and multiply and spread. The kingdom of God is not a place, a building, a physical structure, a static entity – it is the body of Christ, the presence of God in the world, which is visible in us. Jesus says it is like a mustard seed that grows into a great shrub that becomes a tree in which birds nest. You probably know from other gospel stories that the mustard seed is a very tiny seed, and it does indeed grow many, many times larger. But, it doesn’t grow to be a tree. It would never get to be that big, as anyone in Jesus’ day would know, and it certainly can’t claim the title “the greatest of shrubs.” So Jesus is exaggerating, making a hyperbole. (2) Then he speaks of the woman mixing the yeast into three measures of flour. But three measures of flour would make enough bread to feed 100 people – this must be some pretty powerful yeast. Again, Jesus makes an exaggeration to tell us that the kingdom of God is pervasive and spreading and can multiply from something very small into something very big. The kingdom of heaven doesn’t function in a logical way, but a miraculous one – we get much more than we expect from what we sow. That happens, that pervasive spreading, because the kingdom of God is alive, made of people, disciples, not institutions and organizations. We can experience the kingdom of God in this building, in this denomination of which we are a part – but they themselves aren’t the kingdom of God. We, as Christ’s disciples, bring to light the kingdom of God in our midst. We, the Body of Christ, become agents of the kingdom when we let God into our hearts to change our lives, when we decide that we have to have God more than we have to have anything else. The kingdom of God is a seed, planted in us, yeast, working through our souls, nurtured by Jesus, the bread of life.
The kingdom of heaven is like a seed, sown in good soil, yielding 100 fold harvest. It’s like wheat, that sometimes mixes with a lot of weed. It’s like a mustard seed – so tiny, and yet so huge. It’s like yeast, spreading in a way no one quite understands. It’s like a treasure you stumbled upon without being prepared for how it would change you. It’s like a pearl, so precious, that it’s worth everything for you to have it. That’s what the kingdom of God is like. “Have you understood all this?” With God’s help, may we catch glimpses of the kingdom, alive within us, swirling around us, growing through us. Amen.