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“Five Flashes of the Kingdom”                                                                

Matthew 13: 31–33 & 44--49                                                                   

Makemie Presbyterian Church                                                                         

July 25, 2010

³¹He (that is Jesus) put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took & sowed in his field; ³²it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs & becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come & make nests in its branches.”                                                                                                      

³³He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took & mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”                                                                                                      

⁴⁴“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found & hid; then in his joy he goes & sells all that he has & buys that field.

⁴⁵“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; ⁴⁶on finding one pearl of great value, he went & sold all that he had & bought it.

⁴⁷“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea & caught fish of every kind; ⁴⁸when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, & put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. ⁴⁹So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out & separate the evil from the righteous

This ends our reading.

One of the most difficult things about believing in God is trying to talk about it. Someone asks you why you believe, or how your life is different because you do, & there are no words that are true enough, right enough, big enough to explain. You rummage around for something to say, but everything sounds either too vague or too pious. You could talk about how our hearts fill full to bursting sometimes, or about the mysterious sense of kinship you feel with other human beings. You could talk about how even the worst things that happen to you seem to have a blessing hidden in them somewhere, but the truth is that it’s impossible to speak directly about holy things. How can the language of earth capture the reality of heaven? How can words describe that which is beyond all words? How can human beings speak of God?

We don’t do it well that’s for sure, but because we must somehow try, we tend to talk about what we can’t say in terms of what we can – that is we tend to describe holy things by talking about ordinary things, & trusting each other to make the connections. Believing in God is like coming home, we say, like being born again. It’s like jumping off the high dive, like getting struck by lightning, like falling in love. We can’t say what it is exactly, but we can say what it’s like & most of us get the message.

If you still have your notes from high school English class, you can probably find the section on figures of speech, where this way of talking is called talking in metaphors – talking about one thing by referring to another, getting at the meaning of one thing by comparing it to another. Sometimes the comparisons are comfortable & familiar. Her eyes were as blue as the sky, as blue as the sea, blue as a robin’s egg.  

But sometimes the comparisons are jarring or startling. Her eyes were as blue s a bruise, as blue as ink spilled on a white page, as blue as a wave right before it breaks. When the comparisons catch us by surprise they make us stop, make us think. How can these two things be alike? What do they have in common? How deep does this connection go? When the comparisons catch us by surprise, our everyday understanding of things is broken open & we are invited to explore them all over again, to go inside of them & see what’s new. 

Jesus did it all the time. Throughout the Gospels & in Matthew’s Gospel in particular, he was always making comparison. Sinners are like lost sheep, the word of God is like see sown on different kinds of ground, the kingdom of heaven is like a wedding feast, God is like the owner of a vineyard.

“The kingdom of heaven is like this…” he said over & over again, telling his followers stories about brides & grooms, sheep & shepherds, wheat & tares.

Have you ever wondered why he taught that way? Why didn’t he just come right out & say what he meant? If anyone in the world was qualified to speak directly about God, surely it was Jesus & yet he too spoke indirectly, making surprising comparisons between holy things & ordinary things, breaking open our everyday understanding of things & inviting us to explore them all over again.

In the passage we have just heard he launched a volley of such comparisons. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, he says, like yeast, like buried treasure, like a fine pearl, like a net cast into the sea. The images come quickly, one right after another, with no preparation, no explanation, no time for questions & answers. It’s not like him to be in such a rush. He is usually a better storyteller than that, gathering his listeners around him & sliding into his tale with one of those time-honored introductions like, “There once was a landowner…” or “There once was a king…” When he does, his followers settle down to listen, knowing hat the story will be full of meaning for them, knowing that they had better listen well.

But these five flashes of the kingdom come at us so quickly that there is no time to settle down at all. Jesus zings us with them—one, two, three, four, five—like snapshots, like scenes glimpsed through the windows of a fast-moving train. The kingdom of heaven is like this & this & this, he says. It’s almost as if he doesn’t want us to think too much about them, like he doesn’t want us to get stuck on any one of them but to be dazzled by the number & variety of the things the kingdom of heaven is like – like this & this & this.

The first two comparisons seem easy enough. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed or a handful of yeast – nothing much to look at, not very impressive at all, at least not at first. But give either of them something to work on—sow the seed, mix the yeast with flour—and the results can be astonishing; a tree big enough for birds to nest in, bread enough to feed the family for a month. If the kingdom of heaven is like that, then it is surprising & potent & more than meets the eye.

The next part of the comparison is more difficult. First, the kingdom is like aman who finds buried treasure in a field, covers it up & sells all that he owns to buy that field. He is a poor man who becomes a rich man through luck. And second, the kingdom I like a merchant who searches for & finds a pearl of great price, selling all he owns to buy it. He is a rich man who becomes a richer man through skill. Bur rich or poor, skillful or just plain lucky, each man finds something of great value & sells all that he has to make it his own. Each man finds something that makes everything else he owns trivial by comparison & he does not think twice about trading it all in. If the kingdom is like that, then it is rare but attainable, for those who are not only willing but eager to pay the price.

          The final comparison—of he kingdom of heaven and a fishing net—takes a different tack altogether. Thrown into the sea, the net gathers fish of every kind, good & bad, which are sorted out once the net, is full. If the kingdom of heaven is like that, then it is not, in the end something we find but something that finds us & hauls us into the light.

          It’s a lot to digest at one sitting, but the striking thing about all of these images is their essential hiddenness – the mustard seed hidden in the ground, the yeast hidden in the dough, the treasure hidden in the field, the pearl hidden among all the other pearls, the net hidden in the depths of the sea. If the kingdom is like these, then it is not something readily apparent to the eye but something that must be searched for, something just below the surface of things waiting there to be discovered & claimed.

          Information like that has always tantalized the human imagination. A retired school bus driver takes up rock collecting & spends his weekends at local flea markets looking for interesting stones. One day he picks up a round one, about the size of a walnut & likes the way it feels in his hand. So he buys it & takes it home & polishes it up & shows it to his friend the jeweler, who tells him that what he has bought for a dollar & a half is a 250 carat ruby.

          Or the poor single mother of three is notified of her maiden aunt’s death in a distant city. Since she is the woman’s only kin, she buys a bus ticket with the end of her grocery money & goes to sort through the old woman’s things. Packing her aunt’s old brown wool coat in a box for the Salvation Army, she feels something stiff down around the hem & discovers hundred dollar bills sewn into the lining.

          Or the young research librarian without an adventurous bone in his body is shelving old books one day when one falls apart in his hands. As he tries to stack all the loose pages back together again, a yellowed slip of paper falls out of the ruined binding. Picking it up off the floor & holding it to the light, he finds himself staring at an ancient map to Shangri-la or the fountain of youth, or King Solomon’s mines.

          It’s the stuff legends are made of—the sunken treasure, the secret knowledge, the long lost masterpiece gathering dust gathering dust in the attic – suddenly discovered, suddenly found & claimed & enjoyed amid much celebration. That is what the kingdom of heaven is like, Jesus says. Whether it begins as a seed hidden in the ground or a treasure hidden in a field, the kingdom comes when it’s no longer hidden but revealed, when the tree is fully grown, when the treasure chest is opened, when what was lost is found & what was secret is known & what was hidden away is brought forth for everyone to see.

          It’s an exciting business, but where do we begin? Without a treasure map, or a maiden aunt, or much luck shopping for rubies, where do we start looking for the hidden kingdom of heaven? All of these metaphors are fine, all these parables about seeds & yeast & nets are very interesting but when it comes right down to hunting the honest-to-goodness kingdom of heaven, where are we supposed to start?

          It seems like we ought to start some place really holy, someplace really extraordinary, like a medieval monastery, maybe, translating ancient texts with biblical scholars; or in the slums of Calcutta, bathing the sick & dying with Mother Teresa. Maybe we should begin in the Holy Land, or at the Vatican, or the National Cathedral. Then again it may not matter where we are, exactly, as long as we keep our eyes open for extraordinary clues wherever we are—looking out for heavenly visions, listening out for heavenly voices. Because if he kingdom of heaven is hidden in this world, it is hidden really well, & only the most dedicated detectives among us stand a chance of finding it at all.

          Unless, of course, God has resorted to the oldest trick in the book & hidden it in plain view. There is  always that possibility you know—that decided not to hide the kingdom of heaven in any of the extraordinary places that treasure hunters would be sure to check, but in the last place that any of us would think to look, namely, in the ordinary circumstances of our everyday lives: like a silver spoon in the drawer with the stainless, like a diamond necklace on the bureau with the rhinestones; the extraordinary hidden in the ordinary, the kingdom of heaven all mixed in with the humdrum & the ho-hum of our days,, as easy to find as an amaryllis bulb in the dark basement that suddenly sends forth a shoot, or a child’s smile when she awakes from sleep, or the first thunderstorm after a long drought—all of them signs of he kingdom of heaven, clues to all the holiness hidden in the dullest of our days.

          Jesus knew it all along. Why else would he talk about heaven in terms of farmers &fields & women baking bread & merchants buying & selling things & fishermen sorting fish, unless he meant somehow to be telling us that the kingdom of heaven has to do with these things, that our treasure is buried not in some exotic far-off place that requires a special map but that “X” marks the spot right here, right now, in all the ordinary people & places & activities of our lives?

          If we want to speak of heavenly things, he seems to say, we may begin by speaking about earthly things, & if we want to describe that which is beyond all words, we may begin with words we know, words such as: man, woman, field, seed, bird, air, yeast, bread; words such as: pearl, net, sea, fish, joy. The kingdom is like these things; the kingdom is found in these things. These are the places to dig for the kingdom of heaven; these are the places to look for the will & rule & presence of God.

If we can’t find them here we will never find them anywhere else, for earth is where the seeds of heaven are sown & their treasure is the only one worth having. Amen.

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