God Here and Now, Fully in Charge
24 July 2011
Proper 12A
Spoken Eucharist 8:00 a.m.; Sung Eucharist 10:15 a.m.
Parish Church of St. John the Baptist
Seattle Washington
Genesis 29:15-28; Psalm 105:1-11, 45b or Psalm 128; Romans 8:26-39;
Matt 13:31-33, 42-52
Jesus put before the crowds another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.
He told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened."
"The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.
"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
"Have you understood all this?" They answered, "Yes." And he said to them, "Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old." (Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52)
God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen
What would the world look like if everything were as it ought to be? What would it be like if God were truly in charge, right here, right now, of everything?
This is a question that Jesus regularly asked himself, and which became the core of his teaching. Mark says that Jesus’ message was a joyful proclamation of the arrival of God to reign in power. “The time has come. … God’s kingship has come near. Change your ways and believe the happy news!” (Mark 1:14-15). When Jesus teaches us to pray, he tells us to ask God, “your kingdom come” (Matt 6:10; Luke 11:2). He works marvelous things and then says, “If I by the finger of God heal the sick and cast out demons, then the kingship of God has come near to you” (Luke 11:20).
Today’s Gospel has several parables comparing this arrival of God to rule in power to images taken from everyday life: the Mustard Plant, the Yeast, the Hidden Treasure, the Costly Pearl, and the Dragnet. We are reading them in the Gospel of Matthew, which regularly uses the discreet euphemism “kingdom of heaven” for what everyone else in the New Testament knows as “the Kingdom of God.” Again, the idea is God coming to reign in power, the world becoming as it ought to be, what things would like if God is here and now, fully in charge.
What would it be like if God were truly in charge, right here, right now? Jesus’ parables answer this question. His answer is not like those round him. The Saduccees and Hasmoneans argued that the world as it ought to be was one fully compromised with the Imperial Power, with its Roman Peace, and in which money, prestige, and control of the religious rites brought order and submission. The Essenes or the Dead Seas Scrolls covenanters argued that the world as it ought to be was one where their kooky sectarian religion had conquered all others by force of arms in apocalyptic struggle and no one but observant and faithful Essenes remained. The Zealots thought the world as it ought to be was one where they had revolted against the Roman occupiers and set up their own state controlled by their own people, practicing their own religion. The Pharisees taught that the answer lay in personal piety, scripture study and prayer, and putting a fence around the law so as to separate Jews from gentiles more and more.
What would it be like if God were truly in charge, right here, right now? Jesus parables do not repeat the tired formulas of the religious groups around him. They usually grab you and throw you for a loop—demand a change of perspectives and overthrow conventional expectations, politics, and religion.
God coming here and now, fully in charge—It’s like a mustard plant: a tiny seed that produces a huge plant. Most people think it is a weed and not a cultivated crop. It grows in unusual places, unplanned, apart from human control. If it is noticed, it is unwelcome. If it is some place no one cares about, then it can go wild. It then will grow really big, though it will never be what you call “mighty.” It does not measure up to the usual images for God’s kingdom—vineyards, olive trees, or the great cedar tree, which in Ezekiel shelters the wild birds in its branches. For Jesus, the kingdom is the mustard weed.
God coming here and now, fully in charge—is like a woman who hides a bit of yeast in three measures of flour. Note—religious Jews did not link Passover, hopes for redemption, and the ideal King of the future with leavened bread. It was unleavened bread—without any yeast polluting it and making it impure—that was the controlling image. But Jesus says it is the bread of ordinary life that is like the kingdom. Besides that, the measures of flour at issue here are grotesquely big—the three measures mentioned equal about fifty pounds in our system, much more than a peasant woman could bake and consume before it would go bad, precisely because it was not unleavened. Note also here that the kingship of God is likened to a woman's work, to domestic activity.
God coming here and now, fully in charge—is like a peasant who finds a treasure in a field he is working in. Excited, he buries it, and then scrapes together everything he has so he can purchase the field and have clear title to the hidden treasure. Note that it is a field worker, not the land-owner, who finds the treasure. Usually it is only the ones getting their hands dirty in the work, not the mid-level or senior managers, who actually know its details and run into its unexpected realities. From the point of view of the land-owner, this is a morally and legally dubious affair. The treasure is his, right? But the reality is that the peasant feels no obligation to protect his oppressor’s so-called “right” to further property based on the property he already has: Finders keepers, losers weepers. The point is that no matter how hard it is for the poor peasant to scrape together the necessary capital to buy the field, he will do it once he has had a glimpse of the treasure, since it is so wonderful.
God coming here and now, fully in charge—is like a purse-seine or a drag-net that catches all sorts of fish. It is not selective or discriminating. It does not distinguish between clean and unclean, between normal and abnormal. It works below the surface, hidden, but catches everything it touches. The point is the net’s inclusiveness. The mention of separating the good and bad fish on the shore, which works against this basic image, is almost certainly an addition to the parable by St. Matthew, who repeatedly in his Gospel tries to tame and regularize some of Jesus’ more “anti-religious” statements. Where Jesus was trying to simply shock his listeners into engagement with God right here, right now, Matthew was trying to guide a religious community.
God coming here and now, fully in charge—is like a jewel merchant who runs into the absolutely most ideal pearl he has ever seen or is likely to ever see. Like the peasant in the field, he sells everything he has in order to purchase the prize. That net, as we just saw, catches all sorts of fish. Not only dispossessed field hands can find a treasure. Those accustomed to trading fine things can as well. Maybe even the religious, maybe even the pious and observant--those who are often the butt of the jokes found in Jesus’ parables—may yet encounter God, and be permanently changed. But the cost for them is just as high as for the dispossessed. The final remark in this reading—“a scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who lovingly shows his guests his treasures—old and new”—is Matthew’s ways of restating this. Even scribes like him, with their concern for keeping unchanged what is valuable from the past, can be totally changed by this coming of God, here and now, fully in charge.
Note that most of these ways of describing God in charge contain a shock element: unclean leaven, a dishonest means of gaining a treasure, a fish harvesting method that makes no distinction between clean and unclean, a weed that takes the place of the noble Cedar of Lebanon. But they also include pure, unmixed joy and overwhelming, almost grotesque abundance. And they provoke a desire to sacrifice all to have to obtain that joy, to share that abundance.
I think that often we don’t hear the parables because they are so familiar, and because they use images that come from common life experiences in Jesus’ Palestine, but not so common in our modern lives.
So I propose here several modern parables to make the same points, with a similar shock value.
God coming here and now, fully in charge is like a woman who buys a winning lottery ticket. She not only wins, but she wins big. For a dollar ticket, she wins a prize of 10 million dollars. Imagine how happy and shocked she is.
God coming here and now, fully in charge is like a man who gets a bad tattoo. It is not what he had in mind, since he poorly explained what he wanted to the artist, and the artist was not all that good anyway. After several years of being dissatisfied, ashamed, and unhappy every time he sees the tattoo, and wearing long sleeved shirts to hide it, he goes to another artist, known for his skill and ability in adapting old tattoos into new ones. Seeing photos of the artist’s work, the man gets excited, and goes and refinances his house to get the money together. After many hours of pain in the chair, the man looks at what the artist has done: he used the defective ink-work as part of a larger piece. The result is much better than even what the man had in mind originally, and he is so happy with the result that he constantly tries to find occasions where wear short sleeves so he can show it off.
God coming here and now, fully in charge is like the Boston Red Sox in 2004. From 1918 on, the curse of the Bambino meant that the Sox could not win any title game. Then one night, the Red Sox came back from a 0-3 best-of-seven deficit to beat the Yankees in the League Championship and then went on to sweep the St. Louis Cardinals in the the World Series. The joy in the streets of Boston that night is like God coming in full power here and now.
God coming here and now, fully in charge is like a woman in the process of a nasty divorce. Her husband hired the better lawyer, and she is about to lose almost everything. But in sorting through things that the husband couldn’t be bothered to look at, she finds the old coin collection he inherited from his father a few years after their marriage and which he has never bothered to even look at. She notices a couple of coins that look rare and checks up on them. They are worth more than all their other assets combined. So she says nothing, puts the coin collection on her ledger in the agreement, which the ex-husband signs happily.
God coming here and now, fully in charge is like an HIV/AIDS patient who is cured by an experimental stem-cell treatment.
Jesus’ parables of the Kingdom emphasize the presence of God in everyday life—glorious messy everyday life. But they stress the utter strangeness of God in this messed up world we are used to and to the messed up people we are. In these stories, you encounter constantly abundance, joy, the fulfillment of human desire and the turning of tables on the oppressor. God is immanent, and this brings abundance and joy. But God is also transcendent, and this calls us to joyfully sacrifice all for the abundance he offers us, and to change our ways of thinking and of behaving. This is in sharp contrast with the ideas Jesus’ contemporaries had of God’s kingdom, the results of political or military action, of sectarian isolation, of legalistic religious observance, or of accommodating oneself to the systems of oppression we see around us.
God come fully in charge—here and now. Here indeed is something that calls us to joyfully give up what alienates us from God and from each other.
May we this week work in our prayers and quiet times to identify the areas where we are the oppressors, where we enable the oppressors, and where we, "in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and left undone," have alienated ourselves from God and from what God intends for us. And may we pray for the joyful abandon that we might turn away from these things and make amendment of life. May we pray and live, “your kingdom, your will be done,” and know the abundant joy of God coming here and now, fully in charge. May we live the happy news that Jesus proclaimed.
In the name of God, Amen.
