God Here and Now
27 July 2014
Proper 12A
Spoken Eucharist 8:00 a.m.; Sung
Eucharist with Holy Baptism 10:00 a.m.
Parish Church of Trinity Ashland
(Oregon)
Genesis 29:15-28; Psalm 105:1-11, 45b
or Psalm 128; Romans 8:26-39;
Matt 13:31-33, 42-52
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.
He tells parables to
try to get at the matter. We heard
several today: 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.”
The idea is God’s kingship, or reign, how the world would be if it were as
it ought to be.
What
would it be like if God were truly in charge, right here, right now? The people around Jesus gave
various answers: Supporters of Rome and the Temple Establishment said things
were as they ought to be, with the Empire in charge and Judean society ordered with
them on top. The Essenes argued that
the world would not be set to right until their kooky little sect had conquered
the world by force of arms in apocalyptic struggle. The Zealots thought
it would come when their violent revolt against the Roman occupiers succeeded. The Pharisees taught that it lay not in
society, but 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 give a different
answer. They grab you and throw you for
a loop—demand a change of perspectives and expectations.
God
coming here and now, fully in charge—It’s like a mustard plant: a tiny seed that produces
a huge plant, mainly a weed and not a cultivated crop, growing in unusual
places, unplanned, apart from human control. 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 mustard weed
shelters the birds.
God
coming here and now, fully in charge—is like a woman who stirs in a couple of tablespoons of yeast
into three measures—about fifty pounds—of flour. With a little time, that huge amount of dough
is raised. God in charge is not the
pure, unleavened bread kosher for Passover, but the bread of ordinary
life, with its impure but overwhelming leavening. God in charge is not the holy work of male
priests, but the ordinary domestic work of women!
God coming here and now, fully in charge—is like a peasant working someone else’s field who uncovers a treasure hidden there. Excited, he reburies it, and then scrapes together everything he has so he can purchase the field and its contents. The field worker, not the land-owner, finds the treasure: usually only those getting their hands dirty in work are the ones who actually know its details and run into its surprises. The morality here is not that of legal titles and deeds, but finders, keepers. 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 drag-net that catches all sorts of fish. It is not selective or discriminating. It works below the surface, hidden, and catches everything it touches. The net is inclusive. St. Matthew, ever on the lookout for ways to regularize some of Jesus’ more “anti-religious” statements, has added the comment about sorting good and bad fish on the shore. But Jesus’ original point was that God in charge is overwhelmingly inclusive, and uncontrollable.
God
coming here and now, fully in charge—is like a jewel merchant who runs into the absolutely most perfect
pearl he has ever seen. Like the peasant, 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 gentle way of saying 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.
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 all include pure, unmixed joy at overwhelming, almost grotesque
abundance, and a desire to sacrifice all to have to share that abundance.
We have heard these
parables so often, we don’t actually listen to them. Besides, they use images that come from
common life experiences in Jesus’ Palestine, but not so common in our modern
lives.
So here are some parables
I have written to make the same shocking points Jesus intends in his.
God
coming here and now, fully in charge is like a woman who buys a dollar lottery ticket. Not
expecting to win, she doesn’t even check the results for a few days. But when she does, she learns she has not
only won, but won big: 10 million dollars. She is so shocked she falls down and can’t talk
for a few minutes.
God
coming here and now, fully in charge is like a man who gets a bad tattoo. After several
years of being dissatisfied, ashamed, and unhappy every time he sees it, he
goes into a tattoo parlor and asks if they can fix old, bad tattoos. One
of the artists is an expert in repair and redesign, but it costs a lot. 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 the
magic the artist has wrought, using the old defective ink-work as ground for
and part of a larger piece. The result is beautiful, much better than
even what the man had originally imagined when he got the first tattoo. He is so happy with it 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 abusive husband has 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. She never has to worry about finances, or he
abusive ex, again.
Jesus’ parables of
the Kingdom emphasize the presence of God in everyday life—glorious messy
everyday life. They stress the utter strangeness of God in what we are
used to. In these stories, we encounter
abundance, joy, the fulfillment of human desire and the turning of tables on
the oppressor.
God
come fully in charge—here and now: abundance, surprise, and a call to joyfully give up what
alienates us from God and from each other.
I invite us all this
week in our prayer and meditation to ask how we think things would be if God
were truly in charge and things were as they ought to be. Picture it, savor it. Listen to Jesus’ parables of the kingdom, and
let us use our imaginations to try to come with some of our own. And may we pray for the joyful abandon that
we might turn away from these things in our hearts and lives that keep this
vision from being realized. May we pray
and live, “your kingdom, your will be done, on earth as in heaven” 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.
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