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July 24, 2005 North Park Presbyterian Church Stories of God's Reign Patricia K.
Townsend Old Testament:
Jeremiah 10:1-10
Let me ask you a riddle: How is a church bulletin like a light bulb? Any ideas? . . . I don’t have a clue what the answer is, why do you think I was asking? You’re annoyed, right? I’ve broken the basic rule of riddling. The expectation is that I know the answer and after you make a reasonable attempt to guess, you will say, “I don’t know, how IS a church bulletin like a light bulb?” And then I’m supposed to say something like “Denise can put it out alone but it takes a whole committee to change it.” Jesus frequently told riddles. What we call parables are sometimes short stories with fully developed plots and characters, like the parables of the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan or the Sower, earlier in this chapter, but sometimes they are simple riddles like these four parables of the kingdom. Jesus was a good teacher, telling stories that are about such basic human experiences that they communicate to us across a great distance of time and space. But that wasn’t really his intention in using parables at the time. He wanted to hide the truth rather than reveal it. If he had spoken more openly with this subversive message he would have gotten himself killed. Indeed, after three years of this, when he went to Jerusalem and spoke more openly, he did get himself killed. Meanwhile, he told stories that got people thinking, and then he explained them more fully to his followers in private. The parables serve as wedge to cut into the hearers’ assumptions and separate the serious follower from the casual listener. Today we read four very short and well-known stories, each a variant on the same theme: “the kingdom of heaven is like a fill-in-the-blank.” The kingdom is like a mustard seed. The kingdom is like a packet of dry yeast. The kingdom is like a pearl. The kingdom is like a buried treasure chest. Matthew says “kingdom of heaven” where Mark or Luke would say “kingdom of God.” We don’t know why Matthew does that, and sometimes it leads to the misperception that he was talking about ‘pie in the sky after you die,’ which he wasn’t. Most likely he said “heaven” because he was writing for Jews who would be uncomfortable using the name of God. Or maybe, like us today, he didn’t want to play into stereotypes of God as the old white-bearded man in the sky sitting on a jeweled throne. So perhaps it is best if we use a more neutral term, “the reign of God” or “God’s rule” instead of “kingdom of heaven.” Jesus says that God’s reign does not look like the Roman Empire but it doesn’t look like the Zealots revolution against the Roman Empire either. It doesn’t use money or force to gain its ends. It doesn’t look like the American empire either, or like any of the other nations of today’s world. It is profoundly counter-cultural. It’s not visible unless you have the eyes to see it, hidden under the surface, yet powerfully at work to transform individuals and institutions. Like Jesus and his disciples, the reign of God in the world might seem to be as small as the tiniest seed or granules of yeast, yet like these, it has the power within itself to grow and ferment and change things. The other two parables tell us that it is valuable and important enough to give up all our “stuff” to gain it. Perhaps you’ve noticed that these stories are not the simple kid’s stories that you might have thought when you heard them in Sunday School. Each of them has a bit of a tang, the bite of mustard on a summer hot dog. Last week we talked about the ambiguity of weeds, and Ted McConnon told me that a weed is just a flower that hasn’t come into it’s own. What about the fast-growing mustard plant in this story? Is it a weed or an herb? And the leaven—yeast is useful in making bread but not if you are making unleavened bread for Passover. Usually leaven is an impurity in the stories that Jesus tells, a bad guy. The trader who recklessly risks everything on one purchase has put himself out of business, he has lost all liquidity. And how about that guy who is hired to plow a field, finds a treasure, buries it, and goes to buy the field. Sounds like insider trading to me. You could go to jail for that. Things are never quite as simple as they seem on the surface. But isn’t that the point of these stories, after all? The kingdom is both right now and not yet. Eternal life is sometime in the future but it is also a quality of life we can life right now. The Lord God is king and reigns over the earth: Marty chanted it from the ancient Psalm, Amy read it from Jeremiah in the 6th century BC. The Lord is King! Yet the King is about to return, according to Jesus. Jesus was a prophet of the coming reign of God breaking into history. These very short stories don’t tell us much about the kingdom. How can we learn more about what God’s reign is like? Some we can learn from other teachings of Jesus. There are five long discourses in Matthew, the first and most famous being the Sermon on the Mount in Chapters 5 through 7. That talks about such kingdom qualities as forgiveness, We can also learn about God’s reign from the disciples, that was the big point of those sermons last winter and spring: Jesus took 12 ordinary people of very different temperaments with seemingly not a lot of potential and slowly transformed them into something more as individuals, and more importantly and harder to do, as a community. We can go on into the book of Acts and see how that little community exploded onto the first century Mediterranean world rather than hunkering down into a nice little church that took good care of the aging disciples. If the stories are to be believed, like their master, only John died in his bed as an old man, all those “dudes who did,” as the children’s book calls them, got themselves killed working for the kingdom. Most importantly, we can learn about God’s kingdom from what Jesus did to act it out. He ate a whole lot of leisurely meals and drank water or wine with a motley group of socially unacceptable people, people who were outside the bounds of ritual purity because they were damaged in some way (women, or blind men, or lepers, or the wrong ethnicity, or poor, or had the wrong employment). And he healed and forgave them their sins, while he was at it. And he showed that he had defeated the evil spiritual powers by exorcising demons from other people. At the end of the discourse recorded in Matthew 13, after Jesus told the stories of the sower and weeds and fish and the riddles of the kingdom, verse 51 tells us that he asked the disciples, “Have you understood all this?” The disciples eagerly said yes, we understand. But subsequent events would show that they hadn’t quite got it yet. The best of them fell asleep in Gethsemane, denied him in Jerusalem. The kingdom wasn’t real for them until through his death and resurrection Jesus Christ defeated the power of evil and death. And we know that he has defeated the power of evil, the battle was won; these centuries of the church on earth are (in the words of N. T. Wright) just a kind of mopping-up operation. Jesus asked the disciples, “Have you understood all this?” That’s the question he asks you. Have you understood all this? Do you see God working in history? Are you starting to understand God’s rule in our life together as a church family? Are you starting to grasp the reign of God in your own life? Do you get it? |
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