Seeds of the Kingdom
Scripture: Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
Opening Prayer:
Creative, Gracious, Blessing God, you call us over and over again to a new way of life in your Holy Spirit. Open our ears to hear your word, open our hearts to trust you, and open our hands to do your will, that we might see your kingdom in our own lives. Through the one that brings the good news
to us, Jesus Christ, Amen.
Our Gospel lesson today is taken from Jesus’ own teachings about the Kingdom of God. Jesus gives us a series of metaphors – here is what the kingdom of God is like: it’s like a small seed that is hidden, but then grows into a big bush. It’s like a single, valuable pearl that, once found, is bought with everything else the collector owns. It’s like yeast in flour – just a few scoops make loaves and loaves into soft, airy bread.
I should probably point out that even though the reading repeats the phrase “kingdom of heaven” several times, what we sometimes think of as the kingdom of heaven and what Jesus was talking about as the kingdom of heaven or of God are two different things. First, there’s the difficulty with the word heaven.
Heaven in our culture has often meant a people entering through golden gates kept by St. Peter, and then floating on clouds and playing harps all day like angels. Boring. Of course, even if you have a more interesting vision of what the afterlife might look like, the point is that kingdom of heaven frequently gets conflated with heaven, and therefore gets assigned to the file marked “Information I don’t plan to use for several years.”
Second, there’s the difficulty with the word kingdom. For me, “kingdom” conjures up Shakespeare or King Arthur, with castles and knights, and ramparts, whatever those are. It certainly doesn’t make me think of a current system of government, (except when I’m feeling very cynical about American democracy). Kingdoms are old-fashioned, and don’t have a whole lot to do with my daily life, the way they might have in Jesus’ day.
But the truth is, the news about the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven, is Jesus’ good news for his day and for our day. The kingdom of heaven is breaking out here and now, in this place and this time. July 2008, Catonsville, MD, the kingdom is among us!
Brian McClaren writes about living as a Christian in a world with shifting values. In his book The Secret Message of Jesus he suggests some new metaphors for the kingdom of heaven that is breaking out among us. It’s difficult, because the basileia tou Theo – the kingdom of God – encompasses not just the political, but the social, economic, and religious aspects of the society. One of McClaren’s metaphors I like is of the kingdom as God’s economy of love. In God’s economy of love, we don’t measure things like Gross Domestic Product. Instead we measure Gross National Happiness, and the True Justice rate. What would it be like to measure and value things according to God’s scale, rather than according to the scale of the market?
Another McClaren metaphor that sticks with me is of the peaceful revolution of God. Revolutions are frequently violent. But what about a revolution that doesn’t force anyone to be converted, but simply commits acts of random kindness, goodness, and radical joy? Could a peaceful revolution be overtaking us?
Jesus teaches today about this kingdom of God, this economy of love, this peaceable revolution in other provocative ways. The peaceable revolution of God is like a boatful of fisherman who haul in a large net of fish. They sort through the whole net to find the good fish and throw the rest away. God’s economy of love is like a man who finds a treasure in a field, and sells everything else he owns to get it.
The God administration, in other words, is something both hidden and visible. Yeast hides in flour, good fish hide with bad, a beautiful pearl hides with other, less-worthy jewels. To see it, you have to be paying attention. But once you start looking, Jesus tells us, it can be seen and celebrated with joy. This is indeed good news.
Lutheran Volunteer Corps gives people an opportunity to spend a year exploring three core values, or tenets while serving as stipended volunteers at non-profit agencies. The tenets are Social Justice, Simple and Sustainable Living, and Intentional Community.
Social Justice comes in response to God’s call to seek justice for the poor, the widow, and the orphan, and as a way of following Jesus, whose ministry was not limited to the wealthy and respectable, but who instead spent most of his time among the lowly and outcast of society.
Simple and Sustainable Living means a commitment to slow the pace of our lives and the pace of our consumption, and to recognize the many ways in which we already have what we need, that we already have enough. Part of the challenge of the year is living on a limited budget – rent, utilities, and health care are included, but spending money is limited to $100 per month, and food to $90 per month.
Intentional Community, our third tenet, gives people an opportunity to cooperate with and support each other in simple, sustainable living and in social justice work. By living together and sharing food, chores, and community time, volunteers learn about each other and about themselves through the community-building process.
As the City Coordinator for Lutheran Volunteer Corps here in Baltimore and in Wilmington, Delaware, I help keep the administrative plates spinning, making sure that there are placements lined up, housing and support for volunteers coming in, and ongoing fundraising, recruiting and interviewing for future years of volunteers. I’m sure I’m the only one here who sometimes feels like their job is all flour and no yeast. But about two weeks ago, I was visiting our volunteers in Wilmington, and during a free moment, I noticed the map of their vegetable garden, which is a large-scale project up there. There were rows of tomatoes, of course, but also radishes, broccoli, squash, a variety of herbs, and I don’t know what else. It was impressive, and the little map guide was drawn with obvious love and a dash of flair.
In a few weeks, these volunteers and others like them across the country will finish their year of service and move on – to new cities, to back home, to graduate schools and seminaries, to new organizations, or even to new positions in their volunteering organization. But in that year, something has changed for them. Gardening has become a passion because it means eating healthy food that hasn’t traveled thousands of miles, or they’ve lost some of their fear of “the inner city,” and have met people who live courageously in the face of poverty and extreme adversity, and the volunteers learn about the joys and realities of working toward social justice – that it takes a long time, that choices aren’t always easy, that process matters. In the process, the volunteers, if they weren’t already, have become seeds of God’s kingdom, growing into mustard plants, sturdy and pungent. Or, they’ve become yeast, or that voice that says, “couldn’t we try it another way?”
Of course, this shouldn’t be a surprise, since that is the work that the church has always had – to spend time shaping people for the kingdom of God. LVC is continuing in a long line of tradition, just as you are here, at Salem. Our methods are different, but our goals are the same: to be watching, to be praying, to be waiting, to be encouraging those signs that the kingdom of God, God’s love economy, that peaceable revolution of God, is moving among us, transforming us and calling us to be transforming agents in the world. The kingdom of God is among us. It is hidden, it is a mystery, its work is not always obvious or straightforward, but it is among us.
I’d like to close with a story. Once there was a woman who was very, very careful. She trusted nobody. “They’re not going to get one over on me,” she said to herself as she argued her way out of extra charges on her grocery bills. When she was hit in a car accident, even though she wasn’t so hurt, she still sued for damages. “It’s just a big insurance company, they make too much money anyway,” she said to herself. And when she went to a hotel, she always took all the little soaps and bottles. “Everyone else does it,” she’d think. But as often as not, when she got home she’d throw the samples away, unopened, unused. She lived alone, because it was simpler that way. No need to worry about the door being left open, or about being left behind, empty and broken.
She lived in a small apartment building on the second floor. A family with a little girl lived on the first floor in an apartment with a window that faced the entryway. Every night, the little girl waited at the window and waved cheerfully to the woman as she came in the door. The woman rarely smiled, but sometimes if her hands weren’t full, she would wave back, as though to fulfill a necessary, but unpleasant duty. “Clare should be more careful,” she thought, “it’s not a good idea to be waving to everybody you see.”
One day, Clare knocked at the woman’s apartment.
“I brought you something, Miss Evans.” She was holding an inflatable purple brontosaurus. It was about three feet long.
Miss Evans hesitated. It was truly, spectacularly purple. But Clare was smiling as though she herself were receiving a long wished-for gift.
“It’s perfect for swimming!” she exclaimed.
“Oh, well then, thank you,” said Miss Evans. “Would you...like to come in?”
“I can’t,” said Clare, “it’s time for dinner. And she clattered back downstairs.
Miss Evans threw the toy on the couch. It sat there, gathering laundry for several weeks.
But one night, after Jane Evans turned off the TV to go to bed, she paused. “Hey, Mr. Pool Man,” she said to the dinosaur, “what are you doing here anyway? I didn’t ask for you and you don’t match. There’s no such think as a free lunch, you know.”
The brontosaurus looked back at her, saying nothing. But his painted smile reminded Jane of Clare’s open, wide grin. Suddenly she burst out laughing – at the sweetness, at her own silliness, at the outrageous purple-ness of Mr. Pool Man. She laughed and laughed, and for a moment she felt as though a gray cloud had lifted from around her heart.
In the morning, the gray cloud was back and Jane was back to her usual self. But on her lunch break, as she passed an expired parking meter with a beat-up old car in it, she paused. She could see the officer a few hundred feet away, writing a ticket. Normally, Jane would have chuckled to herself and walked away, checking over her shoulder to see if there would be any drama to watch. But today she dug around in her purse, pulled out a quarter, and slid it into the meter’s narrow slot.
May God be at work in our lives in ways that we can see, and in ways that we cannot. Amen.
Opening Prayer:
Creative, Gracious, Blessing God, you call us over and over again to a new way of life in your Holy Spirit. Open our ears to hear your word, open our hearts to trust you, and open our hands to do your will, that we might see your kingdom in our own lives. Through the one that brings the good news
to us, Jesus Christ, Amen.
Our Gospel lesson today is taken from Jesus’ own teachings about the Kingdom of God. Jesus gives us a series of metaphors – here is what the kingdom of God is like: it’s like a small seed that is hidden, but then grows into a big bush. It’s like a single, valuable pearl that, once found, is bought with everything else the collector owns. It’s like yeast in flour – just a few scoops make loaves and loaves into soft, airy bread.
I should probably point out that even though the reading repeats the phrase “kingdom of heaven” several times, what we sometimes think of as the kingdom of heaven and what Jesus was talking about as the kingdom of heaven or of God are two different things. First, there’s the difficulty with the word heaven.
Heaven in our culture has often meant a people entering through golden gates kept by St. Peter, and then floating on clouds and playing harps all day like angels. Boring. Of course, even if you have a more interesting vision of what the afterlife might look like, the point is that kingdom of heaven frequently gets conflated with heaven, and therefore gets assigned to the file marked “Information I don’t plan to use for several years.”
Second, there’s the difficulty with the word kingdom. For me, “kingdom” conjures up Shakespeare or King Arthur, with castles and knights, and ramparts, whatever those are. It certainly doesn’t make me think of a current system of government, (except when I’m feeling very cynical about American democracy). Kingdoms are old-fashioned, and don’t have a whole lot to do with my daily life, the way they might have in Jesus’ day.
But the truth is, the news about the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven, is Jesus’ good news for his day and for our day. The kingdom of heaven is breaking out here and now, in this place and this time. July 2008, Catonsville, MD, the kingdom is among us!
Brian McClaren writes about living as a Christian in a world with shifting values. In his book The Secret Message of Jesus he suggests some new metaphors for the kingdom of heaven that is breaking out among us. It’s difficult, because the basileia tou Theo – the kingdom of God – encompasses not just the political, but the social, economic, and religious aspects of the society. One of McClaren’s metaphors I like is of the kingdom as God’s economy of love. In God’s economy of love, we don’t measure things like Gross Domestic Product. Instead we measure Gross National Happiness, and the True Justice rate. What would it be like to measure and value things according to God’s scale, rather than according to the scale of the market?
Another McClaren metaphor that sticks with me is of the peaceful revolution of God. Revolutions are frequently violent. But what about a revolution that doesn’t force anyone to be converted, but simply commits acts of random kindness, goodness, and radical joy? Could a peaceful revolution be overtaking us?
Jesus teaches today about this kingdom of God, this economy of love, this peaceable revolution in other provocative ways. The peaceable revolution of God is like a boatful of fisherman who haul in a large net of fish. They sort through the whole net to find the good fish and throw the rest away. God’s economy of love is like a man who finds a treasure in a field, and sells everything else he owns to get it.
The God administration, in other words, is something both hidden and visible. Yeast hides in flour, good fish hide with bad, a beautiful pearl hides with other, less-worthy jewels. To see it, you have to be paying attention. But once you start looking, Jesus tells us, it can be seen and celebrated with joy. This is indeed good news.
Lutheran Volunteer Corps gives people an opportunity to spend a year exploring three core values, or tenets while serving as stipended volunteers at non-profit agencies. The tenets are Social Justice, Simple and Sustainable Living, and Intentional Community.
Social Justice comes in response to God’s call to seek justice for the poor, the widow, and the orphan, and as a way of following Jesus, whose ministry was not limited to the wealthy and respectable, but who instead spent most of his time among the lowly and outcast of society.
Simple and Sustainable Living means a commitment to slow the pace of our lives and the pace of our consumption, and to recognize the many ways in which we already have what we need, that we already have enough. Part of the challenge of the year is living on a limited budget – rent, utilities, and health care are included, but spending money is limited to $100 per month, and food to $90 per month.
Intentional Community, our third tenet, gives people an opportunity to cooperate with and support each other in simple, sustainable living and in social justice work. By living together and sharing food, chores, and community time, volunteers learn about each other and about themselves through the community-building process.
As the City Coordinator for Lutheran Volunteer Corps here in Baltimore and in Wilmington, Delaware, I help keep the administrative plates spinning, making sure that there are placements lined up, housing and support for volunteers coming in, and ongoing fundraising, recruiting and interviewing for future years of volunteers. I’m sure I’m the only one here who sometimes feels like their job is all flour and no yeast. But about two weeks ago, I was visiting our volunteers in Wilmington, and during a free moment, I noticed the map of their vegetable garden, which is a large-scale project up there. There were rows of tomatoes, of course, but also radishes, broccoli, squash, a variety of herbs, and I don’t know what else. It was impressive, and the little map guide was drawn with obvious love and a dash of flair.
In a few weeks, these volunteers and others like them across the country will finish their year of service and move on – to new cities, to back home, to graduate schools and seminaries, to new organizations, or even to new positions in their volunteering organization. But in that year, something has changed for them. Gardening has become a passion because it means eating healthy food that hasn’t traveled thousands of miles, or they’ve lost some of their fear of “the inner city,” and have met people who live courageously in the face of poverty and extreme adversity, and the volunteers learn about the joys and realities of working toward social justice – that it takes a long time, that choices aren’t always easy, that process matters. In the process, the volunteers, if they weren’t already, have become seeds of God’s kingdom, growing into mustard plants, sturdy and pungent. Or, they’ve become yeast, or that voice that says, “couldn’t we try it another way?”
Of course, this shouldn’t be a surprise, since that is the work that the church has always had – to spend time shaping people for the kingdom of God. LVC is continuing in a long line of tradition, just as you are here, at Salem. Our methods are different, but our goals are the same: to be watching, to be praying, to be waiting, to be encouraging those signs that the kingdom of God, God’s love economy, that peaceable revolution of God, is moving among us, transforming us and calling us to be transforming agents in the world. The kingdom of God is among us. It is hidden, it is a mystery, its work is not always obvious or straightforward, but it is among us.
I’d like to close with a story. Once there was a woman who was very, very careful. She trusted nobody. “They’re not going to get one over on me,” she said to herself as she argued her way out of extra charges on her grocery bills. When she was hit in a car accident, even though she wasn’t so hurt, she still sued for damages. “It’s just a big insurance company, they make too much money anyway,” she said to herself. And when she went to a hotel, she always took all the little soaps and bottles. “Everyone else does it,” she’d think. But as often as not, when she got home she’d throw the samples away, unopened, unused. She lived alone, because it was simpler that way. No need to worry about the door being left open, or about being left behind, empty and broken.
She lived in a small apartment building on the second floor. A family with a little girl lived on the first floor in an apartment with a window that faced the entryway. Every night, the little girl waited at the window and waved cheerfully to the woman as she came in the door. The woman rarely smiled, but sometimes if her hands weren’t full, she would wave back, as though to fulfill a necessary, but unpleasant duty. “Clare should be more careful,” she thought, “it’s not a good idea to be waving to everybody you see.”
One day, Clare knocked at the woman’s apartment.
“I brought you something, Miss Evans.” She was holding an inflatable purple brontosaurus. It was about three feet long.
Miss Evans hesitated. It was truly, spectacularly purple. But Clare was smiling as though she herself were receiving a long wished-for gift.
“It’s perfect for swimming!” she exclaimed.
“Oh, well then, thank you,” said Miss Evans. “Would you...like to come in?”
“I can’t,” said Clare, “it’s time for dinner. And she clattered back downstairs.
Miss Evans threw the toy on the couch. It sat there, gathering laundry for several weeks.
But one night, after Jane Evans turned off the TV to go to bed, she paused. “Hey, Mr. Pool Man,” she said to the dinosaur, “what are you doing here anyway? I didn’t ask for you and you don’t match. There’s no such think as a free lunch, you know.”
The brontosaurus looked back at her, saying nothing. But his painted smile reminded Jane of Clare’s open, wide grin. Suddenly she burst out laughing – at the sweetness, at her own silliness, at the outrageous purple-ness of Mr. Pool Man. She laughed and laughed, and for a moment she felt as though a gray cloud had lifted from around her heart.
In the morning, the gray cloud was back and Jane was back to her usual self. But on her lunch break, as she passed an expired parking meter with a beat-up old car in it, she paused. She could see the officer a few hundred feet away, writing a ticket. Normally, Jane would have chuckled to herself and walked away, checking over her shoulder to see if there would be any drama to watch. But today she dug around in her purse, pulled out a quarter, and slid it into the meter’s narrow slot.
May God be at work in our lives in ways that we can see, and in ways that we cannot. Amen.
posted by Amy Sens at 12:00 PM
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