Sermons

“Old Treasures, New Wisdom”

I Corinthians 1:18-25; Matthew 13:31-35, 44-52 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – July 30, 2017

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that your Spirit might guide us through the blessings of scripture. In the name of Jesus we pray, Amen.

I don’t know if it’s a good idea to start with the punch line, but did you notice the funniest word in that entire gospel reading? It comes right after Jesus asks the disciples “Have you understood all this?” And what did they say? One word: “Yes.”

Well, okay then. I guess the rest of us had better catch up! I don’t know if you’re feeling foolish or wise this morning, but according to Paul, God has turned all of that on its head anyway, so all we can do is come to the scriptures the way we are, hoping our hearts are open enough to figure out what’s going on. So we’re going to spend some time today thinking about how we relate to scripture, especially scriptures like these, when Jesus is talking in similes.

Is there a reason he couldn’t just be more clear? Why does he insist on being so confusing? As Laura Hall sings, “Sometimes, I want it all laid out so I can see!” I wonder if it’s for the same good reason that our Constitution doesn’t address cyber security. Not specifically because it didn’t exist as an issue then, but because the crafters knew there would be all manner of specific questions they couldn’t anticipate, so they purposely made it a looser document that we would have to interpret and apply. If Jesus were too specific, the power of scripture would have dimmed over the years, as we were farther and farther removed from his particular circumstances. Instead, we have this more flexible form of guidance, the parable, that ends up seeming less clear, when it fact what it is is more adaptable. There will always be multiple interpretations of the parables, but that’s kind of the point, I think.

So let’s take a look. What if I give you two different interpretations for each simile, and then when we’ve worked our way through them all, we’ll see what we might have learned about the kingdom of heaven? I guess that means we have to start with that mustard seed. Am I the only one who isn’t really a fan of mustard? Not that it matters, but this one always turns me off a little, just because I think mustard is kind of icky.

But at the very least, we can all admit that mustard is powerful, right? Pungent, even! Which is, I think, part of the point here. If Jesus had been in different culinary context, this parable might have been about hot sauce. The most obvious point of this simile is that something large and powerful can come from something tiny and seemingly trivial. That’s good news for small-membership churches like ours!

But for number two for our mustard seed, I want us to notice something else about this simile. Unlike the rest of them, it has a “so that.” There is a reason for the kingdom of heaven here, when it’s a mustard seed at least. It becomes the “greatest of shrubs” and even a tree, “so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” Not only is the kingdom of heaven small but mighty, but its consequences are that precious inhabitants of God’s creation find a home.

In verse 33, we’ve moved on from seasoning to baking. “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast.” For those who are not familiar, yeast is what makes bread rise. It’s what unleavened bread is missing, the thing that makes it puff up, a process which takes a little longer than making flat bread, which is why the Israelites didn’t use it when they were trying to escape from Egypt. For our first lesson for this simile, we’re headed in a similar direction as before. There is something about the kingdom of heaven that starts out small and has an out-size effect on whatever its mixed up with. It doesn’t take very much yeast to transform a lot of bread dough.

But what about this take? What happens when yeast is added to dough and makes the bread rise? There are hundreds of little air pockets. Perhaps this simile is also teaching us that the kingdom of heaven is filled with the Spirit. The breath of God is what makes the kingdom of heaven grow. If we’re not making space for the Spirit to move, the kingdom of heaven is going to have a hard time emerging in our midst.

The next two similes move us into a different question. They are about our response to the kingdom of heaven. And they’re a little bit harder to make sense of. Someone finds a treasure in a field and sells all their possessions so they can buy that field. The point here is that the kingdom of heaven is worth making personal sacrifices for. It is worth giving up everything else in your life. This sounds good on a metaphorical level, but I think most of us would balk at an extreme application of this advice. You can’t eat or live in a treasure in a field, after all.

But there are even more problematic parts of this very short story. The person who found the treasure hid it and bought the field without letting the previous owner know why they were interested. That seems pretty shady, doesn’t it? Is Jesus advocating a “by any means necessary” approach? Or is the whole parable coming from a perspective that rejects the supposed rightness of the land ownership system, and thus sees no value in operating with good faith within that system? Perhaps the kingdom of heaven is far more radical than we imagine, operating outside our conventional notions of morality. This is getting a little unsettling. Is it possible to read too much into scripture? I’m quite certain we do it all the time.

Perhaps that is why the treasure in the field verses are paired with the pearl of great price verses. This guy is much more on the up-and-up. He finds the pearl, presumably in a shop somewhere, since it’s not available for the taking out of the oyster’s shell. He sells all he has and comes back and buys the pearl, presumably at a fair market price for such a jewel. So the point that is being reiterated here is that the kingdom of heaven is worth making sacrifices for. It is worth letting go of all the other stuff in your life to seek it out and have it.

Even here though, the lesson can seem extreme, and I think that’s intentional. There is no way in which selling all the rest of your possessions so you can buy the biggest pearl in the world is a practical decision. The pearl will not feed your children; the pearl will not shelter you from the rain. And yet, somehow, Jesus wants us to believe it’s worth it. This parable is almost a warning really: pursuing the kingdom of heaven may seem like foolishness. It could ruin your life. Everyone will think you are crazy and irresponsible. It is not the “wise” move. Somewhere we’ve heard this warning before, haven’t we?

“We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,” Paul wrote. “Those who give up their lives for the sake of the gospel will save them,” said Jesus. They weren’t messing around; they were trying to prepare us for the depth of sacrifice following Jesus can require. The truth is that most of us don’t do it all the faithfully.

And that’s the reality we carry into the last parable in this passage. A net is thrown into the sea and brings up good fish and bad. And then the angels separate the good from the bad. We’ve all been mixed up together, and now we’re going to be separated. But wait, what if we’re mostly good, but didn’t actually sell all we had and give the proceeds to the poor? What if we’ve been loving, but managed to rationalize having a place to lay our heads, even though Jesus didn’t? What if we’ve lived sensible, thrifty lives so that we could give generously to our church, but didn’t invite the homeless poor into our homes, recognizing they are our kin? Are we good fish or bad fish? Couldn’t we just skip this parable? Well, yes. And no.

Verses 47-50 may make us uncomfortable. We could have arranged the morning’s reading to avoid them. But they’re still there. We have to find some way of addressing the parts of the Bible that don’t align with our understanding of the gospel, or we have to adjust our understanding of the gospel.

If, like me, you believe that the underlying point of the good news Jesus came to share is the mercy of God, then we need to find another way to look at these fish being separated by the angels. What if the point of this parable is that we’re all the fish, and we’re all jumbled together in the net, and we are not the angels, and therefore not qualified to judge good from bad? What if the threat of that furnace isn’t the end of the story, because Jesus Christ came to redeem the creation God made and called good, and in the end, every single fish was made with love by God’s hands, and so God can find something about every single one of us that justifies putting us in the basket? The kingdom of heaven is a place where only God can judge, and God always does that through the eyes of mercy.

What we learn from looking at difficult parables like this is that studying short passages in isolation is not the most fruitful approach to scripture. Jesus reminds his disciples, as they claim understanding, that the kingdom of heaven has new treasures and old ones. It is not complete without both. We will not be able to say “Yes, we understand all this” if we don’t use all the tools at our disposal.

What we learn from parables as a whole is that, rather than laying it out for us, Jesus expects us to do some of the work of figuring out our faith ourselves. We must learn to apply the sense God gave us to these words written down so long ago. We must spend time not just reading scripture, but communing with God in prayer and contemplating the meaning of the story of Christ as a whole, to develop a lens through which to make sense of what we read.

In the end, these parables have taught us a lot about the kingdom of heaven. It is how God does amazing, powerful things through small, seemingly insignificant things and even people, with the goal of providing shelter and rest for all. The kingdom of heaven is what emerges when we make space for the Spirit to move. It is worth sacrificing for, even if it means leaving everything else behind. It may require us to leave behind conventional wisdom and step out in faith into what may seem like foolishness. The kingdom of heaven is a place where we are called to suspend judgment, for we are just as mixed up as the person next to us. Is this all these parables can teach us? Of course not! We may claim to understand them, or not, but there will always be more to be discovered. And so we conclude with one of the most important lessons of all, that our study of scripture is not something to master and be done with. Rather, it is a life-time companion on our journey of following Jesus, constantly revealing old treasures and new wisdom. Alleluia and Amen.