27 July 2014 The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost - Proper 12A

Proper 12A                                                                                      The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Romans 8.26-39

Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52

Every hour of every Sunday on the planet, these words are said and heard countless millions of times.  Millions pray these words each week in worship and many pray these words every day – in the Episcopal and Roman Catholic Churches alone these words are prayed at least 22,000 times a day just in the United States.

Do you know them?

Thy Kingdom Come…

Of course you do.  These words come from the best known prayer in the Christian world…the Lord’s Prayer or the Our Father.  I learned this prayer from my parents as soon as I was old enough to talk and many of you probably learned it the same way.  But . . . When you pray, Thy Kingdom come, what exactly do you mean by Kingdom?  What is it that you want to come?

It would seem a pretty straight forward question with an easy answer, but is it?

Today’s gospel can go a long way toward understanding what God’s Kingdom is all about.  In order to get a full sense of what Jesus taught, however, we need to understand the context of today’s reading and how it fits in with the whole of Matthew’s 13^th chapter.

In this chapter, Jesus tells seven parables concerning the Kingdom of Heaven.  Six times Jesus uses the words, the kingdom of heaven is like…  So, it’s pretty clear that this entire chapter is intended to instruct the crowds and Jesus’ closest followers about what God’s Kingdom is like.  We have five of the seven parables in today’s reading:

·         The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed…

·         The kingdom of heaven is like yeast…

·         The kingdom of heaven is like treasure…

·         The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant…

·         The kingdom of heaven is like a net…

There’s a very interesting question that Jesus asks after telling all of these parables.  See, the disciples asked Jesus to explain the parable of the wheat and the weeds (last week’s Gospel reading), He does, then offers three more parables and asks the disciples, Have you understood all this? To which the disciples respond simply, Yes.  In light of the events that were still to come in the ministry and life of Jesus and the disciples, you have to wonder if they really understood.

Understanding the Kingdom is no little thing.  We know that in the first century the Jewish understanding of the coming Messiah was that he would come with a sword and armies to throw off the yoke of Roman rule.  They surely didn’t understand Messiah in the way that Jesus was being the Messiah.  When He came as a servant instead of a warrior and was eventually crucified rather than driving the Romans out – he didn’t look like the Messiah they had been expecting.  So, there also couldn’t have been a very good understanding of the Kingdom of Heaven.  The warrior Messiah was meant to be God’s agent in bringing about the Kingdom, but if they didn’t understand the idea of Messiah, they couldn’t possibly have understood the meaning of God’s Kingdom either.  We have just as difficult a time understanding what we mean when we pray, Thy Kingdom come.

The key to understanding these parables, I believe, is understanding that the ‘like’ in the phrase the Kingdom of Heaven is like is not about the subject – mustard seed, treasure, merchant – it’s about the action of the story, what happens with these objects.

This was a lesson that was a long time coming for me.  Many of you may already know that I grew up in a small United Methodist Church in central Florida; but my family stopped going to church when I was about 9 or 10.  Afterwards the experience of church, and of faith, clung to me – but I didn’t know what to do with it.  So, I became a ‘seeker,’ searching for God and faith in every place I could imagine.  I studied various churches and religions, I even attended a synagogue for some months.  All of this time, though, I kept expecting some lightning-bolt experience; I expected faith to be something that was bestowed upon me from on high – I was looking for some experience that would tell me that I had found the right place and that would prove to me that I had faith.  Then, in one of those introspective moments – when I had let go of the worry and was simply wondering about faith, religion, and God – it occurred to me that faith isn’t a noun, it’s not a thing - it’s a verb!  Faith is a complicated idea.  It’s something that we do, we choose to live each and every day as faithful followers of Christ.

Just like faith, the Kingdom of Heaven cannot be contained in one simple thought…the Kingdom of Heaven is difficult to get our minds around because it is all-encompassing.  The Kingdom of Heaven changes everything about our world, our values, and our priorities.  That’s why the Gospel of Matthew gives us so many parables about the kingdom in a row – they don’t all mean the same thing, and they’re not all clear descriptions.  They’re trying to point us in the right direction, to the right way of thinking about the Kingdom.

The parables in this chapter that really stand out to me are the central two in our list – the Parable of the Hidden Treasure and the Parable of the Pearl.  These two parables are grouped together in the Gospel, I believe, because they are similar and because putting these parables together helps us understand their meaning.  In the first, someone finds a treasure in a field and then hides it away again.  Strange, but what comes next tells us why.  Then, in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.  You can almost picture this character from an old silent film, rejoicing in his good fortune while slinking away rubbing his hands together.  So, the field is not his.  Maybe our character is a laborer hired by the owner to plow the field in preparation for sowing?  Or maybe he’s just poking around in someone else’s field.  How common would buried treasure have been in ancient Palestine?  More common than we would think.

Let’s say you inherited a tidy sum back in the first century A.D.  Where would you put it?  In a farming society of tribes and villages where everyone knew everyone else’s business, everyone knows that you’re wealthier than you were yesterday, and not everyone would necessarily be happy about it.  There is no bank to go to unless you happened to live in a major city, no mattress to stuff (coins would be awfully lumpy anyway!), and no place to hide it in your simple one- or two-room house.  You could dig up a spot in your dirt floor and hide it there, but how hard would that be for someone else to find while you are out working in the fields?  So you hide it in your field one day when the neighbors think you’re roughing up the ground before the spring planting.  Before too long the plants in the field grow and bloom, and your carefully chosen hiding spot looks just like every other spot in the field.

Of course it may also look like every other spot in the field to you too, which is one explanation for how someone might have left a treasure behind in the first place.  Or it could have been that the Romans swept through one day and you had to run away before having time to dig up your treasure.  Maybe you saved it for a rainy day that never came, or maybe you got mad at your kids and decided not to tell them where it was hidden. If they would just get off their lazy behinds and get to work it would be their plow that bumped into that box of silver one day.[1]

This parable’s companion is the Parable of the Pearl; similar to the Parable of the Treasure, but different in interesting and important ways.  The main character is called a merchant, or a trader.  While merchants make only rare (and almost never positive) appearances in the New Testament, they’re mentioned often enough to be familiar characters to Jesus’ hearers and Matthew’s readers.  So the Kingdom is being compared to a pearl trader, who presumably makes a living selling pearls for more than he paid for them, right?

Pearls were highly valued in the ancient world.  The ancient historian Pliny described pearls as the most precious of all objects, while Job describes wisdom as so valuable as to be above the price of pearls.^[2]  A pearl trader would have sounded exotic and exciting, but not entirely foreign.  The storytelling is pretty straightforward; only 25 words in the Greek.  In the course of his usual pearl trading, a merchant finds a special pearl, and, like the person who found the treasure buried in the field, went and sold all that he had and bought it.  There’s no mention of joy in this story; maybe that’s because this transaction is just a matter of the merchant’s daily business.

Here’s the main question though:  What did the merchant do with the pearl once he bought it at the cost of everything he owned?  Put it on a shelf?  Definitely not, because the shelf would have sold with everything else he owned!  The merchant couldn’t have eaten the pearl, it wouldn’t have kept him warm at night and, unless he sold tickets to passers-by to come and look at this pearl of great price[3], he would have starved to death sooner or later, just as the one who found the treasure would have if he hadn’t sold it.

Clearly the merchant would have sold the pearl, that’s the point of buying it in the first place.  That’s right – the merchant sold the beautiful pearl for which he sold everything he owned.  It’s what merchants do, and likely made a fortune in the process.

The point, though, is that we’re talking about actions, not objects.  The Kingdom of Heaven is not something we possess, like a treasure or a pearl, however valuable those might be.  The Kingdom is much better understood as something we do, or a way we live.  Both finders in these stories take decisive action when encountering something valuable.  Both recognize, however, that the real value lies in giving it away.

The real truth is, that we have to learn to let go of being in control.  The Kingdom of Heaven can never be realized if we never realize that we aren’t in control.

In fact, if you think about the Lord’s Prayer, right after the statement about the Kingdom, Thy Kingdom come, the next clause is, Thy will be done. 

Thy will be done, not my will.  Thy will be done, this is the most difficult prayer in the Christian heritage.  Thy will be done.  Because what I really want is for my will to be done.  I’m really good at telling God what to do:  Oh Lord, heal this person; Oh Lord, bless these young people; Dear Lord don’t let that State Trooper see how fast I’m driving!  We pray for these kinds of things all the time, but they won’t institute the Kingdom of Heaven.  We have to let go of control over all of the things that God is supposed to be in control of.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that our faith shouldn’t be active – remember I said that faith is a verb not a noun.  What I’m saying is that in praying Thy will be done we should learn to let go of what the outcome will be.  Let go of the fear of talking to someone about your faith; let go of the fear of getting to know someone who is completely different from you; let go of the thoughts that you aren’t good enough, or holy enough, or faithful enough – those are weed thoughts as Dean Kate told us last week.

In seminary, one of the things that Episcopal seminarians are require to do is called C.P.E. – Clinical Pastoral Education.  The program has students working as chaplains, mostly in hospitals and hospices, for a summer, usually between the first and second years. I was called to the bedside of many dying patients during my CPE experience and one common thing that I saw, both there and in my own family, is the sight of some poor man or woman – maybe a beloved grandparent – lingering for days on the brink of death.  It never failed, though (and I know some of you have personal knowledge of this phenomenon) that when some family member leaned down and said, “It’s OK, were all here, you can go now,” a peaceful death came soon afterward.

Letting go . . . truly praying Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, is like saying to God, “It’s OK.”  It’s saying to God “I know that you know what’s best for me and for the world.” 

As we pray these words in a few minutes, listen to God and look for those places of fear and the weed feelings of being unworthy or not good enough.  Recognize those thoughts for what they are and then let go and let God guide you. It seems like a simple enough thing, but it’s hard and it takes practice.  Be gentle with yourself, when fear and weeds win out, let go; then, next time you have the opportunity to reach out and help someone or tell someone about your faith, let go of control over what the outcome should be and let the Holy Spirit be in control of that.

Even in the roughest places of our lives our prayer should always be Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done.

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[1] Much of the description of these parables is from: William F. Brosend, Conversations with Scripture: The Parables, Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars Study Series (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Pub., 2006), 36-39.

[2] Job 28:18.

[3] Matt. 13.46 AV

Third Sunday after Pentecost                                                                      Romans 6.12-23

Proper 8A                                                                                                      Psalm 13

                                                                                                                        Matthew 10.40-42

Imagine with me, if you will, a world where Jesus is here with us in the same way that He was with the Disciples in Galilee.  In this world you and I could walk down the street to ask Him what to do when we are hurt and confused:  Jesus, I’m having trouble with my kids; or, Jesus I have this problem at work, or school.  And Jesus could walk up to someone on the street, like he did in the New Testament and say, “Come, follow me.”  What a world that would be!  But we don’t have Jesus with us in the same way that the disciples had Him with them.

Four weeks ago we celebrated the Feast of the Ascension, when the Church remembers the day when, 40 days after His resurrection, Jesus bodily left this earth.  In the presence of 11 of the disciples the Gospels of Mark and Luke tell us that after blessing them he was carried up into heaven.  The Acts of the Apostles says more poetically that he was taken up, and a cloud received him out of their sight.  We live in a post-Ascension world.  We were not privileged to see Him face to face; but the fact that we live in a post-Ascension world is an essential fact of our Christian faith.  That we live in a post-Ascension world has an enormous impact on how we, as baptized followers of Christ Jesus, interact with the world around us.

On a Middle Eastern farm a man, the farmer whose family has farmed this land for four generations, is stooping to pick up apples in the ruins of his orchard.  He picks up the scattered fruit from the ground, the ground that has been scarred and broken by a bulldozer.  One of the farmer’s neighbors tells him that he saw the bulldozer, driven by a government employee.  The orchard had been planted nearly eight years before with apple and almond trees.  Some of the apples could be salvaged, but the almonds never had a chance – at the very edge of the field the crushed and mangled branches of an almond tree reach out from a mound of dirt and rocks, the unripe almonds still clinging to their stems.

This man and his family are the proud descendants of an ancient Christian family.  Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire his ancestors have farmed this land.  Most of the Christians in his part of the world had left for places they though would be more tolerant.  This family, however, had decided to stay; convinced that the small remaining population of Christians had a role to play in their people’s future they remained on their farm.

Now, though, the government claims that they are living and farming illegally on government property.  The family believes that things like the destruction of their orchard are the government’s way of convincing them that it would be far easier if they just gave up and left.  Despite living regularly with such tactics and witnessing the destruction of years of back-breaking work and the family’s pride this farmer’s sister responded to the latest push, the bulldozing of the orchard, by saying:

Nobody can force us to hate.  We refuse to be enemies.

This family, facing hardships and struggles that many of us can only imagine, know what it means to live in a post-Ascension world.  They refuse to hate because they believe that when Jesus said “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” he was calling on his disciples to show the world who He is and, through that knowledge, what kind of God we worship. He said, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”

These words of Christ from the Gospel of Matthew come at the end of what scholars call the “Missionary Discourse.”  This is the speech in which Jesus tells his disciples that, as they go out to declare that the kingdom of heaven has come near, they’re not to take anything with them on the road – no gold or silver or copper, no bag, no extra tunic, extra sandals, or even a staff – the speech where Jesus tells them, as we heard last week, that he has not come to bring peace, but a sword. And, most encouraging of all, Jesus says, See, I am sending you out like sheep among wolves!  This isn’t the most impressive of missionary pep-talks, it doesn’t exactly instill a lot of confidence does it? I often wonder what the disciples were thinking.  But this “Missionary Discourse” begins and ends with the most vital piece of information: all of these dangers can easily be met because of one important detail:  we disciples are like the Master, whoever welcomes us welcomes Jesus – we are Jesus!

In these three verses we overhear the Lord instructing his twelve disciples, and through them us, in an important doctrinal belief about the Church.  We are, as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians the Body of Christ and each and every one of us are individually members of it.  The Church as the Mystical Body of Christ is an important belief about the Church because we live in a post-Ascension world.  Christ Himself is no longer present in the world in the same way He was present with the Twelve, walking through the Galilee.  You, each and every one of you who have been baptized into Christ’s Body the Church, are the way that Christ walks through this world now. 

As you go about your daily lives, shopping at the grocery store, filling your car with gas, paying bills, interacting with your neighbors co-workers or fellow students, or perhaps most important of all on this Sunday which we Episcopalians are celebrating as “Social Media Sunday” – when you send your virtual self into the ether-world of Social Media, and every other interaction we have with our fellow human beings, you are Christ to them.  You may be their first or only encounter with Jesus Christ.  By simply offering a smile and a pleasant “hello,” or by offering to help someone with their grocery bags or their flat tire you are communicating the ever-present love of God in Christ. 

You are empowered for this being Christ when you receive the Eucharist.  Because we believe that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist, when you receive the consecrated bread and wine you take Jesus into your body.  We take Jesus into ourselves so that we can carry Him out into the world.  In that moment of reception you are strengthened in your communion with God the Father - through Jesus Christ - in the power of the Holy Spirit; and with our brothers and sisters in Christ, both living and dead, in the Communion of Saints.

One of my favorite saints, though not one that is recognized on our calendar, was a Polish Roman Catholic priest and a Franciscan – Father Maximillian Kolbe.  Father Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo in February 1941 for hiding 2,000 Jewish men, women, and children from Nazi persecution inside his friary.  After being held in a Polish men’s prison for three months, he was transferred to Auschwitz concentration camp as prisoner 16670. 

Housed in Block 14 with other Polish nationals, Father Kolbe became a spiritual father to the other men with whom he was imprisoned.  In late July 1941 three prisoners from Block 14 disappeared,  it was assumed that they had found some way to escape the terrors of the concentration camp.  All the men of Block 14 were ordered into the yard where they stood at attention.  In a cruel exercise of his power over the prisoners the commander chose 10 men from Block 14 to be punished in order to deter any future escape attempts. They were to be starved to death in an underground bunker.  One of the men, when chosen, cried out “My wife! My children!” -- Father Kolbe stepped forward and volunteered to take the man’s place.  He argued that a priest would make a better example than this poor man. 

After two weeks of dehydration and starvation, only Kolbe remained alive of the ten sentenced to that prolonged death. Finally, the guards wanted the bunker emptied so they decided to give Father Kolbe a lethal injection of carbolic acid. Eyewitnesses say that when the soldiers approached, Kolbe raised his left arm and calmly waited for the injection.  Here was a man who truly knew what it meant to be a member of the Body of Christ – who knew what it means to be Jesus in the world.

God willing none of us will be called upon to give up our lives in a martyr’s death.  The same mind, however, should be in us that was in Maximillian Kolbe.  Our interaction with the world around us should be so infused with the Spirit we received at Baptism that it colors the way we see our fellow human beings – just as it does for that Middle Eastern farming family, just as it did for Maximillian Kolbe.  That farming family doesn’t live their lives in peace and understanding, refusing to be anyone’s enemy, because they believe it will attract praise and give them glory – no, they do it because they believe that being Christ to the world means loving your neighbor as yourself.  Father Kolbe didn’t offer himself in that other man’s place in the hopes that he would be recognized for his holiness and self-sacrifice – he reacted as he believed Christ would have when faced with the unbearable pain of another.

And you…what is it that draws you to this place?  Most, if not all, of you drive past several suburban parishes to come to St. John’s.  When you could easily stay close to home and avoid having to see the pain and suffering in the streets around this cathedral, you come.  Why is this place the place to which the Holy Spirit has called you?

Men and women like these poor, long-suffering farmers, like Father Maximillian Kolbe, and like so many others whose stories aren’t recorded like theirs, know that at the Core of who we are as the Body of Christ, is Love.  As you go out into the world remember – someone out there desperately searching for Christ, even if they don’t know it, may have only you – only you, to make Him known.