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 13th
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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