The Rev. Robert Lundquist           X after Pentecost     7/24/05          St Paul’s, Ft Collins

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-49a  - Online Text -

There’s a billboard on the way into town – it says, “Imagine that Mother’s Day was a place.”  It’s advertising one of the malls, I think.  Seeing it yesterday brought to mind today’s Gospel lesson.  That billboard would read, “Imagine that the Kingdom of heaven was not a place.”  We we’re not at our most reflective I think we think of the Kingdom as place where the streets are paved with gold.  We have in our collective consciousness the medieval idea of the kingdom consisting of a castle with a moat, surrounded by farmland, ruled by a king and queen.  But the realm of God is not a place.  As he tells the parables we hear today, Jesus smiles and says, “Look again.”

These five parables today are exquisite riddles.  “The kingdom of heaven is like…”  We think we’re going to get an answer, but we’re left with more questions.  Is the kingdom like the treasure?  Or is the kingdom like God’s act of hiding the treasure?  Is it like the field that must be bought?  Or is it like the surprise of discovery?  Is the kingdom of heaven like the forced sale of all one’s other possessions?  Is it like the purchase of the field?  Or is it like the merchant’s joy?

Theologian Walter Wink says that parables are tiny bits of coal squeezed into diamonds.  They are condensed metaphors that capture something ultimate, and reflect it back to us.  Parables are not illustrations – they don’t support, elaborate or simplify another idea.  They’re not ideas at all, nor are they theological statements.  They are jeweled portals to another world, says Wink.  Not like windows through which one sees directly, but like refracting surfaces.

Jeweled portals.  Parables cannot be refined, only admired, like gems.

James Breech, another biblical scholar, says that parables are photodramatic.  Literally, “visible actions.”  Parables describe what people do – it’s that simple.

• There once was a man who planted a mustard seed…

• There once was a woman who leavened some meal…

• There once was a man who found hidden treasure…

• There once was a merchant who found a beautiful pearl…

• There once was a net that was cast into the sea…

In each instance, something unusual (though not bizarre) happens.  A mustard shrub is considered a weed – why would someone plant it in a garden?  Why would you leaven 60 pounds of flour at once?  Why would you dig up a treasure – and then bury it again?  Why would you sell everything in order to buy one pearl?  Why did the net catch every kind of fish?

We can guess – but Jesus attributes no motives in any of the parables.  He doesn’t idealize these people, he merely describes people who are free to act – and he tells us what they do.

This sounds like Jesus’ life, doesn’t it?  He chose his disciples, called them out of their former lives.  He chose the people with whom he would speak and with whom he would eat, following some standard higher than the mores of the day.  He refused to shun prostitutes, tax collectors or Pharisees.  Jesus traveled where he chose, and did some extraordinary things along the way.  Perhaps these photodramas capture something of Jesus.  For it is Jesus who describes:

• Possibilities and ways of grasping them

• Relationships and ways of entering into them

• Actions which are idiosyncratic, but not eccentric

• Freedom, and calls it the kingdom of heaven.

In parable the focus is on human action.  Note that these five parables are not about God, but about people and the things they do.  But that’s the point – God is with us, in us, and around us.  It is God in whom we live and move and have our being.  God is with those who leaven and bake, those who buy and sell, those who plant and water, those who fish and sort.  Their freedom is like the kingdom of heaven, says Jesus.

It is Jesus the mystic whom we see in today’s Gospel lesson, the mystic who has a direct experience of the Divine and strives to convey it to others.  Today Jesus is tugging at your sleeve and urging, “Look at this!”  Jesus loves real people, he loves the sounds and feels and smells of everyday life, he loves the waking and the sleeping and the eating.  Jesus is present.  And he never tires of reminding that “the kingdom of heaven has come near to you,” “the kingdom of heaven is within you.”  Can you glimpse it, catch a whiff of it, hear a glimmer of that kingdom?

The kingdom of heaven is like… your life.  And when Jesus tells us about ourselves; about a man planting mustard, about a woman making bread; about a man finding treasure, about a merchant buying a pearl, about a net flung into the sea by a fisherman – when Jesus tells us about ourselves, he smiles.