Proper 12, Year A

July 24, 2011

Corrie and I are trying to choose paint colors for our house. We’ve been in the house for almost a year now, so it’s not like we’re acting impulsively. Of course, the colors that are on the walls right now are quite attractive, and have become familiar to us. But we want something different. Just what we want, we aren’t quite sure. It’s been a long process. Over Christmas, I put a few patches of color here and there, then a few months later, another set of options were added. A couple of weeks ago, I put a coat of primer over all of the old paint samples, and we’ve started anew. It’s getting rather urgent, because I’m starting two weeks of vacation tomorrow and the plan was that I spend much of the time painting. The problem we’re having is that we find it hard to imagine just what this or that room will look like in this or that color. We ask ourselves, is that what we really want?

In a way, our struggle with paint colors is not unlike much of life. We live in patterns and routines that we follow for no apparent reason except that they are comfortable and we can’t imagine what it might be like to live in a different way. It’s only when something big shakes us out of those old patterns that we see the possibility of something new, although often that possibility is quite frightening, brought on by illness, death of a loved, loss of a job, or something else of that magnitude. It’s rare that we will take such leaps into the unknown, into an imagined future without such prodding. The comfortable, the familiar, is just too easy, too normal.

Jesus came, preaching the kingdom of God. He preached it with great urgency and passion, and while his preaching was about many things, above all, it was about change, not just conversion, though that was part of it. The kingdom of God, or better put, the reign of God, that Jesus preached is about looking at the world with new eyes, with a perspective unclouded by the world we know. It is a world imagined in which everything is different. When Jesus sought to explain the reign of God, he used parables.  The parables are strange and challenging, they defy easy interpretation. Unfortunately, they have become familiar, everyday, and it’s often hard for us to recapture the utter strangeness.

What makes it difficult for us to encounter the strangeness of the parables is that they are stories that make use of images from daily life, daily life of 1^st century Palestine, if not of 21^st century America, and because they are images of daily life, we work hard to fit them into categories that we understand

We have several short parables before us today, and unfortunately we don’t have time to unpack all of them. But let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.

Jesus said,

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”

“The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.

Let’s take the mustard seed. The first thing to know is that in the Palestinian context, no one plants mustard seed in fields; it’s basically what we would call an invasive species, growing everywhere and needing to be uprooted. The second thing about it is just what the parable says—it’s a shrub. It’s not a tree. As one commentator put it when trying to make an analogy to contemporary world, we might replace mustard seed with dandelion. Sure, you can make a tasty salad from dandelion greens; the Germans make a honey-like syrup from its blossoms. But let’s get real. The dandelion is a weed. In the same way, a mustard plant in Palestine is an eyesore. It’s not even particularly big and if Jesus had wanted to compare the kingdom of heaven with a large tree, he would have used something like the cedar of Lebanon which appears throughout scripture as the metaphor for greatness.

And the leaven. We are tempted to think of yeast as a good thing and in the antiseptic packets we buy in the grocery store, it is. But that’s not what is meant in this little parable. You should think of sourdough starter, and if you’ve ever tried to make a starter from scratch, you know that for quite a while before actually being able to use it to bake bread, it’s ugly, smelly, almost putrid. So that’s one thing. The other is that the amount of flour the woman uses—that’s enough to make bread for 100 people.

So what’s going on here? Ordinary things, a mustard seed, leaven, becoming something quite different. It requires a feat of the imagination to see a big shrub in a mustard seed, or a feast of bread in a lump of leaven. It also requires a feat of the imagination to see God’s reign in a mustard plant, or in fifty loaves of bread. But such a feat of the imagination is what Jesus challenges us with when he proclaims the reign of God.

We look around us and see an ordinary world, that operates by rules we are all familiar with. We turn to the news and hear stories of horrific slaughters in Norway and political stalemate in Washington that has us all more than a little fearful. We wonder what will happen this week or next—what might happen with the economy, our jobs or retirement savings. We look around and see no reason for hope.

Jesus comes to us preaching the reign of God. It’s not a place that we might go when we’re dead, even if Matthew calls it the kingdom of heaven. But it’s also not imaginary—it’s real. It’s a different mode of existence, in which our ordinary assumptions, values, and ways of doing things are upended. To see the reign of God in a mustard plant is to imagine a different reality in the midst of the mundane, to live, not by human standards but by God’s.

The reign of God is about imagination. It’s about seeing oneself and the world in completely new ways, to see the possibility that God is at work in the mundane and in the frustrating, in the present, even when there is no evidence to support that belief.

The reign of God is also about excitement. You can sense that excitement in the parable of the pearl of great price. “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.” There may be no greater challenge to this kind of excitement than the reality of the familiar. We look around and see what we’ve always seen, the comfort of a life, whether or not it is satisfying, that has its routines. That’s as true of our life of faith as it is of our daily routine of work and home. To catch the excitement of the reign of God is to look at the familiar and see something quite new—to see in a mustard seed, a giant shrub, even a tree, to see possibility in the colors on a living room wall, and to see God’s saving work, in all that we encounter.