Subversive

Charlotte Collins Reed

Christ Church Episcopal

July 26, 2020

12 Proper A

If we are lucky, once in a while a great teacher will come into our lives.  Sometimes that person is a professional teacher.  Sometimes the teacher is an informal mentor or even a child. In my experience, a great teacher is someone who can make difficult concepts come alive, help us find gifts we did not know we had, and find different ways to explain a teaching until there is a way for everyone to understand.  My 6th grade teacher was such a person.  Jimmie Nell Johnson brought out the best in each student and worked tirelessly to make sure everyone understood what she was trying to explain.  This was back in the day when penmanship was taught in school and we got graded on our handwriting.  One student in our class, a boy named Chuck, had dreadful handwriting and there was nothing Mrs. Johnson could do to help him learn to write legibly.  So, she taught him how to type-this was before babies were born knowing how to work an iPad- and she made Chuck feel special in the process.  Mrs. Johnson would simply not give up on a student, even when sometimes we wished she would give up on us.

Jesus seems to be that kind of teacher this morning as he teaches about the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven is a difficult concept to grasp, especially once we realize that Jesus is not talking about where we go when we die, but how we live here on earth.  Good rabbi that Jesus is, we get 5 parables rather than one to explain the mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven.  If gardening and the parable of the mustard seed make no sense to us, then perhaps a baking metaphor and thinking about the Kingdom of God as yeast will make more sense.  Or if we need something that will appeal to our sense of adventure, perhaps the idea of buried treasure will make the Kingdom of Heaven come alive for us.  Or if going to garage sales or going fishing is our passion, then we have the merchant in search of fine pearls or the net cast into the sea.  Surely one of those parables will bring the Kingdom of heaven alive for us and help us understand the presence of God in our midst.

However, the Good Rabbi is not giving us a buffet of parables from which to choose.  Instead, Jesus gives us a 5 course meal of parables.  The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, and yeast, and buried treasure, and a merchant, and a fish net.  All at the same time.   Jesus calls us to look at all of these parables together to understand something of the kingdom of heaven.  While taking in all five parables at once can feel a bit like trying to sip from a fire hydrant, what these 5 little parables have in common will help us understand the Kingdom of Heaven.

          First, they all involve something small and hidden. The mustard seed is small and hidden in the ground.  Yeast is small and hidden in flour.  The buried treasure is small enough to be buried in the ground.  A pearl is small and hidden among other pearls of lesser value.  The net is not small, but the web pretty much disappears when thrown into the sea to catch fish.

Secondly, each parable involves work.  Someone sowed the mustard seed into the field.  The woman took the yeast and mixed it in with the flour.  Someone had to dig up a field to find the buried treasure.  The merchant had to search for the pearls, and someone had to throw that net into the sea.

        Lastly, in each parable, that which started off small and hidden becomes large and visible.  The mustard seed grows into the greatest of shrubs.  The yeast does it work and creates an enormous amount of dough.  When the treasure is found, the man sells all that he has and buys the whole field so that the treasure is his.  The merchant sells everything he owns to buy the one pearl.  And the net catches fish of every kind.

So, from these parables, we learn that the kingdom of God starts off small, and with work grows into the full stature of the Kingdom of God.

However, the explanation of Jesus' parables is rarely that obvious.  Pretty much anything we undertake starts small and with work matures into full potential. As we have noted before, Jesus rarely dispenses common sense.  When we dig a little deeper, we see that each parable is a bit subversive.  Mustard is actually a weed but in this parable the mustard seed is compared with the greatest of all kingdoms, the kingdom of heaven.  Yeast is a symbol of corruption and impurity in Scripture and is cleaned from homes in preparation for Passover.  Someone who finds buried treasure in someone else's field then buys the field to own the treasure without telling the owner is a thief, and merchants rated right up there with tax collectors and other cheats.  But this cheat sells everything to buy the great pearl, which made it impossible for him to do further business.

From this parable, then, we learn that Jesus can use weeds, thieves and cheats to make the Kingdom of Heaven come alive.  Scripture is full of stories about the way God uses thieves, cheats, and weeds.  Our reading from Genesis this morning is evidence of this as Laban tricks Jacob into marrying Leah before he can marry Rachel.  The tables have been turned on Jacob, since Jacob tricked his father to steal his brother's birth right. This is the family through whom God will bless all the families of the earth!  King David was hardly a paragon of virtue yet God used David to create a great nation, and even Noah had some serious character flaws.

In the reading from Romans this morning, Paul tells us that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor death, nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God. Jesus is saying essentially the same thing with his parables this morning.  When we cannot see the kingdom, when it looks like the powers of evil have done their worst, when no rational person would believe that the kingdom is present, when all we can see is sickness, conflict, and fear, Jesus calls us to believe that we are in the midst of the Kingdom of heaven.  The message of the gospel is that the Kingdom of heaven is present not only when our lives and the world are full of peace and good health.  The gospel message is that even in the hardest of times and the scariest of places, the seeds of the kingdom of heaven are present.  Jesus the great teacher uses five parables to help us engage the gospel promise that the Kingdom of Heaven will be grown by the least likely people and found in the least likely places.  The Kingdom of heaven is like a great surprise waiting to be discovered by those who dare to look in the most unpredictable places.

                                                                                        Amen.