Wait, what?

 

Text: Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Tom and I recently watched a movie about some sheep who decide to become detectives to find out what happened to their shepherd whom they found dead in their field. They know what detectives are and what detectives do because their shepherd used to read mysteries to them each night.

In one scene, three of the sheep - two who have never been away from their meadow and a wise old ram who is free range - are walking by a church. 

One sheep says, What’s this?

The Ram replies: this is the church where someone named God lives. 

Who’s God?

It’s a bit confusing. God is a shepherd. 

Could he be our shepherd?

No. …. Because he’s also a lamb…..and he’s also invisible….and he’s made of bread and he dams things.

Dams things? Like a beaver?

Yes.

So … God is a big invisible lamb-beaver made of bread?

Yes…. And they eat him on Sundays.

Poor God.

And they continue on their way.

Welcome to Christianity! 

Where the Lord our shepherd also tells us mysteries, but not the kind that are anything close to bedtime stories. Parables are Jesus’s mysteries.

A parable takes something commonly known and pairs it with something jarringly unexpected, turning what we think we know on its head. Which then challenges our assumptions and expectations - but hopefully will lead us to see the hope and promise that our faith is founded upon. When we hear a parable and are able to incorporate its challenge, we can see the new reality Jesus’s coming to live among us brings.

Today we get five quick parables in a row about the kingdom of heaven. Which leads us to ask, what even is the kingdom of heaven - or the kingdom of God as it is called in other gospels? Whatever we call it, it’s not a place and it’s not a thing. It is not God’s permanent residence. It’s not a destination. But we can see it through something that happens, an action or transaction. 

These kingdom parables are pointing to God’s vision for the world that show up from time to time among us, sometimes even through the actions of ordinary people and ordinary things, almost always surprises, to remind of us God’s promises and faithfulness and the hope that gives us when the going gets rough.

Jesus was big on trying to give us hope for when the going gets rough.

So, a quick recap of today’s parables:

A mustard seed is very small, which was common knowledge to first century folks. They knew that the seed would grow into a big shrub. But it would not grow into a tree in which birds are nesting. Everyone knew this, too. (In our day, we know that a poppy seed will grow into a beautiful red flower but it will not grow into a huge tree.)

Leaven is usually spoken of in the bible as something that corrupts. And three measures of flour are about ten gallons. Well, you don’t make nourishing bread by folding in some moldy stuff, and even if you could, nobody has a pan or an oven big enough for a loaf made from that.

These parables are preposterous. 

But this is the point - the world God wants for us is wildly extravagant and life-giving to all of creation -birds, people, sheep - and it’s not made from fairy dust and it’s not pie in the sky. It’s extraordinary but the foundation is already here, already among us, not something from somewhere else. And God’s always working on it whether or not we notice.

Three more parables follow, one of which is a repeat of last week. The other two are about things of high value. In each of those, the protagonist sells everything for the one thing. These two stories are preposterous, too, are they not? Some guy is just walking through a field and finds a treasure hidden there - who keeps their treasure in a field? And then he sells all that he has and buys the field and now he has the treasure, presumably without telling the owner? 

And the merchant is looking for pearls and finds just one but it’s a whopper so he also goes and sells all that he has so he can buy it. But now the merchant is going out of business because he has no inventory left. 

But let’s face it, Jesus is all about the preposterous. In another movie when someone thought he heard Jesus say “blessed are the cheesemakers” it was no more preposterous than the ones who heard “blessed are the peacemakers” because what kind of messiah is a peacenik?

But the weirdness of the stories underscores the action that is taken: whether or not you are looking for God’s kingdom, which we have already learned is extravagantly life-giving (like wine that doesn’t give out, water that gushes like springs, bread that feeds thousands) it’s there, and when you see it you understand the urgency of responding immediately.

I don’t think we are being asked to suspend our ethics here - but we are being asked to suspend our notions of what practicing our faith and being obedient to God’s call to us looks like. We are being asked to take the treasure we already know about what we already value, (what is old),  and see it in a new way, what we are invited to value (what is new). This is not abandoning what we believe, but expanding what we believe, expanding our faith to embrace something new, and deciding to act accordingly.

I don’t know about you,  I easily get stuck in my assumptions that God has the same values as I do, that my neighbor is someone who also has the same values as I do, who thinks like me and acts like me. We all see things through particular lenses that are formed by what we believe - our ideologies (the values and principles that shape how we interpret the world, that guide our decisions and actions). 

We may have several lenses: religious doctrines, family traditions, economic philosophy, political views. And we pretty much know what they are. Our assumptions about them are fixed and not squishy.

But sometimes, our various worldviews come into conflict with one another. Our religious beliefs may clash with our economic philosophy or our political views. What do we do with that?

I believe that as Christians we are to put our religious beliefs first and to be willing to be challenged in all of our worldviews, including our religious ones. All our beliefs should regularly tested and updated and acted upon through the words and deeds of Jesus. 

Our faith is not static, and neither is the kingdom of heaven.

And we need to remember the strangeness of the central tenet of our Christian belief - that God’s ways are shown to us by a man who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and not a war horse, that God’s anointed king is represented by the whipped and mocked and bleeding crucified Jesus. 

Jesus was not what people expected from a king or a messiah or a savior and most of them were happy to turn on him or even desert him rather than respond to this new vision he was showing them. God’s ways are shocking to those who cannot expand the lens of their faith to embrace these truths, and a lot of people in Jesus’ day were certainly not able to accept this change in expectation and assumption about an all powerful God who wins all the battles, not a man who preaches peace and dies. 

We also have our assumptions and expectations about God, about following that Jesus in our world. Some of those assumptions might be about a damming Jesus who draws lines we believe we are on the right side of. We prefer a domesticated God and a domesticated faith that just happens to illustrate our own values rather than to open ourselves to something that threatens the security we’ve found in our assumptions.

Security is a key word here, I think. We are living in and trying to cope with a world that is often unsettling and even threatening. New and sometimes conflicting information - images, data, stories and rumors - comes at us at the rate of drinking out of a firehose. We cope by finding solace or direction through our worldviews which help us stay on track. They guide us and we make our decisions through that guidance. When faced with a flood, hanging on to your beliefs is natural. 

But in that flood of data and images and stories - the kingdom of God is in there, too. There are new treasures to be sought and new treasures to be found. And they may seem strange, countercultural, shocking even. But in truth, Christianity has always been all of those things.

So the ram was mostly right when he tried to explain God to his companions. While Jesus is not a beaver, he is a shepherd, and he is a lamb, and he is with us when we take the bread and wine into our bodies as sustenance, as food for life’s journey, here at this altar. 

Within the daily flood of challenges is an opportunity to expand our assumptions of what our faith calls us to believe, to be, and to do, and who we are called to see as our neighbor who deserves to be treated with justice and dignity; opportunities to expand the possibilities of who and how we are and be willing to change - that’s the response Jesus is looking for when he tells these stories. 

God is always doing new things, so the scriptures have always said, and our neighbor is often found on the other side of the lines we draw between ourselves and those who we believe are not like us. And there on the other side of that line also is where we will find Jesus, eating and drinking and teaching and loving them, too.