Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
Jesus put before them another parable: “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.”
He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with[e] three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”
“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and reburied; 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; 46 on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.
“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
“Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.” And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”
It’s a joy to get to be with you all today while Pastor Mark is on sabbatical, and I also want to express gratitude for Pastor Cogan and his hard work over these past months. We are so fortunate to have him.
Some of you know our family’s story with this church, and some of you probably don’t. I graduated from New Pal high school in 1996, and began a sojourn in other places: my first husband and I were United Methodist pastors, we had three children in South Carolina, and then he became very ill with cancer, and after three years of failed treatments we came back to New Palestine, to regroup and fall on the mercy of my parents’ care.
When our Indiana United Methodist pastor friends from div school started finding out that we were coming to New Pal, they all said, “If you’re going to be in New Palestine, you have to go to Cross of Grace.” In fact, one pastor said, “You have to go to Mark’s church. He’s our manny.” Your…which? we asked. “Our manny. We take him to Haiti with us and he watches our kids. So like a nanny, only Mark. Manny.”
We washed up on the shore of Cross of Grace like so much debris from a shipwreck, and I saw Hercamps and Schwartzes and Janelsons and Hildebrandts, and I thought - oh, thank you, God, we have come home. So much kindness for our family, so much intentionality and care, so much love in the form of Build-a-bear gift cards and prayer shawls and a family that brought us a meal every week and much, much more. If you’d asked me then what the kingdom of heaven looked like, I might have said, “it looks a little bit like Cross of Grace.”
We are in a happier season now, my current husband who is a former ELCA pastor is here, my children are growing; I’ve got one starting at NPHS this week - and I’m excited about getting to join you all this morning, seeing if we can figure out what Jesus was talking about, seeds and pearls and treasures and nets. How many of you honestly think that when Jesus asked, “Have you understood all this?” and the disciples said, “Yes,” they were telling the truth? Agreed. :) So we are going to give it a shot today together. Will you pray briefly with me?
Holy Spirit, center us. Center our hearts, our minds, our spirits, our bodies, to listen for and to receive and to be changed by whatever word you may have for each one of us today. Amen.
These passages are about desire…
As I have been mulling these passages over the past weeks, it has been sticking in my spirit that both of these passages are about desire. Earlier in Romans, Paul set up that gorgeous passage by telling us that the Spirit has desired to adopt us, to make us God’s children. Jesus is trying to tell us about the kingdom of God’s reign, the way of being when all things are submitted to God’s good intentions, when it’s the way God wants it, and he uses examples that are about desire for treasure, desire for this super valuable pearl, and how finding the thing that you desire leads you to sell everything for its sake.
…which is complicated
It can feel a little awkward to talk about desire in church. We spend a lot of our time disciplining our desires, because so often acting on our desires ends up either putting us in situations we regret or getting us in trouble. We might think of the child in time out because he acted on his desire for a forbidden cookie, or the elder who is grieving a life spent acting on her desire for wealth. I don’t need to tell you about the wildernesses into which our longings for security or comfort or love or belonging can end up leading us. And desire can also just seem immature. I still remember this sort of progression that happened in my own life.
I grew up in a mainline Protestant space like this one, and then I was tricked by a good friend into attending a charismatic church camp with the pitch that the camp was free and there would be cute boys there, and then we weren’t even allowed to SIT WITH or WALK OUT WITH the boys or so much as say hi to the hot praise band drummer because purity culture, but I came home truly transformed by the encounter with Jesus, and spent the next season of my life really immersed in leading parachurch organizations and listening to a lot of evangelical music.
Well, I got to divinity school, where it felt very important that we get all the answers about God exactly right (which, to be clear, learning orthodox theology is a really essential function of divinity school, but when you have a bunch of over-serious twenty-and-thirty-somethings who are being trained in The Right Answers About God en route to being awarded something called a Masters of Divinity - it can go off the rails a little bit). And at that time people were noticing that a lot of contemporary praise music was kind of like a lot of contemporary music...only not as good. (I wrestled with if I should play a South Park clip that was pointing this out in a very funny but not very church-appropriate way, and ultimately I decided that it was way over the line, but you can google “Christian Rock Hard” later if you are a lover of South Park. If you are not a lover of South Park, please forget I said anything.)
All of us serious divinity school people started turning up our noses at any praise song that sounded a little bit like “Jesus is my boyfriend.” We tossed out all the songs that had lyrics like “I want to know you - I want to see your face - I want to hear your voice.” “You are my desire, nothing else will do” etc. We pretended that we had not listened to Jars of Clay in high school and had not played “I want to fall in love with you” on repeat on our new Sony Discman that we got for our sixteenth birthday. And this was not all bad, but here was the problem - we can’t just toss out desire from our lives of discipleship. Because desire, like nothing else, changes us. Desire, like nothing else, changes our lives.
Falling in love changes us
Desire changes our lives…Think about falling in love. If you’ve done it, you know it changes everything. And I’m not just talking about falling in love romantically, although I am including it. I’m talking about falling in love with a rescue animal when you were just going to volunteer at the animal shelter. I’m talking about falling in love with a newborn baby that is placed in your arms. I’m talking about falling in love with a child you meet through foster care. I’m talking about falling in love with a meaningful vocation. It changes our trajectory. It blows up our categories of practicality and cost-benefit analyses. And in the church, desire actually can lead us into covenant.
Falling in love with another human being is about the only thing that could call us into a lasting promise to that person. Falling in love with a baby is about the only thing that could call us into baptismal covenant for a lifetime. Falling in love with a vision of God’s grace, God’s justice, is about the only thing that could lead us to orient a life around sharing that grace and justice with others. And falling in love is about recognizing something we desire so much that we are willing to change our lives in response. Desire is the mustard seed that grows into a huge tree; desire is the yeast that makes a small amount of dough turn into oodles of bread. Desire changes us.
Desire isn’t enough
Desire changes us. And yet, this is not enough. What happens when our desire fails, as it will? When our love grows cold, as it must? When our longing shifts, as it does? What happens when the reality of being a time-bound, sin-sick human means that we are suffering too much, too tired, too disillusioned, to feel desire for God?
That is when we hold to the truth that as unbelievable as it may seem, God’s desire for us led God to sell everything to capture the pearl of great price, the adoption of you and me as children. Led the Son of God to leave all the treasures of heaven to come to you and to me, to tell us stories and teachings like this one, to offer his life on creation’s behalf, to give himself over to death to gain redemption for the world - the world that God so loved, that God yearned over, that God desired.
God’s love, God’s desire for us led our Jesus to the cross. Like a spouse saying, no matter how hard this gets, I will not leave you. Like a teacher or pastor or doctor or janitor committing to a hard vocation all over again. Like a parent saying to a struggling child, there is nothing you could do that would make me stop loving you. Like all of these but with no human failures and no brokenness that is just too hard to bear, we hear Paul saying, what can separate us from God’s love?
Can anything separate us from God’s desire for us? Does our suffering have the power to take us out of God’s hands, out of God’s love? No, says Paul. No. God’s desire for us, God’s love for us, are too strong. 38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
As a response to God’s desire for us and our desire for God, you are invited into a time of prayer. When you feel moved, come forward and take a cross from the altar, spend time in prayer, and allow yourself to feel God’s steadfast love.
