The kingdom is like

From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

THE KINGDOM IS LIKE …. ??? 24 July 2011

The Revd Dr Raymond Pelly

• Psalm 128
• Genesis 29:15-28,
• Romans 8:26-39,
• Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

http://wellingtoncathedral.org.nz/index.php/Sermons

This morning’s Gospel is a string of parables. The kingdom of heaven is like …. what? A mustard seed, like yeast in bread, like hidden treasure or a pearl of great value, like a bumper haul of fish.

To get what this all about, we have first to understand where Jesus is coming from; and then to use our imagination. Where we find or discern the kingdom of God here and now.

So where is Jesus coming from? Basically from a lived experience of God as incredibly prodigally unlimitedly – even wastefully - generous and good. The creator God is the one whose great gift is LIFE, a constant, ever-renewed giving that invites praise and thanksgiving from us, but which also invites us to be gifts for one another. Paul hits the nail on the head when he says, ‘He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him give us everything else?’ (Romans 8:32) What kind of generosity is that? And we learn that Jesus is ‘the gift of gifts’, the one who par excellence knows about the giving and receiving of gifts – in this case, love.

I.

That’s what the parables of the kingdom are all about. And the modern equivalents? Let’s take a look-see.

Take the pearl of great value and the treasure hidden in field. What comes to mind - and here I’m assisted by the OT reading – is how we choose a partner, the person we want ‘to do life’ with. Jacob is on the lookout for a wife. He sees Rachel, ‘graceful and beautiful’ (as Sarah and Rebekah had been before her [Genesis 12:11; 24:16]). Leah, on the other hand, had ‘lovely eyes’, in the original Hebrew, ‘weak, soft’, implying that she was short-sighted. Jacob is in no doubt that Rachel is the one for him, she’s so wonderful that he couldn’t have imagined her until she actually came along. He is also prepared to wait for her, to work for her.

The implications of this for us are obvious: Does this person you’d like to do life with come over as a gift or a blessing? Could you have imagined him or her until they came along? Are you prepared to put yourself out for them, make sacrifices, be prepared to give in return? If ‘yes’, then the kingdom of God has come near. He or she is ‘the pearl of great price, the hidden treasure’.

II.

Now the bumper haul of fish. ‘The kingdom is like a net thrown into the sea that caught fish of every kind.’ Notice the generosity: not a few miserable little tiddlers, but fish of every kind and lots of them. We the hearers (or readers) are supposed to twig: this is the kind of God that God is: incredibly, prodigally, even wastefully generous. But – and this is a big ‘but’ - and here we get the point of the parable – not all these fish are the same. In other words, this parable is about discrimination or making good decisions or choices.

Come back to Jacob choosing a wife. He’s up against a guy called Laban who wants to get his elder daughter, Leah, off his hands – and at the same time extort more free labour from Jacob. The problem is, though, that at the party to celebrate what Jacob thought was his wedding to Rachel, he got so drunk that he couldn’t tell these two women apart, Rachel from Leah, the one from the other. And we can imagine what Rachel felt about that!

What do we learn from this? Perhaps that we live in a time when so much is offered to us -commercially, on-line, and in myriad different ways - that we sometimes get confused, don’t know what’s a good decision or what a bad one. It’s as though we’re drunk on superfluity. The situation gets even worse if we are young and inexperienced, worse still if we are drugged, drunk or brainwashed by loud crude music.

What, then, do the fisherman in the parable do? They sit down – i.e. pause for reflection – and sort out the fish, the good from the bad. ‘They put the good into baskets, and threw out the bad’. Jacob too sobered up, did the hard yards, and finally won the hand of his true beloved, Rachel. Later on in Christian Tradition, St. Ignatius of Loyola was to say, ‘Never make decisions out of desolation, always out of consolation’ or, as we would say, ‘when we’re in a good space’ and have taken some good advice.

The kingdom can come in your life, then, when, faced with some great opportunity or the gift of another person, you make the right choice. And the thing about right decisions is that they invariably open up more possibilities, more outbreaks of good and real life. The God I invoked a moment ago – the creator God who is infinitely and endlessly generous and giving – is interested in that kind of choice. We’re talking about ‘the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God’.

III.

Next, the mustard seed. This is about small beginnings and big outcomes. Yesterday I attended the 80th birthday party of my great friend George Armstrong. The mustard seed in this case was an old whaler with an outboard on the back and a small ad. in the Auckland Herald. We’re in 1975, Peace Squadron time. The US wants to use New Zealand harbours as havens for nuclear-armed ships patrolling the South Pacific. George, in conversation with heaps of people around this end of the world, had worked out a vision of a ‘Nuclear-free and Independent Pacific’. Do we have a conflict situation here? Yes we do; and it all came to a head when the US announced the scheduled arrival of a nuclear-powered and -armed cruiser, the Truxton, in Auckland Harbour. With incredible courage, George put an ad. in the paper to say he intended to put his boat in front of the Truxton in the Harbour Roads, force it to stop. The night before he camped on Rangitoto Island, and, because the Truxton was due at first light, motored out in the dark to position his boat in the Channel.

But then to his surprise and delight, his was not alone. There were many other boats of all shapes and sizes. The Truxton was forced to slow down and stop, if only for a few minutes (while the police and navy cleared the protest boats out of the way). The same thing happened in two subsequent years, this time with nuclear ‘hunter-killer’ submarines. Each time the protest got bigger until finally the US Ambassador in Wellington, Mrs. Martineau, cabled the Naval High Command in Hawaii to the effect that visits to nuclear-armed vessels to New Zealand were unviable. Why? Because the danger of somebody being killed was too great. If that happened, NZ-US relations would plummet, perhaps never recover. The next step, as we all know, was David Lange’s cautious anti-nuclear legislation. But what we have to note here is that we’re talking about real hope in the real world, taking one small but effective step towards a world without nuclear weapons, starting in our own backyard.

But since we’re talking about ‘the kingdom of heaven’, two things to note. The tree in the parable turns out to be the Tree of Life, full of birds of every kind – like the Karori Sanctuary. Life is multiplied over and over again – like a world where people no longer manufacture weapons to annihilate each other in numbers. We recall the God who is the creator and giver of all true life; just as Jesus gave life to all he encounters then and now.

IV.

However, lest you think the Peace Squadron Protests were a breeze – I took part in one of them in 1977 – they were actually very frightening. When you are in a small boat and a nuclear submarine is bearing down on you, it looks like a huge semi-circle with a cross on top (the conning tower and the big stabilizer fins that stick out either side). But we in the Peace Squadron had a theology. To be the body of Christ, we figured, we had actually to put our own bodies in the path of evil and force it to stop – or else run over the top of us. So when we hear Paul asking, ‘Who will separate us from the love of Christ?’ we have to be very clear what we are saying if we answer, ‘nothing’.

Yet who can doubt that when a collection of nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed ships are forced to stop and go some place else, that the kingdom of heaven had come near? And remember: In the Gospels the Resurrection occurred in the very early morning, just as it was getting light.