The Kingdom Is Here

Matthew 13:31-52     7-27-2014

The Kingdom of God is like a sower,

the kingdom of God is like a field,

the kingdom of God is like weeds and wheat.

Jesus is very interested in the Kingdom of God

and thinks its important that we know about it.

Now, for most of Christianity’s history,

when Jesus talked about the kingdom of God,

we assumed that he was talking about heaven

a place that we would see if we were good and flossed regularly.

The kingdom of God was somewhere, a place

like Disney Land. And  we’d only see it after we’d died.

But if Jesus was only talking about heaven

what does that mean if heaven is like a

mustard plant, or leavening?

Maybe we could sort out the pearl or the treasure,

or the net, but mustard plants and leavening?

I’m sure we could come up with better things to say

about the kingdom of heaven.

There are more majestic trees than mustard

there are more delicious ingredients than yeast.

And the truth is, mustard wasn’t

a positive image to use. Mustard could be a useful tree,

the leaves and the seeds and the stems could all be used for things.

But in the dry, desert environment of the Middle East,

mustard mostly had a reputation for being an invasive 

plant that would crowd all other kinds of plants out.

Once you got it in there, it was hard to get rid of and control,

There was actually a Jewish law

that said you couldn’t plant it in your field

because it would inevitably reach someone else’s field.

The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed

Today, an equivalent might be,

The Kingdom of God is like bamboo that someone

planted without putting a cement border around

it and it soon filled everyone’s front yards.

And Jesus also says the Kingdom of God

is like yeast that a woman has mixed into three measures of flour.

That’s almost 80 pounds of flour.

Imagine putting yeast into that?

Once you put that in, something was going to happen,

you were going to end up working,

you might even have to call in some friends to help you,

and get extra pans because that flour was not flour anymore,

that would be lots and lots of bread.

The only image I could come up with for today is

the kingdom of God is like putting regular

soap in the dishwasher and running it.

(If you haven’t done that, yet, just ask someone who has.)

 Or putting a male and a female rabbit in a cage together.

 

Regardless, these images aren’t really

ones you would use to describe a place,

definitely not a place of eternal rest and joy and unity with God.

That’s because I don’t think Jesus is interested

in describing heaven to us

Jesus is more interested in the kingdom of God

on earth as it is in heaven.

The kingdom of God as it is here and now.

It works , it makes things different,

it invades it infests, it grows, it changes things.

The kingdom of God does something.

The kingdom of God is like that. It starts with one small action,

one act of love, forgiveness, sacrifice, understanding.

And it spreads - invading this world, changing it.

like bamboo, like liquid soap, like rabbits,

like mustard, like yeast in a lot of flour.

The kingdom of God is here and now, today.

And even when the world might seem hopeless, like these days,

we have faith that the kingdom of God is working all around us.

Sometimes we just have to look.

For instance,

even as Gaza was launching rockets at Israel

and Israel was preparing military action against the Palestinians.

hundreds of observant Muslims and observant Jews across Israel united to break their mutual fast day together.

The 18th day of Ramadan, the Muslim fast, and 17th of Tammuz, a Jewish, fast fell on the same day in June

and hundreds of observant Jews and Muslims joined together

in Israel and all different countries

in mosques, synagogues, and community centers

in the evening to break their fasts together.

And then

In response to loud nasty anti-immigrant protests in Murrieta, California, St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Murrieta

decided to open their doors and help and host immigrant children and families.

And then 200 people came to a vigil to offer prayer in support of refugee families arriving in local communities.

In response to Christians being persecuted in

Mosul Iraq and being forced to convert to Islam or pay exorbitant taxes or be severely punished, 200 Muslim people, 

gathered in front of a Catholic church in Baghdad to show solidarity with Christians.

A priest at a Catholic Church in Mosul said:

“What gives us hope is a group of citizens - 

Muslims - from Baghdad carrying slogans saying “I am Iraqi, I am Christian,”

“They prayed in solidarity with us,

saying that we are people from this land,”

And right here, our own children at VBS 

went out and collected food from our neighbors. A lot of it! To give out to people who come to our food pantry.

It starts with one little action 

and that action is contagious,

it does something, it changes things.

The kingdom of God is here.

In these acts, in these faces, 

in the hearts of these people 

--Christian, Jewish and Muslim -- who take a chance, and give of themselves.

Although it may seem like the weeds are winning in our garden sometimes. 

The kingdom of God may seem too small to make a difference, 

but it’s powerful and precious.

It is like a small pearl of great value,

it’s like treasure that you would trade everything for.

Because once God plants it in us

and it starts growing, nothing will stop it.

Don't Be A Weeder

Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43

7-20-14

Jesus is talking again about farming, gardening, growing things.

This time it’s not about the soil, but about the plants.

The parable of the wheat and the tears or weeds

Wheat Field Dream
Bob Orsillo, photograph

This parable always gives me some hesitation

The initial thing I think after reading it is that the people of the world

are divided into good and evil.  There are good people and bad people and there’s nothing that can be done about it.

Jesus explanation of the parable says just about as much.

It gives me hesitation

because I don’t think that you can’t just divide

the people of the world into good and bad,

black and white, good guys, and bad guys.

I truly believe that each one of us

is saint and sinner simultaneously –

simil ustus et piccator in latin to quote Martin Luther.

Each person that is convicted of a seriously horrible crime

has a tender heart for something-  even if it’s been hidden for years.

And each perfectly angelic church lady

has some anger and resentment and bitterness –

even if it’s been hidden for years.

No one is exulted and no one is written off as a completely lost cause.

The thought that some people were just born evil and come from

the devil just doesn’t give me a lot of lee way to think that there is hope. The weeds in my garden just don’t gradually turn in to

cucumbers and tomatoes even with all the care in the world.

 

And for humanity and systems, and institutions and countries,

that’s the hope I have really: That new life will be made from old.

And I think I’ve learned this from Jesus.
Some from Paul and some from Luther of course.
But originally, I’m pretty sure this comes

from other things that Jesus has said.

And besides that I’ve seen it happen.

I’ve seen identified weeds in my lifetime bear good fruit.

So when I read that some people were just planted by the

evil one just makes me think that I have to read more closely.

And if we don’t jump to the easiest conclusion,

and we look again, we see that Jesus doesn’t

want us to divide the world into good and evil,

Jesus is saying to do the opposite.

With the parable of the wheat and the weeds,

Jesus is saying there is good in this world and there is evil

And that is just an observable fact. It is there.

We know that there is good, we have seen it:

Compassion, love, and kindness

people sacrificing themselves and their own lives for strangers.

generosity, innocence. We know that God supports this

and helps this to grow and flourish.

But Jesus says there is also evil in the world.

We don’t need proof of that, we can see it

just like the disciples could see it.

Just look at the news in the past two days:

Russians and Ukrainians at war with each other

shoot a innocent passenger jet out of the sky killing 300 people

Israel has started a ground assault on a poor ghetto

inside their own country.

And children are coming alone to our border by the thousands

escaping the horrible poverty and violence in their own country.

Jesus says that these good and evil exist, together.

These two realities grow together in our world.

But when the servants ask the master if they should go

and identify the weeds and take them out

the master says, “No. If you take out the weeds,

you’ll take out the wheat. Let them grow together.”

This is the important part of the parable that maybe gets overlooked:

The master says: Don’t you take out the weeds.

So, we are not supposed to be spending our time

plucking those things we identify as evil.

Our job is not to identify weeds and take them out.

We are not supposed to try and eradicate evil

by removing certain people. It is not our job.

Which is interesting because throughout history,

Christians have kind of gravitated

to this task of eradicating those they identify as evil.

There is this feeling, that if we could just get rid of all the bad people

the good would flourish. Look in our history:

the crusades, the inquisition, witch hunts, countless other “cleansing” wars and invasions, the KKK, the Holocaust, the war on drugs,

the war on terror. The idea is lets get rid of the bad people,

so then the good people can be happy and the world would be great.

Sounds good in theory.

But the reality is,

every attempt at rooting out evil by destroying people

has-  in the process of doing it - produced more evil.

As we can see with Israel and Palestine -

 far more wheat is destroyed than weeds.

And more interestingly, to extend Jesus parable:

It has turned the weeders into the weeds

that they’re trying to get rid of.

All our attempts at eradicating evil creates more evil.

Jesus is saying that we can’t get rid of evil.
So we should not become zealous weeders.

God doesn’t need our help on that end.

Life is too ambiguous from our angle to be doing that.

And we don’t just see this in global politics either.

We experience this in our own personal lives too.

Every good decision is laden with ambiguity as well.

-Do we focus on our career or do we stay home with our family?

-Do we stay in the city or do we abandon the inner city schools and

move our kids to a better school system?

-Do we lay good employees off

or do we risk letting the whole business go under?

And we know our hearts are filled with wheat and weeds as well.

Saint and sinner simultaneous.

Simul Ustus Et piccator in latin.

To bring us back to where I started.

And knowing that is actually freeing.

Trying to fool ourselves into thinking that we could possibly

achieve a weed free world, or that our life could be weed free,

or that our hearts could be weed free

is an expectation that we can’t live up to.
That is what leads to our misery and destruction.

  So what can we do?

Just let evil take over? Of course not.

What we can do is help the good to grow strong.

Our job is to tend to the garden

and treat the weed and the wheat the same.

Foster more love, more generosity,

more forgiveness, more justice -

in our lives and in our world.

Let the love and grace of God fall on both
the good and the evil without regard
for which is wheat and which is weed.

As the servants of God, we are called to

treat the bad with the same compassion

as we treat the good.

God will sort it out in the end.

And we trust that in God’s creative hands,

The righteousness that exists

in all of the world will shine like the sun.

My Burden is Light

Matthew 11: 16-19; 21-30

July 6, 2014

How can Jesus say that his burden is easy?

Because of Jesus it seems we have a lot of extra

burdens that we wouldn’t have before.

We’re told to worship, to pray, to be in choirs,

to serve in all sorts of capacities.

I love doing those things, but

Those can be a burden sometimes.

Jesus burdens me to care about other people

who are less fortunate than me

a world away from me.

I feel better when I do care, but

that is a burden we wouldn’t have.

Because of Jesus,

I’m now driven to understand this confusing and contradictory

book that we use as a basis of our faith

and then I’m called to try and explain it to others.

I love learning about it, and teaching about it,

But it keeps me up at night sometimes thinking about it.

That’s a burden.

Jesus told us kind of recently

that if we take him seriously,

we could upset our families.

that we need to take up our cross.

that we need to give up our lives in order to find them.

How can Jesus say that his burden is light?

That he will give us rest?

It seems like whatever there was to do before,

Jesus is about giving us more to do.

More to feel guilty about.

At least the way that Christians have done it.

 

Jesus opens up this discussion today by asking

what should I compare this generation to?

He says that they are like little children. And not in a good way.

He says that they complain,

“We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;

we wailed, and you did not mourn” in other words,

You didn’t do what we wanted when we wanted it.
He says when John fasted, they complained and judged

and when Jesus ate and drank they complained and judged.

As you might know, in Jesus time and culture,

religion was the center of life and for Jews it was about the laws,

The conduct for living as God ordained was central to the whole culture.

It was there to order people’s lives so that they could

then live in harmony with one another and with God.

In Jewish writings, “the yoke of the law” was a common phrase.

The yoke was the thing that was put on horse or oxen

to guide and direct them to them so that they

could do the work that they were meant to do.

The law was a control that was meant to give people a better life.

But through time, these laws had become

a way to control people.

I actually want to get away from the idea that the Pharisees

had some master plan to control the populous.

The system which God ordained was put into human hands,

and simply because humanity - not one corrupt portion -

but the whole of humanity, progressively, over time,

it set up burdens which no one could live up to.

Just to survive, regular people had to break the rules.

These rules would inevitably benefit those in charge

and bring more comfort, honor, and control

to those who were in power like the Pharisees.

But it’s not just one person’s fault.

 

I say this because this oppression

doesn’t constantly need to be imposed by the leaders.

This oppression becomes self-imposed.

The people set up huge, un-meetable expectations

for themselves and for their peers.

The judgments and punishments were meted out

in subtle ways to one another by families and communities

and people punished themselves with shame and self-loathing.

They were “Like children in a market place calling to one another”

Although Jesus is talking about his generation,

we can certainly understand what he’s talking

about in our generation.

We celebrated independence day this week

and our country has many political freedoms that others don’t.

But we have given our neighbors and ourselves

a huge set of laws and rules and standards to conform to.

We live in an age of chronic dissatisfaction

and we take it out on each other constantly.

Any public figure - politician or celebrity -

is looked at with a microscope.

Their actions and appearance

picked apart with a fine toothed comb.

When people do almost anything, they are

hailed as heroes and flayed as failures or worse,

 often in the same breath.

It seems that as a society we have a love/hate relationship

with everything and every one.

Both drawn and repelled at the same time.

We want to be close and then when we are

we can’t help but criticize or find fault.

“‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;

we wailed, and you did not mourn.”

No one needs to tell us to do it, it is human.

And this eternal dissatisfaction is self-imposed too.

We examine and criticize our own actions mercilessly.

We hold up magazines, movies, TV, and celebrities with nannies and chefs and personal trainers as the models for the way we look,

the way we act, what we do with our lives,

and then we beat ourselves up when we can’t reach those standards.

We’re supposed to have our dream career at 25,

have a perfect family at 35, retire at 45,

and win several Nobel prizes at 55.

I’m not a parent, but just reading any kind of

parenting article or blog makes my head spin.

They’re filled with images of this constantly blissful,

engaging, stimulating, exceptional lives people

provide for their children.

They’re constantly positive, reflective, and spiritual,

even when they’re dealing with tragedy.

Now, I know enough to know that is not real life.

But even when I read the ones who talk about how normal

their families are and how they’re not going to live up to

any expectations, I think “Wow, you found time to

hold down a job, get your kids fed and dressed

 and you could get yourself together to write about it?”

I don’t even have kids and I can’t seem to write a blog.

The expectations for greatness and exceptionalism are so high

that nothing seems to make us happy for long

We are like children in market place calling to one another.

Driving ourselves crazy.

You see, when we base people’s worth

on some outside expectation,

some set of rules and regulations

it leads to an endless hole of dissatisfaction.

No one will ever live up to them,

these self-imposed standards are too steep.

Even if the standard is simple something that we might

set as the minimum the lowest bar:

like just have a roof over your head, and provide food,

and stay out of jail.

Someone – maybe you or me at some time –

will not be able to live up to that standard.

And our standards are much much higher.

So we end up yelling at each other in the market place,

“you didn’t make me happy.”

Likewise, when we base our self-worth

on outside things, or even our own expectations,

we put ourselves at the bottom of that

endless hole as well.

It becomes a hopeless at times.

  

And this is where Jesus comes in.

And Jesus burden is light.

It is difficult to remember in the noise

of this world and it’s magazines and parenting blogs

and the calls of our giant egos -

But Jesus yoke is really easy and light:

The kingdom of God is like this:

The worth of a person is not determined

by what they do, it is only determines by God’s love.

Our self-worth is not determined by our achievements,

it is only determined by how God loves us.

And God loves each one of us.

Everything we do as a church, every task we might have

as members of this church is focused

on understanding and living that truth.

If it doesn’t help that, we need to put it aside.

The truth of God’s love that Jesus proclaims -

the gospel in other words -

lifts us out of that hole of dissatisfaction
that the world’s laws, standards, and expectations put us in.

The yoke of God’s grace guides us and frees us for new life.

Martin Luther understood it.

He wrote these beautiful words:

"The Law says 'Do this' and it is never done,

Grace says 'Believe this' and everything is done already."

Jesus yoke is easy and his burden is light.

God’s love is not based on what we do, achieve, or succeed .

God’s love is given to us and each person absolutely freely.

And in this truth, we can finally find our res