The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
July 27, 2008

Proper 12 – A
1 Kings 3:5-12
Romans 8:26-34
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

A parable is a story whose meaning is supplied by the listener. By “whoever has ears to hear,” says Jesus. A parable is a story “you have to sort of toss around in your head,” Jack Hitt suggests. (Editorial in The Los Angeles Times, April 26, 2005) “You have to think about a parable in terms of life and people as you experience them, and then arrive at some understanding that makes sense to you. In his parables, Jesus makes you work through your own doubt and confusion in order to arrive at a meaning that becomes the foundation of your own faith.” “What do you think?” Jesus was fond of asking about his stories.

So here, today, Jesus gives us a whole collection of short parables, a set of riddles, really, that tease the imagination and challenge conventional wisdom. And when Jesus gets through telling them, he asks his disciples, “Have you understood all this?” And they say, “Yes.”

Well, I wonder.

Everyone in Jesus’ day believed that, whatever else it was, the kingdom of heaven was something big, something great. Whether it was to be established by human military power or by the direct intervention of God, to everyone listening to Jesus at that time the kingdom of heaven represented the most magnificent of realities.

“But no,” says Jesus, “the kingdom is like the smallest of things, like a mustard seed.” The most sublime reality in the universe is something so small you might need a magnifying glass to see it, Jesus suggests. Then he goes on to compare the kingdom of heaven, the purest of all realities, to something his listeners considered impure. He compares it to leaven, to yeast hidden in dough.

What do you think Jesus means by that?

I don’t know for sure, but here are some thoughts I’ve been tossing around in my head: The people of Jesus’ day were a lot like us. They didn’t care much for unlike things being mixed together. “Do not mate different kinds of animals,” commanded the Torah. “Do not plant your field with two kinds of seeds. Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material. And do not marry a foreigner, someone different from you.” Things and people foreign to one another are best kept separate. Synthetics are out. That’s why these commandments were in the Law. Also, the people of Jesus’ day believed that yeast was a corruption. Leavening changes flour into something flour is not. Leaven, for them, therefore, was like hypocrisy, a sign of sin, so the Law did not permit the use of leavened bread on solemn occasions. Like sin, yeast was to be avoided and removed from the house. It was understood by Jesus’ contemporary listeners that that was the way God himself intended things.

And yet just last week, and again this morning, here is Jesus telling stories that challenge this conventional understanding. Last week he said that the kingdom is like a field where two kinds of seed, wheat and weeds, grow together. “Don’t separate them,” Jesus said. And this morning here is Jesus saying that the kingdom of heaven is like yeast, like a woman putting corruption into flour.

What do you think he means?

One of the things I’ve thought is that yeast, like the mustard seed, is a little thing that makes big things happen. Now this thought if not original with me, of course, and perhaps this is Jesus’ point, or part of it at least – that the kingdom of heaven is not big, but small, so small, in fact, that it’s hidden from view. But it’s not static. It’s dynamic. It’s alive. It grows. It may even be a little like life itself – a little messy, like weeds and wheat growing up together, and a little smelly, like yeast. I don’t know for sure. What do you think?

Here’s what Jack Hitt thinks about the Jesus of the parables. “The Jesus who speaks in the Gospels is nothing like the fuming (partisan) Jesus I see on TV [these days],” he says. “Every generation produces a Jesus to suit its own purposes,” so it is understandable, Hitt supposes, “that in the Age of Information our [televangelists and] broadcasters have marketed a Jesus so narrowly defined that he resembles little more than a lobbyist loitering outside [some Senator’s] office hoping for a few minutes of the great man’s time.”

But the living Jesus, Hitt goes on to say, the Jesus of the living words of the parables, unlike the Jesus created by some to endorse a prevailing political or cultural view, the living Jesus ”was a leader who understood that ambiguity and doubt are not to be feared but are, simply, facts of life that a great teacher exploits to guide his followers on their own paths toward conviction and belief.” To Hitt, the living Jesus seems more like the Jesus on the poster that used to adorn the wall in the parish hall, the Jesus who “came to take away our sins, not our minds.” In his parables, Jesus insists that we use the evidence of life to think for ourselves. “Consider the mustard seed and yeast and the kingdom of heaven,” he says. “How do you think they are alike?”

And this reminded me of an essay by C. S. Lewis. Lewis wrote the essay sixty-seven years ago, in 1941. Some people wanted to establish a so-called “Christian Party” in England at the time. And in the essay, Lewis worries about religious parties in politics, because, he says, we human beings have a way of wanting to do political weeding according to our own tastes, as if our tastes are God’s tastes. We have a way of putting forth our own personal values and purposes and calling them God’s values and purposes. And that was a concern to Lewis, because he didn’t think people are thinking clearly when they do that.

“Whatever it calls itself,” Lewis said, “[a so-called Christian party] will not represent Christendom. The principle which divides [any Christian party] from its brethren and unites it to its political allies will not be theological. It will have no authority to speak for Christianity. It will have no more power than the political skill of its members to control the behavior of its unbelieving allies.

“But there will be a real and most disastrous novelty. [A Christian party] will be not simply a part of Christendom, but a part claiming to be the whole. [It will claim to speak for God, and will insist that only those who agree with them are Christian.] By the mere fact of calling itself the Christian party, it implicitly accuses all Christians who do not join it of apostasy and betrayal. It will be exposed, in an aggravated degree, to that temptation which the Devil spares none of us at any time – the temptation of claiming for our favorite opinions the kind and degree of certainty and authority which really belongs only to [God]. The danger of mistaking our merely natural, though perhaps legitimate, enthusiasms for holy zeal is always great.” (The Guardian, January 10, 1941)

In other words, Christians are free, like Solomon, to pray for discernment, so that they can sift the evidence for themselves, which may lead some of us to differ from the conventional wisdom.

Well Lewis’s concern made me think about another parable about the kingdom of heaven. But this is not a parable Jesus told; this is a parable Jesus did, a parable he acted out in response to the religious parties of his day.

Later, on their way to Jerusalem, right after Jesus tells his disciples that he will have to suffer and die, and after the disciples admit that they really don’t understand at all what he is talking about, Jesus goes on into Jerusalem, and he tells some more parables. And people get mad at him – furious, in fact – because, as Thomas Merton puts it, Jesus tells the scribes and the pharisees that they are like a man riding an ox looking for an ox and that they wouldn’t know an ox, or a kingdom of heaven either, if they saw one. And then he tells his disciples that he hopes they will finally get the point when he does what he’s about to do. And then he is arrested by those who don’t “get it,” and they nail him to the Cross. And there, just before he dies, he says, ”Tetelestai!” “It is finished! It’s done! It’s accomplished, completed!”

What’s completed? Now each of you is supposed to be doing his or her own thinking by now. What is Jesus talking about? Is it possible he’s talking about the kingdom of heaven? That’s what I’ve been wondering.

Jesus’ disciples and the parties of conventional wisdom – the religious parties, the priests and the scribes and the pharisees – and we, too, of course – are like a man riding an ox looking for an ox. Sometimes we just don’t see what’s right in front of us. So that leads me to wonder: Is it possible that God’s purpose, the kingdom that God has been at work to bring to perfection for all time since the beginning, is the Cross? Is it possible that what has now been perfected, completed, is someone’s loving the world so much that he is willing to lay down his own life for the sake of the world he loves? Is it possible the kingdom of heaven is like that? Is it possible, in fact, that such love is the kingdom of heaven?

Is it possible that the kingdom of heaven, like a seed working its hidden mystery in the ground and like yeast working its hidden mystery in flour, is all around us all the time, like the air we breathe and like the loving relationships we have with the people we work and live and go to church with?

Is it possible that the kingdom of heaven is as obvious as the ox we’re riding? Is it possible that the kingdom is hidden in the stuff of daily life? Like seed. Like yeast. Is it possible the kingdom of heaven is like One who loved the world so much that he was willing to become flesh and live among us, willing to mix with us mortals, the divine mixed in with the sinful, like the yeast in the dough and seed in the ground? Is it possible that the kingdom is like One who who was willing to suffer with us and for us because he loves us, and willing even to suffer mockery and to die for us? Like the Word who became flesh? Like seed? Like yeast? And all this so that we, too, might experience the same completion, so that we too might know and live such sacrificial love, which is the purpose of God? Is it possible that this is what heaven is?

Do you “get it”?

The disciples didn’t. Mention “Messiah” to them, says Robert Capon, and they would picture a king on horseback or a religious party holding a convention or a political lobbyist at the royal palace, not a carpenter on a cross. Mention forgiveness and they would start setting up rules about how many times you have to do it and other rules about when you can stop doing it.

Forgiveness, friends, is like this: it is the power of the kingdom of heaven. It is a power that is small and hidden. Like seed. Like yeast. Like sacrificial love. It is power that the world doesn’t see, because the world is too busy being impressed with big, flashy things like force – things like rockets and bombs and so-called Christian politics, and all that – things which can be bombastic and very noisy, but whose power is really very small.

But consider real power, Capon suggests. Consider the power you need to remain in loving relationships with other people, like the power God needed to perfect and complete his creation on the Cross, like the power needed to bring the kingdom of God. The power you need to do that is the power of restraint, not the power of force.

Capon contends that we human beings busy ourselves asking the wrong questions about God. “If God wants to turn this messed-up world into heaven,” we ask, “why doesn’t he just knock some heads together and put all the bad people under a large flat rock and get on with the job? After all, he’s God, and he is powerful enough to do whatever he wants to do.”

But suppose that’s not God’s purpose. Suppose weeding out all the weeds and putting all the “bad guys” under a large flat rock or in a blazing furnace, or suppose having nineteen men hijack four airplanes in order to fly them into buildings and kill people, or suppose having Americans send all the “foreigners” back to where they came from, or suppose having Americans invade one country after another around the world until the world is remade in our own image – suppose all this is not God’s purpose. Suppose this is just our purpose, which we like to claim is God’s purpose.

Suppose the purpose of God, the purpose God intends to complete and make perfect, is to stay in loving relationship with the rebellious world he created. And suppose God’s purpose is for us to do the same. Knocking heads simply will not accomplish that! Neither will pulling weeds or establishing religious parties or building other nations in our own image, or cleaning up other people’s back yards while letting our own go to seed.

Consider, Capon says, what it’s like with someone you know and love, such as your own child perhaps. “Direct, straight-line, intervening, [head-knocking] power does, of course, have many uses. With it, you can lift the spaghetti from the plate to your mouth, wipe the sauce off your slacks and carry them to the dry cleaners, and perhaps even make enough money to ransom them back. Indeed, straight-line [head-knocking] power – ‘use the force you need to get the result you want’ – is responsible for almost everything that happens in the world. And the beauty of it is, it works. From removing the dust with a cloth to removing your enemy with a .45 [or an F-16], it achieves its ends in sensible, effective, easily understood ways.

“Unfortunately,” Capon quickly adds, “[head-knocking power] has a whopping limitation. If you take the view that one of the chief objects in life is [not to knock heads, but] to remain in loving relationships with other people, straight-line [head-knocking] power becomes useless.

“Oh, you can snatch your baby boy away from the edge of a cliff and not have a broken relationship on your hands. But when he is twenty just try interfering with his plans for the season and see what happens, especially if his chosen plans play havoc with your own.

“Suppose he makes unauthorized use of your car, and you use a little straight-line [head-knocking] verbal power to scare him out of doing it again. Well and good. But suppose further that he does it again anyway – and again and again and again. What do you do next if you are committed to straight-line [head-knocking] power? You raise your voice a little more nastily each time till you can’t shout any louder. And then you beat him, if you are stronger than he is, until you can’t beat any harder. Then you chain him to a radiator till.... But you see the point. At some [time] in that difficult, personal relationship, the whole thing will be destroyed unless you simply refuse to use it, unless, in other words, you decide that instead of dishing out justifiable pain and punishment, you are willing, quite foolishly, to take a beating yourself.” (Robert Farrar Capon, The Parables of the Kingdom, pp. 18-20)

And so, instead of riding into Jerusalem on a horse, Jesus rode in on a silly little donkey, “humble, and mounted on an ass, on a colt, the foal of an ass.” Instead of founding a Christian party or mobilizing troops, Jesus had dinner with his friends. And then he told them again that he loved them, and he commanded them to love each other the same way he was loving them. And then, when they still didn’t “get it” and after they all had either denied or betrayed or abandoned him, he walked up the hill to Calvary where he asked his Father to forgive them, because they don’t understand and they don’t know what they do.

St. Paul speaks to us today about this purpose of God. “In everything, as we know,” Paul says, “the Spirit works for good with those who love God and who are called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.”

Or, better, listen to it in The Revised English translation: “For those whom God knew before ever they were, he also ordained to share the likeness of his Son, so that he might be the eldest among a large family of brothers.”

Paul says that this is God’s purpose, the purpose that God intends and has intended since the beginning – that we should all be like Christ, that we should be like him who dismissed the horse in favor of the donkey and who invited Peter and James and John, and even Judas, to dinner, and who loved them even unto the Cross, that we might be “a large family of brothers.”

The kingdom of heaven, ”hidden” in the Cross, is like this: It is a kingdom of wounds, not a kingdom of weapons. This is the mystery of life, the saving mystery, which is the kingdom of heaven to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Well, this is what I’ve been thinking. What do you think? Do we understand all these things?

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.