9th Sunday after Pentecost
Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
My mother was born in a former part of Germany called East Prussia. Her family lived on a big farm. Towards the end of the Second World War, it became clear that sooner or later the Russian troops would overrun the area. To prepare for the ransacking and looting that typically goes along with being occupied by enemy forces, my grandmother packed two big crates, one with the family’s silver, the other with porcelain. One night, she and my great-aunt dug two deep holes somewhere on the farm and buried the crates.
The Russians did come; my mom and her family escaped to what was left of Germany. The farm ended up in the nation of Poland and become part of a communist commune. The two boxes are still buried somewhere on that farm. My grandmother and my great-aunt are dead. Nobody knows where the crates are buried.
Someday, someone is going to dig a new well or drainage ditch or something, and stumble upon these treasures. Just like a farmer in Staffordshire in England stumbled upon a hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure in 2009; 1,500 pieces of gold and precious stones had been buried in the ground. What an amazing find.
Before the invention of bank vaults and safe deposit boxes, burying treasure in the ground was the best way to keep it safe during wartime or long absences. If the owner died in battle or while travelling, the treasure would stay put, sometimes for centuries.
It is such a treasure the man in Jesus’ parable finds in a field. He is going about his work, probably a day laborer plowing someone else’s field, when he finds this treasure. What joy! However, in order to legitimately own the treasure and take advantage of the joy it brings, he first needs to buy the field. In his joy, he goes and sells everything he has in order to raise the money and buy the field. Once he finds the treasure, everything else pales in comparison. The treasure is now his number one priority.
That’s what it is like with the kingdom of heaven, says Jesus. Once you stumble upon it, the joy is so overwhelming that it becomes the number one priority in your life. Everything else is secondary beside it.
The merchant has a similar experience. He is out shopping for pearls when he spots one that is absolutely superb. So precious and valuable is it that the merchant sells his entire warehouse stock in order to buy this one pearl.
The kingdom of God is like that, Jesus says. It is so superb and precious, once you have found it you can’t imagine living without it. Whatever it takes to be part of this kingdom is worth it. Living in the kingdom of heaven is that awesome.
That is how C.S. Lewis, author of many books, including the Chronicles of Narnia, describes his own conversion experience. When he experienced the love of Christ for the first time in a really powerful way, he said he was “surprised by joy”. Joy. It’s about joy.
Joy is what makes the treasure finder act the way he does. In his joy, he goes and sells everything, we read. This is not drudgery or sacrifice; it is a joyful giving of all he can give for the sake of the kingdom.
The treasure finder and the merchant stumble upon the kingdom, are changed by the kingdom, and joyfully rearrange their lives in accordance with the kingdom.
The first two people Jesus is talking about today come to the kingdom a different way, much more slowly.
The first is a man who sows a mustard seed in his field. Sounds like an everyday kind of thing to do, right? It isn’t, though. Mustard was feared by farmers in that area. Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer from Jesus’ time, writes, “Mustard with its pungent taste and fiery effect is extremely beneficial for the health. It grows entirely wild, though it is improved by being transplanted; but on the other hand, when it has once been sown, it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once.”
Today we would call this an invasive plant. Think kudzu or dandelion. Weeds you just can’t get rid of.
The kingdom of heaven is like that, says Jesus. Pervasive like a weed. Once it comes into a field, a person, a community, it cannot be eradicated.
The woman placing leaven into her flour is also doing something seemingly banal. Baking bread was a routine task in a woman’s life. She would mix leaven into the flour and let it sit so the dough would rise.
The kingdom of heaven is like that, Jesus says. Like leaven in a batch of flour, slowly but surely affecting the whole batch and making it rise and expand.
Some of us here have stumbled upon the kingdom of heaven like the treasure finder and the merchant: it hit us out of the blue with its incredible joy and changed our lives forever.
Others have come into the kingdom’s joy through an extended process in which the gospel slowly but surely spread in us, filled us with joy and peace, and affected the way we live.
A good example for this is the very different ways in which my husband Eric and I received our calls into ministry.
My call story is the slow, pervasive type. Raised in a Lutheran parsonage, I was always surrounded by faithful people and was always active in the church. As I grew older, I began to take on more leadership roles in the church, such as catechism classes and youth camps. People affirmed my gifts for ministry, and I sensed the inward call from God, and eventually I entered seminary and became a pastor.
Eric was also raised in a faithful Lutheran home and went to church every Sunday, but to hear his mom tell it, all he ever did there was either sleep or tease his younger sister. As soon as he was off to college, church disappeared from his life. Only when visiting home would he attend worship, as that was expected from anyone living in my in-laws’ house.
It was during one of those command performances that Eric was hit over the head with a call experience. The parable of the prodigal son just grabbed him with such power that he knew he needed to become a pastor. He quit his job in New York City, moved to Gettysburg, and enrolled in seminary.
Two very different ways of being called. Yet both led to the joy of experiencing God’s powerful kingdom.
The kingdom of heaven is often a hidden reality, like seed in the soil, like leaven within the flour, like treasure buried in a field, like a pearl among many other pearls. When we look our complicated world nowadays, we can agree: Yes, the kingdom of God is indeed rather hidden! It is not easy to spot among the stresses and worries and fears of our lives.
And yet, now and then we have experiences that assure us beyond a reasonable doubt that God is powerful and that God’s kingdom is growing, slowly but pervasively, like weeds and rising dough. Those kingdom moments come to us by God’s grace. We just go about our daily routines, planting seeds, baking bread, engaging in trade, plowing a field, doing our jobs and our chores, when God’s mercy grabs us and fills us with joy.
This joy then compels us to share the good news. Like the mustard seed grows and becomes a plant big enough to offer shelter for birds, so our faith grows to build community and invite others into God’s sheltering presence. Like the woman takes leaven to make her bread dough rise and in the end bakes bread for a lot of people – she uses enough flour to feed over 100 folks! – so does our faith grow and nurture and nourish many people we encounter in our everyday lives.
As bearers of God’s kingdom seeds, we keep doing things which may look silly to others, to those who have not yet themselves stumbled over the treasure of God’s love. Silly things like planting weeds and selling everything for one pearl. But to us, these activities contain the seed of a transformed world, a new creation.
We keep coming to church and sing our old hymns and our new praise songs. We recite our creeds and affirm our faith in God. We read an ancient book called the Bible and find in it truths that are anything but ancient. We keep gathering at sick beds and death beds, offer prayer, and trust the healing power of God and the promise of resurrection. We pour water over the heads of babies and youth and adults and proclaim them freed by the power of Christ. We come to God’s table and eat bread and drink wine and know that Christ is with us in, with, and under the meal.
We do all these things, knowing that they don’t just mean something, they mean everything! They mean life. They mean joy. They mean eternal life.
And so we keep working for the kingdom in this mixed-up, complicated world of ours. We quietly carry out our jobs and raise our children and grandchildren and tend to our marriages and point people to the cross and to the one who died there for all of us; we do it all in the trust that God is at work in us and among us, transforming the world with gospel power.
Today’s parables offer encouragement: Hang in there, they say. God’s new reality is closer than you think. It is already seeping into your life, even when you might not always be able to feel it. Trust that God’s kingdom is growing, is slowly and persistently filling you with joy and courage and hope and strength.
Today’s parables offer promise: Believe it, they say. No matter what things may look like, God’s kingdom will prevail. And so, in the face of war, we proclaim peace. In the face of illness, we proclaim God’s healing power. In the face of hate, we proclaim love. In the face of death, we proclaim life everlasting.
We do so because we fully trust and believe that God’s kingdom is here and is growing, and before we know is, it will transform everything and everyone with its joy. Amen