Sunday, July 27, 2014

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Matthew 13
31 He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. 32 Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”
33 He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds[b] of flour until it worked all through the dough.”
44 “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.
45 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. 46 When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.
47 “Once again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was let down into the lake and caught all kinds of fish. 48 When it was full, the fishermen pulled it up on the shore. Then they sat down and collected the good fish in baskets, but threw the bad away. 49 This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous 50 and throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
51 “Have you understood all these things?” Jesus asked.
“Yes,” they replied.
52 He said to them, “Therefore every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.”


I guess if I had to sum up my childhood in a single sentence, it would be “you kids go outside.”

But I have to do it right. This is my mother, ashtray in one hand and cigarette in the other saying “you kids go outside.” (Mother, if you are reading this in the internet, I did do the gravelly-cigarette voice, which I only use to enhance the experience of my listeners. It really wasn’t that bad.)

You might say, I was parented ‘Old School.’ Old school parenting had the kids outside for nearly every moment of the day, excepting, of course, the real threat of lighting, tornado or flash flood. But the threat had to be real.

Old school parenting meant kids were part of the supporting cast of any social function, never the centre of attention. As a variation on the ‘seen but not heard’ rule, there was the kid’s table, the basement, perhaps a rec room, or that old stand by, outside.

It’s not that our parents didn’t care, or were disinterested in what we did—they simply engaged with others or were busy doing their own thing for much of the day. There was little thought given to our fragile sense-of-self, so-called ‘stranger-danger’ or the fact that there was a fiery ball in the sky that had it in for us redheads.

Having shared all this, I do not mean to add to the ‘past-is-better’ narrative that we frequently see in serial-emails and various baby-boomer nostalgia conversations. I would argue that it was neither better nor worse, just different. A place at the grown-up table has made my children better equipped to converse with people of all ages, to give just one example.

And the narrative of ‘old school versus new school’ is hardly new. Like so many things we think were invented by the present generation, this debate predates Dr. Spock, the Farmer’s Almanac and the internet. Old school versus new school is one of the key themes of the Bible, both Old and New Testament, and is one of the key points in the reading I shared.

In many ways, this is either the preacher’s dream passage or our worst nightmare. There are five or six parables in this short passage (depends how you count them) and another parable that is omitted from the introduction of the passage, making our total about seven on the day. Since it’s summer, we’ll forget the parable of the weeds, but you could read it at home, or maybe while pulling weeds from your yard.

So here is the line-up:

The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed.
The Kingdom of God is like yeast.
The Kingdom of God is like treasure.
The Kingdom of God is like a merchant looking for pearls.
The Kingdom of God is like a net lowered in the lake.
The Kingdom of God is like the owner of a house.

If we had to put them in categories, we might say they describe surprizing abundance, surprizing abundance, hidden treasure, hidden treasure, surprizing abundance, and I’m not sure. I say I’m not sure because the last one is parabolic in nature, fits with the others, but seems to do something quite different than the others. Hold that thought.

So we’re being led to the conclusion that the Kingdom of God is about surprizing abundance and hidden treasure. On the few occasions we have talked about this, we’ve experimented with making our own, and for the most part it’s an easy process.

The Kingdom of God is like the growing collection of single socks in your drawer.
The Kingdom of God is like spam in your inbox.
The Kingdom of God is like finding 20 bucks in the pocket of your coat the first time you put it on in the fall.
The Kingdom of God is like finding a warm spot while swimming.
The Kingdom of God is like mosquitos at sundown.
The Kingdom of God is like seeing old friends in worship each summer.

And then that other one. Let’s give it the full Sesame Street treatment, because clearly some of these things are not like the others. Or, if you prefer, maybe we give it the Dan Brown treatment, minus the classy European setting and Tom Hanks. First, context. What leads to this odd-man-out parable?

47 “Once again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was let down into the lake and caught all kinds of fish. 48 When it was full, the fishermen pulled it up on the shore. Then they sat down and collected the good fish in baskets, but threw the bad away.

52 He said to them, “Therefore every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.”

So the first half of what I just shared, the ‘nets let down into the lake’ parable, is lumped with the surprizing abundance group. The net was let down in the lake and caught all kinds of fish. Both good and bad. Suddenly you’re wondering if we can legitimately put this parable in the surprizing abundance group. Maybe we need a new group, maybe called ‘mixed-bag’ or ‘the good with the bad.’

In other words, we have a problem. Parables are about the surprizing abundance and the hidden nature of the Kingdom, not bad fish and a fiery end. What on earth just happened, when everything was going so well?

Some scholars might call this a scribal addition, or clarification, and that may well be the case. But since we can’t know, and since Jesus did say similar things like ‘separating the sheep from the goats,’ we have to be open to the possibility this was not simply the work of an overzealous scribe.

So deciding that this is the real-deal and a confusing twist on surprizing abundance, we turn to the last little parable to understand: “every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.”

In other words, the traditional parables of surprizing abundance and hidden stuff fall under the category of new treasures, and the parable of the good and bad fish fall in the category of old treasure. And Jesus wants us to embrace both, not simply the new treasures that are so appealing and easy to love.

Let me put it another way. The queen of the parables—the paradigmatic parable—is the Prodigal Son. It has everything: two brothers, dissolute living, repentance, forgiveness, and an angry older brother. When we’re not seeing ourselves in one of the characters, we’re busy begin confounded by such amazing grace.

So the Kingdom of God, according to the parable of all parables, is about confounding grace. But it’s a mixed bag. Even the most graceful among us can understand the older brother, and see that he embodies an old school approach. We celebrate extravagant grace even as we harbour some sympathy for the view of the older brother. If the sea is full of good and wicked fish, and the net is full of both, we hope that someone will take the time to separate out the wicked fish.

If the new treasure is abundant grace and the old treasure is throwing out rotten fish, I would argue we want both. We want to experience the hidden treasure of forgiveness but we want to know that at least some bad fish will find their way to the discarded fish pile.

Jesus lived in the tension of two biblical traditions. He understood God’s anger at our disobedience—the first half of Isaiah is a good example—and he embodied the forgiveness of God found in the latter half of Isaiah. He was drawn to the impulse that somehow the good would prosper and the wicked would suffer (see Matthew 25) and he was busy forgiving everyone he met, sinners of every variety.

And we too live in this tension. When a civil war on the edge of Europe results in the death of innocent air travelers, it is easy to feel rage and far harder to imagine how to apply God’s confounding grace to such a crime. And I don’t think we should even try to solve this problem—at least not right away. Instead, the parable of the storeroom full of treasure, both new and old reminds us that anger at disobedience has at least a place in our response along with the abiding goal to forgive.

The modern mind wants to decide, old school versus new school, judgment or grace, anger or forgiveness—when in fact, there is a storehouse in our tradition that says we have old and new treasure, different approaches to the same problem. And rather than decide, we are invited to ponder both, the consider both, to allow both to live in our imagination for a time.

Then, and only then, can we fully understand hidden treasure, surprizing abundance, and confounding grace. Thanks be to God. Amen.