Sermon for 6 Pentecost 7/24/2011

The Gospel reading for today is the third in a three week series
from the 13th chapter of Matthew,
a whole long chapter of the parables of Jesus about the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Kingdom of Heaven –
and it is good to note here that these parables are not about the heaven
people often think of as where you go after you die if you’ve been good.

No, this is the Kingdom of Heaven at hand,
obviously then not a political kingdom or system of government,
and not the pearly gates,
but something else that seems intangible or cloaked or undiscerned.

So Jesus tells these stories, these parables
that those with spiritual perception will pick up on,
parables not entirely apparent on the surface reading,
but loaded with depth of insight and meaning.

In today’s selection we have five short parables.
Let’s look at one of them.

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field,
which someone found and hid;
then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.”

Notice that there is the field, and there is the treasure hidden in the field –
two different things.

The field could be good acreage for planting a crop
or full of boulders and weeds
or covered by trees and flowers.
There could have been an old barn in the field
or a lovely building of good architectural design and functionality.

But it wasn’t any of this that made the field so valuable
that someone would go and sell all that he has
in order to buy that field.
One might observe that the treasure that this someone found and hid again
was worth more than what he could raise even by selling all that he had,
and worth far more than the field in itself.

In this parable the kingdom of heaven is not like the field,
but like the hidden treasure.
The field has a value of its own, but it can’t compare with the treasure.

Now I am thinking that the Church can be described in terms of this parable.
The Church in general.
The Church is the field, an expanse of a piece of property
possibly with grass and trees and flowers
and a building on the land of particular design and functionality.
It has its value, but this is not the kingdom of heaven.

The kingdom of heaven is hidden within it, hidden – oddly enough,
too often obscured from sight, a treasure waiting to be discovered,
a treasure of such value that those who find it
are willing to sell all in order to have it.

How perplexing and disturbing it has been for me
through all my years of ministry
in so many different local congregations,
that so many come to church and don’t see past the field to the treasure.

After all, it is not the field – that is, the church building and its grounds –
that will save you.

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field…”

So what exactly is the kingdom of heaven?
if we are not talking about heaven when you die,
or a kingdom like a political system of government.

The answer, like the treasure in the field, is hidden in plain sight.

Look at Jesus.

Look at the one who was saying, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
Everything he said and did exhibited what the kingdom of heaven is like,
the values and qualities, the potency and effectiveness,
the actuality and the truth of the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus, the Good Shepherd, healing all who came to him,
liberating those who were oppressed and bound by demonic forces,
transforming awareness and teaching truth,
teaching reality breaking through self-deception,
Jesus expressing the Love of God
and Jesus confronting,
confronting hypocrisy, closed-handedness, hard heartedness, and lack of faith,
O ye of little faith,
all the ways in which we contract away from the generosity of life
endowed upon us by our Creator
and respond with a miserly littleness of attitude and action.

Look at Jesus, everything he did and everything he said,
and especially at the incredibly generous and selfless way
he poured out his whole life.
Look at the Cross and look at the Resurrection
and look at the sending of the Holy Spirit.
Were it not for this universal and eternal saving action of Christ
holding all that is together right now,
the whole world would burn itself up in the insanity of all the violence.

Look, look! The world, the people in it, are totally crazy,
drunk with violence and greed and contention
and tight-fisted, self-centered, hardness of heart
in relationship of one to another,
whether we are talking about nations or individuals.

The treasure is here, present among us,
veiled in bread and wine,
expressed in words and actions that flow out of that love which is real,
that love which God is.

The treasure is here, present with us,
hidden in the words of the Epistle lesson for today
until we read them and see them and get it.

“The Spirit helps us in our weakness; [Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome]
for we do not know how to pray as we ought,
but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”

Those who regularly practice the spiritual disciplines of prayer and meditation
know what this means.
What a treasure! God the Holy Spirit praying within us!
“…interced(ing) for the saints according to the will of God.”
Open your Bibles and read these words from the 8th chapter of Romans.

And look, all of us who are of little faith, look at these words:

“We know that all things work together for good for those who love God,
who are called according to his purpose.”

and
“Who will separate us from the love of Christ?
Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine,
or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
… No, in all these things we are more than conquerors
through him who loved us.
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers,
nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,
nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,
will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Where IS our faith?
In the temporal things of this world that we can see?
Or in the treasure hidden in the field?

Want an example of what I mean by temporal?
although I know that we all can name examples.

Consider the Old Testament story today
in this summer-long series of readings
from the stories about the patriarchs in Genesis.

Jacob, the trickster, Jacob, whose name means trickster, gets tricked.

Well, what goes around, comes around.
Jacob tricked his brother Esau out of his birthright and blessing.
Now Laban does a bait and switch trick on Jacob
to get another seven years of service out of him. Shrewd.
It’s definitely the way of the world –
temporal actions for temporal value for temporal results,
and tricks of deception motivated by greed and hardness of heart.

Yet stay tuned for next week’s installment:
God will work with Jacob until he has his trickiness wrestled out of him.
Then Jacob will be more useful in his destined role as a patriarch of faith.
Ah, that which is eternal, not temporal – the treasure, not the field.

There, that is an example of temporal.
Now an example of that which is not temporal but eternal.

I quote from the diocesan news magazine, Episcopal Voice,
that just came out, page 9, from an article by our own Hunt Priest:

“I live and work in one of the ‘good neighborhoods,’
which means I have to be very intentional to remember,
make real and live out solidarity with the poor,
whether in my own life or in the life of the congregation I serve
as priest and pastor.
Our prayers, our work and our political influence for ‘the least of these’ –
the poor, the hungry, the elderly, children, immigrants –
must be central to our identity as Christians.
Otherwise, we no longer identify with those Jesus cared most about.”

"The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed
that someone took and sowed in his field;
it is the smallest of all the seeds,
but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree,
so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches."

"The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took
and mixed in with three measures of flour [not just one, but THREE measures]
until all of it was leavened."

The Kingdom of Heaven is about absurd abundance
from what initially appeared so small,
not the closed handedness of a scarcity mentality exhibiting little faith.

One is real and the other is not.
One is eternal and the other is business as usual on the temporal plane.

And let us remember these words from the collect for today:
may we so pass through the things temporal,
that we lose not the things eternal.
Amen.

Sermon for 3 Pentecost 7/3/2011

"Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me;
for I am gentle and humble in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

Yes! These are words we like to hear, words of great comfort.

But look at them in their context,
that is, how they fit in with the words that come before them,
and that will show us even more
about what these beautiful words mean.

That is, it’s not just rest, getting some R and R, taking a vacation,
that these words are all about.
No, there is a lot more than meets the eye.

These words, at the end of a whole chapter about controversy
over just who Jesus was, and who John the Baptist was.
Some saw them both as great prophets,
but those with the theological backgrounds had lots of considerations, because, first of all,
John the Baptist was this strange man
coming out of the Judean desert
with bits of grasshopper wings and dribbles of honey
in his untrimmed beard,
preaching sermons full of fire and brimstone and name calling.
Then Jesus comes along,
having called a tax-collector, to be one of his disciples,
a collaborator with an oppressive foreign regime,
Jesus eating and drinking with all sorts of low life.

Jesus certainly did not fit the observance of worship of God
or keeping of Torah, the Law,
as did those highly respected religious leaders,
like the clergy and the theologians
and congregational leaders, that is, the Pharisees,
known for the examples of how they lived upstanding lives.

But nevertheless what Jesus was saying and doing
galvanized many into following him about
to hear him preach and watch him heal.
And lives were being transformed,
people were being healed
and liberated in ways that opened their understanding
to experiencing the Kingdom of God present in their midst,
while at the same time
those who were so much into their practice of religion
were taking affront with this that was going on with Jesus
as irregular, immoral and uncontrolled.

So Jesus says,
"I give thanks to you, Father, Lord of the heaven and of the earth,
because you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent
and have revealed them to infants;
yes, Father, for it was delightful before you, this that was coming to be."

So it's not the head knowledge that the wise and intelligent have,
but what can be called “heart” knowledge,
that is able to comprehend and take in the revelation of God.

“…revealed them to infants…” he said.
The word here is not just implying having child-like faith.

This is the word for new born babies,
those who have just experienced a MAJOR paradigm shift,
emerging from a tight, confined life space
into a whole new world of experiences
for which they do not have any words,
no way to express what it is they are experiencing yet.
Those who followed Jesus around listening to what he said,
to all the outlandish things he was saying in parables,
got jolted into whole new ways of looking at things.

They were shedding all the overlays of enculturation, of sophistication,
of all the commonly held beliefs about how life is supposed to work.
They were going through a MAJOR paradigm shift
about what their religion and faith practice was all about,
all revealed through Jesus. Infants.

So Jesus says,
"All things have been handed over to me by my Father;
and no one knows the Son except the Father,
and no one knows the Father except the Son
and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."

And this is the direct context for the familiar words that follow,
which will tell us how the Son reveals the Father to us.

"Come to me, all those spent with labor and burdened,
those for whom life isn’t working out,
and I will give you rest.
- literally, I will cause you to rest, to come to a stop.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me;
for I am meek and humble in heart,
- meek! Jesus meek?
In Greek the word means unassuming or without ego investment,
gentle, kind, forgiving, humane
and so totally absorbed in Divine Presence
that there is no violence, no aggression at all within him – meek
- and humble, lowly,
meaning that there is no pride or focus on self in Jesus,
and so he opens the way, gives accessibility to the Father -
and you will find rest for your souls.
- in the Greek literally it is a place of rest
where is this place? in Jesus' heart, a place of open access to God -
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

Rest is promised.
We have dreams of Jesus soothing our brow,
taking our hand and patting it, saying,
"There, there. Put your feet up."

Rest is promised, but it’s a strange way to get rest:
"Take my yoke upon you…"
Take up a yoke, an instrument for bearing more work and burden.

Take my yoke … and learn from me…" enter into discipleship with me.
This is how the Son reveals the Father to us.
Through the learning process of a yoke, our submission.
By submitting to a yoke of obedience,
one will have the Kingdom of God open into your awareness.
You don’t like that word submission? Too bad.
There’s truth here. Just be with it.

But this yoke is not a yoke of work or effort, of striving and exhaustion,
The rest Jesus offers is in a yoke of obedience and with a burden to carry;
it is in this discipleship, he says, that you will be led to rest and refreshment.

Why do we make it such work then?

We generally don't get it about discipleship;
we may think it must be a heavy load.
The point being made here is that it's not hard,
and it's actually refreshing and restful.

Submission and discipleship actually are very liberating.

By now it should be apparent
that the access point is the heart, not the head,
because we are speaking paradoxes here, not logical sense.
It has to be revealed to us by the Spirit of Jesus through grace
a whole new perspective to address this confusing, frustrating way
in which we habitually live.

We all can to some degree or another identify with
St. Paul’s classic description of the human predicament
described in the Epistle reading from Romans for today.

To paraphrase, I want to do what is right, but find that I can’t,
because there is such disharmony within me
that one part of me is at war with another part of me.
Paul realizes that it is only through intervention beyond himself
that he is saved out of all that.

“The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free
from the law of sin and of death,” Paul states.

The yoke of the Spirit of life in Jesus has set you free
from the wearisome burden of struggle
to extricate yourself from the deadening and life-draining labor
of living life all on one’s own.

“Come to me, all you that are weary…
…my yoke is easy…”

It comes to me that this is all another way of saying,
“Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and its righteousness,
and all these things shall be added unto you.”

The result is the same – the revealing of God.
The yoke helps us to be guided into harmony, alignment,
so that this reality of the divine comes into focus for us.

The yoke is easy; there is no effort, no striving.
Someone Else is doing the heavy work.

May it not be said of us what Jesus said to the crowd,
“To what will I compare this generation?
It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another,
‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.’”
Why won’t you come play my game with me?

“Come to me,” Jesus says to us, “all you who are weary,
and I’ll bring all your striving to a stop,
and in sitting still, in obedient submission
all the treasures of heaven will be revealed,
the Divine Presence will be in your awareness,
and then you will find rest for your soul.”