The Kingdom and the Way

Propers: The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 17), A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

What is the Kingdom of Heaven like? It is like the mighty empires of ancient and modern times? Or is it more like the Way of Jesus—small, disheveled, largely unwanted, yet somehow overcoming even death itself?

We know what we want the Kingdom to be like, generally speaking. We want it to say great things and do great things and build great things. We want it to be strong and wealthy and influential and respected. In other words, power. When we look for the Kingdom, we look for its power.

This is nothing new. You can see it in every age, every place: in gaudy crystal cathedrals; in the fighting bishops of medieval times; even in the Israel of Jesus’ own day. In the time of the Gospels, Israel had been conquered by Rome, the latest and greatest in a succession of world-sprawling empires which had run roughshod over God’s people for the preceding several centuries.

Rome was strong, ruthless, inventive, and civilized. They cared about money and control, about peace through the sword. Indeed, their role in the Middle East 2000 years ago eerily presages our own. And ancient Israel was having none of it. You know how religious fanatics are in the Fertile Crescent. They didn’t have the technology, but they surely had the zeal. And for them the Kingdom of God was at hand, just as the prophets had promised from of old.

And that Kingdom, by God, would look like an army, like the Maccabees, a band of faithful followers who would drive out the pagan Romans by fire and sword, reinstituting the kingdom and the empire of David, a new, old, pure theocracy. And when the fires cooled, and the blood dried, and the incense wafted up once again—then at last we would have peace, over the bones of everyone who got in the way.

This is why they wanted a warrior messiah, why we still do today. We are inheritors both of Israel and Rome. We believe in the myth of redemptive violence, of peace through power, of necessary sacrifice and acceptable collateral damage.

And this is also why we killed Christ. Judas handed Him over to try to force His hand, to make Him fight, make Him be the warrior whom we all wanted God to be. And the bureaucracy of Rome calmly, methodically, mercilessly murdered Him out of political and economic expedience—to nip another would-be messiah in the bud.

But the Way of Jesus Christ is not the way of empire. And the Kingdom of Heaven He brings down to earth is not the militant faith we so readily prefer, with our strong-man fantasies and our cult of sacrificial youth. Rather, the Kingdom of Heaven is beyond anything that we could imagine, anything that words could describe. And when attempting to speak of something beyond words—well, it seems that we have to use rather a lot of words.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed,” sayeth the Lord. Not like an oak or sequoia. Not like a mighty wall erected for homeland security. But like a mustard seed—like some tiny little spicy speck. A weed, really, considered unclean by the religious establishment—because mustard is wild and unruly. Once you plant it in your garden, it respects no boundaries, observes no borders. It spreads and infects and takes over.

And eventually it grows up to become a shelter even for the birds of the air—an unwanted shrub here become a tree, to rival even the cedars of Lebanon. In the Hebrew Bible, trees are consistently metaphors for kingdoms and for peoples. Here then is a new Kingdom, a weed-kingdom, a spice-kingdom. Here is something the mighty cannot stop.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast,” a micro-organism, a defilement. To make bread or beer in the ancient world, one needed yeast, yet one did not find such things in little dry packets in the baked goods aisle. One made yeast by taking a pinch of dough and letting it go bad—letting it putrefy. Just a bit, mind you, a tiny morsel of corruption. But when you kneed that back into three full measures of flour, the entire dough would be leavened, brought to life.

Civilization began with agriculture, which began with bread and beer, which began with yeast. So small you can’t see it; and when you can it’s rather gross. Yet this is the very thing that keeps us all alive, that feeds and nourishes us, that brings us joy. The Kingdom of Heaven is like that—invisible, unsavory, yet powerful in being so small.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure hidden in a field,” valuables obscured by dirt, invisible, unknown, yet once discovered prove worth everything you have and more. “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a pearl of great price,” again, a tiny, hidden thing, a mere pinprick of beauty, worth giving everything to possess.

“Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind”—something common, something lowly, something workaday which nevertheless reaps superabundant reward, gathering in together both the good and the bad for later discernment, later purification.

The Kingdom of God is not like an empire, which cares only for profits and never for people; which distracts its own unwashed masses with power politics and primal tribal fears; which enforces its will with a network of military bases spanning the globe; and which says that might makes right, that the strong do as they will while the weak suffer what they must. And this they call freedom.

The Kingdom of God is not like a preacher who flies around in Gulfstream jets, nor a bishop festooned with gold and jewels. It is not like the worship of mammon, defining ourselves by consumption, by our preferences, purchases, or politics. The Kingdom of God is not like Rome, or Washington, or even Jerusalem.

The Kingdom of God looks like Christ: like a wandering, nonviolent Galilean; a rabbi from the desert who healed the sick and taught the ignorant and lifted up the poor; who fearlessly spoke truth to power, and laid down His life for the salvation of the very people who murdered Him—namely, you and me.

If you want to look for God, do not look up, but down. That’s where you’ll find Him—in the poor, the forgotten, the oppressed, the sinner, the outsider, the immigrant, the very young and the very old. In Christ has God come down.

The Kingdom of God is like the vast ocean, which is the lord of 10,000 rivers because it lies beneath them all.

The Kingdom of God is like a stream, which bends effortlessly around the rocks in its path—and thereby whittles the rocks away.

The Kingdom of God is like a queen whose subjects complain of caterpillars. She watches the little worms closely and finds thereby the secret to harvesting silk.

The Kingdom of God is like a boxer, who uses his opponent’s own strength against him.

The Kingdom of God is like an emperor who learns to rule by watching a peasant boy care lovingly for his horse.

The Kingdom of God is like a valley hidden between two great mountains, which collects their runoff to produce an abundance of food which the mountains themselves could never supply.

The Kingdom of God is like a virus, which cares not for politics or posturing, but simply spreads, quietly and unseen, until it reaches to the far corners of the cosmos.

The Kingdom of God is like a quiet country church, small and unimpressive in the eyes of all who pass it by, yet which the King of All Kings and Creator of All Worlds dutifully attends, with great solemnity and a smile, each and every Sunday morning.

The Kingdom of God is like a Man on a Cross whose own death made death die.

Let he who has ears to hear listen.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Credit where credit is due: several parables above are drawn from The Te of Piglet, and the image from the podcast "A Christian Reads the Tao Te Ching."