Foundry United
Rev.
“Secrets of the Kingdom: The Parables of Matthew 13”
Sunday, February 27,
2011
Rev.
The Secrete of Buying and Selling
Matthew 13:44-45
The kingdom of heaven is precious.
In all of Scripture, Jesus never comes right out and says plainly what the kingdom of heaven is. Jesus tells his disciples "To you is given to know the secrets of the Kingdom of heaven." But Jesus does not give a definition of the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus uses only metaphors, images, and parables to describe the kingdom of heaven. He has no literal definition. He tells stories.
Jesus tells a story about a sower sowing seed. God is like a sower who sows seeds of love, and they fall on hard and thorny places in our heart, and do not take root. But God is a sower who is so extravagant that God just keeps sowing until some seeds fall on soft and tender places in our hearts and takes root, and the seed that falls on good ground brings forth a harvest of grain 100 fold or 60 or 30. This love that is born into the world when God's love grows in our hearts is the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus tells another story. God is a farmer and an enemy plants weeds in his wheat field. There are weeds growing in the wheat fields of our lives. But the farmer does not focus on the weeds. The farmer focuses instead on the wheat. The wheat growing in our lives is the kingdom of God.
Jesus uses the image of yeast, because God's love isn't just a seed that grows quietly and unobtrusively. God is like a woman who puts a little yeast in a big batch of dough and the yeast bubbles, and ferments, and agitates, and transforms the dough into something malleable that God can knead and shape. The fermentation is the kingdom of heaven.
And now Jesus tells two more parables in Matthew 13, verses 44 and 45: one about a man who discovers buried treasurer in a field and who joyfully sells everything he owns to buy that field.
And another about a pearl merchant who one day finds the perfect pearl, and she sells everything she owns to buy the pearl of great value.
The kingdom of heaven is precious. To live in the kingdom of heaven we need to know what is precious and what isn't.
Love is precious. If there is someone who loves you and whom you love, that is a treasure that is a priceless pearl.
I would sell everything I own for Jane. Who among us would not give up every material possession we have for our spouse, partner, children, grandchildren, and loved ones? There is just nothing more precious than love.
When we are thinking clearly, we are eternally grateful for every experience of love we are given. Love is the kingdom of heaven. It is precious.
I was visiting someone in the hospital once who was a workaholic, like many of you are. Due to his illness, it had been sometime since he had been able to work, and he realized that the possibility existed that he might never be able to go back to work again. It made him wonder, he said, whether it was right for him to go on living – to take the resources of society without being able to give back.
Then, he said, someone would come visit him in the hospital and communicate to him how much his friendship meant to him or her, and it gave him the will to go on.
We literally hold other people's lives in our hands. Our expressions of love and caring can literally influence whether others have the will to live.
In the summer of 2002, nine coal miners were trapped in a half-flooded chamber in a coal mine near Somerset, PA. I don't know what Chilean coal miners are like, but I know what Pennsylvania coal miners are like. I had a summer job during college in a paint factory. Most of the other workers in the factory were former coal miners.
I watched CNN every day in July 2002 when those miners were trapped in the mine because I know those men. When the rescuers broke through to the chamber where they were trapped, the first thing the miners asked for was chewing tobacco?
Chewing tobacco. I know these men. I worked with them. I played poker with them one time one summer during college. It was the only time. They showed the college guy no mercy and I needed my pay checks. I went out with them after work a few times, but after the first time, I always left early. They drank boiler-makers; Yuengling beer and Canadian Club. And you did not want to be in a bar with them too late at night because the night could get dangerous. They were the toughest of tough guys.
I doubt anybody else remembers this. Do you know what saved the Pennsylvania coal miners' lives when they were trapped in the half-flooded chamber of a mine in the summer of 2002? Whenever anyone of them was on the edge of hypothermia, the others would surround him and hold him in their arms until the danger was past.
I know those men and when I heard about them saving each other's lives by holding each other in their arms, it made me cry.
I heard an NPR reporter talk about her experiences covering the war in Iraq. She traveled with a group of Marines. The days were tense, constant anxiety. They lost a man to a booby trap, she said. And the nights were freezing cold.
She paused. "I don't know if they would want me to share this," she said. But then she did. "At night," she said, "to stay warm, they cuddled." Marines. Marines.
We are all trapped in a coal mine, and the water is cold, and the only thing that will save us is if, when any one of us is about to freeze, if we will surround them and hold them in our arms.
We are in the midst of a war and we are terrorized and freezing, and the only way we will survive is if we cuddle.
Love literally saves our lives. It is precious.
The kingdom of heaven is like a man who finds buried treasure in a field and sells everything he owns and sells it willingly and joyfully to buy that field.
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant who discovers the perfect jewel and sells everything she owns to buy that jewel and does it willingly and joyfully.
The secret of the kingdom of heaven is knowing what to buy and what to sell. The secret is knowing what to hold on to and what to let go of. It is knowing what is precious and what isn't.
Do you ever let what you do for a pay check during the day put you in such a bad place that it ruins the time you have at night with the people you love?
Do unimportant things ever get in the way of the most precious parts of your life?
I had an encounter not long ago with Bank of America. They called here at church and left a message that either I or Jane Malone had to call them back immediately. They said you needed to call them back immediately, Kirsten, who took the call, told me. Immediately. So I did.
I got someone and told her I was returning a call. She looked up my name and then told me to call another number. I did.
When I dialed that number, I got a recording telling me that someone would be with me shortly and 14 minutes later someone was. After a few minutes of being on hold while someone checked my records, she told me that we had underpaid our mortgage payment by $78.43. Because we had underpaid, they had allocated our entire payment toward principle, not interest, so we were 2 days behind on our payment and owed them not only the payment but late penalties.
I said we do automatic payments, how could this have happened? She put me on hold for another 5 minutes. They had apparently adjusted our payment amount at the end of the year but we had not gotten the message.
How can you change our payment amount, not inform us, and then penalize us for not paying the right amount? I asked. And then call me at my place at work with an emergency message for me or my wife, who doesn't even work here, to call back immediately?
When I couldn't get it straightened out, I asked to speak to a supervisor and I spent another 20-some minutes listening to the pretty music before a supervisor got around to me.
It took a couple of days to get it straightened out. If you needed pastoral care during those two days, I hope you got it from Dee because you would not have gotten decent pastoral care from me. I let Bank of America ruin two days of my life. Understand Bank of America did not ruin two days of my life. I allowed Bank of America to ruin two days of my life.
Living in the kingdom of heaven is not letting what isn't precious divert your attention and energy from what is. I did not have to let Bank of America ruin two days of my life.
Living in the kingdom of heaven here and now is all about knowing what to buy and what to sell.
There is one thing about these parables in Matthew 13:44 and 45 that have bothered me. When I was an editor it used to drive me crazy when my writers did not follow the basic principle of writing called parallelism. Parallelism requires that we follow the same syntactical order when we list things.
This is what has been bothering me about these parables in Matthews 13:44 and 45.
In the parable of the sower in the beginning of the chapter, the sower obviously refers to God. In the parable of the farmer and the wheat and weed, the farmer obviously refers to God. In the parable of the woman in her kitchen who puts yeast in the dough, the woman obviously refers to God.
But suddenly in these parables in verses 44 and 45, the man who finds treasurer in the field and the merchant who discovers the pearl of great price refers to us. They refer to humanity. The kingdom of heaven is so precious to us that we ought to be willing to give everything we own to experience it.
But this is not parallel expression. When I was an editor I would send this back to the writer and demand a rewrite. I'd send it back to Matthew and say rewrite your gospel. Make the structure of your Gospel parallel.
This bothered me until a strange thought came to me. What if it were parallel.
What if the man who found the buried treasure and sold everything to buy the field was God? What if the merchant who sold everything she owned to buy the pearl of great value was God?
What if Jesus was trying to tell us in these parables that the kingdom of love is so precious to God that God would give up everything else to be part of it. That God would leave the divine throne of power and glory for the sake of the kingdom of love in our midst.
What if love were so precious to God that God was willing to sell the riches of glory and to buy a place in the kingdom of love. What if God were to decide to become a human being and dwell among us in order to plant the seed of love in our hearts? What if?
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