July 27, 2008
Pentecost 11, Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
I have a good friend from college who has her PhD as a school psychologist. So she not only knows all those theories about childhood development, but also has worked with enough kids of all ages and abilities that she can actually put all that stuff into practice. And it just so happens that she has 4 children under the age of 6. They are wonderful kids – sweet and polite, rambunctious but not overwhelming, remarkably kind to one another. She stays home with the kids, but also finds time to keep up on recent scholarship in her area and do some consulting work with schools part-time. Somehow their house is neat and clean. She is organized enough to remember our birthdays. And she is generally the first one to be there for me when I need her. She even finds time to exercise. And so my friend became a sort of a model of excellence for me. One of those people that I try to watch and learn from. An inspiration that maybe one day I too will learn to juggle all of my assorted balls of human life with dignity and grace.
But then one day when I visited her, I was sharing with her my experiences of feeling sometimes overwhelmed by the challenges of kids, keeping up a house, searching for a Mary Poppins babysitter, getting things done at work to my satisfaction, finding time for my spouse and my friends. And, much to my surprise, she was no stranger to any of that. I’d had this image of her at home with her kids, always involved in a fun activity and constantly teaching them in interesting, age-appropriate ways so that they would go on to be healthy, well-adjusted, productive members of society. But it turned out that she had the same feelings as me that sometimes it was all she could do just to keep the kids alive and, with any luck, relatively happy throughout the day. She had the same struggles with balancing her family and her work, had to make the same efforts to maintain her house, her friendships and her marriage. It was a healthy realization for me, that even this woman who looked like she was completely in control had her own frustrations and struggles.
The stuff of life isn’t easy for any of us all of the time. Some people may look like they have it all together in this or that area, but the truth is, chances are that we are all struggling with something, that none of us are 100 percent satisfied with how we’re doing. And that is not only okay, it is actually unavoidable for us as humans. We can’t be great at everything, we can’t live our lives perfectly, we can’t know everything. And realizing that, and being able to admit it, is not only a good thing for open and honest human relationships, but it is absolutely critical for our relationship with God.
Maybe that’s why our Gospel for this morning makes me want to giggle. Or better yet, to give one of those big snorts of unbelieving laughter.
Here we are privy to Jesus sharing a host of parables with the disciples. In rapid-fire succession, he tells them these five things that the kingdom of heaven is like. Jesus picks interesting, earthy subjects that you can really get your hands around. A teeny seed that grows into a big tree, yeast that leavens a large mixture of flour, the treasure and the pearl that are worthy of selling everything to buy, and the net catching every kind of fish. Each one of these is worthy of thought and consideration. Each one of them have multiple applications that can give us deep insights into God’s kingdom. I feel like for each one I could stop and ponder for a good while what it might mean for the way I live and the way I think about God. And most likely, whatever I’d come up with would be different in some way from the things you all would come up with.
But before they have any time at all to think about these parables, much less understand and start applying them, Jesus asks the disciples, “Have you understood all this?” And without any hesitation, without any questions, with no hemming and hawing, they quickly answer, “Yes.”
It’s as if they’re saying, “Oh, Yes, of course, Jesus. Of course we understand exactly what you mean about the Kingdom of Heaven. Now we know just how God works, just what God wants from us. Nothing that you’ve said leaves us with any questions at all.” And maybe I’m just projecting here, but I am stricken by the absurdity of that.
Not that I haven’t had my moments where I’ve claimed to understand something when really I don’t. When I worked at the law firm, there was a partner who was renowned for not making sense when he explained an assignment. Like every other associate, I’d go into his office, try to write down every word that he said, nod my head like I understood, and then go back to my office and make sense of it all.
And of course, sometimes we really think we do understand when actually we don’t. I have a friend who went to a church in D.C. for its All Souls Day service last year. She said the preacher spent the entire sermon very confidently talking about Purgatory in such great detail that his description practically went down to the color of the curtains.
I wonder which camp the disciples fell into when they assured Jesus that they understood his parables. Were they trying to look like they understood, an Emperor’s New Clothes sort of ploy where they just wanted to look as smart as the disciple next to them, and planned to think more about it all later? Or did they actually think they understood it all? Did they really believe the kingdom of heaven was as easy to pin down as their initial understanding might suggest?
And it seems like such a strange question for Jesus to ask in the first place – “Have you understood all this?” Maybe he was being ironic. Because if his parables were so easy that they didn’t spark any discussion, if any of what’s in the Bible were so simple that we could understand it on our first casual reading and stop there, wouldn’t it all be a little too shallow? Not to mention boring and without much potential for the work of the Holy Spirit.
When our Presiding Bishop, Katherine Jefforts Schiori, was in town last fall, she came to the seminary and invited clergy and lay leaders from the diocese to be with her for conversation. She gave a short introduction and then opened up the floor to any questions we might have. Which I thought was a bold move, given some of the current issues in the Episcopal Church. There were plenty of people, like me, that were just interested to meet her and hear what she had to say. But there was also a vocal minority there that was not pleased with her and came with a fairly confrontational agenda. Early on, someone asked her something about her views on the necessity of Jesus Christ for salvation, convinced that she had shown too much willingness to be in conversation with people of other faiths. I cringed, worried that she might say something that would end up in the newspapers the next morning. The last thing we need. But I just loved her answer. She talked about how we in the Christian tradition understand Jesus to be our vehicle to God. And yet, she admitted, neither she nor anyone else can really understand how that works or what it means.
I liked her willingness to admit that she didn’t have all the answers. There’s a lot about God that seems to work that way. And that makes perfect sense. Afterall, if our God is, as we say, more than we can imagine or comprehend, then understanding perfectly how God works would seem to put God into an awfully small box. Which is why I’m pretty sure that, like me, there was no way the disciples could have understood all those parables Jesus just shared with them.
The truth is that, No, there is not much about God that we understand completely. But that’s part of the mystery, part of the fun. From the seed of our understanding, or probably more realistically, from the seed of our longing to understand, God can grow a strong and steady tree capable of welcoming a multitude of others to find their homes in its branches. In the midst of feeling that we don’t understand, we are that much more open to the mystery and beauty of the leaven of God that can somehow transforms us and everything around us.
We get wonderful opportunities to know and discover God. And one piece of great news is that they come whether we are looking for them or not. Treasure came to both the pearl merchant who was looking for it and the field worker who just happened across it. But the crux of both their stories was in what came next. Would they recognize the value of their treasures and do all in their power to claim them? And, of course, the answer is “Yes.” They jumped up with joy and did everything they could to keep those treasures in their lives.
Maybe when the disciples answered “Yes” to Jesus, it was less because they’d understood every detail of what he’d said and more because they knew in their hearts the value of the treasure they had before them. And with their lives they jumped up with joy and followed him and did their best to help spread the treasure around.
And so they become for us models of faith. People like these are the ones to watch and learn from. Not because they understood every detail about God or because they appear to always have their act together – we see enough of the disciples’ foibles and misunderstandings in the Gospels to know better than that. Instead, they are our models because they are people who have discovered something about God, come into relationship with God, and started building their lives around God. How can we answer “Yes” to Jesus with our lives?
Amen.
Elizabeth Rees