Readings (click here for full text of the readings):
   1 Kings 3:5-12; Psalm 119:121-136; Romans 8:26-34; Matthew 13:31-33,44-49a

When we think of Jesus talking in parables, we usually think of long, flowery stories, with lots of detail. The Prodigal Son, full of greed, disappointment, and feasts of fatted calves.  The Good Samaritan, complete with specific descriptions that make us wonder, “In today’s world, who would be the Levite who just walked on by? Who would be the Samaritan who tended the wounded man?”  And recently we heard the Parable of the Sower – the only one that appears in all the gospels – with its four areas where the seed fell, tempting us to pay more attention to terrain conditions than to the rampant generosity of the spendthrift sower.

But today (Matthew 13:31-33,44-49a) we have five rapid-fire parables, short on detail and diverse of imagery, right on top of one another. And, speaking as the father of a 2 ½-year-old, I can understand why Jesus might have told them that way.

Because as soon as we get in the car – whether it be for a trip to the grocery store or for a long drive to see a distant relative – the first thing Catie says is, “Tell me a story, Mommy.  Tell me a story, Daddy.” Now, if it’s been a little while since the last story – which rarely happens – we might well go into great detail about the mythical adventures of Barney the Dinosaur, or Dora the Explorer.  But more often than not the last story only ended a few minutes before, and we have other things to attend to – speaking as the father of a five-month-old, as well – and sometimes I try to get away with a bare bones story. It’s not uncommon for me, too, to try throw in a little moral to it, just for good measure.

“Once upon a time,” I might say, “there was a huge purple dinosaur named Barney. And he and his parents were going on a long trip.  And somehow Barney was able to play quietly by himself the whole way, and his parents were very proud of him. The end.”

Now you can probably imagine how such a Cliffs Notes version is received.  Catie tends to say – rather loudly – “Tell me another story, Daddy.”  (She might as well have said, “Tell me a real story.”)  Or she just might cry, again rather loudly. And if I’m a good daddy and patience is in ample supply, I’ll tell her a better story the next time.  But if I’m tired and a little frustrated and wonder why I have to tell yet another story when I thought the one from an hour ago was pretty darn good and should have lasted me the better part of the day, I might tell her an equally short story. And she’ll ask for yet another, and I’ll give her more of the same. 

When it comes to stubbornness, as you can see, like father, like daughter.

And that might well have been how Jesus was feeling a couple of thousand years ago.  You see, He’d already told the people a lot of parables, and yet they didn’t understand. The log in your eye, the narrow gate, the sower, the weeds and the wheat. All with the same basic message that never got through the people’s thick heads.

“Tell me another parable, Jesus,” the people might have said. 

G.K. Chesterton, a famous Anglican, once said that if you give people an analogy that they claim they don’t understand, you should graciously offer them anther.  If they say they don’t understand that either, you should oblige them with a third. But from there, Chesterton says, if they still insist they don’t understand, the only thing left is to praise them for the one truth they have a grip on: “Yes,” you tell them, “that is quite correct.  You do not understand.”

But instead of giving up on the people, Jesus tells them another parable.  And then another. Short, rapid fire, one right after the next. And gone are the subtle nuances of the Sower, or of the Wheat and the Weeds. No extraneous details, no attempts at explanation. Yet still the familiar images, taken from everyday life, in an almost frantic attempt to get the people to understand what the kingdom of heaven is like.

First is the story of the mustard seed.  From the tiniest of seeds comes the greatest of shrubs, and finally a tree which the birds of the air can rest in. Notice that the kingdom of heaven is what is sown, not the earth it’s sown in or the tree that eventually grows.  We tend to look for the kingdom of heaven in grand, visible things.  We like to think that we have something to do with the kingdom of heaven, as if it’s one part God and one part us. But Jesus says that the kingdom is this tiny seed, before it ever hits the earth and regardless of whether it lands on thorns or rocks or the road. It’s all about the seed, not about us.

Lest the people think that the kingdom of heaven was small potatoes, Jesus told them another parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.” Now, to us, “three measures” may not seem like a whole lot. Three cups, we might think.  But three measures – three sata, in Greek – is a bushel of flour. That’s 128 cups. Or sixteen of those five-pound bags of King Arthur flour from Shaw’s. And when you add enough water to make it come together – 42 cups or so – you’ve got 101 pounds of dough!  This is a major endeavor we’re talking about here, and some serious yeast.

Speaking as an aspiring bread baker, there are three important things we need to remember about yeast. First, a little goes a long way. It doesn’t take much yeast to cause a whole lot of commotion, and change. Second, yeast affects the entire dough.  It doesn’t just affect a part of it, but the whole thing. Like the gospel, like the kingdom of heaven. It isn’t just for a few of us; it isn’t directed at the privileged, or the well-informed. Once it gets into something, it affects everything.

And, finally, yeast makes things grow, expand, rise up.  I was reminded of that when Pam and I were on our honeymoon in Italy, and I was trying to buy bread-makings at a local supermarket.  I found salt, sugar, and flour (which is farina in Italian) without a problem, but I had no idea where the yeast was, and – being a guy – I was reluctant to ask for directions.  Finally I broke down and asked a woman who worked there, but she didn’t speak a lick of English, and I didn’t speak any Italian.  Finally, desperate, I said, “Farina, whoosh!”, and her eyes lit up, and she said, “Ah! Levitaté!”  Levitaté.

Discovery. Connection.  Overcoming a language barrier.  Rising up, in a wood-fired oven, and on the last day. Yeast.

(In case you hadn’t noticed, that was a modern parable for you.)

Without even pausing, Jesus gives them another one: “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.”  We need to look closely at what that one says: a man found a treasure in a field, hid it, and then sold everything he had in order to buy that field. But notice that it doesn’t say where he hid the treasure, once he found it.  There’s no reason to suspect he hid it in the same field where he found it in the first place.  And that’s the point that Jesus is getting across – the kingdom of heaven is so precious that once we find it we never want to risk losing it, but we’re also so grateful that we’ll give up our entire lives to buy, and tend, and nurture the field where it first came into our lives. 

The kingdom is all about generosity. We don’t hoard our salvation.  We don’t pretend that nothing’s changed. We throw caution to the wind and place all our trust in God, giving up everything we have except the one thing that matters most. We give back to what – and who – gave us eternal life in the first place.

Next comes the story of the pearl of great price, which I’ve talked about in other sermons.  I mentioned that I call people who drive me absolutely crazy “pearls,” because they offer me the valuable opportunity to be patient and forgiving.  I didn’t expect so many people, as they filed out of the church that day, to ask me if they were one of my pearls. Trust me, there aren’t any of that kind of pearl here.

And, finally, we come to the parable of the net. Interestingly, the word Matthew uses for “net” appears nowhere else in the entire Bible, and it refers to a net that’s dragged along, picking up everything in its path.  And I mean everything, because the parable – in the original Greek – never uses the word “fish.”  It just says that the net picked up “every kind of thing.”  Tires, milk cartons, bottles with messages in them – everything.

This tells us a lot about the church should be.  The church shouldn’t be like a sport fisherman who’s looking for the biggest and best fish there is.  The church isn’t about being choosy.  And it also tells us that we’re not supposed to do the sorting out as we go along. We don’t sift through the net on a moment-to-moment basis. We wait until the net is full, and only then do we haul it in, old tires and all.  Then we take it ashore, and sit down, and let God do the sifting.

Why God? Because the choice isn’t so simple.  The English translation talks about keeping the good and throwing out the bad, but the Greek words Matthew uses are a bit unusual. He doesn’t use the common Greek word for good that means “doing the right thing;” instead, the word he uses means fair, or beautiful. And the word translated as “bad” doesn’t refer to doing bad things; it’s a word used only five times in the Bible, and it means corrupt, unattractive, or inappropriate. So, in the parable, it’s not like the goodie-goodies are kept and the rebels are tossed out.  It’s not about what you did, it’s about how the person choosing feels about you.  To continue with the imagery, the chooser might toss a fish if he already has too many of that kind, and he might keep an old tire if he needs something to weigh down a tarp. 

And, thank goodness, the person choosing is God. Which tells us that we keep whatever’s in our net, because we can’t be sure what God will keep or throw out. That’s not our decision.

So it seems like there’s a lot to learn from just a few brief, perhaps exasperated parables. But what I keep coming back to is the story of the yeast – perhaps that’s the baker in me. And as all bakers know, processed yeast is a new invention. In the old days you couldn’t just go buy yeast in the supermarket.  You had to rely on what’s already there, hidden deep within the flour. Because there’s wild yeast in there, but you have to cultivate it, nurture it, let it grow and expand in the way it was meant to. Just like the treasure was hidden in the field, so the yeast is hidden in the flour. (In fact, the Greek word for “mixed in” literally means hidden in – the woman hid the yeast in the flour.)

And so it is with the kingdom of God.  It’s not some magic ingredient that we add to inert flour to make it grow. It’s already in there, from the beginning, from the creation.  It’s within each of us, and what God calls us to do is nurture it, so that we can grow, and rise and become what He always intended us to be. That, as Jesus said many times in many ways, is the kingdom of heaven.

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