Thy Kingdom Come

 

If there’s one thing that Jesus talks about in the Gospels, it’s the “Kingdom of Heaven.” He seems to want us to give our all for it, to ask God for it with all our hearts. We dutifully pray every Sunday the words that Jesus taught us, “Thy Kingdom come ... on earth as it is in heaven.” But do we know what we’re praying for? Will we be able to recognize it when we see it?

When I look at the news headlines, it sure doesn’t look much like the Kingdom of Heaven around here. Where is it hiding? Where do I have to go to find it?  If you had asked Christian theologians throughout much of Christianity about the Kingdom of Heaven, they would have said that God’s Kingdom is to be found in the next world, after we die. They would point out that this world is a temporary stop on our journey toward God’s Heavenly Kingdom. In a world filled with war, famine, poverty, slavery, disease, corrupt rulers, and lives cut short, they found little room for heaven on earth. For much of Christian history, we taught that our goal in life should be to escape this world, to live in such a way that God might grant us access to God’s heavenly Kingdom, where all would be put right. Such an interpretation would have been a surprise to Jesus, though, who was clearly speaking about an earthly reality, a divine rule of love opposed to the oppressive rule of Caesar.

These days, many Christians don’t even like to use the word, “kingdom.” Kings are out of vogue—they represent hierarchy and imperialism and male dominance. You’ll read and hear liturgies that speak, instead, of God’s “reign” (spelled R-E-I-G-N). Unfortunately, that phrase often sounds to my ears like a heavenly weather forecast: You know, “Cloudy, with God’s thunder and God’s rain.” Other liturgists leave out the “g” in kingdom, calling it the “Kin-dom of Heaven,” as in “a world in which we are all kin, all equals.” Presiding Bishop Curry, among others, likes to call it, “God’s dream for the world.” Another preacher defines it as the name for Creation when Creation is rightly-ordered by the goodness of God.[1] I like the image of God’s Kingdom being a world made new. Yet, when we make the Kingdom of Heaven into a perfect world on earth, we can also start thinking that it’s a human project, that it’s something we have to create for God. To me, that makes the Kingdom sound more like a burden than a gift.

Rather than drawing us a map to the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus uses parables to help us find it. He asks us to use our imaginations to intuit a Kingdom hiding in plain sight.[2] Think of these five short parables in today’s Gospel as Instagram reels with the sound turned off—as short, homemade film clips of common things, that present our imaginations with some images, one after the other. Close your eyes now if you’d like—not for a nap--but to watch the reels unfold, jumble around in your brain, and lead us to that crazy divine Kingdom that is already .... but not yet ... here.

 “When you say ‘kingdom of heaven,’ Jesus begins, “picture a tiny grain of mustard seed, the minute speck that turns into unwieldy bushes that sprout up everywhere like weeds. Look, here’s a farmer methodically planting his crops in nice, neat rows. That’s not my Father’s Kingdom! Instead, picture a farmer deliberately throwing mustard seed in a wheat field where it doesn’t belong! By planting invasive mustard, this farmer’s risking chaos by mixing ‘kinds’ of crops together, breaking the Law of Moses. He’s risking failure by planting a weed that will contaminate his wheat harvest. OK, now, imagine the majestic, tall cedar tree of Lebanon, with sturdy boughs that provide a home for birds from far and wide. It's often a symbol of powerful, strong nations, welcoming other nations under its shade. But that’s not my Father’s Kingdom! Instead, picture the birds finding safety and shelter among the weak, drooping branches of a four-foot tall mustard bush. Seek God’s Kingdom among the weak and insignificant, the unruly and the wild. By the way, if you don’t know about planting mustard …. maybe you can imagine a computer virus, a little bitty equation, that gets dropped into a computer system. It brings banks and governments to their knees.”

“Here’s another reel to watch,” offers Jesus. “Picture a royal herald announcing the triumphal entry of the emperor and his court with trumpets and fanfare. That’s not how my Father’s Kingdom will come. No, picture instead a lowly housewife picking up a tiny piece of decaying bread, called leaven. This bit of bread has been sitting in a damp, dark place until it is full of mold. The woman  quietly hides it in a massive amount of flour. As the mold spreads in that huge vat of flour, watch this dough rise into at least 110 pounds of warm, delicious bread. This much bread could feed 150 hungry people![3] Watch God’s Kingdom slowly multiply beyond our understanding, breaking down the boundaries of pure and impure, of holy and corrupt, feeding us all along the way. By the way, does this reel remind you of the story about the crucified criminal who becomes the messiah, the story where death becomes the way to eternal life, the story where suffering leads to glory?[4] That’s the way to get to God’s Kingdom and be fed.”

“Ready for another reel? Picture someone receiving a sudden reward. See the joy on his face? Can you see the shiver of delight that rushes through him all the way to his fingertips? Imagine someone picking a winning lottery ticket, receiving an unexpected kiss, learning that a tumor is benign. That person didn’t do anything to earn the money, or the love, or the good news. We don’t see the end of the story to know that they did the right thing with it, once they have the reward in their all-too-human hands. Now, imagine a construction worker, digging in the heat in a field.  His shovel unexpectedly hits the top of a chest full of gold coins. What can be better than that! But wait, the field doesn’t belong the worker. As an employee, can he keep the coins? Doesn’t he have to return the treasure to the owner of the field? Picture the worker quickly covering the coins back up with dirt, hiding them with sod, and pawning everything that he owns to buy the field before he announces his miraculous find to anyone. If he buys the land, the treasure that brings such joy will belong to him undisputed and forever …. But wait! Don’t his sneaky actions make him shifty person, deserving of punishment rather than reward? But yet, he’s rewarded anyway!”

“Now, imagine a rich art dealer who finds the most beautiful painting in the world, the perfect one that she’s been searching for in auction after auction, all of her life. She wants its beauty so badly that she sells her gallery, her house, and her car in order to buy it. She has her painting—but what was she thinking? Now, except for the painting, she’s totally broke! Remember the story about the medieval Church, selling the free gift of forgiveness of sins in order to fill its coffers with gold? Indulgences, they were called.  Remember the old song from the ‘60’s about the people with the One Tin Soldier who kill everyone in the mountain kingdom for their secret treasure—their treasure that turns out to be a stone inscribed with “Peace on Earth?” Love is a treasure, a treasure that we didn’t earn, a treasure worth giving everything for …. but it’s not a treasure that can be bought and sold, or possessed in some perfect way. It’s an undeserved gift, a joy worth everything, and always a surprise.”

“Ready for one last reel? Picture a big net full of bounty from the sea, ready to be sorted. Is this net the Church? A big net, full of all kinds of people, people that we have to accept with a sigh until the final judgment, when God will give the rotten ones what’s coming to them? Is the Church God’s Kingdom? No ... As the Kingdom, God’s net must be bigger than the Church and bigger than we could ever imagine. We the Church are just one of those sea creatures in there, one that has yet to prove by its actions whether it is fresh or rotten.[5]”

Today’s Gospel parables show us that there’s nothing clear-cut about the Kingdom of Heaven or our place in it. How far do we have to run from our messed-up lives to find God’s Kingdom? The Good News is that we don’t. It’s a Kingdom in which a criminal can find rest and forgiveness. Yet it’s also a Kingdom in which justice will be done. It is a Kingdom with a King who bleeds just like his wounded subjects. It is a Kingdom that waits silently within tragedy, waiting to transform it in ways that we don’t always understand. It is a Kingdom that we can’t control or possess, pin down or regulate. It’s a Kingdom whose best teachers are children, the outcast, and the lost. It’s a Kingdom that spreads in spite of evil, uses corruption for its own purposes, and breaks down every boundary that we put up in its way.

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[1] Michael Fitzpatrick, “Passionate Love for the Kingdom of Heaven,” July 23, 2023. Found at https://www.journeywithjesus.net/lectionary-essays/current-essay?id=3599.

[2] My interpretation of these parables is highly dependent on that of Bernard Scott in his book, Hear Then the Parable.

[3]See Ulrich Luz, Matthew, 262.  

[4] Scott, 328-29.

                [5] Luz, 284.

One-Hundred Fold

 

One summer, I bought a lovely new container for my patio, along with a package of flower seeds. I planted the seeds, scattering what looked like hard grains of dirt all over the vitamin-enriched potting soil. As I planted, I could immediately see in my mind’s eye the tall, beautiful potential blossoms; I could smell their sweet scent and could imagine them waving softly in the summer breeze. The next day, however, my niece and her two-year-old son came to town for a visit. Puttering around my patio, the toddler spied my planter, and mischief glimmered in his eyes. I carefully explained to him that he should leave the pot alone, since I had just planted flowers in it …. But despite my clear warnings, he couldn’t put together in his mind the “flowers” that he heard me describe, and the empty reality that he saw in the nice “miniature sandbox” right at his level. In the blink of an eye, my bountiful flower “harvest” lay scattered in clumps on the concrete and clung to sweaty two-year-old fists.

In the simplicity of his vision, my little great-nephew didn’t grasp the glorious potential of seeds. I, on the other hand, didn’t grasp in my flights of fancy that seeds require some careful tending before they can be called flowers. The challenge before us, Jesus implies in the parable of the sower, is to recognize the potentiality hidden in the present--and to tend it.

In the Gospels, the parables of Jesus are themselves like seeds: mysterious, enveloped in a tough, hard-to-crack shell, difficult to categorize and to understand. Like the truth that they carry within them, the parables are deceptively simple and unremarkable in appearance. At the same time, they are bearers of enormous transformative power. They mean to break through our ordinary ways of seeing until we find ourselves changed.

Unfortunately, rather than hearing the parables in their transforming truth, we, like Matthew in today’s Gospel, tend to allegorize Jesus’ strange tales. We want to tame them so that the elements line up logically and the stories mean just one thing. In the parable of the sower, so often we turn—like Matthew does in verse 18—to focus on the soil, rather than on the more nebulous potentiality of the seed itself.  We immediately start to judge our own spiritual soil, or the soil of our neighbors, weighing who might treat the seed well and who might squander its gifts. With a gardener’s precision, we measure the depth of our thoughts, the fecundity of our hearts, the size of the pebbles blocking our wills. We want to reassure ourselves that we will be among those who will welcome the word with a dark, rich loam, the kind found deep beneath an ancient forest floor. And we imagine how the hard-hearted unbelievers next to us will only squander God’s word upon the rocky soil of their inadequate souls.

          Yet Jesus begins his parable with a wide-open image. As he was speaking to the crowd by the sea, his first listeners knew that they were surrounded by Galilean farmers in the nearby hills—by farmers who were casting seed upon the ground in a timeless, simple gesture of sowing. Jesus tries to wake his listeners up, to encourage them to look at the farming scenes around them in a new and different light. He shouts, “Listen up! Pay attention! Right now, as you watch your neighbors sow their fall crops, tiny, compact seeds of God’s Kingdom are being sown, as well. At this moment. All over. In all kinds of places. Not just in the places you would expect. Not just in the favorable places, or in the places where you like to look for them, but everywhere.” In his parable, Jesus presents to our imaginations not only the seeds that withered and the seeds that were choked, but he opens our minds to the seeds that are still growing up and increasing, with ever greater and greater yields.

          The catch is that, no matter how hard we try, we, like my little great-nephew, have trouble seeing potentiality. When faith tells us one thing and we seem to see another, we can be left squinting and rubbing our eyes. We believe, for example, that the Church is the body of Christ—yet often when we gather in community, we see individuals struggling to work together. We talk about Eternal Life and Resurrection, and yet we watch loved ones suffer and die. We read about signs of the kingdom of God breaking forth, yet every day we pass by signs of injustice and poverty. How much easier it is to walk through the fields and point out the worm-eaten sprouts and shriveled leaves around us than it is to speak confidently of the absurdly-abundant, hundred-fold yield that will come from clusters of grain that haven’t yet sprouted.

          Seeing potentiality, and living by it, is a spiritual discipline. Not long ago, I came across the night-time prayer that Eleanor Roosevelt used as she took a key role in the creation of the universal declaration of human rights. This strong woman of action prayed at night, “Make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new.”[1]

It’s interesting to note that Roosevelt’s drive to work for change in the world was accompanied by her nightly practice of praying to be made aware of potentiality. She was sitting, day after day, week after week, in a room full of stinging cold War rhetoric. She was dealing with soaring egos, stubborn governments, and impossibly lofty ideals. It was her nightly prayer that kept her eyes open to the potentiality of one-hundred fold yields. Seeing the world as God sees it, as “a world made ever new,” Roosevelt was able to persevere in her work, to respond to what she saw, and to work for human rights, for God’s Kingdom on earth.

          Can we train ourselves to see the potentiality of God’s abundance? Can we look at St. Ambrose like a seed about to break out of its shell? Can we gather each week as if we’re gathering in a world made new in Christ? Can we yield fruit more abundant than seems logically possible? Yes, we can. It will take time, and prayer, and practice. It will take coming together with hearts open to see what lies beneath the surface of things. Living into potentiality doesn’t mean just sitting back and imagining some vague and easy flowering that will come someday, without any effort on our parts. Neither does it mean flinging dirt around like my great-nephew, ignoring the seeds that God has planted in our midst. We can look at our parish and see cracks and weeds. Or we can look at our parish and see God’s light shining through who we are and what we do. We can start listing God’s potential within us, rather than our troubles. We can pray that we, and others, will be able to see us as God sees us, filled with light and infinite possibilities.

As Jesus cries out to us, “Pay attention! The seed is being scattered here!” I pray that we will have all been trained by faithful spiritual practice to stand on untilled soil and to respond, “Let’s join in the harvest!”

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[1] In Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001), unnumbered page.