Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
“The Kingdom of Heaven” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (First Kings 3:5-12/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52/NRSVUE)
I’ve always enjoyed being outside and working in the yard during the long days of summer, when the sun comes up early in the morning and continues to shine late into the evening. But these inferno-like temperatures we’ve been experiencing lately have kept me from doing as much as I’d like to do in the way of outdoor projects when I get home, so I’ve had to look for other things to occupy my free time. And because I can be kind of lazy sometimes, the path of least resistance generally lands me right in front of the television.
For as long as I can remember, though, summer TV has been an awful spectacle to behold. Year after year, even so-called “primetime” is filled with reruns and retreads of shows that weren’t worth watching the first time around. In this age of miracle and wonder I could probably find something interesting on Netflix to watch on demand, but, like I said, I’m kind of lazy and that requires a bit more effort than I’m willing to expend.
And so, I often find myself being drawn into the reboots of all the classic gameshows from my childhood — Match Game, Press Your Luck, The One Hundred Thousand Dollar Pyramid; I’m not proud of this fact by any means, but I‘ll pretty much watch any of them — and just to underscore how old I am, I actually remember the days when the Pyramid was worth ten thousand dollars. But my favorite, by far, has always been Family Feud.
For those of you who have never seen it, the basic premise of the show is this: Two teams of contestants are given a question that has previously been posed to a group of a hundred people. Contestants need to come up with the lion’s share of the top four or five or six answers that the survey group gave to the question in order to win.
If they choose an answer that the survey group also chose, then they get to keep playing until there are no more answers left to give. If, however, they give an answer that’s not among those the survey group gave, they get a strike. The accumulation of three strikes enables the other team the chance to give one of the remaining correct answers in order to steal the round and win. I know, I know — it doesn’t exactly sound like the most compelling contest in the world but it’s always managed to draw me in like a porch light does a moth.
As I was reflecting upon today’s passage from Matthew’s Gospel over the course of this past week, my mind kept meandering back to Family Feud. Maybe it’s because it is literally being shown on some channel twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But maybe there’s a bit more to it than that.
Anyway, we’ve got a good one for you today, folks! One hundred people surveyed, the top six answers are on the board… The kingdom of God is like… blank?
A mustard seed.
Or, yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of bread until all of it was leavened.
Or, a treasure hidden in a field.
Or, a merchant in search of fine pearls,
Or, a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind.
But after all of the rounds are complete we have a tie, and you know what that means: Sudden Death. One question, the top answer is on the board and whoever gets it wins… Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like… blank?
I know, I know: the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old. Game over.
Okay, I feel confident in saying that these are questions that have never appeared and will never appear on an episode of Family Feud — their subject matter is way too theological for that particular venue. The questions on the Feud tend to be drawn from the experiences of everyday life, for example: “What is the most dependable brand of car?” or “What is a first name that rhymes with the word ‘picky’?”
And yet, while the topic of Jesus’s litany of parables here is kind of out there — the nature of God’s Kingdom is pretty lofty subject matter — the images that Jesus uses to describe that Kingdom are surprisingly ordinary, like the one we heard in the parable of the sower last week and the six we heard in today. I can’t help but wonder how all of this would have gone over with Jesus’s original audience.
Picture the scene – the crowds have gathered there by the Sea of Galilee to hear all that Jesus has to say about God’s Kingdom.
They have been living under the thumb of oppressive Roman rule for a while now, after having been dominated by various empires — Egyptians and Babylonians and Persians — for many centuries before this. And now this Jesus guy comes along preaching about the new kingdom that’s on the way, which would certainly have been enough to make people stop and listen.
But they probably would have been surprised and, frankly, very disappointed when Jesus actually started talking here. Imagine that Family Feud existed way back in the first century and the question up for grabs happened to be this: “Name something that you associate with a kingdom.”
The number one answer would probably have been “a king” — truth be told, it would still be the number one answer even today. The other responses would, in all likelihood, have consisted of all the other trappings of your typical kingdom — a palace, a crown, heaps of diamonds and gold, loyal subjects, and armies of soldiers to do the monarch’s bidding.
The answers that Jesus gives here, however, draw our focus to a bunch of things that we would probably walk right past: a tiny mustard seed that becomes a tree, the birds of the air, and buried treasure;
they turn our attention toward ordinary people doing very ordinary things: a farmer working in the field, a woman making bread in the kitchen, fishermen casting nets into the sea.
According to Jesus, this is what the kingdom of God is like.
Now, if Jesus were actually on Family Feud he would have racked-up three strikes rather quickly here. But the game that Jesus is playing (which is, of course, not a game at all) seems to have an entirely different set of rules.
When God arrives here in the person of a poor Jewish laborer from Nazareth named Jesus, all of the ideas that we have about what kings and kingdoms mean go right out the window. You see, while the customary trappings of earthly power might be important to us, they are not even remotely important to God — and the implications of this truth are enormous.
For starters, this “Lord” and “King” doesn’t reign sitting upon a throne inside a palace, wearing a crown of gold and fancy robes, protected by soldiers; he reigns hanging upon a cross outside the city walls, wearing a crown of thorns with soldiers casting lots for his meager clothing.
And when Jesus is asked to describe the essence of God’s kingdom, he doesn’t do so by drawing attention to himself; no, he directs his listeners’ focus to the world all around them — the good, the bad and the ugly — because this, apparently, is where we encounter the divine.
The whole point is that we catch a glimpse of what God’s reign is like by watching Jesus at work among us. Jesus doesn’t simply issue edicts from inside the safety of a castle surrounded by a group of doting and devoted admirers; he engages in relationships with highly ordinary (and very flawed) people out in the real world — with tax collectors and sinners and widows and children and the poor, with disciples who will deny and even betray him.
At the end of the day, we have no definitive explanation for why God chose to do all of this, for why God decided to set things up this way. And, at least for right now, we don’t have anything close to a complete understanding of God’s Kingdom. But Jesus reminds us here that Emmanuel, God-with-us, really is with us in all of the everyday details of our everyday lives — and that has to mean something.
God is there with us in the kitchen and out in the field and at the ocean’s edge;
God is there as we worry about the complete mess the world is these days;
God is there with us as we’re sitting beside a loved one’s hospital bed;
God is there with us as lakes are drying up and as forests are on fire;
and yes, God is even there with us at home as we park ourselves on the couch watching Family Feud, which is on every weeknight from eight to eleven on the Game Show Network.
And that doesn’t just mean something; that means everything.
For this, and for so much else, thanks be to God.