The Unsolvable Mystery of the Kingdom Come Near - Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost July 30, 2023 by Rev. Holly Huff, Associate Priest

That question, “Have you understood all this?” is supposed to be a laugh line I think. The strange parables of Jesus are meant to wake us up to the mystery of the kingdom of heaven come near.

A word about mystery from Frederick Buechner, the Presbyterian minister, gifted preacher, & author: “There are mysteries which you can solve by taking thought. For instance, a murder mystery whose mysteriousness must be dispelled in order for the truth to be known. There are other mysteries which do not conceal a truth to think your way to but whose truth is itself the mystery. The mystery of your self, for example. The more you try to fathom it, the more fathomless it is revealed to be. No matter how much of your self you are able to objectify and examine, the quintessential, living part of yourself will always elude you, i.e., the part that is conducting the examination. Thus you do not solve the mystery, you live the mystery. And you do that not by fully knowing yourself but by fully being yourself. To that God is a mystery is to say that you can never nail him down. Even on Christ the nails proved ultimately ineffective.”

Parables resist our attempts to solve them and so they invite us to live the mystery. When we try to solve them like a whodunnit, we end up seeing our own judgements about the kingdom of heaven, our preconceptions and expectations closing down mystery, rather than the blazing burning bush reality that shines on unconsumed beneath our limiting stories about it. By resisting our easy interpretation with discursive reason, the parables invite us to an attitude of wonder, curiosity, and open-handedness. They invite us to perceive the mystery of God’s dream for the world being worked out in the stuff of ordinary life, the kingdom of heaven that is already here and not yet revealed. It’s a mystery to be lived, lived into, rather than a riddle to be answered or puzzle to be solved. We can learn to say with Jacob, “Surely God is in this place, though I did not know it! This is the very gate of heaven.”

Today we hear 5 parables about the kingdom of heaven, and each of these parables today shows us some aspect of this mystery of the kingdom, this mystery of God’s presence at work in the ordinary that can’t be solved and thereby closed down.

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard bush, and a mustard bush is a weed, really. If you were really keeping kosher, you’re not supposed to plant it in your garden at all, because the mustard weed will quickly take over the neatly ordered rows with their popsicle stick signs at each end to strew vines across the whole plot, uprooting the anticipated crops to set up a home for many strange-feathered friends. Unexpected, unpredicted, and turning up all your plans: that’s the kingdom come near, flowering into hospitality.

The kingdom of heaven is like the yeast in the dough, huge amounts of dough, industrial quantities of dough, 3 measures of flour being something like 3 barrels of flour— and God has mixed this yeast in to the stuff of creation, all her creation, from the very beginning. The baker woman has put the essential yet nearly-invisible leaven in the whole lump, no matter how lumpy we are. There’s not anywhere the kingdom of heaven is not.

The kingdom of heaven is inevitable, despite all appearances. God is coming to fish us out as with a dragnet, and he’ll scrape up absolutely everything to find us, not one bit of the deep God won’t trawl to pull us home to what is already given. Christ descends below all things for us, he doesn’t despise our humanity but plunges into it with all the stinky fish that go alongside it. He accepts it and blesses it all, wheat and tares together. Any sorting out that needs to be sorted out will get done—but later, and not by us, and that essential beloved core of goodness in each one of us will certainly be saved.

The kingdom of heaven is like giving everything you have to just to get your hands on something that has been hidden there all along. It’s like mortgaging it all, the house the car the furniture, anything everything to go out and buy the one finest pearl for which one has searched and searched.

I heard the Godly Play version of the Great Pearl for the first time last fall when St. Mark’s hosted a Godly Play training. In Godly Play all the parables come in golden boxes: they come in golden boxes because they are gifts, and because it may take some time to figure out how to open up a parable so you can enter in. But as we say each time, we keep wondering about the parable even when it seems to be shut and one day it may open for you. It’s Godly Play, so wooden figures on felt backgrounds mediate lectio divina-style reflections on the Bible for kids of many ages, inviting them to wonder about and so wonder and wander into the word of God as a treasury of sacramental presence. In the Parable of the Great Pearl, a cut out figure of a merchant moves through the felt houses of the world, leaving behind the cutouts of his bed and trunk and table and bag of gold and candlestick and other essential possessions in the felt box that it is his house. The other houses hold single pearls, and the merchant holds them up, inspects them, looks so so closely, eyes wide, and finally says this is it. This is the one. Having found the Great Pearl, the merchant returns to his home and one by one begins to drag everything to the market to buy the single pearl. He brings the bed and the trunk and the table and the bag of gold and the candlestick, absolutely everything in the house. When the felt house is empty, he folds up the house itself, and takes that to market, too.

During the training weekend last fall, our lovely trainer Joel told us about one of his students’s reaction to hearing the Parable of the Great Pearl for the first time. Let’s say her name was Sarah. She was about 8 years old, and upon seeing the merchant preparing to give up everything, even his house, she let out an anguished cry: “Not the house! Not the house!” It was heartwrenching, she was very upset, and she refused to engage with the story any further, and became withdrawn and quiet. Joel learned afterward that she was living with her mother and her boyfriend and they were about to move again for the 3rd time that year. Where was the safe house for this child? She was in and out of church for the next few months, and Joel didn’t see her much until about 4 months later, when he was subbing for someone else in Godly Play last minute. Coming in without a plan, he asked the kids what story they wanted to hear. He was surprised to hear Sarah adamantly insisting “Tell the pearl! Tell the pearl!” Joel said he was a little hesitant to revisit that story that had been so sensitive but he trusted the story and the kid and God in all of it, so he told the pearl. He told the story and then asked some of the wondering questions at the end: where are you in this story?­­­ Sarah reached out to pick up the Great Pearl, for which everything had been given up, and she said, “I get it. I’m the pearl. And Jesus gave away everything to be with me, even his house.”

Sarah let this parable take her deep into the mystery of the self-emptying of Jesus! Who “though he was in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.” Mystery of the kingdom right there: Jesus comes to be with us, will stop at nothing to love us, is willing to give up every privilege and power proper to divinity to inhabit and bless our humanity, weak and little as it is, and reveal it shot through with holiness. “This flesh is the very gate of heaven!”

Frederick Buechner again. He said once “If I were called upon to [sum up] everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

Sarah was listening to her life and living into mystery. It was too painful at first, and she tried to shut it down. But big questions like hers are lived through, not neatly answered. As the letter to the Romans says, the Spirit groans within us in our weakness. When we are tempted to shut down mystery in our fears and anxieties—that same Spirit can help us to stay, to abide, to be with and open to mystery, assuring us of God’s presence, helping us to open our hands to receive it.

The point of the parable isn’t that we need to go out and fetch pearls, not even the very best pearls: it’s a doorway into the fathomless mystery of God’s steadfast covenant faithfulness, God with us, God coming back to fetch us, God seeking us out, dragging us up from the depth of despair and doubt, even death itself. Drawing us into wonder, giving us eyes to see and ears to hear the already-present kingdom.

Final comment on the Godly Play story—and no this is not an ad spot for Godly Play although it really is that good. But the felt background on which the whole Parable of the Great Pearl takes place: is a giant white circle, sort of like a snowball or…an enormous pearl. No attention is called to it, it’s never mentioned explicitly, but it gently backgrounds the parable, reminding us that the entire search for the one precious thing takes place over top of and is always grounded by that one precious thing. Looking for the pearl, you’re in the pearl. The kingdom has come near, and nothing, absolutely nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, who has given everything to be with us.

Amen.