July 24, 2011

Proper 12: Genesis 29:15-28; Psalm 105:1-11; Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33 & 44-52

Today’s Gospel parables about the Kingdom or Reign of God, in the context of our other readings, remind me of one of the old jokes beginning ‘I’ve got good news and bad news…”  The good news about God’s reign is its desirability, its joyfulness, its praiseworthiness and its power to transform our lives, even our suffering, as our epistle, psalm and Gospel readings all testify.  The bad news is that God’s reign is disruptive and unsettling, drawing us beyond our lives of pious convention; it is indiscriminate and even dangerous to be caught up in.

We have a hint of these good and bad dimensions in the tragicomedy of our Genesis reading today – in which the course of true love does not run smooth.  Jacob is captivated by Rachel, his own pearl of great price, and no sacrifice to win her is too much, not even seven years working for an even bigger schemer than himself, her father Laban.  Yet the good news of his marriage going ahead at last becomes bad news for Jacob when he awakens in the morning to find Leah, the less desirable sister, in his marriage bed – bad news for Leah too, pushed into a loveless marriage by the dad from hell.  But it all ends well as Jacob and his descendants join the praise of God in our psalm today, with God’s covenant faithfulness toward Israel celebrated for the good news that it is – though there is bad news for Canaan at the end of our psalm: the nation dispossessed so that Israel can have its promised land.  The good news of God’s reign involves disruption of the status quo, and even the risk of some moral ambiguity.

We see this plurality in our Gospel parables today where the Kingdom of God is evoked in a variety of striking and suggestive images: treasure buried in a field, a merchant in search of a fine pearl, and a great big dragnet for bulk fishing.  These suggest different dimensions of this wonderful thing the Reign of God, and also its more confronting aspects.  First, the buried treasure: a passive image of God’s reign waiting patiently to erupt into our lives unexpectedly, rather like a landmine.  The one who stumbles upon this treasure and discovers its worth is so stunned and galvanized that he engages in some dodgy business practice to get hold of it.  Rather than going to the landowner and owning up about the treasure he’s found in the field, our protagonist does the equivalent of some insider trading, capitalizing on the fact that his newfound knowledge isn’t public.  The widespread modern civil religion that reduces Christianity to propriety, to moral and so-called “spiritual” values, can have no use for this parable, with its shameless profiteer casting all scruple to the wind for the sake of one big score.  Here the feel, the excitement and the sense of good fortune accompanying the discovery of God’s reign is rendered palpable, blowing everything else out of the water: prudence, convention, respectability, spiritual poise.  This is an edgy parable and definitely not for Sunday School.  Its message about the Reign of God is essentially that if you know what is good for you, then you won’t think twice.  God’s reality and God’s claim is bigger and better than our normal calculus of sober uprightness.  It is a visceral thing, and this parable with its roguish protagonist helps us feel and taste its desirability.

The merchant in search of fine pearls may not be a rogue, though I imagine him as a rather exotic Oriental figure, a fastidious bachelor perhaps, lavish in accoutrements and always on his cell-phone – definitely a man on a mission.  He has a dream of beauty, quality and uniqueness, and to possess it he’ll set aside all the prudence of a balanced portfolio, just as I suspect he also neglects a balanced diet.  This dreamer, this aesthete, this obsessive and rather profligate seeker is meant to show us how God’s reign is advancing in the world.  He shows us that God will do anything for the good, the true and the beautiful; that God will do what it takes to preserve the ones he loves and chooses – even the likes of you and me – with the bright-eyed zeal of this merchant, someone you’d never let near your credit card or your mortgage offset account!  Once again this is not the stuff of safe predictable, low temperature, hedging your bets religion.  Rather the Reign of God is a matter of life and death, and caught up in it you find yourself casting care and prudence to the wind – writing a big check, surprising your family and friends by doing something rash and wonderful.  The risks are endless for those who let the Reign of God work its spell on them, or perhaps just as accurately, get its hooks into them.  Good news and bad news indeed!

Then there is today’s image of the dragnet, which we know about from watching those Alaskan fishermen on TV, dragging in huge catches with no effort or risk spared.  The reign of God here is big, bold, public and obviously ecclesiastical.  The catch is hauled aboard and that’s us, the Church.  In this parable we miss the discrimination that was characteristic of the merchant, as all sorts of fish are netted willy-nilly, including many that won’t make the cut.  These are the fish Long John Silver’s rejected in an image of the final judgment.  But in the meantime the Church is full of odd and ill-fitting specimens who need to be lived with and tolerated.  God will sort them out in the long run; this is not our problem or our job in the present.  Like Matthew’s earlier parable of the mustard seed, with a small seed becoming an improbably big tree with all sorts of unexpected creatures hanging about in it, or like the weeds growing up with the wheat for that matter, also from earlier in Matthew 13, God’s loving embrace is extensive and indiscriminate.  This is good news for those who are being saved, but the bad news accompanying this state of affairs is that we have a Church which is neither pure nor perfect.  Those eager to throw fish out of the Church, whether liberal or conservative, would do well to meditate on the mixed blessing of God’s reign as it is set out in these parables; it is wonderful news, but with some disturbing implications.

Even Paul mixes his good news with some bad in today’s stirring epistle reading, which may be familiar to you from attending funerals.  The good news is that our belonging to Christ puts us on the winning side of history, tooled up in the Spirit to overcome everything life can throw at us – even suffering and death.  But the bad news is that these things are likely to come our way – both in terms of natural suffering that the likes of Bill Maher can’t square with any sort of loving God, and in terms of religious persecution, which many Christians around the world still experience as the price of being faithful to Christ and to his public face, the Church.  Another sting in the tail of the epistle reading is the way powers and principalities are named and put on notice – height, depth, rulers, powers and so on.  This is not just stirring pulpit rhetoric from Paul.  These powers and principalities of the New Testament world are not just things that go bump in the night either.  Rather, this is technical talk from Paul about concrete socio-political realities.  These powers and principalities are the real forces that shape life on this earth: that in New Testament times had made Rome the great empire of violent fatalism that it was, and that still have their tentacles into our lives, our imaginations and our futures amid the kingdoms of our own globalized information age.  Instead of Paul’s language we talk in terms of psychology, economics, societal forces, historical trends and cultural imperatives.  All this is put on notice by Paul in today’s epistle as being less than ultimate, as being necessary but not absolute, as being part of God’s plan but not the whole story.  The whole story belongs to Christ and to his love and his sacrifice and to his triumph in the face of how things are supposed to go in the world.  Belonging to Christ puts us wonderfully but dangerously beyond the pale, so that we really only have one foot in this present world with its typical preoccupations, priorities and pretentions.

So, friends, as they say, I have good news and bad news.  We belong to the most wonderful thing there is, to the Kingdom of God, through our baptism and through our weekly inhabitation of the Holy Eucharist.  Yet this belonging, this strength, this hope spoils for us much of what the world regards as desirable, relevant, proper and important.  We cannot reduce Christianity, as so many want to do, to conventional morality, prudential wisdom, accustomed habit and undemanding talk about “spiritual” values.  It is shockingly better than that.  Amen.