July 30, 2023, The Kingdom of Small Things, Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ July 30, 2023 ♦ Leave a comment

To listen to the sermon, click the link above. An outline of the sermon is given below.

In recent years, people have made some really beautiful documentaries about the natural world. Our daughter Emily gave us the dvd series “Planet Earth,” made by David Attenborough, for Christmas a few years ago. They are really amazing films. The cinematography is spectacular, and the narrative is fascinating. The films are created with a real love and a great respect for the natural world, and a passionate concern for imparting that respect to the world so that hopefully people will wake up to the destruction human beings have wrought on the creation before it’s too late to make changes.

I can remember seeing nature shows on television when I was a little girl – things like Wild Kingdom – and usually I hated watching them. I’m sure they were interesting and educational, but they always had to have those scenes where some predator, a lion, or a tiger, chases down its unsuspecting prey, something like a baby antelope, something cute and helpless, and catches it. They didn’t get too graphic, but they left no doubt in my childish mind that what happened after the film stopped rolling was that the lion tore the little antelope to pieces, and the lion family had a nice dinner that night.

As a kid, I was traumatized by those scenes, but it was an honest portrayal of the laws of nature, what the Lion King movie euphemistically calls the “Circle of Life” – which is really just that old cycle of predator and prey, life and death, and the hierarchy of the “survival of the fittest.” The Planet Earth films are much more artfully filmed and much more engrossing overall, but there is still the inescapable reality of that natural law – only nowadays, it has become so much more obvious that the most dangerous and devastating predator of all is us, and that survival of the fittest, without proper respect for the less fit, might end up being no survival at all.

So, we’ve been reading parables of the kingdom over the last couple of weeks – parables that Matthew recorded for us, and today we have five short parables in a little cluster. All of these parables, the parable of the sower, and the parable of the weeds in the wheat, and these parables today, begin with these words: the kingdom of heaven is like…

We think of a kingdom as a physical place, like Denmark or Japan, or the “Magic Kingdom” at Disney World. But what Jesus is talking about, when he describes the kingdom of heaven, is much more like a system: like what we mean when we speak of the kingdom of nature – the interconnections between its creatures, and the laws that govern their existence. A kingdom is the way things work. The natural kingdom means the effective rule of natural law, survival of the fittest, the interdependence of species, the cycle of birth and death and all that stuff.

The kingdom of heaven, then, doesn’t mean the land of angels floating around on clouds out there somewhere – it means the effective rule of God’s law; it’s how things work when God is running the show. It’s what we pray for every day, in fact: thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. We know that God is sovereign over all of creation, but ever since the Fall, the world has been subjected to a system of natural law that conflicts with God’s original design. We read that last week in Romans: “the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” Freedom from that kingdom of futility is what the prophets are envisioning when they talk about the lion lying down with the lamb, and the little child putting her hand on the adder’s nest: a kingdom based on peace, rather than survival; a kingdom based on humility rather than power.

And when he preached, Jesus’s message was always about God’s kingdom breaking in to the kingdom of this world. So these five little parables are all about how things work in God’s kingdom, according to God’s rules. The first two parables are parables of small things. “The kingdom of heaven is like a little bitty mustard seed that grows up in the garden and provides shade and shelter for everybody.” “It’s like a bit of yeast that a woman kneaded into her bread, that grew and made the whole mass of dough rise.”

When I had a billion kids I used to bake twelve loaves of bread at a time, and one day I was working outside and lost track of time, and when I came back in the kitchen the bread dough had overflowed the bowl and was about to rise right over the edge of the table. Yeast is small, but mighty.

Unlike the kingdom of nature where the big guys win, the kingdom of heaven is powered by small things, by humble things. The people that came flocking to hear Jesus weren’t the bigwigs and the powers that be. The message of the kingdom drew the blind and the lame, the poor, the little children. “I thank you,” Jesus once prayed to the Father, “that you have hidden these things from the powerful and wise and revealed them to little children. Because that was your will.”

And Paul, the great theologian of the New Testament, discovered that God’s power is perfected in our weakness, not in our strength and brilliance. I find that very comforting, as someone who is neither strong nor brilliant – but it was certainly offensive to some, when Jesus pointed out that it was sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors, not to mention dumb fishermen, who were the ones leading the way into God’s kingdom.

The kingdom of heaven is the kingdom of small things, the kingdom of weakness and humility, the kingdom of the marginalized. “The meek will inherit the earth,” Jesus told us. But the kingdom of heaven is also the kingdom of incomparable worth. Jesus tells the parables of the treasure discovered out in a field, of the pearl of great price, of those who sold everything they had so they could possess it. We read about the young man who wanted to follow Jesus, but couldn’t bring himself to sell his worldly possessions, and so he went away, sad.

The great secret of this kingdom of small, humble beginnings is that there is absolutely nothing in this whole earthly kingdom that can even begin to hold a candle to it.

And the parable of the dragnet, like the parable of the weeds that we read last week, reminds us that the kingdom exists right now, not off in its own little safety zone of goodness and purity, not hidden inside the four solid walls of the church, but right smack in the wriggling middle of life in this world. Because the mustard seed isn’t planted to grow out in the middle of nowhere, it’s planted in the midst of the garden, where it can give shade and shelter to all the creatures around it. And yeast does no good sitting in a bowl on a shelf; it only does its yeasty magic when someone mixes it thoroughly into the whole mass of bread dough.

For us, as citizens of the kingdom of heaven, that means we live our lives right in the midst of this messy world – and more, we live our lives for the good of this messy world – but we live by an entirely different set of rules and standards. We sometimes say it this way, that “we are in the world, but not of it.” We live in the kingdom of “might makes right” but we live as those who come not to serve, but to be served. We live in the kingdom of the “survival of the fittest” but we recognize our Lord and Master in the faces of the poor and the homeless, of prisoners and refugees. On a human level, we live in the kingdom of ambition and self-interest and tik-tok influencers, but we live as those who, as Paul wrote so eloquently, “count everything the world has to offer as garbage compared to the priceless joy of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord.”

And that’s not always comfortable. I think sometimes being citizens of the kingdom of heaven, here in this world, feels a lot like those rooms in a fun-house where the angles that you see around you are very different from the angles of the floor where you’re walking. Your horizontal and your vertical don’t match up with the horizontal and vertical of the space you can see around you, and it really throws you off balance. But the reality is not the illusion you see; the reality is the solid ground beneath your feet, and that is the kingdom of heaven. It is the kingdom of humility and small beginnings. It is the kingdom of mercy and freedom and grace. It is the kingdom of incomparable worth. “On Christ the solid rock I stand,” as the hymn goes, “all other ground is sinking sand.”

And that is why we are planted right here in the middle of everything. Because we get to be a part of bringing the kingdom of heaven to birth in this world that God loves. +