Sermon: Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

One of the smartest decisions Josh and I have made together was to purchase this little gadget. This week I used it to take me to a tiny little church in Elgin. I didn’t even have to know the address, I just press a few keys, and the gps takes me where I want to go. It talks to me, I can even use it to make phone calls. This little gadget does almost everything I could ever need.
However, it gets a little confused when I ask it to take me to the kingdom of God. Apparently, that is not a location in its database. The closest I can get is somewhere called Kingdom City, Missouri. I can’t get into my car and drive to the kingdom of God, because it isn’t as simple as finding Zion Lutheran Church in Elgin. I can’t drive to it, walk to it, but sometimes, as in our parables for this day we run right smack into it, when we weren’t planning on finding it at all.
The parables we hear from Jesus this morning are all about this kingdom of God. In fact, if Jesus had been following most rules about preaching, he would know that he used way too many images to describe this kingdom of God. Jesus says that the kingdom is like a mustard seed, like the yeast in three measures of flour, the kingdom is like a treasure buried in a field, like a pearl of great price, like a net thrown into the sea. With all that Jesus says the kingdom is, I don’t find myself ready to answer Jesus’s question- “have you understood all this?” The disciples say yes. I say, honestly, not really. The kingdom of God is like all these things, and yet I find myself grasping for what the kingdom of God is like for me. Or where I can find it, or even how to begin.
Because what most of these images tell us is that the kingdom of God is so often hidden. The kingdom of God is like the tiny mustard seed. You drop it on the ground and you can’t find it again. Here. This is what the kingdom of God is like. You can’t even see it from where you are sitting. Or this, the kingdom of God is like the measure of yeast. Again, how can we tell someone that doesn’t know that this is what the kingdom of God is like?
The kingdom of God is like the tiniest of seeds, like the small measure of yeast. It is like a tiny gathering of people hoping to change a neighborhood. The kingdom of God is found in the smallest of beginnings, but with God, a mustard seed becomes a great tree and a small speck of yeast leavens a loaf. The kingdom of God rests on that dreamy naïve belief, the belief that somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, God is using the smallest of things, the people gathered in this place to bring about the kingdom of God in the world. The kingdom of God rests on the power of God, the power to create out of the most hidden incredible and amazing glimpses of the way we know the world was meant to be.
But these are not the only images Jesus presents us with this morning, because he speaks not just of this small hiddenness of the kingdom, but of the ways that we find that kingdom. Sometimes, we stumble into the kingdom like a man who has been plowing a field. Suddenly, that plow strikes against something solid, and when he bends down the remove it from his path, he realizes that what he had discovered is a treasure. A treasure buried in a field, a treasure that no one knew about, that no one had seen before, and suddenly here it is, right in front of him, and so he buries it, and he sells all that he has to own that field because he knows that there is a treasure buried there. It is as if the treasure has found him, because that too can be what this kingdom of God is like, like something you stumble into. Like trying to follow a map that doesn’t quite show you where you are going, and suddenly you stumble upon what you had been looking for. Like trying to satisfy your deepest longings with all the things of this world, until one day you wake up and realize that the hole inside is in the shape of God, and it is the only thing that can fill you. The kingdom of God is like a treasure buried in a field, a treasure you didn’t even know you were looking for until you found it, and now, it is the only things that matters.
And sometimes, we come upon the kingdom of God because we have been searching desperately for it. Sometimes we come upon the kingdom of God because we need it, and we know what it is worth, and it is the only thing we can hold on to and trust in a world that is filled with more questions than answers. The kingdom of God can be like the fine pearl, that thing we have been looking for since before we could put words to it, and when we find it we pay whatever we have to possess it. The kingdom of God can be the end of the search or the beginning of it.
The kingdom of God doesn’t come with fanfare. It is best described by insignificant seeds and the work of the everyday. The kingdom of God sometimes comes as a surprise and other times as the culmination of a journey that began at our baptism. The kingdom of God has always been found in humble beginnings. In a baby in a manager. In a table where bread is broken by sinners and saints. In the healing of the sick.
I stand before you this morning because I believe the kingdom of God is the most significant force in our world. The kingdom of God found in the gospel is a kingdom of freedom, whether you search for or stumble upon it. It is only the tiniest of things that is the right size to burrow into your heart and change it. It is only the tiniest of things that makes a space inside of you and continues to grow until you can’t remember when God’s work wasn’t the center of your life. There are moments when I am not sure if the tiny kingdom of God is growing, or if it is being beaten back by the tragedy and the evil of this world. And, then, it seems that I will stumble right into it- I’ll see it as we pour water over the head of a baby in this sanctuary. I’ll see it at the bedside of the sick, as family gathers around the usher one they love from this world to the next. I’ll see it in the love that grows among the people of this place, people from different walks of life, people who need each other whether they ever knew it.
The kingdom of God, the tiny, sometimes hidden, kingdom of God shapes the lives of God’s people. Sometimes we stumble into it, sometimes after a long search we realize it has been with us all the time. Amen and thanks be to God.