Sermons

Jul 24 - The Rev. Brian C. Taylor

As a young child, Solomon inherited the kingdom of Israel from his father David. Overwhelmed by the task of leadership before him, he prayed for the gift of wisdom. He would need it. He would be tempted by the lure of wealth, power, and the worship of foreign gods. His enemies encircled him, threatening his borders and demanding compromising alliances. His sons, divided among themselves, would eventually split up the kingdom. Solomon was a man looking for God’s clarity in the middle of very confusing times.

A thousand years later, St. Paul wrote to the church in Rome, revealing a very personal struggle with faith and prayer. It is a struggle familiar to every person of faith. He looked around and wondered why bad things happen to perfectly faithful people. His own weakness threatened his faith; he couldn’t even pray at times. But he put his trust in God, who searches out the Spirit within us when we cannot. The Spirit then prays through us. And somehow, Paul says, all things work together for good for those who love God. Paul was a man looking for God’s clarity within his own confused and divided soul.

And two thousand years later, here we are. Our own nation, our own world is still confused and divided. Our own souls are just as conflicted as Paul’s. We still don’t always know what to do, how to understand our circumstances, or even how to pray. We too look for the clarity of God’s guidance.

We tend to think that God’s presence and direction for our lives is supposed to be obvious. We imagine that if we were really spiritual, we would just know that everything will work out; we wouldn’t have any nagging theological doubts; our mood would be steady and positive; we would feel God’s presence all the time; our priorities would be clear, our motives pure, and our actions consistent. This imagined certainty and consistency is a delusion. Beware of those who proclaim it.

Jesus knew about all this delusion. In fact, he said that the kingdom of heaven is not about pure motives and lightning bolts and clear pathways stretching before us into a cloudless horizon. It is, Jesus says, more like yeast that is hidden in dough. It is like wheat that grows up among weeds, to use last Sunday’s parable. It is like a net that is thrown into the sea, gathering good and bad fish together. It is hidden like a treasure in a field or a pearl of great value in a shop full of trinkets.

And using apparent sarcasm, Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is like the tiny mustard seed, growing into a mighty tree. There is no such thing as a mustard tree. In 1st-century Palestine, just like 21st-century New Mexico, the tiny mustard seed grows into an average-sized weed that takes over your garden and then dies at the end of the season. The kingdom of heaven is not a cedar of Lebanon; it is the plant that everyone pulls up in order to grow something more important. We don’t even recognize the kingdom when it’s growing in our own yard, because it is too ordinary; it doesn’t match our expectations of holiness.

What is Jesus talking about? Could it be that he is saying that God can only be found among our weeds, bad fish, and trinkets? That God is hiding within those very fields that we’d rather not look in, in our weakness, unimportance and obscurity? That if we’re searching for God in complete clarity, certainty, strength, and peace of mind, we’re looking in the wrong place?

It is so difficult to embrace this truth. Look around you. We live in a world that is being ravaged by certainty. Faced with ever more difficult dilemmas, we grab for black and white solutions. Terrorism is only the most obvious example of a sweeping tendency towards religious intolerance and rigidity. There are plenty of religious groups that proclaim loudly that they know God’s mind, and they are the ones that are booming. Religions such as ours that avoid rigid morality and theology are shrinking.

And what is true of religion is also true among political parties, among nations. We’re all so damned certain, so positive that we’re right and the other couldn’t possibly have anything good to offer.

But as Jesus understood, this won’t lead us into the kingdom of heaven. For even though we may imagine an undivided, pure pathway as the ideal, that’s not how life is. Our fields are never free of weeds, our treasure is buried underground and hard to find, and our nets contain both good and bad fish. In fact, Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is like this!

What might it look like if we were to accept this fact? What would it be like for us to embrace a kingdom of heaven that is so hidden, so ordinary, so seemingly compromised?

It might mean that our prayer life wouldn’t be about trying to get rid of distractions and inconsistency. Prayer can then be a more relaxed welcome of whatever state we find ourselves in, making that an acceptable offering to God. Rather than trying to work ourselves into a state of imagined clarity and peace of mind, we present to God our concerns and ourselves, as we are this day, as an acceptable offering. We may not have any flashes of lightning or peace of mind, but we will be real. We may not even feel that we are able to pray as we should, but God searches out the Spirit within us, and prays through us when we cannot, with sighs too deep for words. We God’s wheat is then found right there among our weeds.

It might mean that we let go of who we think the bad guys and the good guys are in this world, and open up to the possibility that most of us have a piece of the truth that contributes to the whole. There’s no such nation or movement or political party whose motives and actions are purely good or purely evil. The kingdom of heaven is potentially everywhere. God’s treasure can be discovered hidden in the most unlikely fields.

It might mean that we see even our religion not as something that has been perfected long ago and is easily accessed by the true of heart, but as a very imperfect, culturally-influenced institution which manages nevertheless to convey something of the beautiful mystery of the Spirit. The Christian church, Islam, Judaism, every religious tradition is flawed and somewhat determined by human forces that are sometimes just plain wrong. And yet, God searches out the Spirit within our efforts and brings forth good. God’s net is full of both good and bad fish.

And most importantly, it might mean that we look for the God who resides within the most unlikely places in our own heart: in our frailty, our bad habits, our mistakes and our compromises. God is not waiting, off in the distance, until the day when you finally get it together. God is searching out the Spirit within you as you are, today, through your virtues and your faults. The kingdom is among us, right here in our ordinary life. God is that old mustard bush that we tried to get rid of, in favor of better-manicured plants. God is that valuable pearl, stashed somewhere among the junk.

I close with the well-known prayer of Thomas Merton, who understood something about this weedy kingdom. He understood it because he lived it. A man of great spiritual depth, peace, and clarity at times, he was also plagued by doubt, anger at his own church and nation, distracted in prayer, aware of his own impure motives, and struggling, sometimes quite unsuccessfully, with many temptations. And yet he knew that it was only through this reality that the hidden God might emerge.

This is what he prayed:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen.