24 July 2011
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
The kingdom of heaven as if someone should blow on a dandelion flower. A single seed floats on the breeze and takes root in the corner of the garden, and before you know it the whole lawn is covered in a Roundup resistant variety.
The kingdom of heaven is like Eurasian milfoil. By the time you notice it, the plant has taken over the lake. And the more you cut it, the more it grows.
The kingdom of heaven is like a zebra mussel….
When Jesus told these parables, the listeners knew that Jesus was comparing God’s kingdom to things which were noxious weeds, invasive species, and ritually unclean. We don’t really have a “ritually unclean” equivalent in modern society, but I think the hated zebra mussel comes the closest. Poor zebra mussel. It never meant to take over our lakes. It’s not as if some terrorist zebra mussel organization—the ZMLO-- planned an invasion…. A mussel’s got to do what a mussel’s got to do… whatever that is.
Same with milfoil and dandelions. It is in their nature to grow, to resist attack, to persist in growing and spreading abroad. Floating on the air, drifting through the water, as innocent as it is unstoppable.
Jesus was speaking to a people who were as weeds to the empire. Families, whole villages, were plucked up from their land forced to move elsewhere, or be crushed. Their ancestral lands were given to those who were deemed more appropriate: Roman settlers, soldiers and officers, the Vichy government or whatever its equivalent was—those who collaborated in their own country’s colonization.
So when they heard Jesus evoking the kingdom of God, not in the Holy temple or the ritually consecrated furnishings associated with it, but in the common, the base, the untouchable, the ritually unclean…. They knew he was talking about them.
The kingdom of God is not like the priests; the kingdom of God is not like the legions, the kingdom of God is like you. The presence of God is among you, the despised, the forgotten, the plucked up and the crushed. But like the yeast you rise. Like the weeds, you grow tall and strong. God is at work in you.
It was a scandalous joy! The way Jesus talked, it was a scandalous joy! Here is a rabbi talking about God among us. Scandalous! Joy!
Do you understand? Jesus asked. “Ye-es” the disciples said, but did they really? And do we? The church began as an underground movement. Small, poor, despised, afflicted, but growing, in spite of persecutions, it continued to grow. Because Christians saw the presence of God in the despised of the earth, and they reached out and cared for those who had no one else to care for them.
But as the church grew, and received the patronage of the empire that crucified Jesus, it began to emulate the empire, rather than God’s kingdom.
So we must tell each other these stories again and again, to remind ourselves of God’s place in the world. God is found in the last place we would look.
As a church, we do a lot of good things. We go to the soup kitchen and feed people, we go out to the ends of the earth to bring health care and build shelter and serve. But never forget, that wherever we go, we do not “bring God;” God is already there. God has always been there. Among the weeds. Among the displaced. Among the uprooted, downtrodden and crushed, there is God. If we pay attention, we might see the kingdom of God in our midst.
