The kingdom of God is like...

 May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be always acceptable in your sight, my strength and my redeemer. Amen.

I have a couple houseplants that are giving me a run for my money, but not in the way you would think. The first one, which was a gift from somebody shortly after the start of the pandemic, is a small begonia. Despite a year of benign neglect, somehow this plant began flowering. First, one or two, and then a ton, flowering and dropping their flowers so fast that little wilted buds littered my kitchen counter even though the entire plant was still regularly blooming. After a while, the plant went so wild that I had to clip it off into another, and then another, rooting the cuttings and creating even more full sized plants. The other plant is, I think, a pothos. I got the plant when I was in graduate school, the first of my houseplant collection, and after we moved to the new house, the little fellow exploded. Long tendrils draped over my mantel and hung down to the floor. Periodically one of my kids would roam past and grab a handful of leaves, which I would then throw in water and, you guessed it, get more houseplants. I now have so many baby pothos' around my house that I'm running out of room. Soon, my house will be a jungle of pothos plants and begonias, with no room left for people.

I love preaching parables, because these stories give us images to wrap around our faith life; concrete examples when a lot of what we hear in the gospels is a little abstract. What is the kingdom of God like? It's like a sower, it's like a field with wheat and weeds, it's like a mustard seed, it's like yeast, it's like a pearl, it's like treasure buried in a field. All of these different metaphors are Jesus' attempt to explain something intangible and difficult to understand to people who have a limited basis of experience. In my sermon at Saint Anne's last week, I said that parables can also be tricky, because sometimes in our attempt to parse apart every aspect of the parable we can miss the forest for the trees. Parables weren't really intended to give us concrete answers, but to give us a frame of reference for some of our questions. This set of stories in particular gives us two big questions to chew on: first, what is the kingdom of heaven like? Secondly, once we understand it, what do we do?

Agricultural imagery is particularly useful in parables, because apart from some technological advances, a lot of growing has stayed the same. I may use a grow light now, but the hearers of a story would understand about planting for optimal lighting in 33 AD or 2023. The same goes for bread making. Yeast, it turns out, has not changed much in the last two thousand years. You still mix a little bit in, and with some time and heat your flour and water become bread. Both of these stories, and several of the previous parables we have read the last couple weeks, are seeking to get to the bottom of what exactly the kingdom of God is. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but here are a few ideas I'd like for you to chew on.

First, the kingdom of heaven is transformational. Like my plants that went from being tiny, half dead little things to a massive jungle in my house, the kingdom of God transforms. Although the kingdom begins as one thing: a tiny seed or a bit of yeast, it becomes something else. Something bigger, something which, when mixed with some other elements, changes its nature and makes all of the other things greater than the sum of their parts. A seed is just a seed, but when mixed with soil and trace nutrients, water, and sunlight, it becomes a tree, something which provides shelter, a home for birds, and food. A little bit of yeast mixes together with flour, water, sugar, and seasonings to become a loaf of bread, more than any of those things are on their own. The kingdom of God, then, is gestalt: it makes us and the world greater, more useful, more nourishing than what we were before.

Next, the kingdom of heaven is directional. By that, I mean the kingdom is moving toward something. It isn't stagnant, like a seed tossed on the ground to wither away in the sun, or a jar of yeast sitting on a shelf losing potency. It is moving toward something, toward becoming something, toward engendering life, toward offering protection, growth, nourishment.

Third, the kingdom of heaven is mysterious. Although through modern science we understand a lot more about what makes a seed grow and what makes bread rise, anybody who has ever baked something the exact same way as all the previous times and had it turn out differently knows that there is a sort of magic to the process. You throw some yeast in a bowl with water and somehow the water activates it and causes all sorts of chemical, bubble releasing things to happen. We don't know entirely why this works, or why sometimes it doesn't work, but I can personally say that I stand in awe anytime I try a new recipe and from a gooey sludge on my counter end up with food.

What else is the kingdom of God? Vital? Inspirational? Hopeful? Powerful? What do you think? The kingdom of God is all these things and more. When reflecting on the reign of Christ and all the ways that we see God at work in the world, I am frankly awe struck. If the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, and the kingdom of God is in you and me, what incredible things are happening below our surfaces? What amazing things are we moving toward?? It's pretty cool to think about!

Now, the second two parables in this reading are concerned not with what exactly the kingdom of God is like, but, once we recognize that we have found something special, what do we do? The kingdom of heaven is like treasure buried in a field, that upon recognizing the value of it, the person sells all their possessions and buys the field; or it's like a pearl that a merchant sells all that he has to buy. Jesus has a habit of asking people to leave their families and homes and comforts to follow him, and these parables are no different: these people recognize that they have something special and they risk their stability and livelihood and everything else to stake a claim on this remarkable thing. There has been a lot of speculation about what it means to follow Christ. Do we really have to give up our families and everything we have known in pursuit of this kingdom? Or is it perhaps that once we find this jewel, this incredible thing, we begin to recognize that much of what we put our faith into: power as defined in this world, security, stuff, money, prestige, recognition, these things are actually meaningless by comparison?

This is where my good old Lutheran theological background always helps me wrap my head around these things. The kingdom of God is here, but it's also not yet. The kingdom of God is active, but we have not seen the fruition of it. I imagine that the culmination, the eschatological finale, if you will, will be incredible. It will be the end of all war and violence, it will be valuing all people equally, it will be an end to suffering, to hunger, to disease, to discrimination, to cruelty and hatred. We don't live there yet. But the kingdom of God is out there, and it's also in here, inside you and me. And that's why I started thinking about my house plants. They started out as just one plant, not even very impressive or beautiful plants. And despite not taking very good care of them at first, through nurture and care and intentionality, I've been able to propagate many more plants so that now not only are the original plants beautiful and strong, there are many more of them, in my house and other people's houses as I give away the cuttings and other people nurture them. When I started tending the plants, I certainly did not foresee the outcome, but the care and tending created strong roots and allowed me to break off pieces to give away to others.

That's a little bit like the kingdom of heaven. First, a little seed is planted or a little yeast is mixed in. Then with the right water, sunlight, ingredients, mixing, soon you have so much sourdough starter that it's taking over your fridge! Soon you have so many little pothos plants you don't know where to put them! And so what do you do? You give them away! How could you not? There's more bread than you could ever consume; more plants than shelving. You are standing on street corners with all this extra and soon somebody comes by who wants your plants and maybe it's just a little cutting, but they take it and they put it in water and nurture it and soon it's going wild and they have to start making more shelf space and pawn off their cuttings on everybody they know until the whole world is beautiful; until everyone has bread.

So this begs the question for me of how do we nurture it. Obviously, conditions need to be right. We learned this in the parable of the sower. And to some extent, the kingdom does what it's going to do. But, I think, the beauty of all the agricultural metaphors is that it invites us to take some accountability for what happens. Prayer, reading the Bible, gathering for worship, coming together around the table, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick. These things cultivate us; make us a habitable home for that little something that God has planted in us and in the world. And when we keep cultivating it, when we make space for the new blossoms, we are transformed, and in turn we transform those around us.

That's the beauty of these metaphors. Nobody really knows exactly what the kingdom of God looks like, tastes like, smells like. But we know what it acts like, and so we can prepare ourselves for it, and we can open our hearts to its transformational, forward moving, mystical power, and in doing so, we ourselves become the seeds and the yeast. Thanks be to God.