Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 6 2014

1 Kings 3.5-12

Romans 8:26-39

Matthew 13.31-33,44-52

The newly appointed Bishop of Barchester, who was still trying to get used to his role, was woken by a phone call early one morning. “What do you want for Christmas?” asked the voice at the other end.

The Bishop, half awake, thought for a moment. The palace he was forced to live in was really very cold and draughty. So he said, “well, really I’d like a new dressing down and a pair of fluffy slippers, please”.

The next day the story ran in the newspapers. “Our reporter asked a number of leading religious figures what their hopes were for Christmas. The Bishop of London said he hoped for world peace, the Bishop of Southwark looked for an end to hunger and poverty, and the Bishop of Barchester said he wanted a new dressing gown and a pair of fluffy slippers.”

It’s not enough just to answer the question. You have to know what the question really means, what really matters in the heart of the person asking it.

Jesus today continues to answer a question that he has set himself, “what is the kingdom of God like, to what shall I compare it?”.

Let’s think for a moment how we might answer that question, if we hadn’t heard Jesus’ own response just now in the Gospel. “What is the kingdom of God like?” In other words, what would it be like if God’s rule of justice and peace were to be fulfilled and perfectly obeyed throughout the world? What would that be like?

We surely can’t ask ourselves that question without thinking of the news headlines these last couple of weeks. It seems as though horrors and outrages have come thick and fast one on top of another. In Gaza, Ukraine and Iraq terrible things have happened, so many people killed, countless people made to suffer and flee from their homes in great fear.

“What is the Kingdom of God like?” Surely, we might answer, it would be a world where things like that don’t happen. A world where human rights are respected, violence is not used to settle political differences, and everyone is free to live and flourish on the good earth.

Well there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s very different from the answers that Jesus gives. It’s not as if his situation was very different from ours. The world Jesus lived in had its own share of violence and horror, with a brutal Roman occupation in Judea and violent terrorist groups, or freedom fighters, resisting it. Jesus himself became another victim of this conflict on Good Friday.

But Jesus does not propose a political solution. He does not respond to the world in the way the world is. Because the problem is that violence is all about responding to the world in the way the world is. You attack me, so I attack you back. That’s how violence carries on, tit for tat. In order to undo violence you somehow have to get outside it altogether. You have to start again with a new vision, a new way of being human.

So Jesus answers in parables. Parables are strange stories that are meant to open our understanding and bring us to a new vision. The world they describe is not quite like the one we know.

So for instance, “‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field”. That’s strange, because the kind of mustard that grows in the Holy Land is a straggly weed. No-one would deliberately plant it in their field. Also, it’s small, the tiniest seed, it’s insignificant, the thing you’re most likely to overlook. But strangely that insignificant useless thing, which someone chooses to sow, becomes the most important thing of all, a mighty tree sheltering the birds of heaven.

A common thread runs through some of the parables we heard today. A little bit of yeast, leavening the dough. A treasure found in a field. A merchant searching for pearls who sells all he has to buy just one perfect pearl.

The Kingdom of heaven is like finding something seemingly insignificant, something you can easily overlook, but, if you find it, it changes everything. But it is also something that can be rejected. There were good fish and bad in the net. There is a choice to be made, perhaps a risky one: sell all you have, and buy the field with the hidden treasure hidden – or don’t. Stay safe, and hold on to what you’ve got. But then you will be missing out on the one thing that really matters.

What changes everything in the Gospels is Jesus himself. Jesus is the one who seems to many to be insignificant, maybe even a troublesome weed in the field of Israel. Jesus is the one who will end up rejected. But it is Jesus who has the secret of the Kingdom. It is Jesus who opens the way to the treasure hidden in the field, the pearl of great price.

The Kingdom of God can only come about if we are conscious of God, present as the ground of all things. God can only rule in our lives if we are attentive to God. Jesus lived the kingdom because he lived in total and perfect union with the Father. And he calls his church to share the same life as himself.

Jesus does not respond to the world in the way the world is. He brings in a new reality. The teaching of Jesus flows from his deep and continual communion with God the Father. So often he would go off to lonely places and spend the night in prayer. Prayer is to the spirit what oxygen is to the body, and for Jesus that constant breathing of God could never be interrupted.

It is prayer that opens up the Kingdom in our hearts. Prayer opens us to the presence of God in the ground of our being, the treasure hidden in the field of our hearts. This may seem to be so small a thing. But the Kingdom of God begins with the consciousness of God, and grows, and spreads, and changes the world. Because if we are conscious of God, if we believe that the loving creator is the supreme reality behind and beneath all things, then that will change the whole way we live in the world.

Now this does lead to political engagement with the world, of course. Feeding the homeless is a political act. Non-violent resistance to violence is a political act. But it is an act that flows from the deep consciousness of God. Gandhi preached non-violence, but he did so from a life deeply rooted in prayer and meditation. “Be the change that you want to see in the world”, he once said. Start deep within, and let the change flow out from your heart.

This is not a soft option, or a cop-out. St Paul was not sitting in a comfortable armchair in a comfortable life when he wrote “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” This was a man who had experienced all those things for the sake of Christ. But he could be confident in the love of God triumphant over all because he was aware that the supreme reality of his life was God in Christ at the centre of his being. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”

If we become aware of our own union with God, which is God’s gift to us in Christ, then we must be aware also of that potential in all other human beings. And if we are aware of that, then there can be no enemies, no deserving and undeserving, no dividing humanity into insiders and outsiders. God’s kingdom of justice, peace and love begins with our choice to open our hearts to this new reality. And, from small beginnings, the Kingdom will grow until it changes everything.