WISE INVESTING Sunday, July 24, 2005 Vespers Communion Service Carol J. Allen Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church Psalm 143 Matthew 13:31–33, 44–52 “The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.” Matthew 13:45–46 (NRSV) One thing I greatly value about Presbyterian worship is the attention given to the Bible. Our worship is grounded in scripture. That means that preachers and worship leaders try to stay connected with the Bible’s ancient understandings while looking at them in fresh ways, searching for helpful connections with contemporary concerns. When I first started school, before I could even read, I became intrigued with the Bible. My grandmother kept a Bible in a prominent place in her living room. She noticed my curiosity, and when I visited her, she would take the Bible down from the doily-covered table near the window and place it in my lap. It was bound in a cover I could zip and unzip, and as I flipped through its thin paper pages, I was captivated by the fact that some of them had letters in red printed on them. Later I came to understand that her Bible was the King James Version and the red letters were used to highlight the words of Jesus. That Bible is now on my book shelf, showing signs of age and wear from all that zipping and unzipping. It serves as a reminder of the interest in the Bible that my grandmother cultivated in me. She didn’t live long enough to see what she had set in motion, but she got me started on a lifelong exploration of the Bible as a key religious resource for my spiritual growth. By introducing me to the Bible, my grandmother Marion made a wise investment in my well-being. The lectionary guide used by the church in recent weeks directs us to the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew includes a variety of stories that illustrate how Jesus understood God’s presence and purpose in the world and how Jesus responded to these gifts with wise investments in human well-being. Listen for God’s word: Scripture reading from Matthew 13:31–33, 44–52 Jesus made use of images from his culture that were understandable to his hearers. He would go on to add interpretations that could be unexpected and startling. He used this strategy to compare and contrast the partial realities we get glimpses of in our daily experiences with God’s perspective of a larger and more complete reality. Jesus’ listeners often heard his stories as puzzling riddles. Tonight’s parables are no exception. For those with ears to hear and eyes to see, however, his parables served to reveal what appeared hidden from them. For example, when Jesus compared the kingdom of God with yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until it was all leavened, he was taking an image that to his contemporaries signified a source of contamination or corruption and changing it into an image of God’s extravagant providence. Three measures of flour maybe added up to about fifty pounds and, mixed with yeast, could be used to make bread to serve 100 to 150 people. Here Jesus pictures God who transforms corruption into something life-giving. The parable reveals a God who is hidden like yeast in bread but is working for our benefit. Jesus used the process of bread-making to picture God’s kingdom. Jesus often used parables to teach about the kingdom of God. This phrase “kingdom of God” is mentioned in the New Testament at least 150 times, and we repeat it each time we say the Lord’s Prayer. What in this world does “the kingdom of God” mean, and what does it have to do with wise investing? This question is the focus of tonight’s communion meditation. Think back for a minute. You might remember some of the many words and images used in the Bible to picture the kingdom of God. There is light, salt, ripe harvest, royal feast, great banquet, enormous party, wedding feast, leaven, seed, hidden treasure, golden coins hidden in a field, precious pearl, a precious gem found by a shrewd businessman who sells all he has to buy it. What is “it,” this kingdom of God? Is the kingdom of God an “ideal political order; is it the church, the city of Jerusalem, heaven?” Is it the world now, or the world to come?” (see Joseph Donders, Praying and Preaching the Sunday Gospel, 1990). Let’s begin our exploration by saying that the kingdom of God has to do with spiritual experience, that is, with an awareness in the here and now of the sacred, the transcendent, the something that is greater and better than we are by ourselves. I think theologian John Shea accurately understands the yearning for spiritual experience as it occurs in modern culture. Shea describes the current quest for firsthand and immediate experiences of God in his reflections on Matthew’s Gospel. I have felt and hoped for what Shea describes. Perhaps what he says rings true for you too. Shea describes how some search for God by exploring places of great natural beauty. Others hope to be overtaken by God through engaging in intimate loving relationships. Others work for justice. Isn’t it true that in whatever way we seek for God, we hope that once we have an experience of transcendence, that moment when time stands still and we are drawn beyond ourselves into something deeper, that all our doubts will vanish. They will be blocked out by an intense, all-consuming awareness of the underlying wholeness and connectedness of life. We will gain a heightened awareness of the “passions, pleasures, and purposes” that will make us wiser, more loving, and better at our work. In other words, we want our experiences of God to reap immediate benefits in our personal and professional lives (from The Spiritual Wisdom of the Gospel for Christian Preachers and Teachers, Matthew Year A, 2004). I remember one such time of yearning in my own life. I described it in a recent series of daily devotions at Fourth Church. I offer it to invite you to think of a time in your own life when you were yearning for salvation. The year was 1956. The time was autumn. I was going on sixteen. My parents had split up, and our family was coming apart at the seams. I had spent the summer seeking solace in bowls of ice cream. That was no solution. While I was eating ice cream, an overwhelming sadness was consuming me. I felt trapped. The future looked bleak. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to get on in life with my security slipping away. I didn’t know where to turn for help. I didn’t know where God was. I wanted saving then and there. Then the minister came to call. “I need you to teach Sunday School,” he said. “The fourth grade class to be exact.” Little did I know what accepting that invitation would mean for my life. Looking back, I see what John Shea means when he says that experiences of God don’t simply put lives back together and smooth out their wrinkles. Experiences of God can be disruptive. Being with those fourth graders began a process, a process that continues to this day. Those kids began the resurrection of my soul. My experience with them has had ongoing consequences for the choices I have made and continue to make about work, relationships, lifestyle, and the commitments and communities I’ve joined along the way. Some I have accepted. Some I have turned away from. God in that minister, in that congregation, in those grade-school children contributed not to an immediate solution to my problem or my family’s problems. What they did do was open a window for me to the God who is bigger than my brokenness and pointed me to a journey with Jesus who is more absorbing than my losses, more commanding than my flaws. In the embrace of God and God’s people, I have been supported in struggling to come to ever-clearer understandings of my family and its affects on me, to integrate the good with the bad, and, in spite of it all, to live more graciously and constructively. For me that early life experience and each component of it was a pearl of great price. I was treated like a pearl of great price. It was a wise investment that the church made in me. They could do it because God had treated them like a pearl of great price by investing Holy Spirit in them. That was in order that they could see how they might save lives. Maybe you’ll want to take time to write about your own experience of salvation or share with a friend about a time when you were designated a pearl of great price, what it took for you to sort out the good from the bad, how your life was changed for the better, and how you continue to be influenced by the experience. In this way, you and I are images of God’s kingdom; we are our own parables to tell. God is the pearl of greatest price. But in order to receive God, Shea reminds us that we have to enter into a process of giving up things in order to make room. These are things that we may have made into idols and that have taken over our identity and upon which we depend for our security. These might be ideas or people or activities that no longer contribute to our well-being. They may have become sources of toxicity in our lives. This might mean that some of our commitments may have to be revised and changed. We might need to leave toxic situations and enter into a wilderness time when we feel only the emptiness of loss. In this wilderness time, we can pray for God’s insight and help and do the work of integrating our old self with a new one, reviewing our beliefs, choices, and practices in order to sort out the good from the bad. The goal: to arrive at new decisions and directions. This is to let God polish us as his pearl of great price. Both pleasure and pain, comfort and challenge are part of kingdom living. To discover and explore it in all its dimensions takes a lifetime. Princeton seminary professor James Loder, before his death in 2001, wrote about a transforming moment in his life. He and his wife, Arlene, on a beautiful autumn day had just set off in their car on a vacation when they passed by a woman in obvious distress standing at the side of a road by a car with a flat tire. The Loders pulled over to help. About the time that Jim had hoisted up the car to change the tire, another driver rounded the bend, and drowsy at the wheel, he plowed into the car, pinning Jim underneath it. With a surprising surge of adrenaline, Arlene lifted the car off Jim and saved his life. Loder went on to describe how his work back at the seminary took on new and deeper meaning because of that saving moment. Up until then he said he had approached his teaching and research more from his head than his heart. This unwanted and not-asked-for disruption caused him to reexamine his faith. He found it to be somewhat shallow for a seminary professor. Some people might go through what he did and think nothing more of it, writing it off as just a lucky break. Jim experienced God in it. As he told the story of what happened and considered what the gift of his life back meant for his work and relationships, he found himself developing more positive connections with his students, his wife, and his purpose at the seminary. He found that he could no longer remain an objective bystander. Everyone benefited. This led to his book with his ideas on how to tell a true spiritual experience from a false one. The fact of his reprieve turned into a wise investment that will have long-range consequences for seminarians to come. Buying into God as the pearl of greatest price requires letting go of lesser things and trusting that God will be there, like the treasure hidden in a field and found, either by accident or after intense searching (Transforming Moment, 1989). Joseph Donders offers us two additional ways to look at the kingdom of God. He draws attention back to the creation stories in Genesis and to how light, water, earth, plants, animals, fresh air, sky, birds, insects, and the earth came to be. When God made people, he believes they became God’s pearl of great price and God committed and devoted himself to their well-being. When we pray, saying “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” we are praying, says Donders, for the well-being of God’s creation and especially the well-being of humankind. To me that means we are also praying for ourselves. Donders then turns our attention from Genesis and God’s creation of people to Jesus. Look at how Jesus spent the gift of his life. He said to the deaf, “Hear”; to the blind, “See”; to the paralyzed, “Jump”; to the speechless, “Speak”; to the bleeding woman, “Stop”; to his dead friend Lazarus and to Jairus’s daughter, “Wake up, live!” Jesus gave himself to the restoration and repair of life for the poor and oppressed, street kids, prostitutes, adulterers, vagrants and crooks, widows and orphans, the greedy. In a relationship with Jesus, lives changed. The kingdom of God, Donders points out, is hidden in the life and work of Jesus. In his resurrection, God gave to him the identity of the pearl of greatest price. Donders would say that when we invest the gift of our life as a pearl of great price to support others or to engage ourselves in initiatives for human justice, social equality, providing daily bread, defending human rights, eliminating wars, contributing to better family life, and assisting refugees, for examples, we are showing and participating in the kingdom of God Kingdom living means that we take time to judge our own work, our decisions, what we do with our education, and all of our practices in order to separate the more valuable from the less valuable—that is, to check how wise we have been in our investments in human well-being. We can dare to do this because, as Donders puts it, “God has invested his own Spirit in our common human life.” This is the one unchanging reality we can count upon. The kingdom is not the possession of the church or a guarantee of its rightness. The church too must continue to learn new ways to have faith and to follow God’s leading to value human well-beings within the new circumstances and challenges already pushing in on us. In a lecture in 1998 on spirituality, poet Kathleen Norris made these comments that are a good summing up. She said, Christian faith is a way of life, not an impregnable fortress made up of ideas; not a philosophy; not a grocery list of beliefs. . . . The Christian religion asks us to place our trust not in ideas, and certainly not in ideologies, but in a God who was vulnerable enough to become human and die, and who desires to be present to us in everyday circumstances. And because we are human, it is in the realm of the daily and the mundane that we must find our way to God. (Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality, Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana) Beloved of God, don’t forget that each of you is a pearl of great price. God’s kingdom is in and all around you. You participate in the kingdom when you invest wisely in human well-being, when you continue to search for ethical ways of living and loving, when you struggle to open yourself up to God’s great and ongoing love for you, in good times and in bad. Each time you take the bread and drink of the cup, Christ’s body broken for you, Christ’s blood shed for you, that you might have life and have it abundantly, you receive through him God’s blessing of the life that will never, never die. Each of you is a parable of God’s salvation. Your life is the good news that God has to tell and to share with the world. Don’t keep it to yourself.