Hymns:

Earth is Full of Wit and Wisdom ACS 1064

What is the World Like  ACS 1047

All Creatures Worship God Most High ELW 835

He Comes to Us as One Unknown ELW 737

Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is like a seed, like yeast, like treasure, like pearls, like a net! Then he asked the disciples, “Have you understood all this?” And they say, “Yes!” And do we believe them? No. I seriously doubt the honesty of their answer at this point. Do you understand it?  Maybe you do; but then we have had 2,000 years of thinking about our answer.

What might you be moved to say the kingdom is like? For me, the images I grasp are many. It is like the first snowfall of winter, lightly falling in the great diversity of snowflakes individually created.  It is like a flock of snow buntings rising from the fields in the unity of divinely choreographed beauty. It is like the sun rising over Lake Superior, illuminating endless sky and mirrored waters.  The kingdom is like green blades rising from the buried grain.  It is like the seeds of the great boreal forest cast upon the wind and sprouting in the duff everywhere. It is wide and wonderful, unstoppable, and everywhere – that is God’s kingdom to me.

For me the kingdom of heaven is real and around us all the time, yet always beyond our full comprehension.  For me the kingdom of heaven is the assurance that the reign of God is eternal from before the beginning to far beyond the end. The kingdom shines forth in actions of justice, mercy, and humility, when God’s children love one another as they have been loved.  The kingdom shines forth when churches organize to provide food and shelter for their neighbors and care for the sojourner among them. Isaiah’s prophetic words in 58:8 inspire, “Then your light shall break forth like the dawn.”  ‘Then’ refers to the actions and attitude of justice, compassion, and dignity, in short – love.  The kingdom therefore breaks forth shining when love, esteem and appreciation cause the children of light to care for, restore, and protect the homes and habitat and the ability to flourish for all God’s creatures.

In the meantime… we live and move and have our being in the mundane, that can seem anything other than the rhapsodic and poetic.  In fact Jesus uses images that are actually far from beautiful to describe the kingdom: a mustard shrub, yeast, an obsession over a valued possession, and smelly fish nets. No, I don’t believe the disciples understood all this; but at least they remembered it and wrote it down so that we can puzzle over it too.  What is Jesus up to describing an invasive weed shrub as shelter for wildlife? Or why describe yeast, leaven, usually a bad thing in scripture, as providing a bounty of food? Or why use a net full of both good and unclean fish to describe the kingdom? And Jesus says these are like the kingdom of heaven? Perhaps once again we are asked to suspend judgement, as in the parable of the weeds and the wheat.  Perhaps we are being cautioned to not trust traditional human perspective, and try instead to see beyond, to use God’s lens. To forget God’s way and trust human wisdom is folly. What might we be ignoring because it doesn’t fit our expectations of the kingdom?  What might we pass by, unaware of the divine that is right in front of us?

The lesson about Solomon’s request for wisdom is another warning about good intentions about to turn awry.  It seems that most of the Bible lessons about Solomon I learned in my younger days and other Bible lessons I have seen since focus on either Solomon’s psalms or a few good decisions and judgments, or his part in the lineage of Jesus.  There is another story here as well. We so often turn to this prayer and consider it an amazing model of humility and wisdom; a true example of servant leadership. But the story of King Solomon is also a tragic story of ego and short sightedness.  The story of King Solomon is the unfolding of Samuel’s prophetic warning against kings! Samuel was one of the first to say, “No kings.” Samuel warned about the systematic growth of self-serving power that a king would wield.  Rather than living out the role of the shepherd-servant king, Solomon becomes the self-absorbed autocrat who breaks the back of the kingdom, sowing the seeds of unrest that lead to civil war right after his death.

The full story of Solomon is a sad story of a ruler, a society and a system falling completely away from their origin story in the Exodus. Under Solomon, all the wisdom of a people being taught equity and grace during the forty years of manna and mercy was lost; replaced with a power-worshiping system that lavished a gold palace upon the monarch and a power-drunk ruler who lavished in that gold palace and imposed a taxation system on the people so harsh that they later rebelled.  It is a sad but prescient warning in every age and to our own time. There are dangerous people today who try to pervert the wisdom of God in Christ.  They say that power, strength, and warrior spirit will be our salvation.  They say they serve, but they take continuously. Their so-called wisdom will only increase the bitterness of the domination system. Their self-proclaimed wisdom is true foolishness and will break the backs and spirits of many nations, including their own.

So I turn back to the wisdom Jesus advises.  Open your eyes, open your minds, open your hearts.  Jesus beckons us to see more fully and more deeply. The kingdom is all around us and is even there in the events, people, and things we might have discounted. God’s grace is operating around us every day in the everyday, in ways we may never perceive, but perhaps we may catch onto, the more we love and the more we care. 

This we know. There is nothing in all of creation that can separate us from the love and grace and tutelage of God in Christ Jesus.  Paul wasn’t right about everything, but he certainly struck gold with this promise. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. And so, we are wise when we follow the way and teaching of God. We are wise when God’s Word is our lamp and our light, when God’s Word is the voice we hear telling us which path to follow. And God’s greatest teaching/command/law is this: to love, to love one another as God has loved us.  When we do so, our perception of God’s action among us expands. Love allows us to see more fully, appreciate more deeply, and care more completely. We begin to recognize the kingdom germinating and blossoming all around us, we begin to recognize the face of Christ in more and more of our neighbors.  It is then that true wisdom grows and we delight in the cosmos God has made.