Kaleidoscope

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

It’s a lot like looking through a kaleidoscope – reading and hearing these parables of Jesus, one after another. The images shift as you adjust the tube just a little, forming and reforming in patterns that are connected to each other but always changing. 

 

When I was a teenager, my dad brought home a kaleidoscope that – instead of shifting a set of colored chips like the toys I was used to – formed its intriguing patterns by simply reflecting the world in front of you through a curved lens and a set of mirrors.  I loved to point that kaleidoscope at different familiar scenes or objects – a table lamp, the cats, the bright trees and plants in the yard, my family members – and watch patterns form that were almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the familiar sights of my home.

 

That’s what it feels like to me, as seed and bush and leaven and treasure and pearls and merchants and fish all tumble over one another in these stories of Jesus that we hear together today. Patterns of the “real world”, the world around us, are stretched and reflected in odd and curious ways, recognizable and unrecognizable mixed up together and forming new patterns, different from what my eyes – or the rest of me – is used to.

The world seen through the kaleidoscope – or through the parables – is one that I don’t quite know how to navigate, but it’s attractive to me, and I keep coming back to look. To see the world a little differently.

 

And I suspect that’s why Jesus tells parables in the first place.

To get us to see the world a little differently.

 

It struck me this week that every time Jesus introduces one of these sayings or stories, he says, “the kingdom of heaven is like…”. Is, not “will be”. He’s not inviting us to imagine how a future perfect world would work. He’s inviting us to look at the world right in front of us, right around us, the is of our own life, and see the reality reflected by the presence of God saturating what is.

 

And that reality isn’t like just a pearl, or a seed – it’s like the whole story. The kingdom is like the experience, the fullness of the moment described. We’re not supposed to be able to focus on, to navigate, by a recognizable and familiar object or action as we respond to Jesus’ parables. We’re supposed to respond to the whole image, made strange and yet attractive, by the lenses and reflections Jesus offers us.

 

And these stories, these images are strange, as soon as you stop and think about them a little. Deliberately sowing an invasive plant – the mustard bush – in your ordinary field? Putting yourself out of business to purchase one particular pearl? (what are you going to do next?) Dragging ashore a net with rotten fish well mixed in your catch? 

Some of the actions Jesus describes are just… weird. Foolish, probably. Unusual for sure. Ordinary actions of work and business stretched into odd and unexpected shapes. Making a pattern – a pattern in which we start to recognize the kingdom of heaven by a resistance to “conventional wisdom”, and the “right” way to do things.

 

Most of these little moments, these parables of Jesus, depend on something foolish or worthless or unattractive.
A seed both invasive and insignificantly small.
Leaven – not our familiar packaged yeast, but a rising agent made from spoiling dough that can easily become dangerous, and is considered a symbol for corruption in Jesus’ other teachings.
A cheater or thief, sneaking hidden treasure through a probably dishonest purchase.
The foolish merchant and rotten fish.

 

Little or icky or worthless things that are also an experience of exuberance, or fulfillment, or abundance, or the balancing of righteousness in the world. A ridiculously oversized bush that benefits the birds. Ten gallons of flour and bread for a hundred from one hearth. Treasure that’s worth everything. All the fish, not just the good ones, not just a few.

 

New patterns emerge, in which we start to recognize the kingdom of heaven by an embrace of the unexpected and uncomfortable, an openness to discovering glory and value, abundance and fulfillment in the small, worthless, and unattractive.

 

Dig into even one commentary, and you’ll find even more little themes, patterns of oddness and amazement; patterns of things hidden and revealed, of the sensible and the ridiculous in these parables. All of them adding up to a pattern of the unexpected, the glorious or miraculous, in what we thought was ordinary. 

Through the lenses and mirrors Jesus uses, the insignificant becomes extraordinary, stretching and changing what we see, so that the most everyday things start to glow with the presence of all God’s holiness. 

So that silly and impractical choices – picking the loser for your team, buying every single zucchini at the farmers market – start manifesting God’s healing and justice.
And boringly mundane actions – laundry, calendaring meetings, commuting – start to resonate with the presence of the Creator of all, or overflow with unconditional divine love.

 

It's all in how you look.  

All in the lens you or I put to our eye, in the little twist that changes how the world reflects, and what we see. 

The kingdom of heaven is like the world we know, reflected into shapes of unfamiliar grace, surprise, and beauty. All around us, here and now, if we just look through a different lens.

 

“Have you understood these things?” Jesus asks his disciples.
Asks us, maybe.

I don’t think he’s asking if they, or we, can explain what we’ve learned. I think he’s asking us if we’ve understood how to look for the shape of heaven, the vivid reality of the life-giving work of God, in the mundane and foolish objects and actions in front of us, the awkward and unimpressive realities of our daily lives.

 

That’s part of what it means, I think, to be Christian. To be followers of Jesus is to be people who see the world differently because we look differently. Because we practice encountering the world through the lens of expecting to find God at work, transforming and healing and loving us. Practice expecting God’s presence to be reflected in everything.

 

I have found that when I start looking for the traces of God’s work in the world, I tend to find them. To find foolish, extravagant, hope in the pet photos, generous jokes, and little declarations of solidarity that are mixed into the ridiculous disputes, sensationalism, and advertising avalanche of social media.  To find a miracle of creative love – and a temptation to give everything I have for a single treasure – in the taste of one perfectly fresh tomato or cherry.
Found that when I start trying to find one small way to follow Jesus’ teaching to love my neighbor, I discover a previously invisible groundswell of people selflessly running errands, sharing their homes, or giving difficult public testimony to promote the human dignity of their neighbors.

 

A friend of mine once described this as the “blue Chevy” phenomenon. It’s the way you gradually or suddenly start to notice just how many blue Chevrolet sedans there are on the road around you in the days and weeks after you start driving a blue Chevrolet sedan for the first time. Your experience makes just a slight shift in your lens of vision, and the world reveals just how full it is – how full it always has been – of blue Chevys.
Or mustard plants and pearls.

Or tiny, ridiculous actions of peace and joy. 

Or unlovable folks who unmistakably love their neighbor as themselves.

Lovable folks who do that, too. 

 

So maybe the kingdom of heaven is like a kaleidoscope. 

Or maybe it’s like a blue Chevrolet (or whatever you vehicle you used to get yourself to church today). Like a car that someone drove day after day after day, until the everyday road was filled with treasure, and acts of love, and the wonder and glory of God. And then, in our joy, we leave all the other roads behind to share the road that gives abundant life to all.

Our Share of Favor

Genesis 25:19-34 (Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23)

In my mind’s eye, this is starting to look like a scene from Looney Tunes.

We see the mighty hunter tramping through the meadows and wild lands, gun over his shoulder, tired from a long day in the field. Cartoon steam begins to waft across the scene – Elmer Fudd sniffs…sniffs…his nose pulls him right to a tent where a cook is ladling steaming stew into a dish. He reaches out to grab the dish, and exclaims “Give me some of that w(r)ed stuff!”

“Okay, but it’s gotta price. Your birthright. Everything you’ve got.”
“Who cawes about a biwthwight? I’m so hungwy I could die!”

“Izzat a promise, Doc?”

 “Yes! Take it!”

And the chef’s hat comes off, the long ears pop free, Bugs swooshes to Fudd’s house, changes the locks, settles in in two cartoon seconds, and chomps a carrot. Fade to black on Elmer Fudd’s bewildered belated recognition that he’s lost it all and that wascally wabbit got him good. 

I went down quite a rabbit hole (you might say) this week, led by some hints in a commentary that this brief, clunky, scene in which Esau sells Jacob his whole future for a simple meal might be a folksy trickster tale, meant to get a laugh as well as to outline the character and relationships of these two men who will be important players in God’s story.

Jacob comes through as scheming, ambitious and tricky, keen on self-promotion. He takes advantage of a situation, makes an outrageous demand, and gets away with it. 

Esau comes off as an idiot, helplessly impulsive, the natural butt of jokes.  

It’s exaggeration.

It’s caricature, more than character sketch.

It’s a Saturday morning cartoon.

And yet, here, in the Bible – in the stories told and retold for century after century after century – it’s part of the foundational story of God. Of the sorts and kinds of humans God gets close to, that God blesses.

And then the funny story maybe isn’t as comfortable. 

Because in context – in a story set in the pre-history of the people of Israel – it’s actually a story about Jacob cheating Esau in a deal for God’s favor. A swindle to become the “firstborn son”, the one who is the focus of God’s promises, one who carries the blessing of God for the family.

Why would Esau throw away the promises and blessing of God… for a bowl of stew?

It might be easier to explain Jacob. Maybe his mother told him about the oracle she heard, suggesting that he’s the one who should claim the lion’s share of God’s favor, should lead the family’s relationship to God. He’s just cooperating with God’s plan, maybe?

Or maybe he wants more of God – more of God’s love, more blessing, a deeper sense of connection with God’s promises. We applaud a desire to get deeper into your relationship with God around here. So it might be easy to sympathize with Jacob, when he sees an opportunity and seizes it. 

When he makes an extravagant demand for God’s favor, and gets it.

This is great news for those of us who want a big blessing – who want extravagant amounts of God’s attention and grace. Who might also find our outrageous desires for God’s blessing fulfilled.

Good news – except that the path to that blessing that Jacob is modeling looks morally questionable.

Do we have to take away God’s blessings from someone else in order to get more God, more blessing, for ourselves?

From outside the context of the story, from millennia later in the story of the people of God, I can stand here and confidently tell you that no, we don’t have to take anything away from anyone else to get more of the blessing and favor of God. (In fact, I suspect that God’s more inclined to favor those who aren’t trying to get in between someone else and God’s blessings).

And you and I can also read the whole context of the story and speculate that even if Jacob gets Esau’s birthright, it’s not actually changing the balance of God’s favor between them, since God’s already told their mother (and all of us) that Jacob will be the “stronger” brother.

It’s entirely possible, even probable, that when we reach for more of God’s favor ourselves, we can’t actually take that favor away from others. 

We can grab the material effects of God’s blessing – like Esau’s birthright share of the family wealth, we can still take material benefits and status from others - and have to struggle with the moral implications of grabbing those away from our siblings. 

But I’m feeling pretty confident that we can’t take someone else’s place in God’s favor. In God’s love; God’s work and dream and plan for the whole creation.

Which makes Esau look a lot less foolish to me. 

I don’t know how much his mother told him of the oracle that he and his brother would switch places, that their public and expected roles would be reversed. 

We don’t actually need to know.

We just know that he didn’t hold his birthright – his status and privilege – tightly. We see that it was apparently quite easy for him to let go of, to give away. 

Maybe it’s because he is a thoughtless idiot, the natural cartoon victim caricatured in this story. 

But maybe it’s because Esau is already aware that the minimum share of God’s favor is plenty. That he can easily give away all of the “more”, all the privilege, associated with the firstborn because the most basic allotment of blessing is enough. More than enough. 

You don’t need more than infinity, after all. 

Maybe Esau is like the sower of seed in Jesus’ parable today – ready to “foolishly” “waste” the precious resource of seed, of God’s favor, because a small portion is more than enough to yield abundantly.

The story bears this out, in a way. At the end of Esau’s story – spoiler alert – we see him welcoming his brother home after Jacob has spent years (probably decades) scheming and tricking and being tricked to make his fortune. Esau welcomes Jacob with open arms and turns down every attempt of Jacob’s to give him gifts, possessions, payback. He has all that he needs, he tells Jacob. He has plenty.

That’s good news for us, too. For any of us who seem to live life in God’s favor. Good news that we have nothing to fear from losing status or privilege or the outward and visible signs of that favor, whether that’s health and material wealth, respect, official or unofficial status in the church or our families, or any other recognition.

Good news for those of us who’ve never been recognized as people God might favor, too – that even the most basic allotment of grace, the least share of blessing, the smallest possible fraction of God’s love, is more than enough grace and blessing and love, more than we can use up, no matter how we spend it.

I went down a bunch of rabbit holes this week trying to make this story sensible.
But the Bible – the narrator who recorded this story for us, the oral tradition that shaped it, the faithful tradition that’s re-read this story for millennia – the Bible doesn’t really care about making logical sense, or the “rights” of things. 

The story doesn’t make any moral judgements about Jacob or Esau – or their parents, or us. 

The tradition of the Bible just wants us to notice that here are a pair of humans, engaged in a ridiculous transaction, maneuvering to do between themselves what God has already done. 

Which might just mean that no matter how we read it, no matter who we sympathize with in this story, we, too, are already in the right place in God’s favor. 

And that you and I can long and scheme and work to get more of God’s blessing – and get it. 

And that we can hold all God’s love and blessing lightly – giving it away for a song, for a bowl of soup, to the birds, to make someone else happy – and not lose a single thing we need. 

Maybe that Saturday morning Looney Tune would actually fade to black on a split screen – Bugs delightedly settling in all the comfort and privilege he’s just seized, and Fudd spooning up delicious stew with an expression of happy satisfaction on his face, as he satisfies his hunger and relaxes in the knowledge that – wascally wabbit or no – he has everything he needs.

And maybe God laughs along with us, as they both look a bit surprised to be enjoying what was, after all, theirs all along.

Wrestling

Genesis 22:1-14

This morning’s Genesis story – the story of Abraham hearing God and taking Isaac up a mountain for a sacrifice – is a horror story to me. 

I cannot read it – can’t hear God suggest to Abraham that he offer his son as a burnt offering – without at least a little nausea.
I mean, I can’t even make myself watch tv comedies in which someone’s misunderstandings get a family member or friend in funny but real trouble; I’m a basket case if I let myself actively imagine how this story would play out with real people.

 

But here we are.

This story is right here in the Bible. 

Somewhere in the ancestry of our faith, enough people found this story an important revelation about God and us that we decided to keep telling it as part of our holy history.

It might have once made perfect sense in the cultural language it was first written in – a culture long-vanished and very foreign to our own. 

Generations since then have wrestled with it, trying to find that holiness.

We read it in church now and call it “The Word of the Lord”. 

I can’t ignore it.

We can’t ignore it.

 

And so – like the generations before us – I keep wrestling with it. 

We have to wrestle with it.

And – when I step back just a little bit – I’m glad we do.

 

I think we genuinely need to wrestle with the terrible texts. The stories that incorporate horror into our holy history, and also the uncomfortable ones where the tragedy might not be vivid, but where what happens in the story doesn’t feel “right” for our image of God. Not right for the God we long to love. 

(Like the story we heard last week, in which Jesus talks about coming to slash the ties between us and our closest family members.)

 

I think we have to wrestle with the horrible stories – maybe even need to have them in our holy history – because our relationship with God and God’s relationship with us takes in all of the horror of our own existence. God’s relationship with us does not stop at the edges of the horror stories of our world. God takes us complete with the human history of atomic bombs and still-multiplying forms of slavery. We take God complete with the histories of religious wars and persecutions, with stories of a world-destroying flood and a brutal Roman execution.

 

All these things that break us, destroy us – God takes them with us, because God takes us whole. God enters into relationship with all of us; the nasty bits as well as the beautiful. And we – if we want a relationship with God that fills all the empty, raw, infected wounds and cracks in our souls and hearts and bodies – we take God whole, too. The tragic with the miraculous, the agonizing with the ecstatic joy.

 

The personal, direct relationship with God that God establishes with Abraham, the whole-heart, whole-life relationship that Jesus invites us into – these don’t make the world around us nice. Can’t make all our choices good.
And the unconditional love of God doesn’t after all make God “nice”, or even easy to understand. 

 

We wrestle with the tragedies and horrors and discomforts and shocks in our holy history with God because – in the end – we want to be able to find God holding on to us when tragedies and horrors and discomfort and shock in our own lives try to separate us from God. 

Because a God who is only ever “nice” to everybody isn’t much use to a heart filled with rage at the abuse of a child. It’s hard to imagine a “nice” God understanding my grief and bitterness when I recognize how I’ve been rotten to someone else. [or want to be rotten to others.]

A God who is only ever distantly good is hard to trust when the world around me seems to consist of one bad thing; one evil after another. Of wrongs that add up and add up but never make a “right”.

 

I don’t want to think of God as a source of horror. But I can’t ignore these stories; and I can’t ignore the horrors of the world (as much as I’d like to), and I can’t keep God boxed in to “nice”.

 

So I stay here and wrestle with the mess.

 

I think that may be why Abraham – and probably Isaac – and certainly, on record, Abraham’s grandson Jacob – wrestled persistently with God.

And like Jacob – who after wrestling all night would not let God go without a blessing – I’m going to try to refuse to let this story go until it blesses me. Us.

 

I don’t need to be satisfied with someone else’s explanation that this story – of God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son; sacrifice all the evidence of God’s promises – tells us that obedience to God is a virtue that gets rewarded. I can go ahead and yell at the text in my hand that it’s unconscionable to “test” someone by demanding child sacrifice. I can mutter a lot of unprintable words (and trust me, I did this week) and shout that it would have to be more faithful to refuse to kill, more faithful to challenge God, than to pack up the wood and the knife for a burnt offering of any human being. 

 

I can complain to all my colleagues, and to you, that this is a dangerous story. I will keep on insisting that – in its literal form – this is a terrible example of obeying God and you should absolutely, positively, not try this at home and if you ever think you might be hearing the voice of God telling you to sacrifice any person, just don’t. 

 

But I can’t walk away from this story.

I can’t cut it out of the story of God, or of my own relationship with God.

I can’t let it go until it blesses me.

 

That blessing might not be a satisfying “answer” to why God would do such a thing. 

 

Instead, that blessing might turn out to be grief.
Grief that this story unleashes, which allows me to mourn the horrors of our own lives, of the daily news. A blessing to stop suppressing – to release – the powerful but inconvenient griefs at the cruelties of the world that I mostly try to ignore. 

 

That blessing might be an expansion of my expectations of God – might be that I’m feeling God’s resistance to being kept in a box of gentleness and distant benevolence in our lives, my life – and learning to expect that it might be good for God to shock me, disturb us, challenge our definition of “good”.

 

The blessing might just be the wondering I’ve been doing all week. The way I’ve been trying out “explanations” and being unsatisfied with the answers. Like the way speculating about whether Isaac was actually a consenting participant in this drama made me wonder about what I might be capable of in my own relationship with God, even though it didn’t make me any happier with the actual biblical story.

 

It might even be a blessing that this story is so horrifying – a blessing that child sacrifice is not, and never has been, an approvable practice of our faith – though there are times and places where humans did think it was right and faithful. Maybe even everyone else around Abraham, in his time.

 

I don’t know yet, for sure, where we’ll – where I’ll – find the blessing. So I’m not done wrestling with this story. And maybe you aren’t, either. 

Maybe this story blessed you, long ago.  Maybe you wrestled it to peace; maybe it blessed you and you still feel the horror anyway.

 

But maybe it hasn’t. 

And if it hasn’t, well…. you don’t need to be satisfied with whatever I suggest to you about this story today. You can mutter unprintable words – that’s a genuine faithful response to quite a lot in the Bible, actually.  You can argue with God, and with tradition. You can argue with me about it, or complain. 

But don’t let it go. 

Don’t let it go without wrestling. Without demanding a blessing.