LD 48-49, Matthew 13:31-35, 44-46 "The Treasure" Scott Hoezee

The recent meteoric success of the Christian novel The Indwelling is but the latest example of how popular dispensationalist theology is. Millions adhere to some version of the end time which includes a rapture of Christians from this world in advance of a global period of tribulation, suffering, and evil. The Indwelling is part of a series of novels about such themes and these books are being devoured as fiercely by many Christians as the Harry Potter books are being snapped up by kids. Indeed, the authors of this series, Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, made the front page of the New York Times last month when The Indwelling rose to the #1 bestseller spot. The Times article reported that these apocalyptic novels have sold so hotly that Mr. LaHaye and Mr. Jenkins have now made $10 million each.

But again this is but one sign of how popular such theology is. There are also many videos that are regularly shown in premillenialist churches--movies which dramatically depict the rapture. One such film, A Thief in the Night, has been seen by as many as 100 million people. But again and again what emerges in such portrayals is the notion that believers will be safely evacuated prior to anything really bad happening. Jerry Falwell once typified this viewpoint when someone asked if he thought a nuclear holocaust might be the way the world would end. Falwell agreed that he thought such a scenario was likely but that this grim possibility did not bother him. A reporter pressed Falwell as to why. Falwell replied, "You know why I'm not worried? I ain't gonna be here." The rapture will ensure that no suffering will come to the faithful.

But Fred Craddock once called this belief arrogant. It's another way of saying that the disciple is greater than the Master. The Master suffered to bring God's kingdom to this world but now some believers locate that kingdom in some spiritual realm and, what's more, they'll get beamed up into that realm without having to suffer! And if the rapture of a Christian airline pilot in mid-flight means that all the non-Christians on that plane will die horribly, so be it. At least the Christians will be off the jet before it slams into the earth.

But that kind of viewpoint will never do for people who pray "Your kingdom come your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Here is a petition in the Lord's Prayer that should make it clear that Jesus did not want to escape the world, disengage from this earth, or see the whole thing abandoned and ruined.

But then, why should that be a surprise? After all, the words of the Lord's Prayer did not appear mysteriously in the clouds like some heavenly sky-writing. This was not written in the stars or blazed across the inky darkness of the night by some divinely sent meteorites. No, the Lord's Prayer emerged from the very human larynx of the very human Jesus from Nazareth. The words of this prayer passed through the slightly yellowed teeth and moist lips of an undeniably real person. Why is that important? Because obviously the Son of God would not have gone through all the trouble and pain to become a lump of clay like us if, as a matter of fact, the clay and sheer earthiness of life were unimportant!

Of course Jesus prayed for the kingdom to come to this world and of course he prayed for God's will to be done on this earth. Creation matters. And it is for that very reason that this most famous of prayers, but really all of our prayers, must be intimately connected to what happens in this world. That's important since many people think that prayer is the complete opposite of action. Religion, Karl Marx once said, is a way to keep people complacent. Christianity drugs people's minds with visions of heaven in ways calculated to keep them from ever trying to improve earth.

Some time ago I illustrated this pop view of prayer by highlighting a scene from Bertolt Brecht's play Mother Courage and Her Children. Near the end of that play there is a scene in which a farmer, his wife, and a mute girl witness an army regiment marching toward a nearby village, obviously preparing for an early morning surprise attack. As they realize that a dreadful slaughter is imminent, the farmer and his wife exclaim, "Oh, what shall we do? What shall we do? If only we could warn them, but we can't, so let us pray. Our Father in heaven, hear our prayer and protect those people."

Meanwhile, however, the mute girl slips away from the praying couple, grabs a drum, climbs up to the roof of the farmhouse, and begins to bang away loudly on the drum so as to warn the unsuspecting villagers. Horrified, the couple begs the girl to stop, but she continues to beat the drum. Finally, two soldiers come and shoot the girl dead.

Brecht's point is clear: all-too-often prayer becomes a safe refuge from action. If you cannot do anything, or if you dare not do anything, then pray. You pray when all else fails, you pray as a last-ditch sign of your despair, you pray because you're a coward. But in any event prayer is safe. It doesn't do anything. No soldier would have shot the farmer and his wife for merely praying for the villagers. Prayer is safe, it's innocuous, and sometimes it is simply a way to abandon earthly responsibility in favor of heavenly thoughts.

But the Lord's Prayer does not allow us to be idle. We are not allowed to separate the life of prayer from the life of action in this world. We are not allowed to keep all things heavenly in one compartment and all things earthly in a separate place. The kingdom of God has come to this world, for the sake of this world, and so the will of God which animates that kingdom needs to be seen in this world.

Yet as our passages from Matthew 13 make clear this morning, the way that the kingdom comes to this earth and the manner in which the kingdom is present in this world can be quite surprising. The kingdom of God was the single most prominent feature in the teaching and preaching of Jesus. Jesus' very first words in the gospels of Mark and Matthew declare that the kingdom of God was at hand. Following that Jesus laced his parables with references to the kingdom, mentioning it well over 100 times in the gospels.

But as in Matthew 13, so in many places Jesus made clear that the kingdom of God was going to save and rescue this world precisely by virtue of its being so very different from the powerful, flashy, showy political kingdoms which otherwise capture our attention. The kingdom of God, Jesus said, looks small, even tiny. It looks foolish. In fact, the kingdom can even disappear completely. Like a seed it gets buried in the soil. It takes 750 mustard seeds to equal one gram. Drop one of those little wisps into the dirt and you won't even be able to see it. The same is true of yeast in dough: once it's mixed into the water, flour, and oil, the yeast disappears. Yet these tiny things have great effects.

So also with the kingdom: it's not what you expect in terms of political clout. The kingdom of God is not about gleaming capital cities studded with marble colonnades and soaring executive mansions. It's not about some fierce army plowing under opposition by sheer dint of its power. Compared to all of that, God's kingdom looks as insignificant as a grain of mustard or a packet of yeast. But the kingdom can change hearts. It can change the world. It has changed the world.

The kingdom is here but it's modest. It's hidden. It's quiet. In fact, those who discover the kingdom sometimes tend to stumble upon it almost by accident. The kingdom is a great treasure, but you're not going to find this valuable commodity posted on the big board on Wall Street or for sale on Ebay. No, you're going to stumble on it in some remote field. The person who owns the field won't even know it's there, but once you find it your joy will be so massive that you'll do whatever it takes to buy that field.

All of this is profoundly surprising. We are so accustomed to these images in Jesus' parables that they typically don't strike us as absurd or paradoxical. But they are. Think of it: the kingdom is a seed scarcely visible to the naked eye and which disappears completely in dirt. The kingdom is yeast which a woman kneads into dough. In Jesus' day so-called "woman's work" was disdained such that Jesus was being quite provocative by making a woman the parabolic agent of working the kingdom into this world.

And has it ever struck you that the man who finds the treasure in the field is a little devious? Jesus says that this man finds some treasure in a field that does not belong to him. He then covers up this treasure again so the owner won't know it's there and then, without saying a word, he buys this field from the unsuspecting owner. It's a little sneaky! Suppose you were at a garage sale looking over some old purses. But then suppose you discovered that inside one of those old purses was a wad of $100 bills. Wouldn't you feel a little shady if you silently purchased it for $3 without telling the owner that she had missed a wee little something when cleaning out the purse before the garage sale?!

Tiny seeds, invisible yeast, woman's work, a sightly underhanded purchase: had it been left up to us, this is not how we would have described the single most powerful, meaningful, and joyful reality in the universe! But it is how Jesus described it. This is the kingdom Jesus bequeathed to us. It is the kingdom he asked us to pray for and the kingdom in which we asked us to live out the will of God on earth every day.

It is also the kingdom into which we need to call others. We may not pray for God's kingdom and will in this world unless we are willing to follow up our prayers by living a kingdom lifestyle ourselves. If we pray for God's heaven on earth, then we need to be very, very deliberate in how we live. We want to do and say things that will make the kingdom so attractive to others that they, too, will want to enter it.

But if we take our cues from Matthew 13, then it is clear that both our kingdom living and our kingdom proclamation will be more about quiet acts of loving faithfulness than about headline-grabbing, bullhorn tactics. In our evening series on the Fruit of the Spirit we recently reflected on this in connection to the fruit of gentleness. We cannot present the gospel of a suffering servant like Jesus by being arrogant finger-waggers. We cannot give the world the good news of grace if we mostly position ourselves as stern bearers of bad news and judgment. The kingdom of God represents the most powerful force the world has ever known. But we've got to let the kingdom grow and leaven in its own quiet, humble ways if people's hearts are really going to be changed.

In fact, as commentator Dale Brunner points out, it is curious to notice that in the parables of the treasure and pearl, it is only after the people run across these valuables that they become changed people who sell all they have. That may be one of the Bible's many hints, Brunner claims, that we cannot force people into the kingdom by first requiring them to follow a prescribed list of good deeds. Once you find the gospel, you have all the joy you need to motivate you to live a changed life. Until then, however, you won't find much motivation to follow the will of God on earth nor will the church's acting as the world's morality police bully people into the kingdom.

And so as bearers of God's kingdom, we keep plugging away at activities which may look silly or meaningless to the world but which we believe contain the very seed of a new creation. We keep coming to church and singing our old hymns, reciting our old formulas and creeds. People like myself keep cracking open an ancient book called the Bible, looking to find within it truths that are anything-but ancient. We keep gathering at sick beds and death beds and whisper our prayers for the Spirit of the resurrection to be with us in life and in death. We keep drizzling water onto squirming infants and popping cubes of white bread into our mouths in the earnest faith that through the Spirit baptism and communion don't just mean something, they mean everything.

And we keep working for Jesus in this mixed-up, backward world of ours. We quietly carry out our jobs and raise our kids and tend our marriages in the belief that God has designs for all those things and it's our job to follow them. We keep pointing people to an old rugged cross, having the boldness to suggest that the man who died on that cross is now the Lord of the galaxies.

And weaving in and through it all is a spiritual vision which tells us that reality is not just what Tom Brokaw can tell you about each evening. The New York Times can claim that it is the one newspaper that "brings you the world," but we see a deeper, richer reality over and beneath the limited scope of yesterday's or today's news. We see the kingdom of God and we see it growing. We see that somehow in the death and resurrection of Jesus, the whole universe turned the corner from darkness into light--we see that this holy light now bathes everything in its bright goodness.

Of course, there are still many people who would label everything I just said as being every bit as much a piece of pie-in-the-sky escapism as the rapture. All this wispy talk about "the kingdom of God" being just as real as what newspapers report looks like fiction to those without faith. About the only way we can combat such doubt is in the shape of our living.

A kingdom, Dallas Willard recently wrote in The Divine Conspiracy, is a place where one person's influence determines what happens. In the case of the kingdom of God, the kingdom is not for now a geographic spot on a map but rather the kingdom of God is present any place and every place where the influence of Jesus' living presence determines the shape of life. Wherever and whenever Jesus' wisdom, Jesus' wit, Jesus savvy, Jesus' words, and Jesus' love mold the words, actions, thoughts, and life patterns of some person or group of persons, then there is where God's kingdom is manifest.

We've got to show the world how real the kingdom is by how we conduct ourselves. And the first, best way we can do that is to live as Jesus lived. Of course, Jesus did not reach everybody, and we surely won't either, therefore. To some Jesus appeared misguided, so will we appear to at least some. To others Jesus seemed quintessentially ineffective (what with all those quirky and confusing parables and that rag-tag group of loser fishermen and women of questionable repute who followed him around). So also we may never come close to generating a fraction of the kind of the head-turning excitement that tingles people's spines every time Tom Cruise or Kim Basinger walks into a Los Angeles restaurant for dinner.

But we live the quiet, faithful, humble, service-oriented life of Jesus because it's all we have to go on! As N.T. Wright recently wrote, the disciples finally asked Jesus how to pray because they'd already spent some time watching the peculiar shape of Jesus' life. We'd dearly love to teach the whole world to pray Jesus' prayer the same way Jesus taught his disciples to pray these words.

But maybe as with Jesus, so with us, our best chance to do that will come only after the world spends some time watching our cross-shaped lives of dedicated service. As it happened for Jesus' disciples, so with us perhaps the day will come when those around us will come up to us and say, "We see something in you. Could you teach us how to pray so that we, too, can have some of the treasure that you've already got?" If that happens, then we not only pray "Your kingdom come," we see it coming. We see that indeed, it's already here. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, Amen.