"Who is the neighbor?"

Luke 10:25-37

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he said, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" He said to him, "What is written in the law? What do you read there?" He answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." And he said to him, "You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live."
But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" Jesus replied,

"A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, `Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.' Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" He said, "The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

“Who is my neighbor?” This question belongs on the Bible’s list of The Worst Questions Ever Asked in the History of the World. Alongside, “how many times must I forgive my brother?” and “when you come into your kingdom, can we sit at your right hand?” and “am I my brother’s keeper?”, this question lives in biblical infamy.

But this isn’t the only bad question that's asked in our text. The first question is, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Well, what’s wrong with this question? Maybe nothing, as far as it goes. But notice, it’s not, what do I have to do to be a good person, or to please God, or what have you. It’s, what must I do to inherit eternal life? What do I have to do to get the reward? But even before the man opens his mouth to ask his first wrong question, we know it’s bound to be grim. The story, after all, identifies the man as “a lawyer.”

At first, Jesus plays the lawyer’s game. He knows the man is just asking to test him. But even so, he answers the man on his own grounds, asking his counterquestion in terms that a lawyer will understand. “What is written in the Law?” Jesus asks him. And the man of course knows the answer, as do we all. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, etc., etc., and your neighbor as yourself.” That’s right, Jesus tells him. A gold star for the lawyer boy. Now all you have to do is go do it: “Do this,” Jesus says, “and you will live.”

And it is here of course that the story really gets going. Because in answering the lawyer on his own grounds, by accepting the premises of the lawyer’s wrong question, Jesus leads him straight into the point at which his question and assumptions are all wrong. The lawyer knows the answer to his question. The lawyer knows the Law, knows the Good. The lawyer knows what Jesus will answer, even. The lawyer knows a whole lot. But what Jesus knows, that the lawyer doesn’t, is that knowledge isn’t enough. Knowing the answer is not really the answer. The real answer, to the right question, is not about knowing the Good. It’s about doing it. “Do this,” Jesus says, “and you will live.”

The lawyer knows he’s caught. As are we all. You may have heard, perhaps, of the “famous seminary experiment of the Good Samaritans.” The experiment was designed to test whether or not people thinking “helpful, religious” type thoughts would be any more likely to stop and offer assistance to someone who needed it. So the researchers recruited seminary students, told them to give a talk on the Good Samaritan, and made them late for it. Then they said, “hey, you’re late—you better get going” and placed a slumped-over man, coughing and moaning, in their way. Less than half of the students stopped to offer any help…and apparently some of them literally stepped over the man in the alley in order to get to their destination and give their talk on the Good Samaritan.

This appalling truth about humanness is why Jesus corners the lawyer with his simple and indisputable pronouncement: “Do this and you will live.” Know this, and only know it, and you’ll know what it is you lack, the exact dimensions of your failure. But do this, and you will live.

The lawyer, the seminary students in a hurry, all of us, we’re all caught, we’re all cornered. And so the lawyer, advocating for himself (or perhaps all of us), wanting, as the Bible tells us, to justify himself (or all of us), hastens to ask that desperate, infamous follow-up question.

“And who is my neighbor?”

We all know the parable Jesus tells in reply; we know it by heart. A wounded man, a priest and a Levite (the seminary students of their day, if you will), and a Samaritan ( perhaps today's devout Muslim?). Jesus’ strategy in reaching the lawyer changes with the telling of the parable. At first, he accepted the legalistic question, leading the questioner straight into the absurdity of the divorce of knowledge and action. But the lawyer pushes on, even further into the absurd--preferring, apparently, to be absurd rather than wrong. He’d rather be silly than stupid, rather be ridiculous than repent. And so Jesus tells a story, and at the end, as he so often does, instead of answering the wrong question asked of him, he asks his interrogator a right question instead. Not “who is my neighbor?” but “which of the three was a neighbor to the wounded man?”*

The difference between these two questions is vast. “Who is my neighbor” can only be answered in one way, with a list of who is not: not Samaritans, not wounded men on the sides of roads, not homeless people with a hacking cough, not people in Africa dying of AIDS, not people I don't know, not those people who need so much help that I don’t have time in my busy schedule to give, or any idea how to really help them. But “who was a neighbor to the wounded man?” is not answered that way. And the lawyer--smart man!--gets this answer right, too: he answers, “the one who showed him mercy.” Who is the neighbor? Not the wounded man; the Samaritan! Because the answer to Jesus’ question is that one makes oneself a neighbor—not somebody else.

And how? By being a neighbor to that person. The answer to the right question is not an identity; it is an action. This is why it is no accident that the neighbor in Jesus’ story is a Samaritan, a despised person, a reject, an outcast. It’s not identity that makes a neighbor.

Making oneself a neighbor is active. No, more than that—it is proactive, a preemptive strike of neighborliness. The wounded man does nothing to make the Samaritan his neighbor. He just lies there, wounded. It is the Samaritan who acts: who approaches, binds his wounds, takes him to the inn and provides for further care. The Samaritan makes himself the neighbor to the wounded man through his actions. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus concludes: Go and make yourself a neighbor to the wounded.

But—like the lawyer—I have a follow-up question to ask. What if this were a different story, one we don't know by heart, one where there was no good Samaritan to stop and help—just a priest and a Levite who walk by, and a wounded, abandoned, dying man on the road? Were there no good Samaritan in the story, what would we say? That the wounded man had no neighbor because no one made himself a neighbor to the man? Maybe that would be true, but it’s also only partially true, which means of course that it’s also a lie. Because, as Paul Harvey would say, “the rest of the story” is that all three travelers should be neighbors to the wounded man; that all three are neighbors to the man, even if only one of them acted like it.

The truth is, the wounded man does not just do nothing to make the Samaritan his neighbor. Sure, he doesn't do much. He just lies there, wounded. But that's exactly it. It is his woundedness that makes the priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan his neighbor. It is his need that puts these passers-by under obligation to respond to it. Were he not wounded, they would have passed on the road with a nod and a smile, or perhaps less than that. But he is wounded. He is in need. And the neighbor must answer.

The priest and the Levite pass by on the far side of the road. That is their answer. But the Samaritan, Jesus says, “came near” the wounded man and “when he saw him he was moved with pity.” I imagine that he saw the man’s face, and that the wounded man’s glance was one of both supplication and demand. Begging: please help me. And commanding: you must help me! The wounded man has the right to make this demand, simply because of his need.**

Who is the neighbor? Does the Samaritan make himself the neighbor through his neighborly act, or does the wounded man make the Samaritan his neighbor through the fact of his need?

Like all either-ors, to pose the question this way is to present a false dilemma. Yes, the woundedness of the wounded man makes the Samaritan his neighbor; yes, the action of the Samaritan in being neighbor to the wounded man makes him his true neighbor. What we learn from this parable is both of these things. What we learn is not just that the Samaritan comes through as the true neighbor, the one who showed mercy, but that the priest and the Levite fail, utterly, because they refuse to recognize their obligation to the wounded man’s need.

Do we understand their failure? If we’re honest with ourselves: yes. We are too often the priest and the Levite of the story who pass by on the other side of the road, the seminary students of the experiment, who step over the fallen man in the alley. We are stuffed full of knowledge of the Good and so preoccupied with it that we have forgotten that Good is not something you know, it’s something you do. Or perhaps we might even say, God is not something you know; God is something you do.

We live in a wounded world. It’s a world full of wounded people on the sides of roads full of busy people walking by them. We are the neighbor, with the power to help and to heal. Those wounds make us the neighbor. The only question left is, do we act like it. Do we?

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." We, too, can give the right answer. And Jesus tells us: "Do this, and you will live."

Let us pray together the Prayer of Confession:

Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbor as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us;
that we may delight in your will,
and walk in your ways,
to the glory of your name. Amen.

O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that we may both know and understand what things we ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to do them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.



*from Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation: “The parable of the Good Samaritan ends with the famous inversion which Christ makes of the original question. They asked him, ‘Who is my neighbor?’ and when everything seemed to point to the wounded man in the ditch on the side of the road, Christ asked, ‘which of these three do you think was neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ The neighbor was the Samaritan who approached the wounded man and made him his neighbor” (198).

**from Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity : “The gaze that supplicates and demands, that can supplicate only because it demands, deprived of everything because entitled to everything, and which one recognizes in giving—this gaze is precisely the epiphany of the face as a face. The nakedness of the face is destituteness. To recognize the Other is to recognize a hunger. To recognize the Other is to give. But is to give to the master, to the lord, to him whom one approaches in a dimension of height” (75).

Who is She, and how do we know Her?: A sermon for Trinity Sunday

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Does not wisdom call,
and does not understanding raise her voice?
On the heights, beside the way,
at the crossroads she takes her stand;
beside the gates in front of the town,
at the entrance of the portals she cries out:
"To you, O people, I call,
and my cry is to all that live.
The LORD created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth--
when he had not yet made earth and fields,
or the world's first bits of soil.
When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.

I know a lot of smart people. Really, really smart people. People who intimidate me with their wit, their vocabularies, their incredible breadth of knowledge. I’ve sat with them in class, I’ve learned from their lectures, I’ve read their blogs, Igo to church with them. But wise people? I don’t even know if I know anyone I would call “wise.”

The thing is, we don’t really talk about wisdom much so to tell the truth I don’t really know exactly what it is, or at least, I don’t really know exactly what it is we mean we say wisdom nowadays. I have a vague idea that wisdom is a special kind of knowledge, different from ordinary knowledge, or book-learning, or just being smart or quick-witted. When I think of a wise person, I think of somebody old: wisdom being something acquired through years of first-hand experience of the trials of life—something that, therefore, is undefinable, personal, non-transferable, and cannot be hurried, or achieved simply through effort or desire, or even anticipated. It’s sort of a compensation, maybe, for the wrinkles and the gray hair and the achy joints, and perhaps the reason why old people generally think the world—now being run by the upstart youngsters in their 20’s and 30’s and 40’s and 50’s—is going to hell in a handbasket. But that’s it—that’s all I can really say about wisdom. It’s something vague and undefinable that sometimes old people get, if they’re lucky, if they live well and long and pay attention to stuff, and process their life’s experiences in the right way.

That isn’t what “wisdom” means in our text for today.

To begin with, unlike us, the Israelites thought a lot about wisdom. In fact, there’s a whole genre of OT literature called “wisdom literature.” Proverbs is “wisdom literature” along with Job, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations.

But that’s not all. We think of wisdom generically, as just a sort of way of thinking or living that is attained by a few people by living well. But wisdom in the wisdom literature of the OT is altogether different. It is not something that human beings achieve by living a long time, or even by living well. The wisdom of the wisdom literature in the OT is not human at all. It is God’s wisdom.

But even in saying this we may be tempted to think of this as simply a way of saying that God is really wise: God knows a lot more stuff than we do and even knows a lot more than we do about what is good for us. Sure, God knows a lot of stuff. Maybe even everything. But this isn’t what God’s wisdom is, either. It is not an attribute of God, like omniscience, or a way of saying what God is like. The wisdom of God is itself divine. The wisdom of God is God.

This is why Wisdom is personified in our text today, because to talk about Wisdom is to talk about God. Wisdom in this sense is one of God’s ways of being present and active in the world.

And Wisdom is a woman: divine Sophia.

In our text today, Wisdom speaks directly to us. She makes a lot of claims for herself, as divine Sophia, God’s own wisdom. She claims that she was there at the very beginning, at God’s side during the very act of Creation itself. She is “the first of God’s acts,” and witnessed the establishment of the heavens and the seas and the foundation of the earth. She was, she says, “beside God like a master-worker,” suggesting that perhaps she even participated in God’s act of creation.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God. He was there from the beginning, and through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

Of course, John's prologue is a lot more familiar to us than Wisdom’s speech in Proverbs 8. We have all heard it before, many times. Probably a lot of us could recite it from memory without ever having tried to really memorize it. And of course we all know who it is about, right?

But the amazing parallels between Wisdom’s speech in Proverbs and the prologue of the gospel of John are not accidental. They are, rather, extremely deliberate. Wisdom, divine Sophia, is used as a way of describing God’s action and presence in the world. And of course, nowhere is God more present than in Jesus Christ, who is God incarnate. As articulated by John’s gospel, then, Jesus, like Sophia, is God’s presence and action with us in the world: there from the beginning, involved intimately in the act of creation. The claims made by Sophia in Wisdom’s speech in Proverbs become, in John’s gospel, Christological claims.

But Wisdom is a woman.

Perhaps the fact that God can be seen and spoken of not only with masculine images and metaphor like Father and Son but also with female images and metaphors is not surprising. We're familiar with Jesus' statement about Jerusalem, how he longed to gather her home like a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wings. We know that God is not male, or female. Perhaps both, or neither, or more than, or utterly other than; but never simply, only, male, or female. Nevertheless, I was told once during an especially vulnerable period of my Christian faith, “isn’t God a man?” Unable to respond at the time—unsure if my instinct to yell, “no!” was even faithful—I kept silent. Is God a man? I wondered...Jesus was a man. And Jesus was God incarnate. Does this mean God is a man?

Since then, my question has been not “is God a man,” but “how could anyone believe God is a man?” Of course this is a complicated matter. But on one level, this belief is possible because the Christian tradition, on the whole, speaks of God almost entirely in masculine language. Nowhere is this more evident than in Trinitarian language, which has been so sanctified over the years that it has become really the way to talk about who God is. Who God is in God’s self, and who God is to us. We theologian types call these the immanent and economic trinities. We talk about God in three persons, triunity, the one-in-three, perichoresis, aseity. We talk about social trinitarianism and discuss what works belong to which person, or if all three persons are present whenever God acts. Believe me, it’s complicated and wearying, and it’s been going on for nearly two thousand years.

Today is Trinity Sunday, a.k.a., "the first Sunday after Pentecost." Pentecost, of course, is a day with which we are all reasonably familiar, though sadly none of us remembered to wear the traditional red. But Trinity Sunday I would bet most of us have never heard of. Perhaps you, like me, did not even hear the word “trinity” in church growing up. Those of us from the Church of Christ don’t use that word much; Alexander Campbell, one of our founding fathers, didn’t like it: it isn’t biblical. "Bible things by Bible names!" So while we talk comfortably about God the Father, and Jesus the Son of God, and rather uncomfortably (I mean, let’s be honest) about the Spirit, we do accept the idea of God in three persons…we just don’t call them a trinity.

Why bother with the Trinity? Basically, Trinitarian talk is just our attempt to hold together two essential affirmations about the God we believe in: that God became human, and dwelt among us in the person of Jesus Christ; and that God is, and has been, and will be the same God who has acted in the history of the people of Israel, and who moves among us today as Holy Spirit. How do we talk about a God who is so diversely present to us, and yet the same? The best solution the theologians of the third and fourth centuries could come up with was to talk about Father, Son and Holy Spirit: the three-in-one.

So on this Trinity Sunday, when we celebrate God the Father, who sent the Son, who sent the Spirit, our Comforter—what does it mean to talk about Wisdom, the female symbol of God’s presence and action in the world, divine Sophia, and Christ the Son as the new manifestation of Sophia?

I don’t really want to advocate straight up heresy. Not really. Not here, anyway…if you want heresy, go read my blog. So I’m not suggesting that the doctrine of the Trinity is a bad doctrine, that we need to dump it or revise it or ignore it. I’m certainly not trying to add a fourth member to the Trinity. No, what I'm saying is radical--but radically orthodox: We must be careful about assuming that any human formulation—no matter how old, how venerable, how traditional, how carefully worked out—captures the essence of God, definitively. God is so much more than any human way of naming or describing can capture. God cannot be captured. C.S. Lewis told us this: he’s not a tame lion. (And he’s not really a lion, either.)

God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is Wisdom, divine Sophia. God is Mother, a jilted lover, a fire, a wind. God is all these and none of these. God is Mystery that cannot be contained in any one image, any one metaphor.

Each way of imaging God and speaking of God teaches us something unique, and something new, I believe. The triune God of traditional Christian Trinitarian doctrine teaches us that God so loved the world that he sent his only son; a son who died for the sake of God’s beloved creation, and who promised us the Spirit in his absence. But this does not exhaust what can be said of God. So the question to ask, as we read this text on Trinity Sunday, is, what unique and new thing does Proverbs teach us about God through the voice of divine Wisdom?

Let’s look at our text again with this question in mind. It begins with Wisdom telling us that she cries out to us, and that she cries “to all that live.” This inclusive mission does not take heed of boundaries like nationality or gender or class or ability, or require that one be faithful before she’ll call. Her call is to us and to all that live. That’s everyone.

But that’s not all. When God, as Wisdom, calls out to all who live, it means not just that God wants everyone to hear but that everyone can hear Wisdom’s call. These days, I hear a lot about how Reason is untrustworthy, compromised because of the Fall, and how we have to be suspicious of human wisdom in order to be faithful to God’s Wisdom. Some of this I think is true. Obviously human knowledge is limited—we don’t know everything, and can’t know everything. Often we don’t even know or want what is good for us.

But if Wisdom’s call goes out to all who live then it reaches everyone, even those who do not know God as Father, Son and Spirit; and if Wisdom’s call is meant for all who live, then it means even those who do not know God as Father, Son and Spirit can hear Wisdom’s call. And unless Wisdom calls in vain, it means that all who live can respond to her. Human beings are not “ruined” when it comes to Wisdom; instead, we were created to be able to respond to Wisdom’s call when he hear it.

And now it makes sense that Wisdom’s speech turns into a poetic description of Creation itself: Wisdom was there from the beginning, observing and celebrating and participating in the creation of all things, including human beings; and thus we are in some sense creatures of Wisdom. We can hear her call and know Wisdom for who She is. Not just some of us; but all who live.

And so our text ends with God’s Wisdom “rejoicing in the inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” People, God loves us. And not just like a disappointed father loves a wayward and prodigal son. God delights in the human race! God beams down at us, smiles, laughs, rejoices in us humans very much, I think, the way I watch Clare as she laughs, eats, says “Hi Da!” and “CAT!” while maniacally giggling at our poor patient cat, as she takes her wobbly first steps and grows those funny looking front teeth. I’m shameless—she has her own blog now just because one blog couldn’t contain the immensity of maternal delight! God is rejoicing in this inhabited world and delighting in the human race—children of God, children of Wisdom!

Yes, Wisdom is a woman. And what we see in this text is that Wisdom is God present and active in this world: God loving and delighting in his creation, God calling out to us and to all who live. God the Father sent his Son and his Holy Spirit to us; and God as divine Sophia calls us all home, delighting in us as a woman does her child. God is all these, and none of these. God is mystery that cannot be contained, contained in all things, in the Wisdom that created all.

"Unready"

Isaiah 6:1-8

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said:

"Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory."

The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said: "Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!"
Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: "Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out." Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I; send me!"

Luke 5:1-11

Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch." Simon answered, "Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets." When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people." When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you--unless you have come to believe in vain.
For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them--though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe.


Today is the fifth Sunday of Epiphany. The Season of Epiphany is all about discovering who Jesus really is. The scriptures and stories we read during this season are stories of miracles, of healings, of teachings that show us that Jesus is not just some guy from Galilee, but someone special; someone touched by the divine, someone who—by the time we get to the story of the Transfiguration—is divine.

Of course, our perspective, as readers and hearers of these biblical stories, preserved and canonized and handed down through generations, is one that takes the outcome for granted. And we know, of course, that this perspective is exactly what is not taken for granted by those in the stories themselves. The crowds, the disciples—sometimes I think even Jesus himself—did not share our automatic certainty that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. They are always on the cusp of grasping this astonishing revelation...and then, most often, losing it. They are always in the middle of the epiphany, while we are ages past it.

It is of course nearly impossible for us to recreate the mindset of the people who lived these things, who walked and talked and watched and learned from the man Jesus, the man who occasionally is revealed to them as Someone Divine. We can’t forget that these things have happened. Even when we try to place ourselves within the narrative, as one of the disciples, or one of the crowd, or one of the many healed, our knowledge of Jesus’ identity—the very thing at issue in the stories—is a matter taken to some extent for granted, shaping how we imagine our participation in the event that reveals it. It is for this reason that we find ourselves with the easy conviction that we would have known, we would have followed, we would have said thank you, we never would have crucified, or mocked, or doubted, or denied.

So I will not ask you to imagine being there. I honestly don’t think that we can forget who Jesus is to us long enough for imagination to do the work we ask it to do.

Instead, let’s consider what these stories have in common. Sometimes, especially during ordinary or green time, the texts in the lectionary seem rather arbitrary and unrelated. This week, however, the experiences of Isaiah, Peter and Paul all seem to follow a pattern, despite the wide separation of years and circumstance that distinguish them. And because that is so, I believe the lesson we learn from the commonality of their experiences, recorded for us, is one that we can best learn not by reaching backwards with our imaginations to try to picture what it must have been like for them, but to scrutinize our own present to discern where the pattern of these experiences repeats itself in our lives, in its own unique permutation, despite the wide separation of years and circumstance between us and Isaiah, Peter and Paul.

Isaiah tells us that in the year King Uzziah died, he had a vision. He saw the Lord: as if God were a king, on a throne, with a court of seraphs as attendants. I had a professor at Harding, Mr. Eddins, who referred to such as “heavenly critters”—to emphasize the fact that we don’t really know what “seraphs” are, or what the word really means or even how to translate it, as seraph is really just an Anglicized version of the Greek-icized version of the original Hebrew word. But the symbolic point of the throne, the robe, and the heavenly critters is clear: this is a powerful and singular God Isaiah sees. And Isaiah is filled with a sense of God’s power and holiness. And because Isaiah sees just how powerful and holy this God is, the more acute his sense of his own human vulnerability and un-holiness becomes. Instead of joining with the heavenly critters in their chorus of praise, instead of proclaiming joyfully the holiness and glory of God, Isaiah voices instead his sense of his own unworthiness and fear. “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips,” he cries out.

Likewise, we see Peter protest in response to Jesus. Jesus asks a favor of Simon, later to be called Peter, which he seems happy enough to do. To get away from the pressing of the crowds, Jesus hops in his boat and asks him to put out a little way from the shore, so that Jesus can continue teaching. When he finishes, he tells Peter to go catch some fish. And here, I can’t help imagining a bit, that Peter’s reaction was in reality a little more dubious than what we get recorded in the text. Perhaps even a little miffed. After all, what does a religious teacher know about catching fish, and why would someone clearly not an expert presume to instruct someone who does it for a living? Just because he’s so smart, doesn’t mean he knows everything. But Peter does it anyway, though a little less than graciously. And when Jesus is proved right despite all expectation, Peter is amazed. But the expression of his amazement does not take the form of simple astonishment, or praise, or even a declaration of allegiance. Instead he falls down at Jesus’ feet and says, “Go away!” Why? Because, Peter says, he is a “sinful man.” Like Isaiah, Peter’s experience of the divine prompts, not acceptance or glad recognition or relief, but fear and a sense of being unworthy.

It is in Acts that we get an account of the story of Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus. Unlike Isaiah’s vision, we get a third-person rather than a first-person account: Luke’s version of Paul’s story. But in his letter to the Corinthians, Paul refers back to that experience: “Last of all, he appeared to me, as to one untimely born; for I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” In Paul, even in retrospect, we see the same reaction repeated. The stark difference between himself and Jesus is not softened by the passage of time. The vision of the divine, even the remembrance of that vision, prompts a recognition of unworthiness.

I want to ask you now to think about yourself; not to ask you how you would feel or what you would say if you suddenly had a vision in the night of God on a throne surrounded by heavenly critters, or if Jesus appeared to you in the middle of the subway. But to ask you, do you, as I do, understand exactly what that feeling of vulnerability, fear, inability and unworthiness feels like? To be facing up to a task, and think, I cannot possibly do this? To be facing a person, and know yourself to be completely inadequate to give them what they need? To be facing the future, and worry helplessly because you have no idea what will happen to you? And dare I ask you, what manifestation of the divine was it, in those instances of fear and self-doubt, that you were reacting to? Did you see God there? Do you see God there now, in retrospect?

God doesn’t wait for us to be ready for a vision. He doesn’t require preparation for a call. God simply breaks into the mundane, unpredictably and unaccountably, and—there it is. And you have to deal. And of course, our first moment, no matter who we are, Isaiahs and Moseses and Peters and Pauls (or even Jesuses?) notwithstanding, our first instinct is to refuse. To say no. To say, I am not ready. I am a man of unclean lips. I am a sinful man. I am unfit to be called an apostle.

But God doesn’t care. Our unreadiness is a fact; it is an aspect of being human. But God doesn’t care. God calls us anyway, in the very situations and circumstances that define the nature and shape of our unreadiness.

Did I say God doesn’t care? Of course God cares. To our first, instinctive, utter refusal of God’s call, God answers: but yes. To Isaiah, the man of unclean lips, God sends a heavenly critter to clean those lips, with the message, “your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” To Simon Peter, Jesus responds, “Do not be afraid.” And Paul, reflecting on his Damascus road experience, can say, despite his unfitness, “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain.”

Do not be afraid. Your guilt has departed and your sin blotted out. By the grace of God you are what you are, and God’s grace is not in vain.

And now what?

Isaiah: “here am I, send me.” Peter, who left everything and followed. Paul, who writes the church in Corinth, “I have handed on to you what I received.” Let me suggest to you that these three unready—unclean, sinful, unfit—human beings together model for us three steps in answering our own call from God. Isaiah’s simple declaration gives us the first: acceptance. No more protesting or arguing, but acceptance that even this powerful, mighty God is asking us, you, me, for help; asking us to be God’s presence in this world. Peter’s action gives us the second: leave it and follow. I don’t know what form this may take in your life. It took a radical one in Peter’s—not just a job change, but an apparently complete forsaking of material goods and any prospect of security. Paul, finally, gives us the third: handing on what has been given to us, making “brothers and sisters” of all whom we encounter, proclaiming to them the good news through which we are being saved and through which all may be saved.

“For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.”

Amen.

Mark 9.2-9

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, "Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, "This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!" Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus. As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

2 Corinthians 4.3-6

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. 6 For it is the God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Of all the questions this astonishing text raises, this is the real question, the question that must have confronted Peter, James and John as they stood there on that mountaintop, afraid and confused, beholding a scene utterly out of this world. And, I think, it is the question the text forces us to confront today as we read it. Who is Jesus? There are many who believe Jesus to have been a good man, a great man, a prophet, a wise teacher, perhaps even a healer or miracle-worker, and nothing more. Certainly he was these things. But the Christian witness wants to claim something more, something else, something entirely different. Christians also claim that Jesus is God: and here we touch on the very core of the gospel proclamation, the heart of Christian belief, the mystery at the center of the Christian promise of salvation—that God would become flesh, and dwell among us, and this is who Jesus is.

It’s not as easy as it sounds, to believe this. It’s not easy for us. There’s a lot we don’t understand about it, and in some ways, we have the advantage over those who walked and talked and sat and ate with Jesus. We’re the lucky ones; we have a testimony which we can pore over, memorize, read again and again until it sinks into our very bones and forms the structure of our life so deeply that we become unconscious of the startling impossibilities embedded in it, the impossibilities that consistently tripped up the disciples. We see Jesus truly from the very beginning, aided by the story of the virgin birth and the shepherds and the angels and the wise kings from the East. We see Jesus in the temple as a boy, and later, teaching with authority. We see the miracles and the healings and the penetrating insights of Jesus’ ministry, and we understand them from the start in the context of Jesus as the Christ, Jesus as the Son of God, Jesus, the Word made flesh which has come and dwelt among us. We have a chance to see Jesus truly from beginning to end, in a way that those who traveled alongside him could not; they could only piece together the clues as they came, not understanding them at all, really, until they understood the resurrection.

Imagine, then, how hard it must have been for Peter, James and John as they stood on that mountaintop. They ascended the mountain with their friend and teacher, expecting, perhaps, an intense small-group tutoring session, or special instructions, or perhaps just a quiet day to hang out and rest from the frenetic activity so often pressed on them all by the demands of the crowds that follow Jesus around. They expect the familiar. And instead, they receive the completely unfamiliar; they witness an incomprehensible transformation.

Mark 9 describes a break into routine, humdrum reality with a metamorphosis, a transformation, a moment for Peter and James and John when their friend, Jesus, is transfigured from the familiar buddy they’ve traveled around with into an exalted figure, at his ease with other exalted figures of Israel’s past. Peter responds wildly, a little stupidly, in an attempt to somehow make this out-of-the-world experience fit within his idea of reality. “Wow, it’s great to be here. Let’s, ah, make you guys a little more comfortable…”

But their fear and confusion is evident. Nothing about this experience squares with “reality.” And it’s not over yet! Even more, Jesus is elevated beyond the status of the exalted figures of Elijah and Moses, identified by a voice from a cloud: “this is my son whom I love.” How do they reconcile the friend they know with the Lord they see transfigured before them? How can the fellow human being they know and love also be, as the voice from the cloud tells them, God’s own beloved Son? Gone is their friend, with whom they have walked and talked and eaten in easy familiarity; and in his place is…who? Or even, what?

And then suddenly, this swift, passing glimpse into a truth that surpasses the mundane has vanished. They look around and everything is “back to normal.” No more Moses, no more Elijah. No more cloud, no more voice. Surely they must have staggered a bit at the abrupt transition, and wondered if anything had really happened at all. Maybe they even hoped nothing had happened. Maybe they didn’t look at each other or mention it for fear that they were the only crazy one there. Maybe being crazy by oneself would be preferable to the kind of reality-shaking alternative! But as they come down from the mountain, Jesus tells them, “don’t tell anyone what you saw.” Confirmation: so they really did truly see it, they think.

It’s interesting, from a literary point of view, to note the rich number of allusions in this short text from Mark 9. Echoes of the story of Moses’ shining face as he descended from the mountain with the stone tablets; the presence of Elijah, who was swept up to heaven in a fiery chariot; the voice from heaven identifying Jesus as God’s beloved son, in much the same way as the account of Jesus’ baptism in the first chapter of Mark. All of these echoes are echoes of earlier signs, earlier actions of God in the lives of Moses, Elijah, and Jesus which functioned to set them apart, mark them as special, specially favored and specially called. Throughout the season of Epiphany, which concludes with this Sunday, Transfiguration Sunday, the lectionary texts describe sign after sign of Jesus’ specialness, Jesus’ uniqueness. The miracle at the wedding at Cana; stories of special knowledge and authority; stories of miraculous healing, all culminating in this moment on the mountaintop with Peter, James, and John.

Today we see the climactic moment in this slow process of figuring out who Jesus really is. Mark 9: 2-9 describes for us a moment, a brief, still, shining moment in which three clueless human beings are given a glimpse into something beyond the mundane, quotidian, routine process of seeing their way through daily life.

They must have asked themselves: am I seeing truly? Who is the real Jesus—the friend with dusty feet who gets tired and hungry, the Jesus we thought we knew—or this shining Jesus, conversing easily with the great prophets, Elijah and Moses, and of whom God says, “this is my beloved son?” What does it mean to see Jesus truly in this moment of transfiguration? What does it mean to see truly?

This is not really an easy question. Seeing isn’t always believing; or at least, in my opinion, it shouldn’t be. Like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, I’m apt to take the skeptical view that the senses cannot always be trusted: why? Because a blob of mustard or an undigested piece of beef or bad gruel can affect them. “There’s more of gravy than of grave about you!” Scrooge tells the ghost of Jacob Marley. (I’m a sucker for puns.) How do we know when we’re seeing truly? It’s not that easy.

Human beings have a great capacity for self-deception, for seeing falsely. Sometimes we see falsely because it’s easy, or comfortable. We imagine the world to be as we would like it to be, and in the process, convince ourselves that that’s how it “really” is. This happens all the time. Although some people may lose perspective altogether, I don’t think that this tendency is “crazy”—rather, I think it’s universal. Here’s an example of what I mean. In one of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut novels, he coins the term “granfalloon.” A granfalloon is an illusory sense of camaraderie or belonging to a group based on some superficial connection, some casual evaluation of external characteristics. Vonnegut’s example in the novel is “Hoosiers.” One character meets another, quite randomly, on a plane. They find out through some small talk that both of them are from Indiana. “Call me MOM!” one character gushes to the other. “He’s a HOOSIER!” she excitedly announces to her husband.

I’m a part of the great granfalloon, the “Class of ’94.” We celebrate that particular granfalloon with regularly scheduled high school class reunions. We imagine some lasting connection between us—despite more and more intervening years, total lack of contact and the fact that the only thing we really shared with each other when we were together was complete indifference to each other. There’s nothing real there. There’s nothing about who I am that is represented or touched by the concept of “Class of ’94.” There’s simply the bare fact that I am a certain age, graduated a certain year, lived in a certain place, went to a particular high school, with about 400 other people. There’s nothing about who I truly am captured in any of that. But somehow, it’s comforting to rewrite history, to imagine a connection to these people I barely know from a past that gets, thankfully, dimmer and dimmer.

Maybe this seems harmless. But seeing falsely can take more pernicious forms. Convincing oneself to stay in an abusive relationship, for example, by claiming it’s not that bad, or that he’s really trying this time, he’s really sorry, surely this is the last time... This kind of seeing falsely leads to dire consequences. It’s my suspicion that this capacity, more than anything else, describes theologically what “original sin” or general “fallenness” might mean: this human tendency to see ourselves, others, and the world around us falsely, to our own harm and others’.

There’s another way to miss the boat on “seeing truly,” and it’s not necessarily seeing falsely. It’s simply seeing routinely or mundanely, seeing habitually. This isn’t necessarily sinful, in my opinion. It’s a matter of navigating the world we’re in efficiently. We train ourselves, or others train us, in how to “see” as a way of coping. Recently in the “Film and Theology” class I am TA for this semester, we were put to the test in this matter. We were shown several film clips which were exercises to make us more aware of how techniques in film use our habits of seeing. In one clip, we were shown a man at a desk working, and hearing a telephone out of sight ring, in one frame; in the next frame, a man answered the telephone out in the hall. It took the class—60 people—three viewings and a clue from the professor (“watch the shirt” he said) to realize that the man in the second frame was a completely different man from the man at the desk. Different hair. Different shirt. Different glasses. Different facial features. Completely different person! We were seeing habitually; because it made sense to assume that it would be the same man, we simply didn’t see any different.

As I said, I don’t think this is “sinful,” or even stupid or dim-witted, really. I have to say this, right, because it took me three tries and a clue before I could see the film clip “truly.” I think it’s simply how the human mind works as it processes information.

There’s a sense, however, in which seeing routinely slides very easily into seeing falsely, in how we view each other and the people we encounter day to day as we go about the business of our lives. We don’t know everyone we encounter during the course of a day. And so we size people up on the basis of those external characteristics that are most obvious to us. Sometimes, we do so and end up making a granfalloon-ish connection; sometimes we do so to draw conclusions about how to best interact, how to best avoid, how to best protect ourselves from the others we encounter. In doing so we see other people not as who they truly are—this is invisible to us. We see them as obstacles or annoyances or even dangers; but we do not see them for who they truly are.

It takes something breaking in from outside, something startling and undeniable, to shake us out of the routine, the habitual mode of seeing only what we already know and expect to see. Sometimes it takes more than one try and more than one clue to get us to see truly. Once we do, though, we wonder how we could ever have been so blind…

This is, in a sense, what I think the season of Epiphany is all about. Multiple tries and multiple clues, to show us how to see the person of Jesus truly. To show us that Jesus is special. To show us that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, or in Mark’s phrase, the Son of Man. The transfiguration is the Big Clue for Peter, James and John. It is the Big Clue that pushes them to finally see Jesus truly.

But in the end, after things are “back to normal,” descending from the mountain, we see that they don’t really fully get it. They understand that something has happened, but not what it really means. They know they witnessed something miraculous, but they haven’t yet grasped the fullness of who Jesus has been revealed to be. Jesus tells them, as they come down from the mountain, not to tell anyone what they saw until “the son of man has risen from the dead.” Maybe Peter, James and John were relieved at this instruction from Jesus. Maybe not to tell would have been their first instinct anyhow. But why would Jesus ask them not to tell?

I think Jesus knew that even this clue was not fully understood, and wouldn’t be, until the time of his resurrection. Peter, James and John get a sneak peek at the true identity of Jesus in this moment of transfiguration, an identity which is declared openly to all the disciples, and indeed, to all people, in the event of the resurrection. It is at this point that Peter and James and John’s witness of this startling transformation will, perhaps, make sense to people. Perhaps by itself it remains unbelievable, and incomprehensible, even to those three who saw it; but in the light of the resurrection, the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountaintop in front of astonished human eyes takes on its real significance, as one moment among many in which Jesus’ identity as Christ, Son of man, Son of God, even God Himself, is revealed.

Of course, the disciples don’t understand all this, not now, not at this point. The gospel of Mark is unrelentingly honest in its portrayal of Jesus’ disciples, even these closest to him, as completely clueless. As they descend the mountain they ask themselves, “what does he mean, ‘rise from the dead?’ And they ask Jesus, “what’s all this about Elijah anyway?” Even Peter, James, and John, the three disciples closest to Jesus, don’t really understand what they just saw and who Jesus truly is; and perhaps, this is the reason for Jesus’ instruction to keep quiet about it. Like their potential audience, Peter and James and John need the resurrection in order to understand the transfiguration; but they don’t comprehend the possibility of resurrection, not yet. The difficulty of seeing beyond the ordinary, seeing beyond the expected, the everyday, the normal is so great that even this revelatory moment of transfiguration on the mountaintop goes only partially comprehended, by Jesus’ closest friends and disciples.

In 2 Corinthians 4:3-6, the epistle text for today, Paul, too, acknowledges the difficulty of seeing truly: for some, he says, the gospel is “veiled.” It is veiled to those “who are perishing.” This image or metaphor of the veil is introduced in chapter 3, where Paul alludes to the veil over Moses’ face when Moses descends from the mountain with the stone tablets, a veil which Moses wears because of the unbearable brightness of his face, a reflection of having seen God’s own glory. This veil becomes an image, for Paul, of the inability to comprehend God’s message, or, in other words, the inability to see truly.

In acknowledging that the gospel can be “veiled,” Paul is acknowledging the difficulty of seeing truly. “The god of this world,” Paul says in 4:4, “has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light.” I think what Paul is talking about here is the inability to break out of our habitual, routine ways of seeing the world, an inability that closes us off to the new, novel, redeeming message of the gospel, which is, as always for Paul, the simple declaration that “Jesus Christ is Lord.” Those mired in the world, stuck in the rut, have no eyes to see this; it is veiled. It’s not impossible to see it. But it requires something huge and startling, and the openness to consider the seemingly incomprehensible. It is not something we can produce ourselves, from our own resources or our own habits of seeing. It comes to us from outside; as a grace, from God: “For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.”

A little further on in 2 Corinthians, Paul goes on to pen a verse which has intrigued me for years: 5:16. “From now on, therefore we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard him thus no longer.” It’s a strange verse, in some ways. What does it mean to “regard Christ from a human point of view?” What does Paul mean by that? It is easy enough to guess that Paul is referring to his way of seeing Jesus prior to his Damascus road experience: an inadequate, partial view of Jesus based only on externals and completely missing the reality of who Jesus truly was, and is. And it is clear enough that now Paul understands that this “human point of view” completely misses the point. Seeing Jesus from a “human” point of view means not understanding who he truly is: Jesus Christ as Lord.

What do we do with this knowledge, given to us by God, testified to through the witness of Peter, James and John on the mountain beholding the transfigured Jesus, through the witness of the women at the empty tomb, through the witness of Paul, who beheld an ascended Christ on the road to Damascus? Is it enough to give our assent, and go home? To stand up and acknowledge Christ as Lord as a truth in which we believe and sit back down again? Is this something we can “get right” simply by saying it is so, or “get wrong” by denying it? What difference does this make for us, this belief in Jesus Christ as Lord?

For Paul, this revelation of who Jesus Christ truly is is bound up intimately with the revelation of who and what human beings truly are. Just as Paul tell us that he once regarded Christ from “a human point of view” but no longer, so, he says, we no longer regard anyone from this inadequate, partial, external “human point of view.” Seeing Jesus truly means that we understand the necessity of seeing all other human beings “truly” in this sense as well. Seeing truly means being prepared to see beyond the immediately visible, the surface obvious. It means seeing the true holiness inherent in what we behold: the divinity of Christ; the sharing of that divinity of all who are in Christ, and the sharing of that divinity which is common to all human beings, having been created in the image of God. Past the appearances, the trappings and the stations, the signals we send out consciously and unconsciously in dress, hair, mannerisms, patterns of speech—beyond all of that, to a true vision of the Other as both Christ-to-us and in-need-of-Christ. Seeing truly means being prepared to be, ourselves, the startling, unexpected sign from outside to others, to be the transfiguring event in their lives, as astonishing and unexpected as Jesus' transformation on the mountaintop was to Peter, James, and John, and just as reality-changing, changing how others see themselves, each other, the world. May we all be granted this transfiguring vision, vision that enables us to see, and serve, each other truly.

Matthew 15.21-28

And Jesus left there, withdrew into the area of Tyre and Sidon. And, would you believe it, a Canaanite woman from that region came and cried out, saying, “Have mercy on me, Son of David! My daughter is evilly possessed.” And he answered her not one word. And the disciples coming to him asked him, saying, “Send her away, because she’s making a scene.” And he answered, “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” And he answered and said, “It is not right to take the bread of the children and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord; but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.” Then Jesus answered, “Woman, great is your faith! May it be as you wish.” And her daughter was healed from that hour (Jen's Translation).

Ever embarrassed to admit that you’re a church-going, Bible-believing Christian? Let me just say that there are days when I’d really rather keep quiet about this occasionally embarrassing fact.

Lately I have become addicted to blogging. For those of you who do not suffer from this virtual addiction, here’s a definition: “blog” is short for “web log,” a kind of website where a person can record their thoughts, observations, and comments on whatever strikes their fancy, and then “publish” them on the Internet, where anyone can visit the site and read what they’ve written. Almost like an on-line diary of sorts. I collaborate with three others in writing a blog called "A Few Voices,” the purpose of which is to comment on things cultural and political from a religious point of view; the idea motivating this blog is that the dreadful caricature of American Christianity commonly promoted—without reflection or serious examination or challenge—is one that doesn’t fit us, the few voices behind afewvoices.com. I also write a personal blog, the sole purpose of which is to provide a semi-anonymous forum where I can rant and rave about things that drive me crazy or tick me off. And I am addicted to reading blogs. I read about a dozen regularly, and by regularly I mean daily. All of them are religious, specifically Christian, and most are Church of Christ blogs by other seminarians who are addicted to wondering obsessively about the same things I do. And I keep up with the latest appearances of religious news by checking The Revealer, “a daily review of religion and the press.”

It’s here, at The Revealer, that some of the most truly embarrassing things about being a Christian in America today can be found, exhibited for general amusement and, possibly, to shame the rest of us into letting these good brothers and sisters get away with such shenanigans. The most recent headline at The Revealer tells you where you can go to order your very own copy of the 16-cassette tape series, “Patriarchy Made Simple.” Scroll down the screen for a link to an article with information about how prayer helps you shed pounds [editor's note: you can read the whole article here, if you're desperate, ahem, faithful enough to try it].

Yes, I have my moments of excruciating embarrassment about being a Christian.

Matthew’s story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman sounds like something you might read on The Revealer, about a TV evangelist/healer who walks around the streets of NYC, tight-lipped and clench-jawed, ignoring the bag lady shouting desperately after him, “Help me! Help me!” Not a stellar moment for Christianity. Not a stellar moment for Jesus, either.

It’s one thing to be embarrassed by a TV preacher shouting some nonsense about prayer hankies. It’s quite another to be embarrassed by your very own Lord, the Son of God, Jesus himself. And we’re presented with an embarrassment in this text. Suppose this were you, walking down the street with a woman shouting “help me” following after you. You’d say to yourself, “What would Jesus do? Jesus would help this woman.” But forget it! Not even Jesus is doing What Jesus Would Do—all of a sudden, Jesus is acting like he’s his own Evil Twin. Jesus ignores this woman. And the disciples aren’t any better; their only concern is to plead with Jesus to shut her up, because she’s making a scene. They don’t ask him to stop and help her—they just want her gone, this very embarrassing, ultra-inappropriate Canaanite female person. They’re not doing What Jesus Would Do anymore than Jesus is.

This text burdens us with its demand that we rationalize Jesus’ inexplicable behavior. We feel obligated to find ways of reading it that make it look less un-Jesus-like. Jesus can’t come off bad, after all, so we have to find some way to understand this so that Jesus comes off all right. But it’s not that easy. Jesus calls this woman a dog! Such is our collective desperation to understand this in a “nice” way that some commentaries suggest—in all seriousness, now—that what Jesus actually called her was something more like “nice little puppy.”

So what’s going on here? Well, here are some possibilities: 1) Jesus really was sent to the Jews first and foremost, and he’s not being rude or cruel, just telling the uncomfortable truth; in salvation-history terms, Israel is first, Gentiles are second. 2) Jesus is expressing a deep truth about all ministry: human beings are finite and ministry must always be done locally if it is to be effective; hence, he emphasizes that he must minister to those among whom he finds himself, that is, Israel. Others will just have to wait. 3) Jesus is concerned with teaching his disciples a lesson about who’s in and who’s not out and therefore employs some irony and dramatic roleplay as an attention-grabbing teaching technique.

Let’s consider Door #1. Perhaps it is true to say that Jesus was sent to the Jews first; Jesus is, after all, the “Messiah,” a figure that Israel had been waiting on for years, a word which would have no meaning at all outside of Israel’s history. But is this really what Jesus says, when he finally speaks? He says, “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Perhaps your Bible reads simply, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” The more literal double negative—“I was not sent except to Israel”—comes across a little stronger, a little more emphatic; in effect, Jesus says, if not for Israel, I wouldn’t be here at all. To read this as a claim of mere chronological precedence—Israel happens to be the people God deals with first, and therefore to whom Jesus is sent—doesn’t capture the full sense of this statement. Even to read this as a claim of pecking order within the kingdom of God doesn’t go far enough. What Jesus says sounds like an exclusive statement without exception. Plus, is a pecking order within the kingdom of God really something that sounds consistent with Jesus’ teaching? Perhaps Door #1 only opens onto an empty room after all.

Maybe Door #2 offers us a better explanation. Maybe Jesus was simply trying to say, “Look, I was sent to do a thing and I was sent to a particular place at a particular time, and I have to be about this, and I’m sorry, but this is simply outside my purview.” After all, Jesus was human, too; he needed to rest and eat and he had only two hands and two feet and 24 hours in a day like the rest of us. There’s simply a limit to what can be done, and you have to do what you can where you are. Maybe Jesus is just trying to say, I have to do my ministry where God put me in the first place.

Tom Long, homiletics prof at Emory, makes sense of this encounter by comparing Jesus to the founder of a battered woman’s shelter. If a homeless man shows up on the doorstep of a battered woman’s shelter begging for help, Long points out, the founder of the shelter may feel a great deal of compassion and yet still have to say no to his plea. Can she, should she, hand over the resources, finite and limited as they are, that she had worked so hard to gather for the women whose need is great, to someone who isn’t a part of the group she ministers to? (Long, Matthew, 176).

As tempting as this explanation is, I find two things unsatisfactory about it. First, Jesus has withdrawn into the area of Tyre and Sidon, and is hanging out in the iffy border-lands between Israel and Gentile territory. It seems that he is looking for some R & R, but this bothersome and loud Canaanite woman has somehow heard about him, and seeks him out. If the issue is localized, specific ministry to those whom you happen to come across—well, this woman fits the bill as well as anyone else who has ever sought Jesus out. Second, we’re not talking about disbursing funds, or even some kind of ministry which seems to involve belabored effort; while it is true that Jesus is human and therefore is subject to the same kinds of physical demands as everyone else who has ever lived, Jesus’ healing ministry has always been a sign of the divine side of Jesus. It’s certainly something outside of normal human capacity; something which, as a budding theologian interested in religion & science questions, I’ll just shrug and mumble “I dunno” if you ask me how he did it. The analogy to the women’s shelter, then, falls apart right at the point where it is supposed to illuminate. Jesus isn’t going to run out of healing juice in the same way that the women’s shelter is likely to run out of money.

So perhaps we’ll opt for Door #3. Maybe Jesus just doesn’t really mean it. At least, not in a straightforward, literal way. Perhaps he’s being ironic! Jesus can be tricky sometimes, as well we know. Maybe he makes this statement so strongly so that everyone will understand that he can’t possibly mean what it sounds like. Certainly, the woman doesn’t seem put off; she, at least, seems to think that, no matter how final that first statement sounded, that there is room for her in Jesus’ ministry.

So maybe it goes something like this: Jesus has been hanging out with these disciples of his for awhile, and he knows that there are some things they’re just having trouble getting their minds around. So Jesus decides to play it out. Here’s the perfect opportunity for a little bit of dramatic lesson-teaching. So first, Jesus ignores the woman—just like any righteous Teacher of Israel would do. The reaction of his disciples, though, is a little disappointing: instead of saying, “Rabbi, don’t you hear this woman crying to you for help? Why won’t you stop and heal her daughter?” No, they say, “Jesus, can’t you deal with this? Shut this woman up, she’s embarrassing us, GOSH!” So Jesus says, to everyone, still playing his ironic role, “I was not sent but to Israel.” The disciples apparently have no objection to this statement, but the woman knows better. Instead of leaving, she comes and kneels at Jesus’ feet and says, simply, “Lord, help me.” Maybe the disciples were grimacing and muttering amongst themselves, and Jesus saw that they still weren’t getting it—this woman’s demonstration of faith and trust was still not yet enough to soften their arrogance and self-assurance regarding their own guaranteed places in the kingdom, and the woman’s obvious out-of-placeness. So he plays it out even further, telling her, “It’s not right to take the children’s food and give it to dogs.” Maybe the disciples “Amen-ed” and nodded. But the woman knows better. Certain that the Jesus she has heard of, and trusted enough to follow after, would be willing and even eager to help her—no matter who she is, or isn't—she replies, “even the dogs have a place, under the table, eating what the children don’t want.” Maybe the humility of this reply startles some of the disciples out of their self-satisfied stupor. Maybe Jesus is so happy that this woman is so certain of him and so trusting that he can no longer bear to continue in his ironic stance toward her, and now turns to her, eager to heal, eager to show her and the disciples that she and her daughter, too, no matter how “inappropriate” they are, are equally a part of God’s kingdom.

I like this one—you can probably tell. This ironic interpretation makes sense of everything: Jesus’ weird behavior, the disciple’s teenage-like angst over their image, the woman’s persistence, Jesus’ eventual change of heart.

What’s missing, though, is any indication that the disciples got Jesus’ message. If this was the whole point, if Jesus went to such lengths to teach this lesson, well, there’s no indication that anyone ever got it. There’s no verse to follow the healing of the woman’s daughter that tells us anything about the disciples, whether they continued to be embarrassed by this woman’s presence, whether they were happy or annoyed by the fact that Jesus paid attention to her request, whether they repented of their juvenile obsession over image.

And even in this interpretation there is a lingering sense that Jesus was somehow a little unkind to this poor and desperate woman. She has no idea that she is the occasion for an inventive and ironic episode designed for the disciples’ benefit. Certainly whatever callousness Jesus displays in using her this way is a great deal less disturbing than his unkindness in a straightforward interpretation in which Jesus calls her a dog and tells her she has no part in the good news he is preaching to Israel. But still, a little uneasiness remains: does Jesus really use people in this way? Are we comfortable with this idea, and should we be?

So I want to propose yet another possibility—one which doesn’t get a door, because there’s never any “Door #4” on game shows. Certainly there is a lesson being taught here. But perhaps Jesus isn’t the all-knowing Teacher in this story. Maybe Jesus, just like all the rest of us, has something to learn from life; maybe what happens in this exchange is that Jesus, too, is a learner, and the Teacher in the story—unwittingly—is this fragile and yet courageous Canaanite woman, whose persistence teaches even Jesus something new about the nature of the kingdom. Perhaps Jesus was stunned at the prospect that the Good News he was preaching to Israel communicated itself even to those outside its borders, to people who had no preparation, no ongoing relationship with Yahweh, no idea of what it meant—but who somehow grasped the essence of the limitless grace of the kingdom of God anyhow, somehow grasped that this kingdom, unlike any other kingdom they’d ever known, has no borders to defend, knows no outsiders. Perhaps it took a moment for Jesus to absorb this stunning truth. Perhaps even Jesus was dazzled by the unbounded grace of God, kneeling before him the figure of this inappropriate woman, humbly yet persistently asserting that she and her daughter, too, had a place in God’s kingdom, as even the dogs have a place under the kitchen table. Gently and obstinately, the woman keeps insisting, we belong here, too.

Isaiah tells us, in the Old Testament reading for today, that God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, will “gather others to them, besides those already gathered.” Jesus knew the outcasts of Israel. He ate with them, talked with them, touched them and healed them, and ignored the protests and slander of the “righteous.” But this outcast is not an outcast of Israel; she is another…but one who will gathered as well, to those who are already gathered.

Perhaps it makes us a little uncomfortable to contemplate a picture of Jesus who’s not in complete control, who isn’t omniscient—who doesn’t know the future, who doesn’t necessarily know the intimate details and thoughts of everyone he encounters, who might have to learn along the way just what it means to be the Son of God. Maybe Jesus seems a little less righteous this way, a little less perfect. But righteousness doesn’t have to mean getting things right automatically, without having to think about it; perhaps righteousness, even in Jesus, includes being able to listen to the outcast and learn what righteousness is all over again.

We have to ask ourselves, now, where are we in this story. And it's pretty obvious, isn't it, that we stand with the disciples--the ones who, no matter which door you choose, which interpretation you choose, come off badly every time. Because it’s human nature, isn’t it, to think of ourselves and others in terms of what we are and what we aren’t, in terms of who is in and who is out of a particular group. It’s nearly impossible to describe yourself without employing these kinds of descriptors. And we experience a kind of natural affinity for those whom we can see are like us in some way. I gravitate to fellow students when I socialize at church; we have something to talk about (or more accurately complain about) that others don’t. In China, I experienced a sort of affinity-on-steroids for my fellow Americans; if I was walking down the street and saw a foreign face that I didn’t know, I would shout “Lao wai!” [“Foreigner!”] and accost the person, pathetic in my eagerness to connect.

But the flip side of this natural tendency of all of us human beings is that seeking out people who aren’t like us is then “unnatural.” It’s not that we can’t do it. It’s just that we don’t tend to, and it’s harder for us. No matter how much you want to break these barriers down, or deny that they exist, they are there, challenging your “unnatural” desire to live in a kingdom that doesn’t defend its borders.

And the church is by no means immune to this way of thinking, this who’s in, who’s out mentality. We know this, to our shame. It’s not just a Church of Christ problem, or an American Christianity problem. It’s been the church’s problem since the very beginning, when the Jews and the Gentiles were trying to figure out what to do with each other. It’s the problem Paul addresses in Romans, taking turns bashing the Gentiles and then the Jews, telling each group, “you’re not ‘in’ and they’re not ‘out’. God has called all of you, and God doesn’t make mistakes.”

In this world, where we have to learn from each other how to be righteous all over again, all the time, in every encounter, the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman gives us a picture of profound righteousness. Jesus, the Son of God, allows himself to be corrected by a loudmouthed, embarrassing female who insists on making a scene. This is righteousness at its truest and most humble. May we all find the strength to follow Christ’s example.

Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52

He put before them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches." He told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and [hid in] three measures of flour until all of it was leavened."

"The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, 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. Again, the kindgom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Have you understood all this?" They answered, "Yes." And he said to them, "Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old" (NRSV).

Today’s text, found in Matthew 13, isn’t really “a” text at all, it seems to me. It is a little collection of multiple texts, very short little sayings of Jesus, all of which seem to be fairly freestanding, independent, and, let’s face it, completely obvious. As a kid I always thought it was funny that we would study these in a class, or that a preacher would preach on one. I mean, “the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that grew into a tree.” So … the kingdom of heaven starts small, and then it gets really really big. There doesn’t seem to be much else to say about it. It’s pretty clear … so clear, in fact, even the disciples seem to understand these parables, although earlier in the chapter Matthew recounts that they had to ask for an explanation of the Parable of the Sower—not an especially difficult one there, either. But the disciples, not always altogether that swift, do seem to get the short, sweet ones with the really obvious point. These are about their speed. And, I’ll be honest, if the other option is the Parable of the Unjust Steward, I’ll take these any day of the week. Especially Sunday.

This is the first time, in Matthew’s account, that Jesus has spoken to the people following him in parables. And here, for the first time, all of a sudden, everything is a parable; if it’s not a parable, then it’s an explanation of a parable, or an comment on why, suddenly, Jesus has decided to only speak in parables. The Sermon on the Mount, while not exactly easy, is pretty direct; but Jesus has decided to switch strategies here in the middle of Matthew, to change in midstream and start teaching indirectly through the use of parables. Why do this? Jesus’ comments here in chapter 13, just before he relates the various kingdom of heaven parables, seem to say that he does this because people aren’t really getting what he’s been saying all along. But they don't really get the parables either. Perhaps some of them were shrugging and muttering to their neighbor, “so you sow seed on good soil, and it grows, who doesn’t know that?” Perhaps some of them were furrowing their brows and thinking, “this sounds so obvious…but I know there’s gotta be something profound here…” And probably in the back row there were a few troublemakers throwing spit-balls at each other and telling jokes…or maybe now I’m just projecting…

Like anyone else, when I read the gospels, I like to mentally place myself cozily in Jesus’ immediate ring of followers, his closest disciples, the people who were always there, who heard every word, who understood everything. But the gospels themselves often challenge this easy assumption. We realize with unease, embarrassment, maybe horror, that we are the Pharisee, or the hypocrite, or the scribe attempting to trip up Jesus in a legalistic conundrum; this time, I realized I was the anonymous clueless listener who thought to herself, uh, so what?

But I often also feel, reading parables like these, that perhaps I think they’re so obvious because I’m just not reading carefully enough, or thinking hard enough, or being faithful enough, to see the real profundity of them. There has to be something there, right? After all, this is the Bible. This is Jesus talking. It has to be profound … and if I can’t see it, the problem’s gotta be me. This feeling gets even worse when I’m surrounded by very faithful and intelligent people who all seem to be getting something I don’t, or at the very least, taking it for granted that something is there that I’m having trouble seeing.

But I’m not alone in this feeling, either. Other Christians through the years have struggled with the suspicion that these short, sweet little obvious sayings have to mean more than the obvious, have to be more than they appear to be, and they’ve struggled really hard to find the deeper meaning in them. This often led to allegorical interpretation, in which each element of the parable becomes a symbol for something else. Take, for example, Hilary of Poitier, a 4th century bishop, on the parable of the leaven, who claimed that the yeast represents Christ, the woman represents the synagogue, and the three measures of flour, the law, the prophets and the gospel, and also the unity of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit and also, possibly, the calling of the three nations out of Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Hilary is a little doubtful about this last one, actually, you’ll be relieved to know.) But lest you think Hilary’s the only one looking a little too hard, Jerome—the very learned man who first translated the Bible into Latin, giving us the Vulgate—interpreted the yeast as knowledge of the Scriptures, and found the significance of the three measures of flour to be that “the spirit, the soul and the body” which are then blended into one.

Perhaps this seems very clearly ridiculous. All of this from a parable a single sentence long, which, in my Bible, doesn’t even get its own heading but tags along after the mustard tree like a little kid after his big brother. Certainly the point seems pretty obvious: again, something really small gets really big—the kingdom of heaven is like that.

Not too long ago, the Youngish-Professionalish-Adultish class at my church started studying the parables. Our first discussion centered on this very problem: do the parables have one meaning, or many possible meanings? Do they make one point, or lots of different points all at the same time? I’m sorry to report to you that we didn’t really settle this question. But I left with an interesting image to keep in mind as we read the parables: one way of thinking about the meaning is as a centripetal force, drawing everything into the center, into a single point. Another way of thinking about a parable’s meaning is as a centrifugal force, where meanings spin off, flying away in multiple directions. Some parables seem to draw everything to a distinct, single point; others seem to offer all kinds of possibilities, perhaps so many that we can’t sift through all of them.

Today I want to do a little of both. I think these short, sweet, obvious parables do make a single, overwhelming point, one that is easy to grasp, though, perhaps, not always easy to implement. But I also found, as I read through them again and again, that when read “against each other,” so to speak, that the meanings start coalescing in new ways, offering something new in addition to the single points the parables make on their own.

I’d like to spend the rest our time looking at the three parables in verses 44-50. Like the mustard seed and the leaven, their meaning seems plain, although the message is a different one. In both the parable of the treasure and the parable of the pearl, a single object is found that is of such great value that the person goes and sells everything in order to buy it. The kingdom of heaven, Jesus tells us, is like that treasure, or that pearl: it is of such great value that everything else you have is worth nothing compared to it.

--What is, exactly, the kingdom of heaven? Well, as my husband pointed out to me, whole books have been written on that … and what we have here is not so much a definition as it is a handful of hints, which as disciples, we must put together into a coherent picture, learning inductively what the kingdom of heaven means as we go along. Perhaps this is part of why Jesus turns to parables at this point; each parable gives us another hint, another piece of the picture, in a way that demands further synthesis, further thought. Jesus’ comments to the disciples on why parables may be getting at just this truth: people have been hearing him without understanding, Jesus tells them, and so now he will speak in parables—not because they’re easier to understand, but because they require something different of the listener, a participation in putting together the meaning. The kingdom of heaven isn’t something that we can take notes on as Jesus outlines its main features for us. It’s something to be grasped, bit by bit, along the way.

So far, Jesus has told his disciples that the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard tree, leaven, treasure in a field, and a pearl. A handful of clues, if you will. The stories of the growing mustard seed and the leaven hidden in the flour give us a picture of something small, humble, insignificant, which—by doing what it does naturally—turns into something large, strong, and mature. It accomplishes this silently, simply growing, perhaps unnoticed until the final result is accomplished. The parables of the treasure and the pearl give us a glimpse into how important the kingdom of heaven truly is; more important than anything else in the world. Taken as single clues, they tell us that the kingdom of God is both humble, hidden, and yet at the same time great and important.

But these parables also, I think, tell us something else, when read all together. What I want to say here is that in all of these parables, the kingdom of heaven has been likened to something singular: one object, a tree, a treasure, a single shining pearl. The kingdom of heaven has been described in its unity, its wholeness and integrity assumed. The kingdom is one. The kingdom of heaven acts as a single unit: it grows, like a tree; it leavens, like yeast; it is possessed in whole or not at all, like the treasure or the pearl. The kingdom does not come in halves or quarters. It is, essentially, one.

And doesn’t this, too, tell us something significant about the kingdom of heaven? When we discover the kingdom of heaven, we do find it to be essentially one; despite the signs on our buildings, despite doctrinal quibbling, deep down, I think, we all recognize that the kingdom of heaven itself is undivided. Are we not all one in Christ Jesus? Doesn’t Jesus himself pray for unity for his followers, in John 17?

And yet Jesus has one more parable for us, in this 13th chapter of Matthew. He tells us that the kingdom of heaven is like a net full of every kind of fish. Every kind of fish. We’ve gone straight from the kingdom of heaven is like a single shining pearl to, the kingdom of heaven is like a net full of every kind of floppy, stinky fish. All of a sudden, unity is suddenly pushed into the background as Jesus presents with a startlingly different description of the kingdom, a kingdom which encompasses the very outer limits of diversity, represented by not just different kinds but every different kind of fish that there is. Apparently, whoever’s throwing the net into the sea doesn’t really care what kind of fish the net drags in—all this fisherman cares about is if it’s full. When it is full, the net is drawn ashore…and then the sorting begins. But we’re not sorting one kind from another, here. We’re not sorting trout from striped bass or catfish from dogfish or red fish from blue fish—just sorting good from bad. And here, Jesus helps us out a bit more, by telling us that this sorting of the fish is like the angels separating the righteous from the evil at “the close of the age.” The only relevant sorting is good from bad; not light fish from dark fish, or rich fish from poor fish, or smart fish from dumb fish, or even religious fish from secular fish; just good from bad, righteous from unrighteous. The point is, I think, pretty clear: within the kingdom of heaven there is amazing diversity. All kinds of fish get dragged in. All kinds of fish get sorted. The kingdom of heaven is a kingdom of every different kind of fish.

And now we have a great contrast, don’t we, between the essential unity of the kingdom of heaven, and the essential diversity of it; and what are we to make of this?

There are, I think, two thoughts to follow here. One is, Matthew is clearly building the train of thought which will climax in his recounting of the Great Commission, in which the risen Jesus instructs the disciples to go out and make disciples of all nations. Matthew’s gospel was most probably written for an original audience of predominantly Jewish Christians, people who would be struggling with reconciling their Jewish identity and heritage with the implications of Jesus’ teaching for Gentiles. Here in this parable, we see Matthew stressing the universality of Jesus’ teaching: it’s not just for Jewish fish, Matthew tells his original readers, it’s for every kind of fish in the sea. In fact, being one kind or the other makes no difference at all in the end; when you’re sorted, it’s just about being good or bad that counts.

This brings us to the second thought: the only distinction to be made with regard to the kingdom of heaven is essentially ethical—one is righteous or unrighteous. A few weeks ago, reading the end of the Sermon on the Mount together, we noted Matthew’s emphasis on action as a necessary component of righteousness; simple knowledge of what is good is not enough—this knowledge must be acted on. Here, again, this theme in Matthew makes itself felt. In the end, Matthew tells us, the kingdom of heaven is about righteousness.

Bearing these things in mind, I want to look again at the two parables that precede the parable of the fish. The main point, the obvious point, still stands: the worth of the kingdom of heaven exceeds all else. But with an eye toward the idea of the simultaneous diversity and unity of the kingdom, what else might this pair of deceptively simple stories tell us? In the first, a man “finds” a hidden treasure. He’s not, apparently, looking for it. He just finds it, stumbles over it, seemingly. He just happens to be in the right place at the right time, tripping over the right rock, falling face flat on X-marks-the-spot while no one else is looking. In his joy, the text says, he sells all he has to buy the field. In the second, a merchant is in search of fine pearls; and he finds one. Unlike the man in the field, the merchant spends his time looking for what he finds. It’s his livelihood—his whole life, in a sense, is organized around this search for fine pearls. When he finds one, the one, he’s not surprised, but he knows what he must do to get it, and he does it.

One stumbles into the kingdom seemingly by accident; one searches it out deliberately. And yet they both respond to the evident worth of the kingdom; they both understand that though it means giving up everything else, the kingdom is worth it.

Maybe Matthew wants to tell us that the first man is like the Gentile; unprepared, without Israel’s long history and relationship with God, the Gentile stumbles onto the gospel without really knowing what it is that he’s looking for. But he knows, after he finds it, the worth of what he’s found. Maybe Matthew wants to tell us that the merchant is like the Jewish Christian: he knows what it is he seeks, he organizes his whole life around the pursuit, and when he finds it, he knows what to do.

Perhaps in our own context we can read these different ways of coming to the kingdom with a different emphasis. Perhaps the man who stumbles over the treasure is like those of us who were lucky enough to be born in a place where we can, without design, without intent, without even meaning to, stumble into the gospel. Some of us are born into families who have hidden the gospel all around us just so that we can stumble onto it before we even know we should be looking for it. There it is, hidden in the illustrated Children’s Book of Bible Stories on the bedside table, or in the prayer Grandpa says before meals. But some of us, like the merchant, search long and hard, knowing what we’re missing in our lives but not quite knowing where to find it, before we finally catch sight of it. I think about the difference between my own story, my own faith journey, and those of the Christians I met in China. I stumbled into the kingdom before I even knew what it was. My friend Anya waited out every other student after my first English class to ask, when everyone was gone and it was safe, “can you teach me the Bible?”

And yet, as the parable of the fish tells us, it doesn’t matter which way we come to find the kingdom; whether we know what we’re looking for or don’t, whether we’re searching high and low or never even had to search at all, we land in the same place. We are all brought onto shore together in the same net. Anya and I discovered the same kingdom, were brought into the same kingdom.

And, regardless of how we come to find the kingdom, we’re all called to the same response; we’re all asked to give up the same thing: all that we have, whatever it is. It’s not simply that the kingdom of heaven is worth so much more than anything else we might happen to possess; in these parables, the only way to get hold of the kingdom is to sell all you have. Certainly there are echoes here of the story Matthew will tell in chapter 19 of “the rich young ruler,” the young man who walks away from Jesus sorrowfully because he cannot do this very thing. But I think here the intent may include rather more than simply the idea of material wealth—although the context of the parable makes this the most obvious and perhaps the first meaning. There is also a hint of the revolutionary quality of the kingdom of heaven—this amazing thing that turns your whole life inside out, makes you re-evaluate everything, re-order, re-prioritize, perhaps even throw it all out and start from scratch.

At the conclusion of these parables, Jesus asks his disciples, “Have you understood all this?” And they tell him, “yes.” Now, if this were Mark telling the story, Mark would tell us, uh, no, the disciples never really got anything Jesus tried to tell them until much, much later. But Matthew is more optimistic in his portrayal of the disciples’ ability to understand. Matthew tells us that they do get it. And Jesus responds to them with what is, at least to us, a somewhat enigmatic statement, almost another parable in itself: “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” Maybe this is Jesus’ way of telling them they get an A in their first parables class. It seems clear, at any rate, that Jesus is counting the disciples as “scribes being trained for the kingdom of heaven,” and, anyway, what better training for the kingdom of heaven could there be than following Jesus around? But what does Jesus mean by the comparison of the disciples to a householder who brings out new and old treasure?

I want to suggest that here, again, we have an echo of the unity and diversity of the kingdom of heaven. The old treasure is the old wisdom, the law, the prophets, the history of Israel’s long relationship with God; the new is Jesus’ own teaching, the inbreaking of the kingdom of heaven, or perhaps even Jesus himself! As “scholars trained for the kingdom of heaven,” the disciples are to bring out both the new and the old; both witness to the reality of the kingdom of heaven. Some will find the kingdom of heaven as they traverse from the old to the new; some will find the kingdom of heaven in the new, and rejoice then to discover the old.

So, finally, I think, the question of the unity and diversity of the kingdom of heaven becomes clear. Anyone may find the kingdom. The ways in which we here today have found the kingdom are, I’m sure, as diverse as the number of people here today. And yet when we find it, we are all called to the same response. We are all faced with the same necessity. We are all asked, what will you do with your find?