Rev. Kevin M. Pleas

Matthew 13:33, 44-46 April 6, 2008

He told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with 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."

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There are some classic situations that ministers get themselves into that never fail to amuse their congregations. One is talking to the children during worship. This is always a source of anxiety because you can never completely control what the kids might say. For example, one time a minister gathered the children around him and began talking about heaven. "If I sold my house and my car, had a big garage sale and gave all my money to the church, would I get into heaven?" "No!" the children answered. "If I cleaned the church every day, mowed the yard, and kept everything neat and tidy, would I get into heaven?" "No," said the kids again. "Well," he said, "then how can I get into heaven?" A five-year old boy shouted out, "You gotta be dead!"

Well, that seems pretty obvious. You would think you'd have to be dead before you could get into heaven. The interesting thing is though, if that's what you think, you would be wrong. Jesus, according to the gospels, talked about heaven all the time. The kingdom of heaven - or the kingdom of God, which is the same thing - comes up over and over again in Jesus' preaching. The word "kingdom" appears in 114 verses of the gospels, and when we add in phrases like "the reign of God" and the "rule of God" and the "fullness of time," it becomes pretty hard to ignore the fact that the subject of heaven was shot through virtually everything Jesus said. But, what also becomes clear is that he didn't think about it in the same way we normally do. Heaven, for Jesus, was not simply a nice, fluffy place that good people get to go when they die. Heaven, he taught, is all around us, among us, within us, breaking into our lives at every turn, if we but have eyes to see.

But that's the problem. For the most part, we don't have eyes to see. We don't live in a kingdom. Most of us don't have any direct experience with kingdoms at all, apart from books and movies. So, we find kingdoms hard to relate to. We find heaven hard to relate to, and when we try to put the two ideas together, what we usually end up with are romantic notions of clouds, angels and harp music somewhere off in the hopefully distant, rosy future.

On Block Island, in the Long Island Sound, there's a gravestone in an old cemetery I came across one time. It reads "In Memory of the Honorable Luther Dickens, who departed this life Nov. 26, 1878, Age 56 year, 1 month, 29 day." Below this personal information, a poem is inscribed that captures this idea of heaven perfectly;

I must sleep within the silence of the dark and lonely grave.

But I'll live again in Eden when He comes who died to save.

Then remember, oh my loved ones, I would have you meet me there.

Where no pain nor sorrow enters, all immortal, bright and fair.

Now that's lovely, if you like poetry, as I do. And there's certainly nothing wrong with thinking about heaven this way. It can be comforting. It gives us something to look forward to. It promises that, in spite of all the things that don't work out the way we want them to in this life, there will come a time when everything is put to rights. But, and this is important, if we want to think about heaven the way Jesus did, we need to approach it a little differently. We need to approach it a little bit more like the good Reverend, Jeremiah Wright.

Holy cats! What a brouhaha! With three little words, "G** D*** America," the man managed to blow off the lid of the entire country. Now that's amazing. Truly amazing. Think about the power released by the simple uttering of three little words. I find it absolutely stunning. You know what it reminds me of? You remember a couple of years ago when the Danish newspaper published those unflattering cartoons of Muhammad and the Islamic world was suddenly up for grabs? The fury those cartoons released was enormous.

All around the Muslim world people were protesting, sometimes violently, and all over a few simple cartoons. Most of us couldn't believe it. We had no idea how offensive those cartoons would prove to be. After all, we sit idly by all the time by while people poke fun at Christianity. We hardly get offended at all when comedians on TV and the internet make scathing comments about our Christian faith. But Jeremiah Wright utters three little words, and without warning people all over the country are screaming for his head on a silver platter, and roundly condemning his church, the denomination his church belongs to and the presidential candidate who happens to be a member of his flock.

That, my friends, is what Jesus was talking about. The kingdom of heaven is something small, something subtle, something unexpected, and yet exceedingly powerful. It is a catalyst. It is something that moves mountains. Its dramatic effects are out of all proportion to its size. It is, in fact, the very presence of the living God. If our idea of heaven was only some fuzzy notion off in the future that gives us a little comfort and the assurance that everything will work out… if that's our notion of heaven, we have completely misunderstood Jesus.

Now, you may wish to know, how dare I suggest a comparison between Jeremiah Wright's words and the kingdom of heaven? Well, to begin with, I think what he said was tremendously offensive. But it was offensive in a way that got everybody's attention. Jesus did that a lot. That's what we call the prophetic tradition. A prophet is someone who offends people in order to get their attention. There are lots of prophets in the Bible, and one thing that's true of all of them, if you read carefully, is that over and over again, they are offending people. They are chased out of town. They are beaten. They are killed. But they do get people's attention.

Now personally, even recognizing that Rev. Wright was trying to offend people, I still think it's unfair to reduce a man's entire ministry to a thirty second sound bite. I'm sure if you've been watching this story develop, you've probably already heard someone complain about how unfair it is. I've seen comments like that in about six different places, and I agree. It's unfair to take Wright's three little words out of context, regardless of how offensive they are, and make them out to be the defining moment of his entire ministry.

I've tried to imagine how I would feel about someone doing that to me; lifting out a sentence here or there from among the many sermons I've preached, and putting it in the worst possible light. I'm forced to realize that it may very well happen at some point. It's a sign of the age we're in now; the internet age. Lights are being shined on our lives in ways that we've never imagined before. My sermons are all going online. So are most of my colleagues. So how do you think you would feel if, years from now, you decided to run for office and someone tried to disqualify you because of something I once said from this very pulpit? Interesting thought isn't it.

The truth is, what was done to Rev. Wright could have been done to any minister; any minister who is faithful at any rate. We are supposed to offend people. Can you imagine going through an entire ministry without ever offending anyone? What kind of ministry would that be? Are we supposed to simply pat everyone on the back every week? I hope you don't think that. That's part of my job, patting people on the back. But another part of my job is kicking people in the butt, when that's what needs to happen. You know me. I'm not very good at the butt kicking part. I've never been all that prophetic in my own ministry. But I do respect people who are, because some things aren't the way they're supposed to be, and the truth is, we shouldn't be so complacent about the way things are if the way things are isn't right.

Beyond just being offensive though, for the sake of getting attention, let me invite you to think about what Rev. Wright actually said for just a moment. In his damning of America, the suggestion is not that this is not a great nation, not that we are not a good people, not that we have not had our tremendous successes over the years. The suggestion is simply that God does not bless everything we do. And that's shocking because almost nobody has had the guts to come right out and say so. It's shocking because we presume God's blessing on America all the time, but rarely acknowledge out loud that we don't always deserve it.

The fact that we are so shocked says a lot about what we believe. We have come to believe, we have come to take for granted, that God does bless America, regardless of what we do. And that's not true. We print "In God We Trust" on our money, but we don't actually trust in God just because the money we spend says so. We pledge our allegiance that we are, "one nation under God," and yet we do things, often, that God would have no part of. That's not condemnation of our country. It is a simple statement of fact. And our saying so doesn't mean that we don't love this country. It simply means we am not blind to our faults.

Ministers are called to offend: not always, but often enough to remind people that we are blessed by God when we live Gods values. We are blessed by God when we behave in ways that deserve God's blessing. Of course, we are forgiven and loved even when we fail, but we should never use that as an excuse for not trying. God does not simply rubber stamp all we do just because we claim to be "one nation under God."

The kingdom of heaven is among you. It is within you. Is that power of truth that sometimes comes as a harsh and offensive contradiction to our comfortable illusions. It leads us to behave in ways that God approves, encourages and blesses. And, as a matter of fact, we know what behaving that way looks like in human life because we have Jesus. In all of human history, we claim Jesus as the one person who most fully lived God's values and was most fully deserving of God's blessing. In calling ourselves Christian, we are claiming to be his followers. But if Jesus is the one we actually are following, we are going to have to learn to live with offending people at times. We should never forget that the human reward Jesus received for being faithful to God, was to be crucified.

Amen