Something new, and something old

This past Sunday evening, August 15, I was the guest preacher at the Cuttyhunk Church Vespers Service. I preached on a text that does appear in the lectionary once every three years (and only in Matthew's Gospel) but it comes up in Year A. (We are currently in Year B.) An advantage of preaching in an ecumenical setting is the preacher gets to pick their own text, and this one has been on my mind throughout the pandemic. So this sermon is on Matthew 13:31-33, 44-54.

When Matthew says “kingdom of heaven” he means the same thing that Mark and Luke mean when they say “kingdom of God.” It’s just that Matthew represents the most Jewish of those three first-century faith  communities, and as you may know Jews refrain from speaking the name of God out loud or even writing it. Why this matters is that none of the three synoptic gospel writers are talking about “heaven” out there somewhere as a place where we go when we die. They are all speaking about the ways God is made manifest and known here on earth, in places like this island and in our daily lives: in our homes and around our tables, in our workplaces, and on our streets. It’s about God’s activity in our lives so if you don’t like talk of “kingdoms” then reign is better than realm, because it’s more activity than place. The reign of God – that’s what Jesus is teaching about. 

Jesus teaches in parables to uncover, reveal, imagine and then re-imagine the ways that the reign of God is, as he says, among us and in our midst. Even now. Even here.

I want to teach you one of my favorite words. It’s not found in the Bible but it is used by some Biblical scholars. I tend to prefer to stay very close to Jesus’ words rather than the theologian’s words, but this is one of the handful of exceptions. The word is proleptic. Or, more precisely, proleptically. The meaning is to use a present tense description to describe something in the future. So you might say a person is a “dead duck.” They are still breathing but you say, in present tense, what is about to happen – they are in big trouble.

When it comes to the Reign of God, we experience it proleptically. It’s already, but not yet. Jesus speaks about it in present-tense as something already real, yet not fully realized. So we pray for peace on earth and good will to all, sure signs of the God’s Reign. But we go with what we got. We look for places where it's happening. When a dad runs out to welcome his long lost child home and everyone sits down for veal piccata, the reign of God is experienced proleptically and we get a taste of something even greater - a heavenly banquet. We seek places of healing and reconciliation and new life and when we do, we experience the Kingdom proleptically. 

Are you with me? I think this is all prologue to how we hear Jesus teach about the Kingdom of heaven. It’s like a mustard seed, a tiny little seed that when it grows is, well, let’s be honest, basically a weed. To call it a shrub is very generous. But Jesus is a very clever teacher. The point remains: where do we look for the Reign of God? We look in small places for proleptic signs and see there the potential for birds making nests. We dare even to not let the weed label put us off. We might even dare to say that when Jesus says consider the lilies he’s just as interested in us paying attention to the dandelions which have their own beauty. It’s all around us. But we have to learn to look and pay attention and even be surprised that labels about what counts for beautiful in God’s good creation are human constructs.

But you all know this, you are spend time in this thin place where God is all around us.

We also heard Jesus say that the Kingdom of heaven is like yeast. When I was a parish priest I used to bake communion bread with our fifth-graders when they were learning more about what it means to be part of a Eucharistic community. I was always amazed about how many of them had never before done this at home. Little hands kneading flour and salt and water and oil and yeast. “What does that do?” I’d ask them. Well usually at least one knew that it makes the bread rise. It’s what makes it bread as we know it and you don’t need much, but it’s crucial. In another place Jesus says the Church is called to be like yeast, and like light, and like salt. But here he says you glimpse the Reign of God proleptically every time you make a loaf of bread. Or maybe even when you eat the bread someone else has baked and you bless it and break it and give it to remember that though we are many, we are one bread, and one body.  

Notice these are all similes. I think that’s because you can’t pin down the Reign of God into a creed or a doctrine. Because it’s like stuff. It’s like a mustard seed. It’s like yeast. It’s like a hidden treasure in a field. It’s like a fine pearl of great value. It’s like a whole school of fish swimming right into your net! Jesus teaches ordinary people where to look for signs of God’s reign right where they are: doing yardwork, in the kitchen, out fishing. It’s the same for us. Where is God? Pay close attention to your daily life, to the work you do and the people you are sharing this journey with and to what is happening in the neighborhood.

So I wonder, where have you seen signs of God’s presence this day? This week? In a world that often feels like it’s coming unglued, Jesus says, pay attention. Pay attention to your life and learn to look again, and again. Or as Mary Oliver has put it in one of her more famous poems: “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is, but I know how to pay attention.” I think Jesus would say “amen” to that.

I’m running out of runway, so let me get to the sermon I really want to preach tonight. I’m finally there. It’s those last verses we heard. Jesus asks his friends: “have you understood all of this?” Like good students they say yes. Like good members of a congregation when the preacher asks for an “amen” they give one. But we know these folks. They don’t usually get it and when they do, they often forget. One of my favorite stories in all of the Bible is when Jesus is telling this same crew that he’s going to prepare a place for them and they know the way where he is going and there is silence and maybe some nods until Thomas speaks up and says, “Jesus, we have no idea where you are going or what you are talking about!”

Do you understand all that Jesus has said? On my best days I get it a little bit. I keep on keeping on nevertheless because I have seen enough to go on. I have experienced the Reign of God proleptically enough to know it’s the path I want to be on. “Have you understood all of this?” Absolutely! Alleluia! Amen! Pass the gravy, please!

Then, Jesus says this (and it’s only recorded in Matthew): “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.” This is what the sermon tonight is on if anyone asks you what it was about! Every scribe who has been trained for the Kingdom of heaven is like (see the pattern, another simile!)…like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new, and what is old.

One Biblical scholar I consulted this week said the order matters: something new comes first and then the old has to settle into that new reality. Otherwise we create old boxes that leave little room for what is new. And yet so many Christians (or at least the Episcopal Christians I spend most of my time with) love what is old and tolerate a little bit of what is new. We like those old prayers that make us feel like we are in Elizabethan England. We like the old to help us interpret the new, to make sense of it. But what if the new doesn’t fit with the old, with what we already know, with what we learned in Sunday School? Then what? Do we dismiss it out of hand? The scholar I consulted said the order matters: the new raises new questions and in so doing invites us to reconsider the old. And therein lie the seeds of possibility for new life, for transformation – for experiencing the reign of God. At least proleptically.

I think it’s safe to say that no one here tonight lived through the last global pandemic in 1918. So as we moved through this one we were all figuring it out along the way, including how to be the Church. And we learned some new things even if we were kicking and screaming the whole way. Now what? Do we go back to the same pews and the same old familiar ways, to what is old, to what is tried and true? No!

Some preachers (and I include myself here) actually discovered the Scriptures coming to life during the pandemic. We saw things in the Bible we had either never known were there or forgotten were there. We found something new – hard to be sure but what was new made us go back and revisit what was old. And it came alive! Words like “plague” that were easily skipped over before jump out at you, to offer just one example.

Now I’m going to move from preaching to meddling. Many of us were raised to read American history through a certain lens: Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, right? And discovered America? Is that the right verb? We thought it was for a long time. I was taught that it was. But it turns out that the story is a lot more complicated. So, too, with the founding of this nation and the compromises that were made to keep slavery intact. And it all came to a head in the middle of the nineteenth century and again in the middle of the twentieth century but it’s still with us, isn’t it? America’s original sin. Black neighbors ask white Americans to look at it all again with new eyes and take a closer look; to question what we learned and when we open ourselves to new insights and to listen to the experiences of others. When that happens, we can grow and change and love our neighbor in new and more faithful ways. And let’s acknowledge that is not always easy.

The people I have known who are most alive are the people who are the least afraid of learning something new. They have inquiring and discerning hearts. I can’t say they never say, “back in the day when I walked to school uphill both ways” but they say it less often and more tongue in cheek. And they inspire me. They give me hope. They are witnesses to the gospel. I want to be more like that when I grow up!

Followers of Jesus are called to be like scribes who, like the master of a household bring out what is new, in order to reinterpret what is old. In so doing we come very close to the living God, who it turns out is a whole lot more interested in doing new things than most of us are. People who recognize this light up the room, and they light up the world. They leaven the whole loaf.  And they help us to experience the Reign of God, here, and now, on this night, in this time and in this place. Even if it’s just proleptically. May it be enough to go on as the journey continues.