May I be helped to speak in the name of the Living God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Imagine your garden. I don’t know how many of you have mustard there, but I guess almost all of you have some plants – vegetables, flowers – that you’ve grown. Maybe they started out as a seed; or perhaps you skipped that phase and bought seedlings from a nursery. Whichever – think about how they have grown.
If you’re not green-fingered enough to grow plants, maybe you have our problem – unwanted plants: two foot high oaks growing where a squirrel once buried but never retrieved an acorn; nettles and dock-leaves filling borders to which they were never invited; brambles trailing out from the hedges, defying every effort to root them out; moss taking over patches of your carefully or not so carefully tended lawn.
In the garden, everything grows. Tiny things grow to huge proportions. Even the huge, mature trees in the church and vicarage gardens were once seeds. This, says Jesus, is what the kingdom of God is like: it starts small, it becomes huge.
The garden’s not for you? Well we all eat – so imagine your kitchen. I don’t know whether you bake bread, but I guess many of you bake cakes sometimes. Even if you haven’t mixed the ingredients yourself I’m sure you’ll have watched what happens. The mixture starts flat, filling maybe a third of the depth of the tin. It grows until it’s overflowing the rim.
What does it? For bread it’s the yeast, for cakes it’s the baking powder. You take a tiny lump of yeast and mix it with flour many times its own volume. If you baked the mixture without the yeast it would stay flat – literally unleavened. But add the yeast to the mixture and its effect is huge. Imagine the risen loaves, the risen cakes being taken from the oven.
In the kitchen, in the oven, things grow. Tiny things mix with larger wholes to give amazing results. Think how very different the cake, the loaf would be if they were flat. This, says Jesus, is what the kingdom of God is like: it starts small, it becomes huge.
Imagine a field. Occasionally someone will find undiscovered treasure buried in it – the Staffordshire Hoard comes to mind. But that doesn’t happen often so how about a more frequently occurring modern-day example. Imagine this field has the potential to become a site of great value – perhaps a new motorway is being planned not too far away. If it goes ahead there will a huge demand for housing in the area, a huge demand for land to build them on.
Someone gets wind that this is going to happen. What does he do? He tries to buy the land before word gets out. He draws together all the funds he can, buys the land cheaply as unexceptional farmland, waits for the motorway announcement to be made, and then sells the land to housing developers for a huge amount of money. His profit is huge, the field has yielded up its treasure.
The world of business is like this. People see the potential in things and invest everything they have to access that potential. This, says Jesus, is what the kingdom of God is like: it is a thing of such value that people give everything to attain it.
Or are you a fan of Antiques Roadshow and Bargain Hunt? Imagine an antiques collector. She has many pieces in her collection, a collection built up over many years. Together the collection may be valuable, but there is nothing there that individually is of great worth. She sees a piece coming up in an auction, which is far better than anything she owns.
What does she do? She sells her collection – lock, stock and barrel. She goes to the auction and spends every penny on this rare, unique piece. It will give her far greater pleasure to look at, to show to others, than that whole collection she previously owned. It’s as though she has exchanged a collection of assorted silver chalices in order to buy – quite literally – the holy grail.
The world of collecting is like this. People see the beauty and value in a thing, and invest everything they have in order to possess it. This, says Jesus, is what the kingdom of God is like: it is a thing of such value that people give everything to attain it.
A seed growing in the garden, yeast in bread dough rising in the kitchen. A piece of land ripe for development, a collectible item of great beauty and worth. What links these things? Their sheer ordinariness. These are things we see every day – in our homes, on our TV screens – as we go about our daily business.
In the mind of Jesus, the most profound theological insights are triggered by the details of ordinary life. He saw parables for the kingdom of God everywhere. He tried to teach the people who came to him to do the same thing – to open their eyes to the world around them and to reflect upon it. To see how elements of our world can be read as symbols of God’s kingdom; to see how our world is shot through with the presence of God’s kingdom.
So I have a challenge for you. As you go about your work this week, as you partake in whatever it is you fill your leisure hours with, as you wander round your homes, sit before your TV screens – think a little. Ask yourself, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, what insight Jesus might take from the things, the events going on around you.
You’ll find it time well spent. Because we have other words for those thoughts that will be flashing into your mind: we call them reflection, meditation … prayer. For prayer isn’t just about the time you spend here in church, or kneeling by your bedside at home … it’s every moment of your life spent walking the path towards God.
Rev’d John Routh