The risk of the kingdom
A homily based on the following Book of Common Prayer daily office lectionary reading:
Matthew 13:44-52 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
“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 kingdom 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.”
The kingdom of heaven sounds like a pretty enormous risk. Selling everything you have to buy a pearl or a buried treasure? This is the kind of risk that if you get it wrong, you lose everything.
But in the kingdom of heaven losing everything is precisely the point.
We surrender what can’t satisfy us—we lose the things that demand that we spend our lives striving for more and more. We trade the anxiety of an uncertain future for abundance and self-giving Love. We step into this Great Cosmic Flow of emptying and receiving, and we lose the thirst to store away possessions or compete with those around us—we no longer live to achieve and succeed, we live in eternal truths.
See Jesus seems to think you get to choose, but you can’t have both: you can have this temporary life, or you can have eternal life. We have these glimpses, don’t we? of waking up? of seeing the game around us everyone’s playing? and seeing it as just that—a game! When we wake up we notice the way we get swept up in some cultural message of what’s good or respectable; we notice how we lose ourselves in “shoulds,” and there comes a moment when you almost look at it and laugh—that’s what I’ve been going crazy about? That I’m afraid of being alone? Or bad? Or worthless? Or too much? Or powerless? I’m afraid of loss or change, so I trade my peace of mind for a story in which I get to earn my way out of this fear. I get to work to prove I’m lovable, or that I’m good, or that I’m enough.
And then we wake up—even if just for a moment—and we see that the version of the world we chose was the one we created inside our own minds, instead of the Creator’s version. When we glimpse the treasure of the kingdom of heaven, we lose everything we’ve always known because we see that it’s meaningless in light of the truth, and we laugh.
Because here’s the wild truth—your worst fear was never true. You are so loved. You are so lovable. You are good and you are just enough. And the kingdom of heaven is like a sweet release from all the games we play to try to earn our way to the truth that was always ours.
The kingdom of heaven says—here is everything, everything you’ve been looking for. Everything you’ve ever thought would make you feel safe up until now has been an illusion, because this is the space where you are truly safe, truly alive, truly free. Here, where you let it all go.
In this space, you have nothing to offer, though—not until you receive. You have to sell all the things you think make you valuable—your possessions, maybe, but probably something more like your title, your grades, your relationship status, your resume. All of that will buy you nothing in the kingdom of heaven, because you will already have all of your questions answered about yourself. You will be perfectly valued, perfectly loved, and you won’t need to prove a thing.
The kingdom of heaven sorts this stuff out in us. The rebellious and rotten and evil bits will all be drawn out and forgotten, because there will be no use for them anymore.
The Kingdom of Heaven is the place where we step out beyond conventional wisdom and security. With risk and with abandon, we step into eternal matters, knowing that this present life is merely a foggy window into a greater, richer, truer reality.
But when we step into the kingdom of heaven, what do we leave behind? We leave behind the promise of comfort, of ease, of control. We leave behind the illusion that the things that rule our thoughts and actions will ever satisfy us. We release ourselves from our enslavement to a neverending cycle of toil and unrest. And we join Christ in eternal life.