In the library in the middle-school where I went…. if you had finished your required reading, they had this section of magazines you could peruse on all sorts of topics like science, news, art, and sports. But there’s one particular magazine I remember – because of the surreal, glistening, shockingly well-muscled people portrayed in it – it was focused on all aspects of strength and agility training for sports. That magazine was titled, “Bigger, Faster, Stronger.”
We live in a “Bigger, Faster, Stronger” world where everything and every-body can be maximalized or capitalized. You can looksmaxx and proteinmaxx and efficiencymaxx. Bigger companies acquire smaller companies. Bigger countries dominate smaller countries. The empire of the biggest, fastest, strongest rules all.
In Jesus’ day no one was seemingly bigger, faster or stronger than the uk.,.kingdom, the kingdom of heaven. Jesus’ claimed that God’s kingdom was the most real thing, the only true reality worth selling everything for and dedicating your life to.
Jesus undermines the myth of bigger, faster, stronger and asks us to consider how God’s kingdom is already among us, working in the seemingly smallest, slowest, and weakest people and places. Jesus points us to glimpse the smallest thing, the hidden place as exactly where God is at work.
Like the mustard seed, so tiny, it gets lost in the dark soil when planted there.
Like the smallest grain of sand, swirling on the dark ocean bed, until serendipitous currents wash it into the shell of an oyster, until lustrous layer after lustrous layer hardens around it to produce a pearl.
Like the yeast – a living strain, passed from the air itself or the microbiome of the bakers’ hands, into the flour – it cannot be seen by the human eye. We can only see its effects – the transformation it causes – sourness and bubbling. The baker hides her clump of funky starter in a mass of wet dough – kneading it in until it seems like the leaven is all gone, invisible once more to the eye.
Jesus compares the unfolding kingdom of God to these kinds of hidden, mysterious, unseen and overlooked treasures.
Jesus calls us to seek this surprising kingdom of God by looking to forgotten places and people. When we might despair because God’s kingdom of justice, mercy, and peace has not come in ways as big, as fast, or as strong as we’d like, Jesus reminds us of the mystery of how God’s kingdom works.
In God’s economy, in God’s family, in God’s kingdom – the small, the slow, the weak, the hidden, has the capacity to transform everything.
The mustard seed does not just remain a tiny seed – but it grows to be a rangey, sprawling shrub that all kinds of critters can find shade and protection under. Our small acts of hospitality and compassion, by the miracle of God’s grace, sprawl outwards ever-wider to extend rest to those who need it.
On its own yeast is merely a curious reminder of a microbiome flourishing beyond our scope to see it. But yeast introduced to flour, or to crushed juice, brings fermentation and new flavors and multiplying growth. God’s kingdom is always beyond our fully glimpsing it and that is a gift, because most of the things that make life beautiful, flavorful, and worth living can’t ever be fully seen or optimized or monetized. Love, beauty, belonging, compassion, friendship are owned by no one but can always be shared.
These parables of Jesus’ point us to seek God’s kingdom, a realm, that paradoxically holds together two confusing and perplexing things:
the small – that is the mustard seed and the yeast and the pearl and the hidden treasure alongside the hope of the transformation of the all, of everything, of all creation and all of us. God’s kingdom works at a scale in which the smallest bubbling up of yeast, or the tiniest seed planted plays a part in the redemption of the entire cosmos that groans to be fully free.
In God’s family, in God’s kindom, each of you, in the smallest and most ordinary gestures of your life are invited to play a part in God’s grand drama of healing the whole world.
And that’s why Jesus tells us that this small, almost invisible working of God in the world, this almost imperceptible sometimes bubbling up of God’s love, is worth giving up everything to pursue:
Drain the college and retirement fund, put the business and house and car up for sale, go and buy that precious pearl, go and buy that field where there is the hidden treasure of God’s kingdom. To follow Jesus is to seek God’s kingdom with joy!
So friends – the allure of a bigger-faster-stronger type life will always be with us. Rome had its glitter, the USA has its shine.
But I pray that by God’s grace we will choose to be befuddled alongside a parable-telling-Jesus and seek the mystery of how it is that God is working amidst the small, the forgotten, the forsaken, the hidden – in order to bring healing and hope to the world.
For the kindom of God is not a top-down dominating, imperializing reality, but it springs forth from the bottom up,
from the depths of the ocean floor where fish swim and pearls grow, and from the dark soil where seeds lie buried
and also from the flour-dusted corners of our lives,
and from the dough-bowl, where given time and grace,
the gifts of God arise miraculously in our midst.
Amen.