A Pearl of Great Value

27 July 2008/Proper 12A – Genesis 29: 15-28/Romans 8:26-39/Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

The Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek, Saint Peter’s at Ellicott Mills, Maryland

A Pearl of Great Value!

An observation: anyone insisting that we turn to the Bible for any kind of definition as to what marriage is might want to revisit that thought after reading the story of Jacob’s wedding. We might also ask ourselves how it is that Jacob the Deceiver becomes the father and namesake of a great nation of God’s people, Israel? After all this is the younger son who stole the older son’s birthright through disguised deception. Despite the deception, God promises Jacob will become the father of numerous offspring, the same promise made to Abraham.

Act One: Jacob’s wedding: We may recall that last week God said to Jacob, “I will be with you always….” And we might note that in this narrative of Jacob’s wedding God seems to be absent. As we all ask sometime or another, “Where is God? Why does God seem to be absent?”

One answer would be that unlike his father Isaac, Jacob does not pray for God to help him find a wife. Instead he continues to rely on his own cunning. So one has to crack at least a smile when Jacob wakes up the morning after his marriage, and after seven years of working for his Uncle Laban to win the hand of Rachel, only to find out that, “When morning came, it was Leah!” As Uncle Laban observed upon meeting Jacob back in verse 14, “Surely you are my bone and my flesh.” It turns out that this means, “Jacob the Deceiver, huh? Boy, you have met your match!”

Now it helps to understand ancient Middle Eastern marriage customs just a little: the woman is veiled throughout the ceremony, at night, and wrapped in a cloak, at night, and taken home to the husband’s tent, at night. No doubt everyone has been drinking more than five cisterns of good wine! Jacob disguised himself as Esau; Laban disguises his daughter Leah as Rachel. Jacob complains. Laban replies, “You may have gotten away with putting yourself before the first born, but that’s not how we do things around here! But for another seven years, you can have Rachel too.” Lest we think this is all a tad old fashioned, rest assured that women are treated like this throughout many cultures to this day, and recent events have revealed that this kind of treatment is carried out right here in the U.S. of A.

So both Leah and Rachel move in, and we know that life is not easy or tranquil in Jacob’s tent. So where is God? Why doesn’t the Lord intercede? Well it turns out God has been there all along adjusting the plan. For in the sequel, in verse 30, God observes that Leah is unloved. So God opens her womb, and Rachel is at least temporarily barren. Leah has four children: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah. The children of Levi eventually come to serve the Lord in the Lord’s Temple in Jerusalem, and from Judah come King David, Solomon and Jesus. Leah testifies to the Lord’s leading even through human deception! Lowly, outcast and unloved Leah!

What the story seems to be saying is that the Lord’s plan for salvation refuses to be derailed by human failings as clumsy as Jacob’s and Laban’s. Even more amazing is the suggestion that the Lord fulfills his promises even using human deception!

As Sidney Greidanus observes, “Today we often wonder where God is when people deceive each other. Nations go to war and kill innocents; Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus and all manner of people are persecuted and killed; children are abused. Is God absent? Is God not aware of what is going on? The wedding of Jacob tells us that God is not absent and is aware of what is going on. But God has also given us humans the freedom and responsibility to plan and act. Because we are sinful creatures, we often mess up, but even then we can be sure that somehow the Lord will use us to fulfill God’s purposes even with our failings.” [The Lectionary Commentary: The First Readings (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids:2001) p.60]

Act Two: In the words of Jesus, Jacob, the even more notorious Laban, and lowly, outcast and unloved Leah are Pearls of Great Value. It sounds odd, but consider this.

Years ago, long before becoming the Bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts, Tom Shaw SSJE, spoke to a group of clergy and addressed one of the Parables of the Kingdom, “The Pearl of Great Value.” Bishop Shaw began by saying that our God is a very frugal God and does not waste one iota, not one jot or tittle, of our life experience. Each moment we live and breathe on this fragile Earth, our island home, God values and savors who we are and what we are doing – especially the work we do for God’s kingdom – but even when we or circumstances are not so good.

Shaw went on to say that a hidden truth embedded in the Good News of Jesus, and hidden in these parables like yeast in dough, is that at the end of the day each one of us is the Pearl of Great Value. Through our Baptism, we are made God’s Beloved. To show how much our God loves us, he sends his only Son to walk among us, dwell among us, to show us the way of the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus.

So much does God savor our life experience that the Lord did not let us get away with killing his Son, his only Son whom he loves, but returned him to us, so that wherever communities of Christians gather in his name, Jesus himself is in the midst of them, calling us back to the God from whence we come: We come from love, we return to love, and love is all around. We are God’s Beloved.

Bishop Shaw urged us to think of ourselves as Pearls of Great Value, hidden in this world, for which God was willing to pay a great price: the ultimate price. God sold all that God had to obtain us, to retain us, to bring us back home to him.

So precious are we in the eyes of our God, said Bishop Shaw, that we really need to take time each day in our prayers to allow God the time to thank us for what we have done for God today. Every day we are to sit in silence in our prayer time and allow ourselves to feel God thanking us for all that we do for God in this world.

Are we really capable of believing and knowing that God loves us that much? Can we feel like Pearls of Great Value? It is central to the life of faith to accept and receive God’s love – to know how much our God values us and everything that we do.

We do not need to do big and heroic things. And like Jacob, we can mess up big time. The truth is, as God’s own pearls of great value, most every little thing we do brings a smile to God’s face. And God forgives us the rest. The more we let God thank us for what we can do for God, the more confident and empowered we become as God’s own people. And soon the people around us and the people we meet begin to feel like pearls of great value as well.

It all begins with faith: Faith that God is with us even when it doesn’t look like it, and Faith that God will use all of our experience for a greater good. All we really need is faith as small as a mustard seed to make the whole creation new; to give new life to our own tired bodies; to put a smile on the face of a stranger; to plant seeds of God’s love throughout the neighborhood in which God has made his home. We are all Pearls of Great Value!

Says Paul: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose.”

Be still and know that I am God

Be still and know that I am God

Let me thank you for every thing you do

Be still and know that I am God

I am with you all the time

I am with you all the time

Let me thank you for every thing you do

I am with you all the time

I am with you everywhere

I am with you everywhere

Let me thank you for every thing you do

I am with you everywhere

When it seems like I’m not there

When it seems like I’m not there

Let me thank you for every thing you do

When it seems like I’m not there

Be still and know that I am God

Be still and know that I am God

Let me thank you for every thing you do

Be still and know that I am God

Copyright Sounds Divine

Season With A Prayer and Song

13 July 2008/Proper 10 – Romans 8:1-11/Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

The Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek, St. Peter’s at Ellicott Mills, Maryland

“…You are in the Spirit,

since the Spirit of God dwells in you.”

- Romans 8: 9

We don’t often think of it, but of all the New Testament literature, Saint Paul’s letters are the oldest sources we have about Jesus – pre-dating the Gospels by a couple of decades. And Paul writes that for those who are “in Christ,” and “Christ is in them,” “the Spirit of God dwells in you.” This ought to strike us as an astonishing assertion. Not something we should take for granted. And we might ask, just how does Christ come to be in us?

And “us” is the operant word here, since Saint Paul writes in the plural (something the English translation cannot indicate) – Paul rarely speaks of an individual’s relationship to Christ. He speaks almost exclusively of the individual in the context of the worshipping community – the community of Christ’s Body, the priesthood of all believers. How does Christ and the Spirit of God come to “dwell in us?”

Along comes the Parable of the Sower rich with varied depths of meanings to help us to see just what things, as our collect for the day urges, we “ought to do,” and just how we might find ourselves equipped with the “grace and power to accomplish them,” which things very well may prepare ourselves as a community to receive Christ and the Spirit of God into our midst – so that God’s spirit might “dwell” among us, a technical word in the Greek for pitching a tent, setting up shop, move into our neighborhood.

And the first thing we might notice is the repetition, “A sower went out to sow, and as he sowed…” That is, this is no random person scattering seed hoping gravity and good luck will take care of the rest. This sower is sowing, which points to a practiced skill. This seed goes where it is supposed to go. No soil is left bare. No soil is overplanted. Yet, even with such a sower, some seed lands on the road, or on stones, or among thorns.

Vincent Van Gogh, the 19^th Century Dutch artist understood this. He understood that the seeds were God’s Word of the Kingdom – and Gogh knew as we all know that Christ is God’s Word of the Kingdom. Christ, the Word of God’s Kingdom, came to proclaim a message: I will set you free, I won’t let you be anything but holy, good and free.

Now what most people do not know is that the young Gogh set off to follow in his Protestant Pastor father’s footsteps – and spent some years evangelizing, bring this good news of God’s Word, to the poor, beginning with mine workers in Borinage. During this time he was able to identify with the miners, their families, and their lifestyles. His religious beliefs made him want to alleviate spiritual and physical suffering.

Only later did he turn to painting as another way to express his desire to bring people closer to God, closer to each other and closer to themselves. In 1888 he painted The Sower, a pivotal work in the history of art, and surely a scene related to our story here in Matthew. One sees the sower, practiced in the art of sowing, deliberately planting the seed in the soil. For Gogh the color yellow symbolized faith, triumph and love. The color blue represented the Divine – and so he combines these colors so they seem to move together shows the relationship of all living things. And there is something holy, good and free in the figure of The Sower – who in the parable of course is God in Christ planting the Good News of God’s kingdom in the soil of our hearts.

And the very thought that this seed, the Word of God, could yield a hundredfold would be heard by the farmers and fishermen Jesus addresses as simply fantastic! No seed known yields such bounty! Maybe ten, twenty or even thirty fold, but sixty or one hundred is unprecedented, unknown, simply unimaginable! We are meant to respond with awe that God’s Word possesses such grace and power – we are meant to want this Word planted in the soil of our own hearts, where we can tend to it, hear it, and be transformed a hundred fold ourselves. What a truly awesome gift from an awesome God.

Of course, the dangers of not tending to it are outlined. It is a parable of self-analysis: Are we fertile, well tilled, deeply mulched soil? Or, are we rocky ground? Do we welcome and make opportunities to tend to God’s word every day? Or, do we spend more time tending to the thorns of wealth and the cares of the world, such that the Word yields nothing?

Many who first heard Jesus tell this story figured out its meaning: we are the soil, the seed of God’s Word comes to rest in us, and for those who till and water and mulch and care for God’s word, we become sowers of the Word ourselves – like the young Vincent Van Gogh, like Saint Paul, like the fishermen, tenant farmers, soldiers and others who first heard this story.

Once upon a time I played music for a living, often in the great state of Maine. In Maine lives a truly wonderful singer/songwriter by the name of David Mallet who has written a song that I believe speaks to what Jesus is calling us to do and be, and at the same time addresses the ecological crisis we face on the Earth, this fragile, island home of ours. As we sing it, or as we listen to it, perhaps it will move us to become more disciplined disciples of Christ – like the skilled Sower may we become more practiced in letting the Word take root in our lives so we might begin to feel and to know that what Saint Paul says is true: we are in the Spirit, God’s Spirit dwells in us. God’s son Jesus desires to pitch his tent and plant his Word in our hearts and minds and souls so that we might truly become holy, good and free!

Garden Song

by David Mallett

 CHORUS:

Inch by inch, row by row

Gonna make this garden grow

Gonna mulch it deep and low

Gonna make it fertile ground

Inch by inch, row by row

Please bless these seeds I sow

Please keep them safe below

'Till the rain comes tumbling down

Pullin' weeds and pickin' stones

We are made of dreams and bones

Need a place to call my own

'Cause the time is close at hand

Grain for grain, sun and rain

Find my way in nature's chain

Till my body and my brain

Tell the music of the land

CHORUS

Plant your rows straight and long

Season with a prayer and song

Mother Earth will make you strong

If you give her loving care

An old crow watching hungrily

From his perch in yonder tree,

In my garden I'm as free

As that feathered thief up there.

CHORUS

©Cherry Lane Music Co (ASCAP)