[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to the Collective Table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
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[00:00:43] Speaker A: Well, good morning for those of you who might be new. My name is Jason and I'm one of the co lead pastors here along with Janelle. We have been working through a new teaching series here on the Parables of Jesus. This has become a little bit of a summer tradition. This is the second summer in a row we have visited the Parables of Jesus and so I'm going to go ahead and continue that series with you today. We're going to look today at Matthew, chapter 13, verses 45 to 46. Just a few brief verses. If you have a Bible with you, of course, welcome to turn there, Matthew 13:44 to 46. If not, we're going to go ahead and put the words up on the screen and I want to just start by reading that parable Now. So Matthew 13, starting in verse 44 says this, the kingdom of heaven.
Actually, we're going to start in 44 and we're going to push through because that gives a little bit of context here. The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field which someone found and hid.
And then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and he buys that field.
Verse 45 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 he bought it.
That's it. That's the parable. Actually, it's two technically. I read the one before it just to give you a little bit of that context. Jesus is talking about a similar notion here when he uses both of these images. The first is somebody who finds something. The image is somebody who sort of stumbles across something that's worth a great deal of money. This sounds very shady to me, but he finds something that's very valuable. He goes, he buries it in a field that this person doesn't own, apparently. And then having hidden the treasure in somebody else's field, he goes, he sells everything he has. He buys that field so that he can get that thing that he found. It's like laundering, right? He's laundered the kingdom of God, right? I didn't find it. I bought it, you know, I own the field. And then the second is very similar. And this is the parable I want us to focus on today.
But the first one, I think, helps make a little bit of sense of the second one. The second one is the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant.
So somebody who does business, right? Somebody who's in business, has inventory in stock. It's what they do for a living to buy and then sell things, ideally, I would think, at a profit so that they can make a living. This person is a merchant.
It might be helpful for you to know that for us, if we read something like this that says the kingdom of God is like a merchant who goes out and we think of a merchant as somebody that's respectable, somebody who is to be admired, somebody who has, you know, created a business and is successful. Plus, the word merchant has this kind of exotic sort of romance attached to it. I think it might be helpful for you to know that the word merchant in Jesus's day would not have been a compliment, right? A merchant would have been sort of conjured up images of somebody who couldn't be trusted.
All right? Somebody who might be swindling you, somebody who might be sticking their finger on the scale, on one side of the scale, as they're, you know, measuring what you owe them, right? So the Yiddish word would be shyster, right? Somebody who maybe you don't quite trust. So this is who we're talking about. We're talking about a merchant, somebody who perhaps makes his living, perhaps in an honest way, but, you know, the trade itself is questionable.
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant who is in search of fine pearls but finds one.
Finds one pearl that's so incredibly valuable. He sells everything. He sells everything that he owns.
So that would be like, you know, the stock, the backstock, the tools, the storefront, the implements, the home that he lives in. Like, every bit of property this person owns, he sells in order to buy this one pearl.
Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is something like that.
So I'm going to pause there and just ask you to pray with me, if you would.
God, we thank you so much for this opportunity for us to gather in this space where others have been gathering for nearly 100 years, just to maybe understand a little bit better what we should and could value that would make a difference.
We ask that you would do that work in us today by your spirit, that you would enlarge our hearts, that you would grow our imagination, that we would fall in love with what is good and right and true. We pray all this in Jesus name, Amen.
Our youngest daughter is Alana. Alana is, I don't know, 24 years old now, right?
And she's a nurse by trade, which means she's, you know, smarter and better educated and more intelligent than I've ever been in my life, Right.
Also better paid. Did I mention that?
I'm not complaining. I'm just saying, like, you know, nurses do pretty well, so she's great. But she wasn't always into nursing. At some point, at a very young age, I don't know when this happened or how this happened, but at some point, I want to say she was, like, 6 or 7 years old, she picked up a rock. At one point, like, backyard or front yard or maybe on a playground, she picked up a rock and she, like, fell in love with this rock. It was beautiful to her.
And she showed it to her mom. She showed it to me, and she was like, I just love this rock. Isn't this amazing? And we were like, huh? Yeah, that's a pretty rock, honey. But she just loved it. And she stuck it in her pocket and she took it home and she, like, washed it so that, you know, like, the beauty of the rock came out. And then something happened to her. Like, she changed. Suddenly. She was in love with rocks.
She was like our daughter who was all about rocks.
And so at first, she would just go out into the front yard or again into the backyard or on the playground at school, and she would bring home.
Oh, thank God. Pockets full of rocks, right? Like, she would have all these rocks that she thought were amazing and beautiful, and they started to, like, litter her room. And she would wash them, and she would display them in her room. And if you visited her room, she would show you her rocks. And pretty soon, her room wasn't enough space to display the rocks. And so the rocks started to infiltrate other parts of our houses, right? Like, we were, like, filled with rocks.
And that, I learned quickly, wasn't enough. There are also, like, these rags that you can buy. They're like polishing rags for rocks. And so she started to do a little bit of digging. She found out that there's such a thing as these polishing rags. And so then she would use those. We'd. We have to buy those rags. She'd polish the rocks, and they would get beautiful. And the next thing you know, we're visiting, like, rock stores.
Did you know that there are stores dedicated to rocks?
I did not know this.
There are stores dedicated to rocks. And then, lo and behold, there are Museums full of rocks. We lived at the time in Columbus, Ohio. Lived very close to the Ohio State University. You're welcome. And because I use the definite article, that's very important if you're a Buckeye. Anyway, so we visited, you know, like, the museum at OSU that had, like, you know, has rocks in it.
It's an institution dedicated to rocks. Next thing I know, we're planning vacations around Alana's, like, Rock Obsession.
We're buying. We bought a tumbler. Raise your hand if you know what a tumbler is. Oh, you guys know all about this.
You plug it in, you throw rocks in it, and it goes, you know, for like, five days.
It's a low noise. You learn to sleep through it.
And at the end of that five days, out comes a beautiful rock. It's a rock, but it's beautiful.
Anyway, this went on for years.
I seriously thought she was going to grow up to become, like, a geologist. Like, she was talking about it.
She was investigating this as a career possibility. And we were like, this is it. This is what Alana's going to do. She's going to fill her house with rocks someday.
And then one day, it was over.
It was her identity for a very long period of time. So much so that when I would, you know, introduce my family to people, I'd be like, this is, you know, this is Judah, this is Savannah, this is Janelle, this is Alana. She's really into rocks.
And then one day I introduced her that way, and she was like, no, I'm not.
I was like, oh, when did that happen?
The point, of course, is that she just deeply loved rocks, and it transformed her life for the time that she was involved in it. I think what's most interesting about this parable, by the way, the parable of the pearl of great price. I think what's most fascinating about it is what Jesus doesn't identify as the pearl, right? So there's this pearl that. That the merchant falls in love with is so incredibly important to the merchant that the merchant sells everything in order to obtain it. But what's interesting to me is Jesus doesn't say, for example, that the pearl of great price is wisdom.
That's a bit of a surprise because wisdom is littered throughout the Hebrew text. In fact, there are passages right there for the picking. Like Job 28:18 says, Wisdom is exalted above any treasure, being more precious than corals and pearls. Pearls, by the way, were were really known at a distance in the ancient Near East. They would have been more Valuable than anything. Most people would have never seen a pearl. So the word pearl occurs very rarely in either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. But here it is in Job 28:18, it's wisdom is like pearls.
Jesus doesn't go there. He doesn't pluck this passage out of his own scripture and say, oh, you know, like that passage in Job or Proverbs 4, 7. Get wisdom, though it cost all you have.
Get understanding.
So it's fascinating to me that Jesus doesn't say, oh, wisdom is like a merchant who goes out and sells everything he has in order to get this pearl. He doesn't say what's right there at the taking.
Also, of course, Jesus is Jewish.
I think he knew that, like there literally was no such thing as a Christian. Jesus certainly wasn't a Christian.
He was Jewish. And as a good Jewish rabbi in the ancient near east for a century, you certainly might expect Jesus to be talking about Torah here.
The Torah, the law, is the pearl, the most highly valued precious commodity that we ought to be willing to give our whole lives for.
And Jesus, of course, highly valued Torah, he highly valued the law. In Matthew 5, 17, 20, he says, hey, don't think, by the way, I'm about to say a bunch of things that make you think that I'm against the law, but so know in advance, I am not against the law. I'm all for the law. He says, in fact, not one iota, one jot or tittle of the law will pass away until everything that I say fulfills that law.
Everything I say is in service to Torah.
So Jesus highly values Torah as an ancient rabbi, but he doesn't say the Torah is like a merchant who goes out and buys this pearl at a great cost to everything else.
I think it makes sense that he doesn't do this, but I think we have to understand a little something in order for it to make sense. What we have to understand is the world that Jesus lived in.
Understand that as a Jewish person, as a, as an inhabitant of ancient Palestine, Jesus is very much like the current inhabitants of ancient Palestine, subject to the oppression of an imperial power.
Jesus and all of his people live in subjugation, in oppression to a foreign occupying army, in this case the Roman Empire.
So they are every single day being oppressed and being put upon, being subjugated, being abused, being subject to political torment and physical torture. Every single day they exist under this massively oppressive foreign occupying army.
And so for Jesus hearers, for Jesus followers, the notion of a kingdom would have conjured up the ideas, the images, the power structure of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was not just a kingdom. It was the kingdom and a kingdom, by the way, that invoked divine power, that justified its power through divine right.
The second thing that was true of Jesus day is in addition to this sort of oppressive, occupying, imperial force, you had people in Jesus's own community who were complicit with that occupying force.
So the political elites of Jesus's day in Jesus's own community were often compliant with that abusive, oppressive, foreign power in order to preserve their own power in their community.
That's the second thing I think that's important to understand. The third thing that I think is important to understand is a whole other segment of Jesus's community, a whole other segment of ancient Jews living in the ancient near east, were really upset about the first two things violently so.
Jesus was not the first Messiah to come along in his day, and he certainly wasn't the last. There was an endless parade of Jews who came along at that time and pointed to the occupying, imperial, oppressive army and said, let's take them.
We can do this.
And so there was in Jesus's time, this tremendous uprising of violence that was ready to come against violence.
This is very much the world that Jesus lived in. It was a world that was defined by the vicious cycle of power and violence.
You pursue power through violent means. You get it now. You have to keep it and preserve it at all costs through violent means.
And anything that you do is okay as long as it serves the pursuit of that power.
Now, it's in the midst of that that Jesus chooses when he sets before his followers, when he sets before all the people who are hearing him, something that we should h highly value more than anything else. He chooses not the word Torah or the law or wisdom. He chooses the word kingdom not because he opposes the law. He thinks the law is good. Instead, he seems to think that the law is not an end in itself, that it leads to something else, and that something else that the law leads to is what he calls the kingdom of God.
And when he uses that phrase, he's very intentionally contrasting what he calls the kingdom of God with the kingdom that is oppressing them.
He's using this phrase in a very particular way to teach them something very important.
Because, see, at that time, as you can imagine, just try to imagine this. I know it will be hard. At that time, some of you are detecting sarcasm, and you're right.
At that time, people had a tendency to project onto God their own desires for power, their own desires for how they think the world should be ordered.
And so because of that, when Jesus calls this thing that he wants all of us to value more than anything else, when he calls it the kingdom of God, he's using that phrase in an ironic way.
And I don't know how to say this to you in a way that will sink in, that will sit with you.
I need you to consider the possibility that when Jesus talks about God and the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven, he is not talking about kingdoms or gods in the way that you tend to think of them.
He's using it ironically.
He's saying, this thing that I'm calling a kingdom is exactly the opposite of everything you have in your mind when you hear the word kingdom.
This God that I am offering to you is the exact opposite of everything you have in mind when you hear the word God. How do I know this? Well, I know this because this is exactly what Jesus illustrates in all of his teaching. This kingdom of God that he wants us to value more than anything else doesn't starve people to death. Instead, it feeds people who are hungry, and it feeds them generously anytime there is a need. This kingdom that Jesus is putting forth doesn't look the other way when people are sick. It doesn't sacrifice people when they are somehow physically less than. No Jesus kingdom heals the sick.
This kingdom of God that Jesus talks about, it doesn't throw everybody and anybody into prison who dares to come against the power and the authority of the empire. No, no, no. This kingdom visits people in prison and brings them comfort. This kingdom that Jesus puts forth appears to be quite weak.
This is why Jesus parables include images like, you know, it's like a tiny little seed.
It's not like a war horse. It's not like a sword. It's not like a standing army. It's. It's not like an empire. It's like a tiny little seed that by itself is very unimpressive and appears to be a threat to nobody.
But if you plant it, still nothing happens until you water it and wait.
And eventually something tiny emerges and begins to grow very slowly. And over time, it turns into something that provides shelter.
That is not the kind of kingdom most of us want.
Most of us want kingdoms that are powerful and strong and authoritative and able to conquer our enemies at a moment's notice. Instead, Jesus offers a kingdom that is like farming.
It's a lot of work.
Gotta get your hands dirty.
Oftentimes it fails. But if you do it well, if you work, if you cultivate, if you feed it, if you water it, and the sun shines on it. And then if you're willing to wait for something mysterious, then it might turn into something that feeds not just your family, but an entire nation.
Jesus says, that's the kingdom of God.
That's the power of God.
It appears to be weak, but it's actually far stronger than your swords, your war horses, or your standing armies.
In this way, Jesus is drawing a contrast between God's power and the power of the world.
God's power, you see, is exactly the opposite of imperial power in every way.
It's the opposite of the kind of power that we desperately want when we are suffering.
Kingdom of God, then, is life.
It's a whole life. It's a whole community, it's a whole existence, a whole civilization, characterized not by the vicious cycle of power and violence, but by the virtuous cycle of love and joy and peace and patience and kindness for all people.
Yes, but first for those who lack it.
It's the kind of power that prioritizes the needs of those who have needs.
Jesus says this. This kind of power in this parable, when he says the kingdom of God is like a merchant who sells everything in order to get this pearl, this pearl that's worth all, all that you own.
That this power is. In other words, like what Jesus says in John 10:10, it's abundant life.
And I'm sort of reluctant to even refer to that phrase because we, as sort of privileged, relatively wealthy Americans, think like abundant life means getting more stuff, right? Another car, a little bit nicer house, nicer clothes.
But it's not abundant life. Abundant life is the life where everybody lives and breathes and exists in goodness because everybody has what they need. This is what Jesus taught over and over again in this parable.
Jesus teaches us three things about it, I think. The first is that this kind of power, the kind that I've just tried to unpack for you, the kind of power that is exactly the opposite of the empire, the opposite of a vicious cycle of power and violence, the kind of power instead that relies on love and graciousness and kindness and goodness, that this kind of power is what we should love more than anything, that it should be for us the pearl that is worth everything.
The second thing I think that this parable teaches us is that this kind of power, the power of God, the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God that's characterized by love and peace and kindness and goodness must be pursued, just like the merchant who was looking for valuable things, searching for, like, his heart's desire. We, too must be searching for this.
It won't just come to us.
We won't just accidentally one day wake up to find that there exists in the United States of America a political party that actually cares about people and is willing to put folks in power who will ensure that that is true.
I can promise you that will never.
If what we want in this world is a life of love and goodness and peace and kindness, I think what this parable teaches us is just like the Merchant. We have to chase after it obsessively because we love it more than anything.
And the third thing I think this parable teaches us is that that pursuit, that chase, will cost us everything.
Like, I mean, literally everything.
I think it's possible that the reason that we don't exist in a world that is more kind, more just, more loving, is because, on balance, there just aren't enough of us who are willing to give everything for it.
That it's.
It's just too hard, that it seems too costly.
Look, I think it seems too costly to most of us who are married to just do it for our spouse.
That is lovely.
I'm kind of digging that.
I know much less that we would be willing to give everything for our neighborhood, that we would be willing to give everything for our community, that we would be willing to give everything for our city in order for it to become the kind of place where nobody goes hungry, where nobody is starved to death in order to gain political power, where nobody is objectified or oppressed in order to preserve power for the few. Like, I just think we're not willing to pay that price.
I know most nights I will spend two hours looking for something decent to watch on Netflix. Like, that's the most trouble I'm willing to go to most days to find a little novelty.
Jesus is asking me to give up everything.
The key to this parable, though, is recognizing that for the Merchant, it was worth it.
The emphasis of this parable is on how much it cost the merchant to get this pearl that he loved so much that he was so obsessed with finding, that he leveraged his whole life for.
But for him, it was worth it.
He saw the value of it.
I love that Amy Jill Levine, who's a.
She's a Jewish New Testament scholar.
What I mean is, she is Jewish and she's a New Testament scholar, which I love the delicious irony of that.
And I love her stuff because she. She brings, I think, a very helpful perspective to parables. Like this. And one of the things she points out is that the merchant, in selling everything to buy this one pearl, ceases to be a merchant.
He's sold everything, including his business, including all of his stock. All of his wares are now gone.
The merchant, in getting what he wanted more than anything, ceases to be a merchant.
His identity is transformed, and he does it gladly.
I wonder if we are willing to give up everything in order to gain the one thing that Jesus says is worth our entire lives and everything in it.
And that one thing is a kingdom that is ruled by the power of love, not the power of violence.
I ask myself a couple of things when I read this parable. The first is, is the kingdom of God, the power of God, the goodness of God, what I value the most?
And like I said, most nights it's just something decent on Netflix. That's what I value the most.
But am I, like Alana, in love with love?
Am I in love with the idea that we could have a church full of people who actually work and pursue and practice the art of loving each other into community?
Do I believe that that kind of love, that kind of obsession, could infect our neighborhood and our city to the point where Oceanside could become a community that believes more in the power of love than we believe in the love of power?
I do. I believe that that makes me foolish or naive or, I don't know, just a progressive pastor, right?
The second question I ask myself is, what am I pursuing? And this is just another way of asking the same question, right? If the first question is, what do you really love? What are you really obsessed with? Are you obsessed with the goodness, the kindness, the power, the peace of the kingdom? Another way of asking that question is, what are you pursuing?
I mean, what is it that you're obsessed about most days? What is it that most of the time you're giving most of your time and your attention and your money to?
Jesus says, that's how you know where your heart is.
Wherever your treasure is, there will your heart be also? Jesus is saying, hey, you know what you really value and care about and love the most, because that's what you spend most of your money on.
That'd be like an interesting discipleship practice, right? Like, everybody just shows how much money they spend on stuff.
Don't worry, we're not going to do that.
But it's an interesting self reflection exercise. What am I really spending most of my extra money on? Assuming you've got extra money and a whole lot of people don't so that exercise only goes so far.
And then I think the third question that I ask myself is, what am I willing to pay?
What am I willing to pay in order to have a church or a community or a city that is characterized by the power of love instead of the love of power? Am I willing to study it? Am I willing to understand it? Am I willing to take that understanding that I think I have and actually experiment with it? In other words, not allow my ideas about God and goodness and love to just be abstract in my head, but am I willing to actually put it into practice?
Am I willing to say, oh, I think I know what this love means, so now I'm gonna go try to actually do it like a little scientist, and then ask myself, did it work or did it not work? If it didn't work, why didn't it work? How is my experiment failing or succeeding in some way? Am I willing to unlearn old ways of being in my relationship with my life, my wife, in order to love her? Am I willing to unlearn my old ways of being in relationship with you and my community in order to learn how to love you?
Am I willing, in other words, like the merchant, to be utterly transformed?
Am I willing to be put out of the business of the love of power so that I can become a merchant of love instead?
Am I willing to be changed? Am I willing to let go of those old identities that have become idols to me, even if that identity is Christian?
Am I willing to celebrate love? Am I willing to vote for love? Am I willing to protest against hate? Am I willing to post about love?
Am I willing to persevere when love appears to be failing and battered and beaten and broken and out of political favor? Am I willing to give myself to it no matter what?
In other words, do I love it?
This is what we do. When we love something, we sacrifice our whole lives for it because it's worth it.
Jesus wants to know if what we love is the right thing, the good thing, the God thing.
And, you know, some days I do, most days I don't, but some days I do.
And hopefully I'm ending up a little bit more on one side of that equation than the other.
My invitation to you today is to take this passage and ask yourself those questions.
What do I really love?
Am I pursuing the goodness of God?
What am I willing to pay for it?
What am I willing for it to cost me? It's okay. Whatever your answer is, really, the transformation happens just in your willingness to ask yourself those questions.
Amen.
Would you pray with me? God, we thank you so much for today, for this time and this place and for all of the people who have come here to be stretched and challenged by the words that we read and the songs that we sing, the prayers that we recite together.
We pray, God today that you would help us to see that all of these things that we do, including the words that we read and the songs that we sing and the prayers that we recite, are not the point.
That all of this is meant to lead us towards a life characterized by your goodness, your love, your power.
We ask that you would help us to keep our eyes on that and that we would fall more deeply in love with the power of love.
More deeply in love with you.
We pray all this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:36:59] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
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