For Sunday
Proper 12A
Collect
O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
Jesus compares the Kin-dom to a mustard seed, yeast, treasure, pearls, and a net. The diversity of images is far more fascinating than any one, I suspect.
We’re familiar with the mustard seed. Familiarity, of course, breeds contempt. And laziness. The treasure and pearl are obvious. Yeast, sure. It goes along with the mustard seed.
But that net image. That seems…different somehow. The others demonstrate that power and scope on the one hand and the precious, desirable quality on the other. But this is something different. It is a tool. A way of gathering what is itself desirable.
What the whole lot of these strikes me with is a demand for urgency and an expectation of agency. That Jesus invites us to tap into the thing we want most, need more than anything, and find ourselves most obsessed with day-to-day: health and happiness right now and forever.
We all want these things. If we have the means, we go to school to maximize the opportunity to have these things. If we don’t have the means, we work to obtain the means to have these things. And not things, so much as the safety and security and joy that comes with not worrying about things in general.
There’s a threshold in the happiness research about how much income affects happiness. It happens to be the income level in which you generally don’t think about whether or not you can afford to eat this week. In other words, you don’t have to check the bank account before buying groceries.
These images for the Kin-dom reflect this vision of desire, this motivation to have it for ourselves, and therefore, the willingness to make this happiness for everyone around us. Because the Kin-dom means we all eat. So none of us worries about it.