For Sunday
Proper 6B
Collect
Keep, O Lord, your household the Church in your steadfast faith and love, that through your grace we may proclaim your truth with boldness, and minister your justice with compassion; for the sake of our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
Jesus offers two illustrations to help understand what the Kingdom of God is like. It helps for us to remember that. He isn’t trying to explain a concept to his students like an algorithm in calculus class. He’s trying to share God’s vision for creation. It is a dream so vivid it feels real, so audacious some find it hard to believe, so true that we are afraid it would work.
We’re familiar with the arrangement, certainly. Jesus is teaching in parables, stories and images. And we take these stories and compare them to the world around us. Seeds can be people and ministry and church and sometimes all of it at once. We embrace that creativity and flexibility just as much as we embrace a vision of understanding, of certainty and conviction.
But we do receive these parables in our context. And they arrive here to us with their own context. And it can be difficult to want to hear the greater message. Not just what the Dream of God is like, but that it is a thing we actually want to participate in.
I’m not trying to be dismissive! I just see us get focused on these teachings, their meanings, rules and expectations, being right, what our neighbors are thinking and doing…and I don’t always see a lot of embracing the Dream of God.
There is a small distinction between trying to understand a concept and to participate in a thing. And it’s one we often make as students.
We might study a particular theologian, for instance. We read all of their work and try to understand everything they said and meant. To really get into their mind.
And we might order our lives around rules we think they would want us to follow. This can help us live into the Dream, I suspect. And it can also be a way to never embody the work, seeing life as correct answers on tests rather than the experience of living it, for example.
God’s dream can grow from almost nothing. That’s a mighty big concept to order one’s life around.