My Ordinary God

Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after The Pentecost

July 26, 2020 Yr A

St. Michael’s Episcopal Church

The Reverend Canon Michael J. Horvath

Gospel: Matthew 13:31-33,44-52

When I first started to practice mindfulness meditation, I had this misconception that it was something that I could do only when I was sitting cross-legged on a pillow. But a long-time practitioner suggested that mindfulness is the energy of being aware and awake to the present moment. It is the continuous practice of touching life deeply in every moment of daily life. To be mindful is to be truly alive, present, and at one with those around you and with what you are doing. We bring our body and mind into harmony while we wash the dishes, drive the car, or take our morning shower. It’s like that with prayer as well. Prayer, connecting with God, can be done in very reverent, liturgical settings like church, as well as in less churchy spaces and times like in our kitchen washing dishes, while we’re driving, or taking our morning shower. God is not present when we summon Him like some spiritual Siri or Alexa. God is always here, present to and for us.

Jesus seems to want to highlight that in the plethora of parables he presents us with today. We’ve heard of the Mustard Seed, Pearl of Great Price, the Leaven and the Flour, the Treasure Hidden in the Field. We might think that it’s oh-so-nice to hear these old chestnuts rolled out again. They comfort us with a well-worn and perhaps childish idea that the Kingdom of Heaven, whenever we get there, is going to be as abundant as the loaves of bread the widow is baking, as shiny as the pearl bought by the merchant, and as exclusive as sorted net of fish which will only contain the good.

But these parables challenged Jesus’s audience in ancient Galilee to question their hidden biases and values, and indeed, their own lives. When they thought of kingdom, the specter of the great Roman Empire popped into their minds first – with untold wealth and resources, with men who looked like kings and women who shined like goddesses.

“Let me tell you about the Kingdom,” Jesus says. And everyone’s minds get in gear, “We already know about kingdoms and empires: rulers, palaces, and emperors and wealth and bloody wars and power. Tell us about the Kingdom of Heaven! What will it look like when we arrive?” And this is when it all gets interesting, because the disciples hear that the Kingdom of Heaven is:

“Like a woman who takes some yeast and hides it in a ton of dough and bakes it into huge loaves of bread!” 

“Like a man who finds the most precious pearl – the purest, largest pearl! And he sells all his possessions and buys it!” 

“Like a mustard seed – the tiniest of seeds! And somebody threw a whole bunch of those little seeds out into the garden and the seed grew, and became a tree, and birds lived in its branches!” 

You see, Jesus used terms and images everybody thought they knew very well and then used metaphor to twist and turn them beyond commonplace recognition. 

And his disciples sat there a bit and scratched their heads. They all knew what kingdoms were – real ones – with armies and emperors and wealth and bloody wars and power and slaves. Yet, Jesus chose over and over again to compare things of the everday to talk to folks about the Kingdom of Heaven – yeast and pearls and mustard seeds. Jesus didn’t describe the Kingdom of Heaven as some far off, mystical land, but readily available in yeast and seeds and the simple things of this world.

For all of the things that we believe make up a kingdom like wealth, and power and domination and rulers, the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus describes in these mundane things points to the fact that God rests in everyday ordinariness.

Amy-Jill Levine in her book on the parables of Jesus, says, “The challenge of the parable can be much homier: don't ask ‘when’ the kingdom comes or ‘where’ it is. The when is in its own good time—as long as it takes for seed to sprout and dough to rise. The where is that it is already present, inchoate, in the world.” God and the Kingdom of Heaven is found in the ordinary, in the day-to-day, moment-to-moments of our lives. This is something monastics strive to connect with. 

But finding God in the everyday things of life is not just for people who live in monasteries but for those who live in the everyday world. Husbands and wives, children, workers, students, artists, thinkers, volunteers etc. If we do our work, no matter what that is, to the glory of God, then our work becomes holy and we have in a very real sense sanctified the ordinary.

So how do we begin? We have to start by knowing that God values and loves each of us. We are created in the image and likeness of God, for goodness sake, so then we are of value. No matter what our station in life, we are of value to God and the Kingdom. Once we have grasped that truth, then we can move to the next truth. That next truth is that everyone else has been created in the image and likeness of God and is of value, again, no matter what their station in life, they are children of God the same as you.

With those truths, we start to see the good in everything, every person and every creature that has been created. We slowly start to see the interconnectedness of everyone and everything, and its value will start to become clear. This is not a new concept; it is found in Buddhism, Hinduism, and also in the spirituality of the early Celtic Christian church and is as real today as it was generations ago. The Celts believed that that they could find the divine in all of created nature, seeing the connectedness of everything and the hand of God through it all. 

The spiritual life is not that difficult. We make it difficult. We create these false compartments in our lives where God is our Sunday thing, and Life is everything else. The reality is that God permeates everything we do, every second of the day. We live in a grace-filled life if only we could quiet our hearts. The Congolese Christians have a saying they recite before prayer: “God, I am here if you are here.” It speaks to making ourselves present to that which is already present to us.

All we need do is to look at the ordinary in our lives and see how we can make this an offering to God. How does our work influence the world around us and how does the world influence each of us? How do our relationships reflect the God we worship? How far reaching does our love for one another compare with God’s? How often are we holding up Jesus, the pearl of great value, as a way of life? If we look closely, we will be able to find God in the ordinariness of our lives; in fact; since God is in each one of us, we just might be looking at Him or Her seated amongst us here today. Perhaps instead of asking “What is the Kingdom of Heaven like?”, we should ask “Who is the Kingdom of Heaven like?”. Amen.