"zucchini" by tattfoo, on Flickr

Matthew 13:31–33, 44–52
[Jesus] put before them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches."

He told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened."

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

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 bought it.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Have you understood all this? They answered, "Yes." And he said to them, "Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”

--
At the beginning of last summer, my first summer in Decorah, I was given a strange piece of advice. Pastor Chad looked at me, a serious look on his face, and told me that it would be in my best interest to lock my car now that summer had arrived. Of course, the lingering city girl in me immediately assumed it was for safety purposes, that maybe mischief and petty vandalism were on the increase during warm weather.

Nope. Chad looked at me with a twinkle in his eye.

"Keep your car locked," he continued, "or someone might sneak over and fill it with zucchini!”

Throughout the rest of the summer, no one ever filled my car with zucchini, but I saw box after box, crate after crate, bag after bag of zucchini show up at the door of the food pantry.

Because the truth about planting zucchini is that you will never ever end up with a reasonable amount of it. Whatever you plant will inexplicably multiply fourfold, leaving you hunting the internet for ever more interesting zucchini recipes, and visiting your neighbors to try to hand off some of your surplus, even when you know that their garden too, is probably overrun with the stuff.

I think if Jesus were talking about the kingdom of God today, he might compare it to zucchini, which, like that mustard seed, becomes something invasive and out of control, expanding to fill all the available space, well-intentioned, perhaps, but absurd and out of proportion.

Absurd and out of proportion can describe pretty much all of the mini-parables in today's gospel reading.

Anybody else a little tired of parables yet?

As a preacher, I know that I am. I suspect that the disciples, also, were tired of Jesus speaking in parables. Jesus shoots of a few rapid-fire parables, some of the least sensical and disconnected parables that he's told up to this point, and looks at the disciples and says, "Do you understand what I mean?" And the disciples say, "Yes," but probably because they really just wanted him to stop talking.

We have this parable of the mustard seed, a small seed growing into a weedy, invasive shrub, and we're not talking about a decorative plant here. The mustard plant is stubborn and creeps into everything and is a general pain in the neck.

And we have a woman leavening three measures of flour, which isn't anything like three cups of flour, but more like enough flour to bake bread for a hundred people, which always for some reason puts an image in my head of a giant quantity of bread dough rising, filling up a small room in the house, and oozing out the doorway into the hallway like a sticky, yeasty version of the blob.

From there, we move on to this man who finds a treasure in a field, buries it, then sells everything he has to buy the field, which is ridiculous because instead of taking the treasure and adding to his assets, instead, he gets rid of everything so that he can own the field which houses the treasure, and who knows if he broke even on the deal.

And then, in a similar fashion, we have the absurd story of a man pawing through some pearls, finding one of great value, and like our hidden treasure friend, he sells everything he has to get this one pearl, nevermind that you can't really buy dinner or new shoes with a pearl.

Finally, we have the nets of fish being pulled in, and the catch being separated out into good fish and bad fish, and somehow we end up talking about weeping and gnashing of teeth, and it makes me really really hope that I'm not a bad fish, because seriously, who wants to be a bad fish?

If you're looking for any singular word about the kingdom of God to come from all of these weird little stories, I think you are going to be disappointed.

Because what we hear in these stories is that the kingdom of God is many things:

It is something that starts small and grows exponentially.

It is wild and untamable.

It is something stubborn and invasive and it creeps into everything.

It is a captivating treasure that inexplicably draws us in until we find that we have given up everything for its sake.

It is something that catches everybody, but also something that presses a bit of separation and even judgement upon us.

In her recent book, Pastrix, Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber writes about her own experience with struggling to preach on today's gospel lesson:

Calling something the greatest of all shrubs is like saying someone is the smartest of all the idiots. Yet Jesus says that heaven's kingdom is like shrubs and nets and yeast....I began to consider that maybe the kingdom of God is found in the unclean and surprising and even the profane....

I mistakenly had been thinking that the kingdom of heaven was something I should be able to find an illustration for on this side of my life. Things are better now. I'm a Christian and I'm clean and sober, so surely any example I might have of the kingdom of heaven would not come from [my old friends] or my young, messy self. Any preachable image of the kingdom would surely come from gardening and being a mom and a pastor and an upstanding citizen. But that's not what Jesus brings.

Jesus brings a kingdom ruled by the crucified one and populated by the unclean and always found in the unexpected. I'd expected to look at the past and see only mistakes that I'd move on from, to see only damage and addiction and tragic self-delusion. But thinking that way, I'd assumed that God was nowhere to be found back then. But that's kind of an insult to God. It's like saying, 'You only exist when I recognize you.' The kingdom of heaven, which Jesus talked about all the time, is, as he said, here. At hand. It's now. Wherever you are. In ways you'd never expect." (Pastrix, p. 162-3)

The kingdom of God - the big, baffling, upside-down, untamed but good news of God's empire- is here. At hand. Now. Wherever you are. Whoever you are. In ways you'd never expect.

If we truly believe what we say about who God is, then perhaps this crazy kingdom should come as no surprise to us.

We believe in a God who has a big enough voice to call the world into being, a God who through prophets and judges spoke words of justice for the poor, liberation for the oppressed, words of judgement for the rich and the comfortable and the oblivious.

We believe in a God who looked at our broken souls and our broken creation and decided to do something about it, a God who put on human flesh in the person of Jesus so that he could feel all the things that we feel, and know what it is like to walk upon this earth.

And in Christ, God healed lepers and touched the unclean and lifted up paralytics and raised the dead and told women that they were of value in God's sight, and promised that he would be the one to fulfill the scriptures about a coming Messiah, and then put his money where his mouth was and went all the way to the cross. We believe in a God who reached across the boundary of death to pull Jesus back to life, bringing him resurrection so that we might also find hope in our own resurrection, and in the resurrection of the world.

Friends, with a God this big, a God this absurd, a God this open and loving and liberating, is it any surprise that no one image can contain the heart of God's kingdom on this earth? Is it any surprise that all of our images are a little sideways and absurd and disproportionate? Because the kingdom of God is a crazy business. It is a vision of a new world where good wins out over evil, where there is truth and there is love, and where all of our former things pass away so that we can embrace the God who reaches out to embrace us, where we ditch everything else because this kingdom of promise is just too good to pass up.

Our Father in heaven, we pray, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done. Your crazy, upside-down, weedy, invasive, valuable, untamed kingdom come. Your gracious, loving, hopeful, all-embracing will be done. On earth. Here on earth. As it is in heaven.

Friends, the kingdom of God is here. At hand. It's now. It is in you and around you. It is everywhere that you wouldn't expect it to be. And it's crazy beautiful.

So tend your zucchini well, my friends, and smile when it overflows its boundaries. Take it as a sign of the overflowing love of God, and then make some zucchini bread, and take it to a friend, and share the treasure that is in you, the pearl of great price, the good news of God in Christ for our weary and hungry world.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.