Order of Worship | Matthew 13:34
Among their many gifts as they grow, my children have become really skilled at imitating me lately. Can you relate? Perhaps it’s a consequence of doing part of my job in front of them most weeks, but at times they’ll take turns, riffing off of eachother with certain phrases or lines. Sometimes they’ll recount a story. They’ll imitate hand motions, facial expressions, pacing, tone. They’re getting good at it. They’ve been practicing for a while.
Our daughter, Della has had an ear for it for years. I remember visiting her one day at school for lunch, it was first or second grade. The practice for her class was that when a parent or guest came for lunch, the student had the option to sit at a separate table and could invite friends to join. We sat down accompanied that day by Lola, Emerson, Amelia from her class.
“Does anyone else want to join us?” I asked.
“Well, that’s all the seats, Daddy,” Della replied.
“Oh… we can always add seats, I said. We always have space for people at our table.”
She looked at me quizzically, and then had a knowing glance looking at her friends seated around and saying, “Ohhh… church talk. He’s doing church talk right now.”
My kids hear more than an average amount of “church talk.” And so they imitate it. A sermon. A prayer. The motions and words of a benediction. And I guess there are worse things. In fact, this might just be the thing I would hope most for my children in a community of faith. Not that they learn my particular words or motions. But that they internalize the promises of our faith, the knowledge that they are beloved of God, and that in their own actions and motions and voices they learn to share that blessing themselves.
I remember hearing Theodore Wardlaw express this hope for his children. Dr. Wardlaw was a pastor in Atlanta and then longtime President of Austin Presbyterian Seminary, and he is also the father of two daughters. And when his daughters were younger one of his habits was to periodically put his hand on their foreheads and make the sign of the cross, as he had at their baptism years before. “Remember your baptism,” he would say… which strikes me as just the sort of annoying thing that children of pastors have to endure!
But it became a ritual in the home, when they were getting ready for school in the morning, shoes on, hair combed, backpack ready, sign of the cross, “Remember your baptism.”
When he was tucking them into bed, teeth brushed, book read, sign of the cross, “Remember your baptism.”
You can imagine how his daughters responded as they got older. It happened less, but he still said it from time to time. Once, when one of his daughters was a teenager she was heading out the door with friends, “Do you have your license?” he said. “Yes.”
“Do you have money for the movies?”
“Yes.”
“Do you…” and she cuts him off, “Dad, I’ve got my license, I’ve got money, I know what time to be home, I’ve done my homework, I’ve walked the dog, and I’m remembering my baptism… okay?!”
But he wanted to instill it. To rehearse it. Because Dr. Wardlaw knew, as my children are coming to know, and as all of us beloved children of God know from time to time, that sometimes our faith, our hope, the kingdom that Jesus inspires us to imagine… sometimes it’s a small thing. It’s not sweeping and overwhelming. Not dramatic and all-encompassing. It can be easy to forget, t overlook, to walk past, to miss altogether. It’s as small as a tiny seed, as hidden as leaven in three measures of flour, as concealed as a single treasure in a vast field.
It’s a small thing. Which means it’s hard to find. Hard to see. Difficult to remember. Easy to hide.
In this stretch of the gospel of Matthew, Jesus is teaching us about the kingdom of heaven composed of such small things with a string of small parables.
As the teaching starts, first he is teaching a large crowd. The kingdom is a miniscule as a mustard seed, as tiny as a spoonful of leaven. The kingdom will surprise you. You won’t see it or touch it or possess it.
But notice as Jesus moves to this parable later in the chapter, he is meeting privately with his closest disciples. The kingdom is like treasure in a field that someone stumbles upon, he tells them. The kingdom is that one thing in your life that holds such value that it makes all other things seem unimportant. And unlike the mustard seed and the leaven, when it comes to the treasure, Jesus speaks as though he expects those of us who follow him to discover it, to encounter it. Only he doesn’t tell us what “it” is. Jesus doesn’t tell us what it is, only that it’s something of such incalculable value that all else becomes dispensable. One single thing that when someone found it, they said “This is it. This is worth my all.”
Jesus doesn’t tell us what it is, but he does give us some idea of where to find it. That peaks our interest, because we all have a bit of treasure hunter in us. You know this if you’ve been in the mountains at all this fall and followed the signs and the winding roads that lead to one of North Carolina’s great cottage industries: the gem-mining business. Cut out of the side of a mountain are these stops where you can pan for gold, or rubies, or sapphires… which is what caught my dad’s eye years ago when we were stopped at one such place and a local man hanging out in the parking lot flashed a sapphire the size of his fist and said, “This right here came right out of that mountain.”
Next thing I knew, my dad was back behind this man’s car and the man was showing him rings in a suitcase. “Do you think mom would like this?” my dad asked me. And that was the time my father bought birthday jewelry for my mother out of the back of a crown victoria on the side of a mountain. She doesn’t really wear that ring much any more.
But so often isn’t that how we approach the good things of God? As though you have to have an insider, or possess some sort of secret knowledge. You have to climb a mountain, up some winding road.
But that’s not where Jesus says it is found. It’s at ground level. In our parable, it’s in a field when someone seems to stumble upon it. There’s nothing about this person’s efforts that are particularly notable. They’re probably literally just plowing along, like always, hands gripping the tools, teeth gritted, and they strike something.
And it can happen like that. Part of the wonder of Jesus’ parables is how mundane they are – dealing in the everyday elements that are buried in the earth. We might want to travel to some extraordinary, holy place to search for it. We might think we have to climb a mountain. So much of Christian theology suggests this. Even the beloved hymns we sing today are geared towards “flying away,” soaring above it all as though it’s beyond us somewhere.
But it turns out that the kingdom and all its possibility is hidden in plain view. Not in any of the places most people would search, but maybe in the last place we think to look: on the ground that we walk, or beneath the surface of our lives.
See, in describing the kingdom of God, Jesus never asks people to leave their world. It need not be some distant dream. You don’t have to go somewhere else for God to dwell with you. The parables of Jesus tell us that it happens as you are drawing water from wells, preparing food, tending sheep, as you’re baking bread, sowing seed, walking a familiar road, or plowing a field.
You can stumble upon it. Which is underscored when you compare this parable of treasure to the parable of the pearl that comes next. Unlike the merchant hunting the pearls, the person who finds the treasure in the field doesn’t seem to be looking for it. But when he finds it, he doesn’t wait. He buries it again, runs to the bank, sells everything he’s accumulated, and then goes back to the owner of the field, “How much do you want for this field?”
See Jesus doesn’t tell us what the treasure is, not precisely. He doesn’t tell us what the kingdom looks like, not exactly. He doesn’t tell us how to find it, at least not specifically. But I think he tells us how we will know when we do.
How is it in the middle of a field or the middle of a life you decide this is it? This is worth my all? The one who found the treasure clears all else away in favor of this one thing. The kingdom belongs to such people. Jesus seems to be saying this is the way we are to live, finding treasure in our lives and pursuing no matter the cost. And we’ll know it’s real – we’ll know we’ve found it – because of this quality that describes the man in our parable, “In his joy”
Right in between when the treasure was found and the field was bought, Jesus uses this phrase. “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field which someone found and hid and then in his joy he goes to sells all and buys that field.” When we find it, there will be joy.
When you find something of great value, that makes other things you own seem dispensable, don’t think twice. If you’ve found the kingdom, stake your life on it. It can be a tiny and overshadowed reality at times, but once you’ve found it, once you’ve experienced it, give your life to it. Buy the whole field. For it’s the kind of thing that can start to make us different people and this world a different place.
It is worth our wholesale efforts. For it does not come through piecemeal approaches. It won’t come about through all the best proven practices and the usual safe and secure strategies.
“Sell all and give your money to the poor,” Jesus says to the rich young man.
“Drop your nets, and follow me into a whole new way of being,” he says to the disciples, “Come along and you will become more than you knew you could be.”
Jesus tells people, if they follow him, they could be rejected by their own family. Everybody could turn against them. He tells them there’s no way to follow him without a cross.
And wouldn’t you know that some dropped everything they were doing, deserted their homes, let the fishing business go, flipped over the tables at the family shop, and followed him.
That’s what you do when you stumble upon the Kingdom of God.
It strikes me as we sit beneath these trees, in view of the church we love in the center of this city we are called to serve, that this was once one big field. Seven acres. Thanks to our church historian, Dr. Scott Culclasure, we know that it was about 1932 when First Baptist began to wonder about a new site to extend and expand its ministries. By 1938, the goal was embraced congregation-wide. Judge William York, Sunday School teacher and Building Committee Chair, presented a report to the Deacons in 1938, presenting several possible sites. One was unanimously selected.
Known as the Balsley property, located on N Mendenhall between then Gaston Street and Guilford Avenue, ready to be sold for the price of 27,500 dollars plus a real estate commission of 612.50. On March 13, 1938, the church voted unanimously for a lot they described as “spacious, accessible, located in the center of Greensboro and the center of our Church membership and can be purchased at a reasonable price.”
Where today we share some of the most holy and treasured things in our lives. We form community and share holy friendships. We bear one another’s burdens. We gather in joy and grief. We share the critical junctures of life. We dedicate babies. We baptize children. We commit dear saints unto God’s care. We pass the love of God around. We seek justice. We work for peace. And all of us, learn the motions and the patterns, the words and pacing of the love of God in our lives, and how through our own bodies and voices we can share that with the world so that when life buries it or hides it from our view, we remember a kingdom that Jesus told us about.
The day came when Ted Wardlaw and his wife dropped their oldest daughter off at college. They were standing there saying goodbye, wondering if they had done enough, been enough. And their daughter gave them one last hug and then left with other first year students. Rounding the corner, all grown up. And they stood there, not knowing exactly where to put their feet or which way to turn, and then just before they left their daughter turned back. And she’s 30 yards away. And she looked at her parents and she offered them the sign of the cross.
And in the middle of that field, they realized they had helped her to find one thing of great value.
Maybe you’ve been forgetful, or preoccupied, or cautious with this treasure. That’s okay. It’s easy to do that with small things. It’s easy to miss something when it’s hidden in plain sight, when it’s as small and concealed as a single piece of treasure buried in the earth.
But, don’t wait any longer. When you’ve found it, you already know what to do. Buy the field.