Sermon for the 30th of July - Eighth Sunday after Trinity

The Kingdom of Heaven…..
I wonder what comes to mind when you hear those words…

Are the images exciting and joyful, blurry and unclear, or maybe just a little bit boring?
A while back, Starbucks Coffee launched a campaign called “The Way I See It.” Various quotes from different sources were printed on the coffee cups….one of them, #230, said this:

“Heaven is totally overrated. It seems boring. Clouds, listening to people play the harp. It should be somewhere you can’t wait to go, like a luxury hotel. Maybe blue skies and soft music were enough to keep people in line in the 17th century, but Heaven has to step it up a bit. They’re basically getting by because they only have to be better than Hell.” — Joel Stein, columnist for the LA Times
So what’s heaven all about? We pray each week, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”.  What do we mean? What is Marigold, being baptised today, really signing up for?

The honest answer, is it’s a bit of a mystery – we don’t really know much about the kingdom of heaven!
In today’s gospel, Jesus tells us a whole series of parables about what the kingdom of heaven is like, but it’s not really clear how they fit together, and in some ways, they don’t make a lot of sense….and maybe that’s the point.

The good news about Christianity is that the Trinitarian God we believe in affirms that we are all loved… but also all different. And if that’s the case, we will all hear Jesus parables in different ways. Different parts will resonate with each of us. We will catch glimpses of the truth…, but never the whole truth. God is just too big and too much for us to grasp…..

I wonder what might we have heard from the plethora of images in today’s gospel?
We might have heard that size doesn’t really matter – things which are small can grow, can produce great results, can transform things.

We might have heard that the kingdom brings great joy and is incredibly valuable. [two words beginning with v can be tricky…. For me at least]

We might have heard that the kingdom of heaven is all inclusive - everyone is caught up in it.
But we might also have heard that the kingdom of heaven is hidden, that it demands sacrifice, that there will be judgement.

Jesus speaks in parables to allow the listener to connect in a way personal to them. He doesn’t speak in a way which makes things too obvious and understandable, because God is not obvious and understandable.

Jesus is asking us to look for the Kingdom of heaven – to look here and now, in the world around us. He asks us to pray that God’s kingdom will come on earth.

And in the first reading, from Paul’s letter to the Romans, we hear that the spirit helps us in our prayers – “for we do not know how to pray as we ought” – but the spirit intercedes for us.

And this is good news, because let’s be honest, most of us don’t really know how to pray as we ought, don’t know how to follow God’s calling on our lives, or even recognise what the calling is. For most of us, it’s not exactly obvious where God is calling us….so we really need God’s spirit.

Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as the comforter, the spirit of truth, who will guide us and support us. It’s the spirit who leads us into truth, helps us to recognise where God is at work, and helps us to follow God’s calling.

In Romans, we hear that all things work together for good, for those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose.

Everyone [is ‘of us’ needed?]  is called to follow God – to live in such a way that the love of God shines through us and onto others, onto our world.

Everyone of us is called to help make God’s kingdom come a little nearer to our fragile and broken world. We are called to heal the sick, set the captives free, and above all to love each other, as God loves us. As Paul writes to the Romans…

“Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? …. I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

That is what the kingdom of heaven is like – it is about living with God’s love and never being separated from it, no matter what. No matter what we do or don’t do – no matter the mistakes we make, the sins we commit, the failures we may not learn from. As Philip Yancey writes in his book – what’s so amazing about Grace – there is nothing we can do to make God love us anymore and there is nothing we can do to make God love us any less.

We know that the path will not always run smoothly – for Marigold and for each of us. We know that Marigold will be good, and she will be bad, she will succeed, and she will fail, she will be happy, and she will be sad. But through it all, she will never be alone.

This is the faith that Marigold is being baptised into today – into the faith that she is loved and will never be separated from the love of God. And this is the faith that we in the church try, however imperfectly, to live by.

So, as we celebrate with Marigold today, perhaps we can also open ourselves a little more to God’s loving presence, and invite the spirit to inspire and guide us, so that we can experience a little more of God’s kingdom here on earth, as it is in heaven.