Friends, our teaching scripture this morning comes from Matthew
chapter 13 verses 47 to 52. It says 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 become a disciple in the Kingdom of
heaven is like the master of a household, who brings out of his
treasure what is new and what is old.
This is the word of the Lord. It's good to be with you.
If you are new with us. My name is Jared and I'm a a
fair bit shorter than Parker is. There we go.
My name is Jared. I'm one of the pastors here.
It's good to be with you. This morning.
We are going to get to some of the oddity of the passage that
we've just read. But first I want to show you a
picture of Gertrude Stein. This is a picture of Gertrude
Stein by Pablo Picasso. Picasso's nineteen O 6 portrait
of Stein is a painting that she hung above her chair until the
day she died. She sat in a cold room on 90
occasions to have this portrait done of her from Pablo Picasso.
So Gertrude Stein was an American writer who moved to
Paris in 1903, and she spent the next 40 years there writing and
thinking and writing poetry and collecting art.
And she is now most famous for one sentence.
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
And in their apartment, she and her brother Leo, they were about
30 years old or so. They were intellectuals.
They were relatively financially comfortable, but they weren't,
like, super, super wealthy. And they loved art.
And so they decided to do something that nobody
respectable in Paris was doing at the time.
They started walking in the galleries in the back streets of
Paris, and they started just buying up almost
indiscriminately, every piece of art that they could find that
just sort of caught their eye. And at the time, art was kind of
in a bit of a flux. It was a bit of an eclectic mix,
and it was a moment in the art world when a lot that was being
put out there, a lot that was being painted, was sort of
outside the bounds of what the art world considered good.
And so in 19 O 5, they walked into a salon in the Grand Palais
and they stumbled into an art show where the biggest scandal
of the show was a portrait of a woman with a green face and a
hat that looked like a melting flower garden by a guy named
Henry Matisse. And people hated this picture
when it first came out. But the Steins, they went back
to this art show week after week.
And after five weeks, they ended up buying it for about $100.
And they just kept walking the streets of Paris
indiscriminately picking up pieces of art.
You know, this is a time when art was flooding the streets of
Paris. They stumbled on this back alley
little shop where a former circus clown literally was
trying to sell some paintings by an unnamed 24 year old Spaniard
named Pablo Picasso, The Steins. They bought a famous painting
called Girl with a Basket of Flowers for $30.00.
I don't have a picture of it because it's a naked girl and
she's a minor and I thought that that would not be a good idea.
Gertrude hated the painting at first, but over the next nine
years, working with very limited money, the Steins, they kept
buying paintings. Cezanne before anyone thought
that he was important. Renoir, Matisse.
They ended up with so many Matisse's that they lended out
Matisse paintings to their friends so that they couldn't
display them in their living room on Saturday nights.
They opened up their apartment at 27 Rue de Flore for a weekly
salon, and Picasso came and Matisse came, and Hemingway
would later stop by, and Fitzgerald and Sherwood,
Anderson and Ezra Pound. This became the place to be.
They were walls covered floor to ceiling with art and not every
painting that they bought however made it onto the walls.
The ones that Gertrude had bought that she felt like we're
maybe not quite her flair and not quite her style.
They no longer seem to be alive to her.
There was some paintings that kind of displeased her and you
know, those got consigned to a little backroom that they called
the Salon de refuse the the the salon of the rejected, rejected
paintings in the back corner of their apartment.
So the selection of paintings was always being sorted, it was
always being sort of moved and shifted around, mounted on the
wall, re evaluated. Some would move up to the living
room, some would be back to the refuge.
And the sorting happened slowly over time.
But it could not have happened without this indiscriminate
buying that they participated in.
Most of what they bought is now considered priceless.
The Matisse, the woman with a hat that nobody wanted in 1905,
is now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
So we're going to come back to this again.
The Kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea
and caught fish of every single kind.
When it was full they drew it ashore, and they sat down, and
they put the good into baskets, but they threw away 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.
Would you spray with me? Oh Lord, we welcome your
presence. We ask God that you would come
and sort and sift our lives. Give his ears to hear Lord, and
eyes to see in Christ's name. Amen.
So as I'm sure you're aware, this passage is going to need a
little bit of explanation, but we'll get there.
So we've been in this series on the parables, which I'm going to
try to wrap up with a bit of a zinger.
If you were here with us a few weeks ago, Parker preached on
the Pearl of Great Prize following a week of preaching on
the hidden treasure in the field, and he encouraged you and
I to read the next paragraph. How many of you went and did
that in your Bibles? You just opened up your Bible
and you read well. You would have come to the
parable of the dragnet, which is rounded out this way.
Have you understood all of this? They answered yes.
And he said to them, therefore every scribe who's become a
disciple in the Kingdom of heaven is like the master of a
household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is
old. And when Jesus has finished
these parables, he left that place.
So Matthew basically puts the most complex and hard parable at
the end of the collection and basically has Jesus saying, you
got all that right? And they're like, absolutely.
And I'm like, I don't think you did.
So what is actually going on here?
So, friends, the parables are designed to help us lean in.
They're meant to draw us deeper into the mystery of the coming
and unfolding Kingdom in the world.
And at the beginning of Matthew, his disciples asked him, why do
you speak in parables? And he basically tells them that
those who want to see and hear the Kingdom will be the people
who stick around and ask the questions and lean in and things
will eventually begin to make sense is what Jesus says.
Those who have ears to hear, let him hear.
But he also says that those who don't really have the appetite
for it, it's going to be hard to make sense of the things that
I'm saying, says Jesus. And here's the good news already
at the beginning here for you and I is that if our posture is
to stick around, to stay in the room and to keep following the
rabbi who occasionally says some really weird things and tries to
help us understand what the Kingdom of God is like by
telling stories with the occasional unsavory character
like an unjust judge or a tipsy slave owner.
The promise is that somehow all of these different ways of
seeing the Kingdom will accumulate in us something that
comes to be called faith and hope and trust.
It just takes time. And so these parables, they
serve as metaphors and the way that Matthew sort of gathers
them all up and puts them together back-to-back in this
rapid fire setting that we find in chapter 13 of Matthew is
meant to help us understand what the Kingdom of God is like.
The Kingdom of God. This is the primary thing that
Jesus talks about in the Gospel narratives and the way that we
have come to understand what Jesus means when he talks about
the Kingdom of God. Specifically for those of us in
a church like ours, the Vineyard Church, the way that we have
conceptualized what it means when Jesus talks about the
Kingdom of God is a particular theological framework that takes
Jesus to mean that the dynamic activity of God's rule and reign
is breaking into history, into your life and into my life, into
all of the lives around us. That God is actively at work in
the world and in our community and in all of different
situations of your life. And so we live our lives ideally
seeing the world in a different way because God is cultivating
his own desires for the world that he is creating right in the
middle of the one that we're living in.
Does that make sense? God wants the world to go in a
particular direction. He has these deep desires.
He's trying to make the world come into this way.
And God is giving us his desires over time and inviting us to
participate in the rule in the reign of God, breaking into the
present. He's growing in US hearts that
want the things that he wants and works for, the things that
he is working for. And through US, He is doing this
through the ordinary things of our lives, the way we, you know,
love each other, the way we asked for forgiveness or
disperse forgiveness to someone else, these seemingly very
ordinary things. Did anybody ask for forgiveness
this week for anything good? Did anybody disperse forgiveness
this week? OK, these are things that you
should pay attention to, by the way, like, like at the end of
your week, did I ask for forgiveness for anything?
Did I forgive anyone? And if at the end of your week,
you can't think of anything in either of those categories, you
might not be paying attention. So friends, when we sort of
honour one another with our words and we seek reconciliation
as best as we can with the people that we've hurt or who
have hurt us, this is how the Kingdom of God comes.
So friends, the central claim of Jesus is that this reign, this
world where things are operating in line with the desires of God,
which everyone tends to think is coming at sometime in the
future, is actually breaking in from the future back towards
where we live. And it's like leaking out
slowly. That's the picture of the
message of the Kingdom of God that Jesus brings to us in the
Gospels. And what happens is we see
people reacting to that message in all kinds of ways.
You got a Roman centurion servant with no religious
background but the Roman Pagan one that he's been raised on,
believing that Jesus could heal his son from a distance.
And then Jesus praises him for his faith.
While at the same time you have religious leaders and people
responsible for guiding the spiritual lives of the masses
responding with suspicion and envy and concern when they see
Jesus opening the eyes of the blind and causing the lame to be
able to walk. It is a mixed bag of how we all
are responding to this message of the Kingdom of God leaking
into the present. What is this Kingdom like?
The people of surrounding Jesus begin to ask him.
Because it doesn't quite make sense that the ones that we
thought were all about this stuff seem to not quite get it.
And those of us who have been furless from God seem to see
something that others can't quite yet see.
The Kingdom of God is like a sower sowing seed, and the seed
is getting generously and indiscriminately scattered all
around, almost carelessly. But whether the seed takes root,
it kind of depends on the kind of soil, says Jesus.
There are all kinds of people in the world and we are living in
all kinds of seasons in our lives and, and the Kingdom seed
is dropping on particular kinds of soil.
And sometimes that's going to grow and sometimes it's not
going to grow and sometimes it's going to grow in a way.
But later on there are these weeds that are going to come and
choke out the life of the Spirit that God is doing inside of us.
Some of you like, know about the weeds.
Some of you know what the weeds feel like.
You know that God has planted something in your heart and
you're living in a season where it's like, man, I think this
thing's getting choked out. The Kingdom of God is is is
like, is like a little bit of yeast working its way through
the dough or like the tiniest of the seeds in the garden, the
mustard seed, which grows up to be this giant tree where the
birds come and nest. It's like a hidden treasure that
someone finds and sells everything in order to buy in
the field to make it his own. It's like that once in a
lifetime Pearl that when you see it, when you get your eyes
around it, all of the other things in your life of value
begin to sort of fade into the backdrop because this one
particular prize begins to be the thing that you look at.
This is what the Kingdom of God is like.
This is the the story that we hear in the parables.
And I want to close our sermon series on the parables, at least
for now, by saying this. I think the thing that Jesus is
primarily trying to say to the parables is that the Kingdom of
God is coming for everything. It's meant to spread everywhere,
but it's not going to happen all at once or to tighten it up a
bit. Everything and everywhere, but
not all at once. He who has ears to hear, let him
hear. Matthew chapter 13 once again.
Again, the Kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into
the sea and caught fish of every kind.
And when it was full, they drew it ashore and they sat down and
they put the good into baskets and they threw out the bad.
So the kind of net that Jesus is referring to in this parable is
what would be called a dragnet, and it's a specific kind of net
that was almost 3 football fields long and it would stretch
across a large portion of the Sea of Galilee.
It was probably 10 or 12 feet on the wings and probably 25 feet
in the middle. And so it was shaped really long
and it kind of went down like this to arc and to sort of model
the bottom of the sea. So get that into your mind.
And three football fields is like 1000 feet long.
And this is basically a wall of netting dragged through the
water by 16 men, 8 on each rope, walking along the shore towards
each other. And a net that size, a dragnet
dragged through the entire water column from bottom up, doesn't
discriminate. It catches everything, every
kind of fish. Everything in its path is
getting swept up in this net that Jesus calls the Kingdom.
It would have picked up a bunch of tilapia, which was the main
kind of fish that they would have been fishing for.
They were actually looking primarily for tilapia.
There were five different kinds of tilapia in that time, and in
that area it was the main stain of the the Galilean diet.
Sardines would have been, you know, side by side with the
tilapia, and those would need to be separated for a separate
processing. You know, we can sell those at
the market. The Romans love their sardines.
And alongside all of the stuff that the fishermen would have
been looking for were all other kinds of fish, catfish, which
really they couldn't do anything with because according to
Levitical law and custom, the catfish would have been
uncleaned or unclean. They were actually, you know,
some of the biggest fish in the sea.
You know, theoretically, it's the thing that, like most people
in Ohio, when they're catching fish looking for catfish.
And I don't know if you've ever tried to eat some catfish, but I
don't like it. I mean, give me some salmon or
some halibut or something like that.
But I don't know how people do it.
If you have a good catfish recipe, you're welcome to invite
me over. So there would have been eels
that would have been caught up into the net, which also were
unclean and they needed to be tossed aside, and all other
kinds of dead fish and diseased fish.
But all of the other things that also would have been resting at
the bottom of the sea, lake bottom debris like sticks and
leaves and. Reeds and branches and stones
and rocks that would get caught in the netting and pottery
shards from broken jars and oil lamps from fishermen who had
tossed over a lamp on the side, and broken fishing gear and and
broken Nets and broken fishing line.
All of it would have been gathered in a dragnet, every
single bit of it. Nothing would have been allowed
to pass through. And so once it got up on the
shore, what would come next is hours of sorting tilapia into
the basket, sardines into this basket, and everything else that
they couldn't eat or that was sort of rotten would get
gathered up and it would get thrown into a fire and get burnt
because they don't want to throw it back into the sea because
they're just going to have to catch it again.
And so they would just burn it. Everyone would have had this
idea in their mind when Jesus said the Kingdom of God is like
a net. The Kingdom of heaven is like a
net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every single
kind. And when it was full, they drew
it ashore, and they sat down and they put the good into the
baskets and they threw out the bad.
The Kingdom of God is coming for everything.
It's coming for everything. It's indiscriminately and
eventually going to gather up every single thing in its path,
the same way that the yeast is going to work its way through
the whole dough. And so many of the parables of
Jesus are talking about the scope or the totality of the
reach of the Kingdom of God. It is broad, it is wide, it is
1000 foot net that's gathering up everything in its pathway.
And theologians, they tell us that Matthew has sort of
stitched all of these various teachings together as a way of
giving Jesus the opportunity to lay out clearly this idea that
whatever part of your life or my life or whatever part of the
world that you inhabit that you think cannot be reached by the
Kingdom, it's coming for you. It's coming for everything.
So Jesus is is asking us to imagine the whole world is a sea
full of various kinds of fish. And the net of the Kingdom is
coming from top to bottom and slowly pulling everything up,
dragging everything in its path to to the shore to be sorted in
some sort of cosmological sorting, which we'll get to.
But here's the thing, if that's happening at a macro level, that
all the fish in this cosmic sea are going to get pulled in by
the net of the Kingdom, what it also means is that on a micro
level, in my own life, it's also going to happen that way.
The Kingdom of God is coming for everything, and the net of the
Kingdom is so big and all-encompassing that it's going
to reach everywhere. So if you were to imagine,
friends, that the net of God's Kingdom is gently passing
through the waters of your life right now, what are some of the
things that you would hope would get caught up in the Kingdom,
like just right now in your life?
What are the parts of my life that hope that you hoped would
get swept up, that you hope will get swept away into the net?
Do you have those things in your life that you're longing for God
to kind of sweep up and help sort you out?
Man, I sure do. Maybe the more important
question might be this. Is there anything that you're
not quite ready to have swept up in the net of the Kingdom,
Anything that you're hoping will just sort of find its way to the
bottom and sort of Nestle in and maybe miss the net?
Maybe the metaphor is going to break down a minute.
But you, you get what I'm saying though, right?
Sometimes there's a sense in which that we have this very
clear cut of what we want to give to God, and then we have
these other things that we're not quite ready to relinquish.
So the people who are surrounding Jesus, asking about
the Kingdom of God, would never have imagined that the Kingdom
of God was something that would come for all of the little
pieces of their lives and touchdown in the minutiae of
their thoughts and desires and their emotions and their hopes.
The way that they, you know, eat and drink and the way that they
play or they don't play, and the way that they work, the way that
they are intimate and with whom they are intimate with.
They would never have imagined that the Kingdom of God would
reach to such places. But the Kingdom is coming for
everything and everywhere. And this language of totality,
it stretches its way through the unfolding understanding of the
Kingdom as the earliest communities are trying to make
sense of how it is that their lives begin to feel as though
they're being sifted by something.
All throughout the letters of the New Testament, the apostle
Paul and other writers are Speaking of the totality of the
Kingdom of God. In Paul's first letter to the
Corinthians, the church at Corinth, he writes this.
He says Then comes the end when he delivers the Kingdom to God
the Father, after destroying, destroying every rule and every
authority and power. For he must reign until he has
put all his enemies under his feet.
The last enemy to be destroyed is death, for God has put all
things in subjection under his feet, meaning Christ, that God
may be all and all. And to the church in Ephesus he
writes, he raised him from the dead, and seated him at his
right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and
authority, and power and dominion, and above every name
that is named, not only in this age, but also in the one to
come. He put all things under His
feet, and gave him as head over all things to the church, which
is His body, the fullness of him who fills All in all.
And pulling from Psalm chapter 8, you put all things under
subjection under His feet. And now putting everything in
subjection to Him, he left nothing outside of His control.
At present the writer of Hebrews says we do not yet see
everything that is being subjected to him.
Don't miss that part. We can't quite see it.
But perhaps the most encouraging of them all, therefore, God has
highly exalted him Jesus, and bestowed on him the name that is
above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should
bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every
tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.
To the glory of God the Father. Everything is being gathered up
by the Kingdom, every knee, every tongue, everywhere in
heaven, on earth, under the earth, beyond the earth.
But it's not happening all at once.
At present we do not see everything that God has under
His reign. Are you guys tracking with me?
Do you guys feel any part of this like the everything, the
everywhere, but particularly the not all at once part man?
That part is like, come on. The invitation that Jesus is
extending to us in this parable is an invitation to trust that
the long, slow, all-encompassing, indiscriminate
work of God is going to gather up all of the things.
All of the things that we see in the news.
All the world leaders making their plans, all the ups and
downs of the price of oil, the price of eggs, all the ways that
those things are hitting us. All the all the different policy
decisions that are being plotted.
And most certainly all the bits and pieces of our lives and the
ones that we love and the ones that don't love us.
All of it is getting gathered up and the net of the Kingdom and
the Kingdom itself is going to sort the good from the bad, the
things of destruction from the things that give life.
So the parable of the dragnet is often paired in kind of
conversation and theological reflection with another parable
from this same passage. They have the same idea, and I'm
going to read this one. He says, by the way, this comes
just a few sort of paragraphs before the dragnet 1.
He says he put before them another parable.
The Kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed
good seed in his field, but while everybody was asleep, an
enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and then went away.
That'd, that'd be terrible, wouldn't it?
And so when the plants came up and they bore grain, then the
weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the
householder came and said to him, Master, did you not sow
good seed in your field? Where then did these weeds come
from? Where Then he answered, and he
says, an enemy has done this. And the, the servants, the
slaves, they said to him, then do you want us to go and gather
them, meaning the weeds? But he replied no, for in the
gathering of the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with sin.
Let both of them grow together until the harvest.
And at the harvest time, I will tell the reapers, collect the
weeds 1st and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather
the wheat into my barn. Really, Jesus, you want us to
live with all these weeds up in here in my life in the world.
And the particular weed, you know, other translations, they
draw this out more particularly in the Greek.
But the particular weed that the enemy in this parable sows,
those nasty enemies, most scholars identify as a weed
called Darnell or sometimes called bearded Darnell or false
wheat. So Darnell is almost
indistinguishable from wheat in its early stages of growth.
That'll preach a little bit, right?
All kinds of things that are happening that people say are
the Kingdom. They think it's the Kingdom, but
it just might be false wheat. And before we go too judgy on
the world, like the same is happening in our own lives.
There's all kinds of things in our own lives that we think,
man, I, I think I got this licked.
I think I got it down. I think I know what this Jesus
thing is about. And we go along in our in our
lives and then eventually we get to realize, I think I just been
like looking at a bunch of weeds in my life.
So Darnell is the most indistinguishable from wheat.
And these early stages of growth, the shoots look the
same, the blades look the same. You, you genuinely cannot tell
the difference between the weeds and the wheat at a particular
time until the heads form, at which point the wheat head is
heavy and gold and it bends with the weight of the grain and the
Darnell head is lighter and thinner and it stays upright.
Jesus says, resist the urge. Stay with me here to sort
everything all at once. Give the field some time, let
the wheat mature, let the weeds show themselves to be the weeds.
And in the end, it's not even your job to sort it out.
Both the dragnet parable and the weeds among the wheat parable
are both more or less saying that this time that we are in
right now is going to come to an end and there are going to be a
lot of things that need to get sorted out.
And Jesus is using what theologians call apocalyptic
language. It's this language that's rooted
in the Hebrew Scriptures, prophets like Daniel and Isaiah
and Jeremiah. The furnace of fire and the
weeping and the gnashing of teeth are apocalyptic imagery.
It's like a whole genre of a way of talking and thinking that
honestly is completely lost on us.
We have no way to sort of like really interpret what that kind
of language is pointing towards. Like if you have teenagers, you
know that there's a complete vocabulary that has emerged in
the past decade where words have come to mean things and
reference things that I have no idea what they mean.
If you're over the age of 40, there is a different language
happening at a register of the 20 somethings.
Do you, you feel me a little bit.
OK, apocalyptic language kind of works like this.
It's the kind of a insider kind of language.
Jesus is borrowing language from the prophets who used a kind of
language to indicate that there are some extraordinary things
that are going to take place someday.
And many of us were taught to read these passages as literal
furnaces of fire that are going to burn forever with the wicked
inside of them. And I just need to say to you, I
do not think that that is what these passages are saying, and I
do not think that that's what's going to happen.
So we can continue to talk about that part.
Is there going to be a time of judgement where things are going
to get sorted, where good is going to be named as good and
evil is going to be named as evil?
Absolutely, that is going to happen, and it's going to happen
on a cosmic level. It's going to happen about
global and historical events, and it's going to happen for my
life and for your life. There is going to be a day,
Friends, where we will stand before God, and God is going to
separate the things inside of us that are good and holy and
relinquished and surrendered to Him.
And that is the wheat. And there are a whole bunch of
other things that God is going to say that is not good, and
we're going to have to sort that out.
So my reading of this parable and others like it is that what
Jesus is trying to stir up for the people is an imagination to
let the Creator of the world do the sorting and that we
ourselves can rest. That everything and everywhere
is going to get pulled up on the eschatological shore and God
himself is going to sit there and sort out the good and the
bad. Are you tracking with me here?
OK, what is the Kingdom or what can be in the Kingdom, or who
can be in or out or what the task of the Kingdom is or
whether it's with that set of politics or that set of
politics. There is this temptation that we
have to do the sorting right now.
And Jesus is saying that all of that dividing up that you think
is your job is not actually how the Kingdom of God works.
So the friends, this human tendency that we have is that we
want to make judgements too soon about what goes in the net or to
pull things out of the things in the field that you think are now
weeds. But that job is for somebody
else at some other time. And what it's meant to do is
bring a little bit of relief to the pressure that you feel about
the weeds among the wheat and about the bad fish among the
good ones. Everything Everywhere, but not
all at once. One of the greatest temptations
of the modern world is to divide up our life into the things that
we think are spiritual and the things in our life that we think
should be categorized in some other way.
There's an old story of soldiers in the day of Charlemagne
holding their swords in their hands above the waters that they
were being baptized in. I have no idea if that story is
actually true, but it does make me wonder if there are things in
my life that I cling to that I'm not ready to let go of and trust
into the hands of God. You know, things that I've
already sorted as not belonging to the Kingdom are not important
enough to bring into the conversation with God.
And so I just sort of wonder in closing, whether there is
anything at all that you would sort of want to bring into the
net and just say, you know, God, I know that you're coming for it
anyway. Let's just get it done right
now. Would you scoop it up in your
net? Lord, the Kingdom of God is
gently coming for everything, everywhere, and it's not going
to get sorted all at once. You know that thing that really
bothers you about the world or that unjust system that you're
fighting or those people who are doing harm to your people, your
loved ones? You know, keep fighting for
justice. That's the Kingdom of God
working in you. Someone has sown weeds among the
wheat and the Kingdom of God is like a landowner that is
responsible for the sorting of the weeds from the wheat.
The same is about your life and about your spouse's life.
You know the weeds that you think are growing in the lives
of your adult children. Some of you, there's weeds and
wheat growing together and you can trust your kids into the
hands of God. There's a way of dealing with
the weeds that theologian Robert Capon calls the right hand of
power. The right hand of power or
right-handed power is direct and it's obvious and it's coercive.
Sometimes it can be actually really effective.
It's the power of force and control and intervention with
visible results. And it's the power that we
instinctively understand and respect.
And when we imagine God acting in the world, we almost always
imagine God doing it with this sort of right-handed power.
God fixing things. God punishing the wicked, God
rewarding the righteous, God intervening dramatically to set
things straight. Right-handed power is power of a
king sitting on throne, positioning armies all around
that's right-handed power and it's something that we want God
to exert when we pray to God. God, would you just do
something? You guys ever pray that in your
life? Would you just do something, RIP
out the weeds, you know, get out the bad fish?
And Robert Capon's argument is that right-handed power is real,
that God has it, he uses it, but it's not God's preferred mode of
operation and it's emphatically not what the parables are about.
What the parables are about is what Capon calls left-handed
power. It's indirect.
It's hidden. It's paradoxical.
It seems to be a bit weak. It works through smallness and
obscurity and death and loss and failure, and it looks to the
world like defeat, but often looks like faithfulness.
It's the power of a seed buried in the ground.
It's the power of a wife praying for her husband.
It's the power of parents praying for their kids.
It's the power that looks like it's losing because somebody is
dying in the process. And listen, I know enough about
some of your stories to know that some of you are doing
really faithful things that look like death.
It's the power of yeast hidden and flour.
It's the power of a man who sells everything and buries a
treasure back in a field. It's the power of a shepherd who
leaves 99 sheep to go after the 1, and ultimately the power of a
God who dies on a cross and gives up the right to have
everything sorted. Right now this is the story that
we live in France. left-handed power does not look like power.
It looks like weakness and foolishness and waste and
failure. And it operates by going down,
not by going up and to the right.
And it achieves its purpose not by overwhelming opposition, but
by undermining it from below. So come back to this story a
little bit, this painting from Gloria Stein.
One of the things I love about the story about the Stein art
collection is that they bought art almost indiscriminately.
They just kept buying it and storing it, and most of what
they bought had already been rejected by other people.
They prejudged the art the Society of France thought was
good at the time. But the Steins just kept buying
it, and they thought they knew wheat from the weeds.
And it turns out that they were wrong.
The paintings that the Steins bought for hundreds of dollars
in dusty back alley galleries are now valued in the billions.
Curators at the Met spent years tracking down the works from
Stein's collection and the ones in the front room and the ones
in the Salon de Refuge. And listen, don't miss this.
Some of the rejected paintings, the ones that didn't even make
Gertrude's wall, the ones that she thought had lost their
luster and she relegated to the backroom, they turned out to be
among the most important works of the 20th century.
You do not know. The things that you have stopped
paying attention to are some of the most prized and important
things to the heart of God for your life.
You do not have eyes to see, and neither do I.
And this is the story that we live in.
So nobody at the time knew which was which, which was going to be
a bad painting, which was going to be a, a glorious painting,
not even the times themselves. And the sorting had to take
place over time, over a long process.
And some of what was thought to be not so good in the end turned
out to be priceless. So, friends, let me close with
this. I know I'm a little long.
There are things in our lives that have lost their shine and
they do not feel like they are worthy of the front room salon
of your life. It feels like, you know,
whatever God could have done in this area of my life is probably
not going to happen. I'm just going to store this
thing away. I'm not going to think about it.
Just let it run its course. You know, some of you that is
your marriages, some of you that's your addictions, some of
you, it's your longings that are unmet.
And I'll just say I, I know that my wife would not mind me saying
this. There have been seasons of our
marriage that we were convinced we're certainly weeds.
And it turns out it was wheat all along.
It just took time. God was doing something in the
midst of us laying down our life.
I, I hope my wife will agree with me.
Amen. Thank you.
OK, I wasn't calling for an Amen, but I just just realizing,
I thought that's what I think. But He's coming for everything.
The Kingdom is at work everywhere.
And when we come into the presence of God, remembering
that it's not going to happen all at once, we can trust that
God is the one that's going to sort it out.
Invite the worship team to come back up.
We're going to close with worship
ministry, I just want to ask you to think if there's anything
that you have kind of relegated to the backroom, anything that
you're not aware that God is really touching in your life.
Maybe some things that you've forgotten about that you would
like to sort of bring back into your awareness and conversation
with God. We would love to pray with you
about that. I'm also, I just have a sense
that there's some of you that the sort of like, is it really
going to come for everything question.
It just brings up a ton of grief for you.
There are things that you've longed for the Kingdom to touch
and it just hasn't touched yet. And I would just ask for you, if
you're in that situation, if you're just bringing some grief,
I would ask that you would bring that into the presence of God.
We would love to pray for you and we would ask that the
Kingdom of God will come today. And in your life, would you
stand as we, as we head into worship?
If you are in our prayer team, could we just have you come and
make some space to pray for other people?