Sunday Worship, Message by Barbara Brown Taylor, May 4, 2025, Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church

37:34 So good morning to all of you. Good morning, Susan Andrews in St. Louis. After a long time imagining you both online and in person, David Gray and I first corresponded in 2018. I am so happy to be worshiping with you today on the third Sunday of Easter in the 70th year of this congregation in the year of our Lord 2025. That's a long time. Both in the near view and in the far one for people like us to be coming together to sing and to pray and to hope and to trust that God is as close as God ever was, even when the headlines fill us with fear. How do you live into the good news with so much bad news in the air? Maybe it's a matter of where you look for the kingdom.

38:24 When I was a new Christian who had absorbed more of the religion about Jesus than the religion of Jesus, I went back to each of the four Gospels to see what they said, he said, at the launch of his public ministry. Not his first words to his parents in the temple when he'd been lost for three days and they found him there. Not his verbal duel with the devil in the wilderness during his 40-day feast fast. Not his one-on-one exchange with John the baptizer before John tipped him backwards into the Jordan River. But later, after all that had happened, what were the very first things Jesus said when he stepped into his role as a public figure and began telling people why he had come. Given everything I had heard as a new Christian, I expected him to say something like, do not fear, I'm finally here, or follow me and you will never stumble. I thought he would say something about himself, in other words, but he didn't. He said something about the nearness of God's kingdom instead. In Matthew's gospel, repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near.

39:40 In Mark, the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe in the good news. In Luke, the first words out of his mouth were 700 year old words from the prophet Isaiah, which he read during Shabbat services in his hometown synagogue. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

40:20 Since I was beginning to hear him in a different way, his emphasis wasn't on me. It was on the Spirit of the Lord, which was very near. For the first time, I realized Jesus didn't come to proclaim himself. He came to proclaim the nearness of God's realm. He came to remind people what it looks like when God's Spirit lands on someone so strongly that they're moved to do God's work, bringing good news to the poor, the captive, the sightless, the insightless, those under someone else's heavy, heavy hand. He didn't shy from the public call to repent either, a word that means to change your mind, change your heart, presumably because there's no way to sense the nearness of the Spirit or to receive the power of the kingdom with an unchanged heart or mind.

41:19 Now John's gospel, famous for going off in its own direction, and that's what happened in my survey as well. In his telling, Jesus' public ministry began with actions, not words. He first turned water into wine at a wedding in Cana of Galilee and then changed money changers out of the temple with a whip of cords. But the first words out of his mouth in John's Gospels come when he found his first two disciples, who'd formerly been disciples of John the Baptist, or when they found him. Jesus was just minding his own business one day when he sensed two men walking behind him, following him really, and he turned around to face them and he said, what are you looking for? His very first words were a question. This was so disarming that all the men could think of to say was, Rabbi, where are you staying? Marriott? Holiday Inn?

42:16 Come and see, he said, staying with him until four that afternoon they did, according to John. What an endearing detail, till four in the afternoon. No wonder people love John's gospel. But it's the rabbi's question that sticks all down the ages. What are you looking for? What do you want? One day maybe we'll start every worship service with that question just to get straight to the point. Is it hope you're looking for? Is it purpose or meaning or faith? Is it peace you want, if only for an hour, just to sing in harmony with other people for once, to pray for the same things, to let yourself be led for once instead of having to make every decision yourself? Or is it a direct encounter with the divine that you're looking for right here in what we call God's house. This one's a mansion. I tried the question out on my husband Ed at the dinner table last Tuesday. I said, what do you think people are looking for in a church?

43:28 Because he's spent more years in church than anyone I know. And he said, I don't think most of us know. All we know is we're looking for something that we're missing and we'll never stop trying to find. oh i said finish my peas but he added another important question to the one jesus asked not just what are you looking for but where are you looking for it and why you've heard the old joke about the man who kept looking for something he lost under a lamp because the light was better there than where he'd lost it and see you laugh because you know it's true wouldn't you rather look for something you want in plain sight? For that matter, wouldn't you rather listen to a preacher who says things straight instead of winding so that all you have to do is follow the directions to find exactly what you want? So this brings me by a winding path to the famously short parables from Matthew's gospel that we all heard a moment ago.

44:35 there are six of them. Four of them found nowhere else in any gospel, and together they make up only a fraction of the 40-something parables that Jesus told over the course of his public ministry. If you put the sermon in the mount in brackets, then parables like these would clearly emerge as Jesus' favorite and most memorable teaching method for reasons even his disciples could not understand. Why do you teach in parables? That's what they asked him, to which he said roughly, so those who are meant to hear them will hear them, and those who aren't won't. Then he pelted them with those six. That answer came right before. Every one of them about the kingdom of heaven. Heaven was Matthew's euphemism for God, since reverent Jews did not and do not say or write G-D, but the kingdom?

45:37 Pointing to that over and over and over, that's why he had come. The parables drop one after another like knock-knock jokes. what is the kingdom like? But they're not jokes. They're keys to the kingdom, which isn't a place in these stories. It's more like a tiny seed that grows into a big tree. It's like a handful of yeast that leavens a hundred pounds of dough. The kingdom's like treasure hidden in a field that a man sells everything he owns to buy. It's now, it's like a merchant of fine pearls who does the same thing when he finds what he's looking for. It's like a net thrown into the sea that catches fish of every kind. It's like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old. Have you understood all this? Pastor David and I both laughed. I even looked that word up in the Greek it's written in and you pronounce it nay. Just play with that. Have you understood all this. I tried to. I really did. The stories, they just won't line up. The man who found treasure in a field wasn't looking for anything when he found it. He just ran his plow into it while he was doing a job for somebody else. And then he buried it again so he could figure out how to buy the whole field without the owner knowing the treasure was there. So the kingdom is like petty larceny.

47:07 you know the the merchant on the other hand that guy was on a quest he knew exactly what he was looking for and he searched everywhere until he found it one pearl of great value which cost so much that he spent everything he had to buy it and that put him promptly out of business so the kingdom of heaven is like going bankrupt for your heart's desire But shouldn't he have sold the pearl and given the proceeds to the poor?

47:40 The treasure thief was joyful, small but important detail. The merchant who paid for the treasure was not. And that dragnet? That's what the kingdom of heaven is like, Jesus says, a net that draws absolutely everything into itself first. The kingdom of heaven drags everything into itself first. before any sorting has taken place, and only later sorts what is good, i.e. what is useful from what is not. So we're all in until we're out, and our edibility is key. I can only conclude I am not among those meant to understand these things, at least from the inside, but even from the outside, a few things are clear. first all of these teachings take place in the world jesus clearly attended synagogue and he knew torah so well that he could debate the finest minds of his time on its teachings but when it came time to point to the nearness of the kingdom he pointed to things that any farmer any baker woman or hired hand or tradesperson or fisher person encountered on a daily basis.

49:01 He pointed to seeds and plants and yeast and flour and plows and fields and merchants and money and nets and fish. Whatever his listeners were looking for, it was vital for them to keep their eyes open to what was happening right in front of them, to look low as well as high, never discounting the Spirit's ability to land on them exactly where they were, with dough on their aprons and dirt in their pants cuffs, with a pearl in their empty pocket and with the fish stink still on their hands. Those who are looking only in sacred places for God's kingdom were at great risk of missing the kingdom in their midst right where they were. Second, as important as memory is to Christian life, I listen to the Easter sermon here.

50:02 As important as it is to remember what happened on Christmas and Good Friday and Easter, to relive the most important events of Jesus' life in the sacraments of baptism and communion, to return to the scriptures again and again, gathering like this to sing and to pray and to hold each other up as the earliest disciples did, as important as all of that is to helping us find what we are looking for, the parables spring up out of nowhere. Nowhere but the imagination of their genius storyteller with no scripture to back them up, no commandments attached, no sanctioned way of hearing them or finding our own places in them at least when they were fresh you know by now this far down the line we have long histories of interpretation of the parables along with volumes of sermons and Sunday school lessons and at least one Broadway musical based on them that became a Hollywood movie in 1973 anybody know it's a trick question Godspell Remember that? I know how old some of you are.

51:20 But when Jesus first told these parables, when the gospel writers started writing them down, A wonderful, new, important human faculty comes to light, whether you're inside them or outside them, and it is a wonderful dance partner for memory. It's the role of imagination in the present, wherever you are. The ability to attend to something without knowing exactly what you're supposed to see. to keep turning it around in your mind and keep digging without knowing exactly where the treasure's hidden, to notice what's happening at the farmer's market and in the doctor's waiting room and in the high school cafeteria and at the Goodwill store on the off chance that the kingdom might be as near as that or at least enough like that for you to notice who the characters are and what they're doing and which one you're most like this time and what they stir up inside you.

52:35 Last point, preachers love three points. Even a parable can lead you to repent, to see things another way, to see people another way, maybe even to see yourself another way, both when the picture is pretty and when it's not. So that your understanding pokes a hole in the box you've been keeping it in, and your heart gets bigger all of a sudden, not as much like a guarded castle with two chambers, but a mansion with the front door open and a lot of rooms inside.

53:14 What are you looking for? What do you want? where are you looking for it and why the kingdom of heaven is like an unhoused man a homeless man sleeping in a doorway wearing a vest that jingles because it's safety pinned with so many keys the kingdom of heaven is like a woman who sees one of her gloves lying on the metro platform just as the doors are closing and she quick pulls out the other glove and throws it so that whoever finds it will have a matched pair. The kingdom of heaven is like a bored, red-headed girl in line with her grandmother at the post office who turns around to look at you and sees a hurt place on your hand and lifts the bruise to her lips for a kiss without saying a word.

54:17 The kingdom of heaven is like an Easter egg a child finds with great delight that turns to disappointment the moment he discovers it's empty until someone tells him that's to make room for him to put a wish inside.