Surprise!

Surprise!
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52; Genesis 29:15-28; Romans 8:26-39

This city boy learned a lot during the years in the rich farm country of northwestern Ohio. I learned why crops are rotated. Corn depletes the soil of nutrients, especially nitrogen. Soybeans fix nitrogen in the soil through the roots, so they are usually planted in fields the year following a corn planting.

To preserve topsoil and nutrients and to reduce fuel costs farmers don’t plow their fields every year. This is low- or no-till farming. Herbicides are used to keep down the weeds and they are very plant specific so that they can be applied without effecting the intended crop. That is why you can look out over a field and see just the crop.

There are times however when you can see stray corn stalks growing in a field of beans. These have gotten a pass from the herbicides and perhaps the cultivator as well. The culprit is not the evil one as was reported in last week’s telling of the parable of the weeds and wheat. Most likely corn stalks in a soybean field come from seed spilled by the combine during the previous fall harvest. A poorly maintained combine can lose a bit of the harvest as it passes through a field. The corn waits through the winter and begins to grow when the soybeans are planted. As beans are harvested, the errant corn will be shook out from the shelled beans in the harvesting process.

The corn stalks are a surprise in the midst of the bean fields, just as the weeds were a surprise last week’s wheat field. Our parables today are also filled with surprise. The someone who planted the mustard seed in the field was not the farmer. Mustard was not an intended crop. While it is not a weed that will impersonate wheat, its presence in a field, like any other weed, is a nuisance.

Weeds create problems. Soybean farmers can deal with corn. But there are other plants which produce seeds that combines can’t always sift out. A weedy load of beans will get a lower price per bushel.

Unwanted plants do surprise and cause problems. If you had come in the office end of the building several weeks ago, you might have noticed a large branch growing out of the holly bush at the end of the row. It wasn’t holly. It was something else that was growing close to the main stem of the holly and had to be cut out.

At the other end of the building, I noticed just the other day that it appeared that the dogwood tree had suddenly gotten taller. When I went to look, I was surprised to discover that there was a very rapidly growing plant just behind the dogwood which had only recently come out of hiding behind the tree. It is still there and you can see it for yourself. It will have to be removed.

Last year was very prolific year for maple seeds and they were growing everywhere this spring. I was weeding the front bed at the manse a couple of weeks ago and there must have been hidden among the young maples I was pulling out some poison ivy, which looks very similar. I was surprised a week later to discover that the poison ivy had ambushed me. That’s not a surprise I like!

Yeast hidden in flour will also surprise a person if they didn’t know it was there. We are used to the instant dry yeast. But before dry yeast or commercial yeast cakes, yeast had to be kept, fed, and taken care of. Something like sourdough bread starter. The baker would keep the yeast in a container and take a bit of the yeast every time she wanted to bake some bread. Yeast was hard to work with so no wonder much of the bread they talk about in the Bible was unleavened. If some yeast mixture unknowingly got dropped into a pot of flour and if it had enough moisture to live on, the whole pot of flour could be converted to a yeasty blob. Surprise!

The manse back yard has gotten shadier over the years. This year I opened up a couple of new beds where there is more sun during the day. As I was digging, I found horseshoe. It was slightly bent and worn, so I am guessing that it was discarded many years ago. The horseshoe is not a treasure, but it was a surprise.

Imagine the surprise of the farmer who found real buried treasure in the field that he was tending. In today’s legal climate there would have been suits and counter-suits about the ownership of the treasure. When we were kids a simple rule applied: finders keepers, losers weepers. The farmer acted somewhere in between. He went and bought the field before claiming ownership of the treasure. It cost a lot to buy, but the treasure that came with the field was worth a whole lot more.

The pearl merchant must have been very surprised to find the precious pearl hidden in the midst of lots of other pearls. I can remember as a kid looking through bags of marbles for one that appealed to me. I can identify with the merchant finding the pearl. What was it about the pearl? Its size, its color, its perfect shape? I wonder if he wasn’t more of a collector than a merchant. The pearl must have had a high price, because the merchant wanted it so much that he gladly sold what he owned in order to buy it. What a glad surprise!

Similarly, when the net of fish was hauled out of the water there were some delicious fish that were hidden in the whole catch. The people sorted through the fish, threw the small ones and the unwanted ones back into the water, and delighted in the great fish they found.

There is something invasive, unpredictable, and surprising about the kingdom of heaven. Perhaps we think of the kingdom as something ordered, like rows of soybeans or wheat. The kingdom shows up like the unexpected stalk of corn.

You and I often want to draw clear boundaries around God’s kingdom. We want the kingdom to have clear borders and official checkpoints. We want king-dom members to be fully credentialed. We envision the pearly gates with St. Peter wearing a TSA uniform and scanning the incomers. We want to be able to define what fits within the church and what must stay out. That’s why we have scripture and creeds and liturgy and tradition. They are the nice, straight rows of carefully tended doctrine and practice.

Then, just when we least expect it, a mustard tree shows up, or the pot of flour is yeast-infected or an unexpected treasure is dug up in a field, or a perfect pearl is found in a mess of mediocre pearls, or a salmon is found in the midst of channel catfish. God insists on invading our orderly world.

God insists on popping out of our well-tended self-ordered creation with a heaven-sent creation of God’s own. That pesky mustard seed that hides in the sack of regular seed, that bit of yeast hiding in the flour, that treasure buried in a field, that one pearl in the whole display case, that fish in the whole netful, that unexpected saint in the midst of the congregation. Hidden, waiting to surprise, ready to celebrate God.

Ted Wardlaw, president of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, writes that sometime in the early 1980s he was watching an interview with Arch-bishop Desmond Tutu. Apartheid was the ordered and entrenched system of South Africa. The archbishop said, “When the white people arrived, we had the land and they had the Bible. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ When we opened our eyes, they had the land and we had the Bible. And we got the better of the deal.”(1)

God’s Word – the Word that God gives us, not the words organized around our ritual of God – is the mustard seed that surprises, the yeast that raises the flour, the treasure that pops up, the perfect pearl that appears, the great fish in the whole catch.

Jesus Christ was the mustard seed that upset the neatness of Judaism of his day. Jesus Christ was the yeast that reacted in the flour of lost and maligned humanity. Jesus Christ was the treasure that simple, unaffected people discovered and gave up livelihoods and families and even their lives for. Jesus Christ was the pearl of great hidden value that put every other religious pearl into perspective. Jesus Christ was the fish that turned ordinary people into evangelists who changed peoples lives.

The kingdom of heaven invades the cultivated soil of our certainties and our boundaries. And out of that invasion it creates something new – “the better of the deal” to use Archbishop Tutu’s words. Hidden within what we think we seek so clearly, the realm of God’s rule is subversive and grows in unexpected and surprising ways until what we thought we knew is transformed and redeemed by our surprising, invasive God.

And through it all, nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus.

So, where is God’s rule hidden in your life? Where in the mundane and mediocre will you be surprised by God’s presence this week? You don’t know now, but will you know it when it happens? Will you rejoice at the treasure in the field? The surprise mustard tree? The unexpected pearl? The good fish? The saint?

Be surprised by God!

Let us pray.

Glorious God, you present yourself in ways both open and hidden. Send your Spirit to us that we may meet Christ this week in surprising ways, unexpected places, and unlikely people. Grow us into kingdom disciples, eager to learn, eager to share, eager to live faithfully. Amen.

(1) Greg Jones, “Africa and the Bible,” www.episcopalcafe.com, July 28, 2007. Cited by Theodore J. Wardlaw, “Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52 – Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville KY: Westminister John Knox Press, 2011) Year A, vol. 3, p. 289.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2014 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.