Parables: A Kingdom Collage

Sermon for July 26, 2026
Matthew 13:31-33,44-52

This morning, I’d like to take you to my dining room – specifically, to one wall in my dining room.  On this wall hang 11 frames.  Because I have such little artistic imagination, those frames hang in greater symmetry than I really intended, reflecting a need for balance I can’t seem to shake.

But here’s what you see.  There’s a frame of three group shots of my wife, Ann; our kids; and either Ann’s mom or me.  There’s a photo from the last dinner we all shared, when the kids and their spouses were in town a couple of weeks before Ann’s last illness.  There’s a print of Rembrandt’s painting The Return of the Prodigal Son.  There’s a shot of Ann holding Kathryn the day after Kathryn was born.  There’s a frame of nine snapshots taken over 20 years or so, images of Ann and me, or Ann and the kids, in special places we’d visited.  There’s a frame with three shots of the kids, Ann, and Ann’s mother, marking that multigenerational bond across the years.  There’s a snapshot at the beach when Kathryn and Dan were 6 and 4, grinning and running in step to escape the wave behind them.  There’s a shot of Ann looking back over her shoulder, caught in beautiful surprise.  There’s an impromptu portrait of Ann in a botanical garden, with flowers all around her.  There’s a painting by a parishioner imagining a heavenly garden.  And there’s a calligraphed verse of Scripture, from John’s Gospel:  “My peace I give unto you; therefore, let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” 

Each of these images has a story and tells a story.  Any one of them would stand on its own that way.  But taken together, despite the overbearing symmetry, these images say something more.  They’re a collage – a collage of love.  Now, this collage doesn’t pretend to define love or capture its fullness.  But it certainly reveals love as my family knew it.

OK – why am I telling you this?  Because I think our Gospel reading today offers something very much like these images on my dining-room wall.  This reading is a collage of the kingdom of God.

You know, we throw around that term a lot – the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven.  But God’s authority, God’s rule over all creation, isn’t like an earthly ruler lording it over his subjects.  In fact, God’s authority turns our expectations upside down … which, I think, is why Jesus doesn’t just give us one straightforward analogy to help us see the kingdom but, instead, one parable after another.  “The kingdom of heaven is like this” or “the kingdom of heaven is like that” – but no single one of them is enough to capture the reign and rule of God on its own.

So, following the two parables we heard over the last two Sundays, first about the sower and then about the weeds and the wheat, Jesus today gives us five rapid-fire parables, five more glimpses of the bigger picture.  Or, if you imagine yourself standing in an art gallery, it’s five more pieces on the kingdom’s wide canvas, five more fragments of the heavenly collage.

First is the parable of the mustard seed, which begins as “the smallest of all the seeds” but grows to offer safe haven where the birds can build their nests (Matthew 13:32).  Then comes the parable of the yeast: that the authority of God is like “yeast that a woman took and mixed in with [50 pounds] of flour until all of it was leavened” (Matthew 13:33).  In these two snapshots, the images are surprising.  God’s authority seems small and insignificant, like a tiny seed or a few pinches of yeast – not like the power kings usually wield.  But with time, the effect of God’s authority grows substantial.  Like the mustard seed, it gives us shelter from all that bears down on us.  Like a few pinches of yeast mixed into 50 pounds of flour, it changes everything, transforming life from run-of-the-mill to rich and remarkable. 

So, here’s what we know about God’s authority so far:  It starts out small; it surprises us with what it becomes; and it changes everything around it.

Then, we get two more parables.  First, Jesus says God’s reign and rule is like a “treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and then hid; then, in his joy, he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matthew 13:44).  Then Jesus says a person in God’s kingdom is like “a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it” (Matthew 13:45). 

So, Jesus says, God’s authority is a treasure, something to be deeply desired.  Well, that seems odd.  I mean, our desires usually run along the lines of what we see on TV commercials – the freedom to sit on the beach with a cold beer in our hands or the power to whip out our Visa cards and buy whatever we want.  But Jesus says God’s authority is the real treasure.  And, he says, if we understood what a treasure it is, we’d risk everything to live under it.  Maybe that sounds crazy.  But remember the picture Jesus paints of God’s kingdom in the Sermon on the Mount – when the poor are fed, when the merciful are blessed, when the peacemakers win, when enemies reconcile, when people hear God’s word and live by it (Matthew 5:1-12).  Deep down, I think that is what we desire.  We want to live in relationship with God and each other; we want to be agents of reconciliation in the world; we want to see God’s righteousness become our way of life.  If that’s not treasure, I don’t know what is.

Then, finally, Jesus gives us the parable of the fishing net: that the rule of God 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 and threw out the bad.  So it will be at the end of the age.” (Matthew 13:47-48)  This piece of the collage shows how God’s authority works on us – in a way that’s so subtle we may not even realize it’s there until it’s already gathered us in.  Now, I’ve never been a fish, so I don’t know; but I imagine a fish doesn’t have much of a sense of what’s happening to it until the net closes and it’s already caught.  I think being under God’s authority is like that:  It’s true regardless of whether we realize it.  Of course, for some people, a blinding light does knock them off their horses and make them change their lives.  But I think, for most of us, God sort of creeps up and draws us in before we really know what’s happening.  So that’s the final thing we learn from these five glimpses of the kingdom:  God’s reign and rule is subtle, catching us before we realize we’ve been caught.

OK, now imagine you’re an artist, and you’re making your own collage of the heavenly kingdom.  You’ve chosen images that speak to you about the mustard tree, the leavened loaf, the treasure hidden in a field, the pearl of great price, and the great catch of fish.  Now your task is to arrange them, to form them into a collage that says more than the sum of its parts.  How might you put the pieces together?  What arrangement might you choose?  There’s always the shape of the cross – can’t go wrong there.  But maybe you make a circle.  Maybe you evoke a sunrise.  Maybe you float the images on the water of life.  Maybe there’s an open doorway, with these five images inviting you to step in and find what’s been calling your name forever.

Or, if you’re like me and you kind of stink at visual art, maybe you’d rather have another parable – a parable to make sense of the parables.  How about this:  The kingdom of God is like being in love.  Now, you can picture that in any context that works for you.  Maybe you’re in love with your partner; maybe with your child; maybe with your family; maybe with a soul friend.  But that love can help you picture the kingdom of heaven.  Like the mustard seed, love starts small; but it grows into something steady and solid, something that shelters and sustains us.  Like the yeast, love starts off almost unnoticed; but with time, it has its way with us and changes us into so much more than we were before.  Like the treasure in the field and the pearl of great price, love is the greatest prize we could ever hope for, despite the fact it’ll never make us rich or powerful.  Like the fishing net, love sneaks up on us and draws us in, binding our life to the life of our beloved before we even know we’re caught. 

And, like love, the reign and rule of God is something we ultimately have to choose.  Despite God’s awesome power and ultimate authority, God doesn’t lord it over us the way we’d expect a king to do.  Even at the end of the age, when the fishing net is finally hauled in, God doesn’t insist that we live under heaven’s authority.  We can always choose to live apart from God, following the world’s authority instead.  As St. Paul said, the kingdom of love “does not insist on its own way” (1 Corinthians 13:5).

But given the chance to dwell in heaven, would you really choose anything else?

Christian Americans: Do What's Hard

Sermon for Independence Day (transferred), July 5, 2026
Deuteronomy 10:17-21; Psalm 145:1-9; Hebrews 11:8-16; Matthew 5:43-48

Happy late Fourth of July, the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  I talked about the preamble to that amazing document in the sermon two weeks ago, for Juneteenth – specifically the national vision statement the Declaration gives us: that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”¹  I believe we’re tremendously blessed to have our national creed stated so clearly.

But, of course, a creed is there to be lived out.  In our Baptismal Covenant, we begin by stating the Apostles’ Creed – what we believe about the nature of God – and we flesh it out with five promises about how we’ll live our belief.  Well, we needed a guide for living out our national creed, too; and that’s the Constitution.  It’s far from a perfect document, as its 27 amendments make clear.  But it begins with words that will never be amended, our nation’s purpose statement – the Constitution’s preamble.  If, like me, you’re of a certain age, and you were blessed to watch Schoolhouse Rock along with your Saturday-morning cartoons, you might even carry our national purpose statement in your head, set to music.  I will resist the temptation to lead us in singing it, but here it is:  “We the People of the United States of America, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”²

Now, as we hear that national purpose statement, there’s one important detail that doesn’t come through, one that mattered to the people who wrote it.  That detail is the look of the words on the page.  I imagine you can see it in your mind’s eye.  When you picture the preamble of the Constitution, what stands out, of course, are the first three words: We the People, written five times bigger than the rest of the text.

Now, those three words didn’t come down on tablets from Mt. Sinai.  They were a choice, and they reasonably might have been different.  The Constitution could have begun, “We the delegates to this Constitutional Convention” or “We the States now United” or “We the victors of the late Revolution.”  But, instead, the Constitution begins, in giant letters, “We the People.”

And, it turns out, there’s a story behind that, something I learned from a newspaper column last week.  The column is about “The Founder … We Don’t Remember,” a man named James Wilson.³  James Wilson was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787; and, it turns out, he was one of the primary editors of that great document, so he has a place close to my heart.  He was on the five-person Committee of Detail, and he wrote the first draft, which compiled all the previously adopted resolutions and proposals.  And that first draft, in Wilson’s handwriting, began with, “We the People….”⁴

Like all of us, Mr. Wilson had a backstory, and his backstory makes those first three words all the more poignant.  In 1779, three years after Independence, Wilson was living in Philadelphia, a wealthy lawyer with one of the city’s finest homes.  Four years into a brutal revolution, with the economy a shambles, the regular folks of Philadelphia were not exactly impressed.  Wilson and his family were living in opulence when most people couldn’t afford what little food there was.  People also questioned Wilson’s allegiance because he had opposed the highly democratic state constitution proposed for Pennsylvania, and he’d defended loyalists being tried for treason.  So, one night in 1779, a drunken mob set out for Wilson’s beautiful home, looking to even the score.  The mob attacked.  In the firefight, seven people were killed and another 17 wounded.

Wilson escaped, but I can’t imagine how traumatized he must have been.  You could see how he might have broken with the movement at that point and hightailed it off to Canada.  Instead, Wilson remained because he could understand why the mob was so upset and looking for someone to blame.  Wilson had grown up poor in Scotland before his family emigrated to the colonies.  He knew what it was to be hungry and under the English thumb.

So, instead of nursing resentment toward the people who’d attacked, Wilson doubled down on democracy.  There in the Constitutional Convention, he pulled a copy of the Declaration of Independence from his coat pocket and read from it to the other delegates, reminding them that the people of the colonies had bound themselves together to advance their inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  His point was that “the people are … ‘the legitimate source of all authority’”⁵ – despite the fact some of them had stormed his house and tried to kill him.  So, the first three words from Wilson’s Constitutional drafting committee are the ones that ring down to us today: “We the People … ordain and establish this Constitution.”

We find ourselves in a day when focusing on the well-being of those who aren’t part of your own tribe might seem naïve.  I imagine it seemed naïve back in the day, too.  Even more so than now, the Revolutionary period was a time of extremes.  You had leading citizens renouncing their national identities.  You had brother fighting against brother, our Civil War, Part One.  You had poor people literally rioting in the streets, shooting cannonballs into the homes of wealthy lawyers.  Common purpose must have seemed like a pipe dream.  Maybe it still does.

I think James Wilson might have said that what unifies us is choosing to be us.  We may not get it right in any given moment – in fact, you can read our history as one example after another of not getting it right.  But you can also read our history as call and response: the call to remember whom we aspire to be and the response of taking one more step to expand the boundaries of “We the People” balancing liberty and justice for all.

So, as we celebrate this feast of Independence Day, I hear our readings as a call to notice how the Good News and our national aspirations intersect, and then a call to remember whom we aspire to be, in both our spiritual and secular lives.  Maybe most fundamentally, I think the Good News and our national aspirations intersect by calling us to pursue not what is easy but what is hard – the “narrow door” through which Jesus calls us to step into God’s kingdom (Luke 13:24).

First, from Deuteronomy, we heard Moses, on the doorstep of the Promised Land, reminding his people to default toward humility despite being God’s chosen.  Yes, Moses says, God has blessed and is blessing you beyond measure.  But remember why: to live out the heart of the One who formed you.  “The Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing.  You shall also love the stranger,” Moses says to these people about to occupy other people’s lands, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (10:17-19)  Once you’re in charge, Moses says, it’ll be easy to think you did this all on your own and then to serve your own interests.  But you’ve been chosen to show God’s ways and purposes to others.  So, follow God’s lead, Moses says, and do what’s hard instead.

Then, from the Psalms, the writer praises God’s “unsearchable” greatness (145:3), awesome majesty, and “wondrous works” (145:5).  And what do those wondrous works look like?  How does the creator and sovereign of the universe wield ultimate power?  “The Lord is gracious and merciful,” the psalmist says, “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.  The Lord is good to all and has compassion over all that he has made.” (145:8-9)  All … not just the blessed, not just the chosen, not just the familiar, but all.  Loving the good and the faithful would be easy.  But God does what’s hard instead.

Then, in the epistle, the writer reminds these Jewish followers of Jesus that their founding father, Abraham, was someone with no capacity for great things on his own.  Instead, what Abraham had was an immense capacity to trust that, even in what seems like endings, God is always working something new.  Abraham and Sarah stepped into their journey with God not in fear but in hope.  Their focus was the homeland not where they were but where they were going – “a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (11:16).  Getting stuck in present fear and failure is easy.  But God calls us to do what’s hard, to help build what’s coming, instead.

And finally, in Matthew, Jesus tells his followers absolutely the last thing they want to hear.  In the Sermon on the Mount, the Torah version 2.0, Jesus says over and over not to ask, “What’s enough?” but to ask, “What is God’s heart?”  Don’t just not murder each other; reconcile with each other.  Don’t just not commit adultery; respect each other as equals, not objects.  Don’t just follow the rules in punishing evildoers; kill them with kindness to change their hearts.  Don’t just love the neighbors who love you back; love even your enemies and pray for your persecutors.  Following the law and reveling in self-righteousness – that’s easy.  But God calls us to do what’s hard, to expand the circle, instead.

Our nation’s 250^th birthday is certainly a time to celebrate, but it’s also a time to remember – to remember the deep complexity of what it means to live as a faithful follower of Jesus among “we the people” in 2026.  The easy way is Christian nationalism – to wrap the baby Jesus in the American flag and decide, in advance, that if the United States does something, it must be God’s will.  The more challenging path is to be not a Christian nationalist but a Christian American.  That means patterning my life on the vision and purpose of the Baptismal Covenant.  It means patterning my civic engagement on the vision and purpose of our nation’s founding documents.  And it means, every day, whether in the pew or in the public square, to choose to be part of “we the people” called by God to do what is hard.

1.       “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription.” National Archives. Available at: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript. Accessed July 3, 2026.

2.       “The Preamble.” Constitution Annotated: Analysis and Interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. Available at: https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/preamble/. Accessed July 3, 2026.

3.       Wegman, Jesse. “The Founder We Need Is the One We Don’t Remember.” New York Times, June 26, 2026. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/opinion/declaration-independence-constitution-james-wilson.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share. Wilson’s story, as told here, comes from this article. See also Wegman’s book The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution.

4.       “Manuscript of the Committee of Detail Report, August, 3, 1787.” American Treasures: Documenting the Nation’s Founding. Available at: https://constitutioncenter.org/american-treasures/manuscript-of-the-committee-of-detail-report/kiosk. Accessed July 3, 2026.

5.       Quoted by Wegman and found in Farrand, Max, ed. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787. Rev. ed. 4 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1937. Volume 1, Chapter 13, Document 18. Available at: https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch13s18.html. Accessed July 3, 2026.