Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
By the time I arrived in Mr. Taylor’s classroom, the super cool one at the very end of the hall with the funky walls, the room for the supposedly smart kids, I’d passed through a tough couple of years, including a hospitalization, the death of a beloved grandmother, and abuse. We’d moved out of the city, and I was no longer the gifted child left feral in the elementary school library, but was instead just an average kid in above average classes. Of course, my seventh grade teacher knew almost none of this. He just told it like he saw it, and informed me that I was a pessimist.
I am pretty sure he was well intentioned, though I doubt telling a confused 12 year-old trauma victim they are a pessimist is in the Teacher’s Handbook. All these years later, I still think back to that conversation. He could not have been more wrong, something he might have discovered had he known what to ask or had I known what to say. I wasn’t a pessimist. I was a survivor. Socially awkward, to be sure, guarded with good reason, but tough as nails.
Today, I mock and denounce the wingnuts who believe there is a child-trafficking ring operating out of a pizza parlor to harvest fear hormones from children, am frustrated by those who fall for Q-Cult disinformation like the recent shockumentary “Sound of Freedom.”
I think Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a dangerous man who believes crazy stuff and is an embarrassment to the family name, and that’s saying something considering Teddy and that bridge back in ’69.
But to be honest, crazy could also be used to describe my belief system, in a creation that is ultimately good, in the power of love and the potential for human thriving. Most days this whole human project looks like a slow-motion disaster, the politest term I could use. And a disaster not just for us, but for life on the planet, the only planet we currently know of where life exists.
And yet, I hope, and I fight, even on the dark days, and most of us have experienced dark days at times.
Today’s scripture texts, from Paul’s letter to the churches in Rome and from the gospel attributed to but surely not written by the disciple Matthew, risk getting into the theological weeds, predestination and justification and other silliness we’ve covered in recent weeks, though at least the selection from Paul ends with that powerful and reassuring passage that says nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ.
But there is this foundational message about the kingdom of God, and that is where I would like to focus.
Humans create religions to answer unanswerable questions. Why did the river flood? What happens when you die? How can the Yankees spend that much money and still lose?
But it can be and should be more than just creating little boxes to store away big questions. Religion, like art, is about an orientation toward life.
Many religions, including the Judeo-Christian trajectory, begin with the idea that the world is fundamentally broken. The myths come in different forms, but honestly, as crazy as L. Ron Hubbard’s absurd Xenu, Intergalactic Dictator is, Eve and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is just as absurd.
We are evolved bipedal primates, and while we might claim some tipping point to what we call consciousness, the simple fact is we are not the only species with emotions or intelligence, so every line we draw is arbitrary. If anything, it is our so-called intelligence that is killing the entire planet. That isn’t a booby-trapped garden and a divine adversary. That’s just us.
Everything is spinning out from a Big Bang, and we know nothing about before or first cause except the placeholder we call God. For all of our accelerating pace of discoveries in the last century, we still know close to nothing when it comes to the cosmos or, for that matter, consciousness.
Locally, we have a pretty good idea how life operates, though not what it is, or how and why it started, instead again inserting the placeholder we call God.
Zooming in even closer, we can see some of our behavior through the lens of biological imperative, the instinct to reproduce and our extended vulnerability as children producing social patterns that have been mostly consistent in our time as the species Homo Sapiens, though we might quibble with the Sapiens part these days, because how wise is it to destroy your own spot?
But many of our behaviors don’t seem particularly adaptive. You can do all the theory and math you want, but you’re going to have a hard time convincing me that a late Mark Rothko painting or a harrowing passage from Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” or that scene on Tatooine when Rey claims the name Skywalker is anything other that magic and spirit and mystery.
The broken-world types think existence is directed backward, toward restoration, or forward toward a planned fulfillment, a “telos” in ancient Greek, creating the fancy-shmancy adjective teleological, meaning moving toward a set design or purpose. Neither values now.
I don’t believe believe that there is any perfect past worth pursuing or any divine blueprint for our future. But you probably knew that already. I don’t see God as a giant human in the sky, emphasis on man, man with a plan. Creation is directional, and love is directional, and art is directional, always pointing out to the other and unknown.
I believe in God, but my God is an artist, if we can apply human terms, is playing, is whirling like a galaxy and falling down giggling. My God is a six year old girl who was bent over colored pencils, an exercise in precision five minutes ago, but is now throwing mud at her brother in the backyard.
Hope is not hope for a thing but hope that we might be aligned with this divine outwardness, this holy and serendipitous creativity, this exuberance, a word I use a lot, because I view life as a blessing, which is why that seventh-grade pessimist is still in the game, still dances with the dog to Dave Matthews while the okra fries in the pan, and still believes in the beauty of the most broken of my sisters and brothers.
This is why I choose to lean into something Jesus says again and again, as recorded in the gospels, even if he meant it teleologically. Jesus declares again and again that the Kingdom of God, the place of love and justice, of beauty and outwardness, is here, just waiting to be discovered. It is like a treasure in a field, that you would sell everything to buy that field. It is like dropping your nets to follow a strange charismatic teacher who tells you that you, working in the family fishing business, can change lives.
Believing is seeing, and I believe. There are many who can be healed, broken hearts, fractured minds, deep wounds and overwhelming grief, right here in our community, right here in these pews.
We do not need God to pop in like Albus Dumbledore and utter “repairo” with the flourish of a wand. God already gave us all the magic we need, science and imagination and compassion and grit, that thing that tough little 12 year-old had all those years ago that a teacher could only read as pessimism.
It may seem a strange week to quote an Israeli politician, a week when that nation falls into authoritarianism, when the racist genocide on the occupied West Bank grinds on unchecked. But Shimon Peres and so many others point to a simple decision. I’m going to die, one way or the other. The question is how I will live.
How will you live? Will you live into the Kingdom of Love? Right here? Right now?
May it be so, this morning, and every morning of your life. Amen.