Re-Imagining the World
Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.” Luke 17:20-21
Last spring’s total solar eclipse was so anticipated! Many from our church traveled to view it or stayed local to see it safely – that moment when the moon moved across the sun and blocked its rays. In Hutchinson, where I watched, only a sliver of sun was visible. The temperature noticeably changed. The air itself was a bit calmer, but cooler. There was a darkness that settled in for a couple of minutes.
And then, the sun started being uncovered and it became brighter and warmer again. Afterward, the nerd in me enjoyed seeing the television coverage, the internet pictures (some of which were obviously photo-shopped or AI-generated!) and all the videos of the eclipse coming and going. My favorite part was not the eclipse itself. It was the moment that the sun started to be revealed again.
The re-emergence of light; the uncovering of the sun – this was a powerful moment for me. All of the hype had been about the eclipse (and that was amazing!), but I hadn’t heard anyone explain ahead of time to watch for the moment the sun peeked out again.
This summer, we have been following Brandon Scott’s book “Re-Imagine the World” about the parables of Jesus. Each week, we have explored a parable and its meaning to the original audience in the ancient world as well as what it might mean to us today. This morning, I want to pull all of the parables together in a
cohesive view so that we can better understand what Jesus was trying to say in these stories. Believe it or not, there are some consistent messages in these parables that give us a glimpse into how Jesus re-imagined the world. This is his alternative view of how to live in the world.
Brandon Scott identifies three points that are consistent in Jesus’ parables. We will consider each point.
1. The first point is perhaps the most shocking: God is unclean. Stick with me here. I’m guessing that RCC is the only Christian church in the area having a sermon today with this point! Brandon Scott reminds us that Jesus was known for his association with outcasts, sinners, lepers, women and tax collectors during his life. In the Hebrew world – this made Jesus “unclean”. Furthermore, when Jesus taught the beatitudes, he pronounced that that poor were blessed (not that they would become rich, but that they were blessed just the way they were).
In fact, Jesus taught that people should not be divided into groups. There were to be no clean and unclean people – no distinction. Jesus’ parables express this same truth:
*The Mustard Seed parable mixes a weed like a plant (the mustard shrub) into a garden. According to Hebrew law, this would have made the entire garden unclean. Yet, Jesus praises the mustard seed’s growth.
*In the parable of the man who finds treasure and then hides it so that he can purchase the land it is on, Jesus shows that the man is doing something immoral. The treasure is not his – he steals it from its rightful owner. But the treasure is a good thing. Again, clean and unclean are juxtaposed.
People put labels on one another like “clean” and “unclean”. “Acceptable” and “unacceptable”. “Sinner”, “prostitute”, “scum”, “unscrupulous”. We label others in order to feel better about ourselves. It seems that Jesus is consistently saying through his parables that when humans do this to one another, God consistently chooses to side with the “unclean”. 99 of the sheep were doing what they should. But the shepherd left them in search of the 1 sheep that was out of the field.
In Jesus’s parables, we find that God, through Jesus, associates with the unclean. And by Hebrew principle, that makes God unclean. This certainly turns the ideas we have about God and society on its head! Imagine going out on the streets in Wichita and inviting the most unclean of our society to your home for dinner…the homeless, the drug users, the gang members, the sex trafficked, the mentally ill. As we discussed last week when we talked about the parable of the dinner party, this is exactly what the host did – he invited those from the city streets to his home for an elaborate dinner party. And Jesus says that this is what the kingdom of God looks like!
2. The 2nd point Brandon Scott identifies is that God is present in absence. A woman starts out with a jar full of grain but arrives home with an empty jar. In his parables, Jesus turns our thoughts upside down. God isn’t known to us when we expect it; God is found in absence. You cannot point to it, yet God is here.
There is a theology that God will come again to earth in the “great by-and-by”, “what a day of rejoicing that will be!” This apocalyptic vision of the world changing someday into God’s kingdom is not supported by Jesus’ words. Jesus directly claims that God’s kingdom is in the here and now and that it does not change our circumstances as much as it changes us.
How do we know when God is present? Jesus’ parables teaches us that it is not when we see Jesus coming in the sky to the sound of trumpets, but it is when we are facing bleak days; when hope is hard to be found. The kingdom of God is in the here and now – there is divine action occurring, but it cannot always be observed with our senses.
My guess is that in the eye of the hurricane this week, when destruction and chaos seem to be having their way, that there will be many personal stories of divine experience. We may not hear them at all – or perhaps some of them will make the news later – but people will experience the hope and help of God in the midst of this storm. God is present in absence.
- The final point Brandon Scott notes as theme in Jesus’s parables is that humans are to cooperate, not compete. Jesus puts a Samaritan at the most compassionate character in his parable about an injured man on the side of the road. This despised Samaritan is the helper-hero of the story.
In the parable of the prodigals, each son and their father are identifiable characters. They compete over the father’s wealth, but in the end, the father does not choose between his sons – he accepts them no matter what they do.
In the parable of the vineyard laborers, the first ones hired complain that by paying the last hired the same amount; the master has made them equal. Jesus’ parables flat out reject social and political hierarchies. This is also evident in the parable of the dinner party that we talked about last Sunday. The hosts ends us inviting the homeless and the poor to his elaborate party. This dismantles the idea of social structure, which was an important element of ancient meals.
In the Kingdom of God as Jesus describes it, our basic human relationships
are redefined.
*Each person is valued and accepted. The most hated are to be blessed. The poorest is to be blessed. The enemies are to be held in prayer.
* Each person has responsibility to care for others. No one is expendable
or outcast.
* We are not in competition with others. We are all loved and accepted as we are without earning a place in the kingdom of God. There is unlimited love and unlimited possibility. We do not have to fight to get ahead.
My temptation is to end the sermon at this point. We can all walk away from the summer of parables and pronounce that we feel good. But warm and fuzzy is not true to the Jesus tradition. These are not bedtime stories. These are stories that caused Jesus to be a threat to the Roman government. His message was so counter cultural that it caused his execution.
What was so powerful in his teaching that it led to his death? I think people were afraid of what could come from his vision. If enough Jewish peasants truly believed that they were able to live into the kind of community Jesus described, God only knows what would happen. It could topple the Roman Empire. That’s because the Roman Empire was built on slave labor, oppression of other
nations and their peoples, war machines and conquering others, and the highest of hierarchies.
Would Jesus’ vision for the kingdom of God work in our world? Perhaps not. It is an ideal; an imagined way of living; a poetic image. “It is more possibility than reality”, as Brandon Scott writes.
The power of Jesus’ vision is that is offers hope. It says that things don’t have to be the way they are. Remember this every time you turn on the news. Things don’t have to be the way they are. We have been shown a different way.
Vaclav Havel was imprisoned for his poems and plays, led the velvet revolution, and became the first President of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic. What Havel has to say about hope explains how parables and the empire of God functioned as a revolutionary symbol for Jesus and his followers.
“Hope,” he says, is “a state of mind, not a state of the world… and it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation… it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons… It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
Can we put into practice Jesus’ vision of the kin-dom of God? Can we make the world a more peaceful, respectful, accepting world? Can we start a revolution where everyone is treated with dignity and the responsibility for another is everyone’s concern? Where compassion is practiced instead of competition? Where enemies are in our prayers and the poor are blessed? Jesus said, “the kin-dom of God is like this…”
Each time we do one of these things, it is as if the sun peaks out from behind and warms up the day. It is the re-emergence of light and life into the world. It gives warmth and light when we have been waiting in the darkness. Let the sun peak out from behind and bring new life to our days! Let it brighten and awaken the spirit of God within us as we work and live out this vision of Jesus.
Resource Used:
Scott, Bernard Brandon. “Re-Imagine the World.” Polebridge Press. 2001