The Kingdom of God is Like

Matthew 13:31-52     July 25, 2026

 

More parables.

Jesus has been telling a lot of parables.

Jesus doesn’t say too much of anything directly.

He doesn’t much say exactly what

we should or shouldn’t do.

Mostly he’s doing things himself and hoping

 we follow suit.

Or he’s using parables and metaphors.

 

Jesus obviously thinks it’s important for us to use our

imagination and creativity when we’re thinking about God.

It’s not enough to just say it, Jesus has to show it.

That’s why if anyone tells you that the Bible is an

instruction manual they’re flat out wrong.

The bible is not at all as dry as a how-to manual.

It’s more like a coloring book, it gives you the lines

and we color it in with our own lives.

 

It really takes a lot of the magic and wonder out

when it’s reduced to a rule book or a  manual.

I don’t even know how you get rules or how-to’s

out of these parables we’ve been hearing.

And especially today.

Jesus is sharing a few images today about

the Kingdom of God. He says, “The kingdom of God is like…”

A lot of times when we hear the kingdom of God,

people think of heaven, eternity, a place we go after we die.

But I think that these parables make it real obvious

that when Jesus says “The Kingdom of God”,

he’s not talking about heaven, because if he was talking

about the promise of a wonderous eternity,

these are some pretty lame descriptions of that:

mustard seeds and yeast.

Not very compelling descriptions of an afterlife.

 

When Jesus says the Kingdom of God,

he’s more talking about what God’s vision and inspiration

looks like when it comes in to our own world.

 

When Jesus says “the Kingdom of God is at hand”

he’s not saying,  “you’re about to die”

He’s saying that the vision of God is coming into the world.

In these parables today, he’s telling people how they can

recognize God’s work in their own communities in their own time.

When we look for God’s work in the world,

what should we look for? A mustard seed and leaven.

 

And then with the last couple metaphors,

what we should do once we find it.

But first the first two: Mustard seed and yeast.

 

One of the things about uncovering the meaning of parables is

trying to understand what  they would have meant to

the people who heard them in the first place.

Although we are familiar with mustard seeds and yeast,

we may not be as intimate with those things as the people

who were around in Jesus time. Growing and home baking

weren’t just hobbies then, they were mandatory for survival.

 

So what about the mustard seed?

Just to interject here, there are two mustard seed images

from Jesus, there’s the one today which is in

Luke too, and then there’s another one where Jesus says that

if we have faith the size of a mustard seed

we could move a mountain.

Today’s is arguably the better one with better imagery.

But just so we don’t conflate the two.

We’re not talking about moving mountains today.

 

But back to this mustard and what people thought of mustard.

 

So - Pliny the Elder was a Roman citizen who

Wrote an encyclopedia of “Natural History” around

the time that Jesus was alive. It covered animals, plants, rocks,

minerals, all things nature. In the entry about the mustard plant

he wrote that “the mustard plant needs no cultivation”

He says “Its seeds are pungent and fiery and very useful”

But in the end he calls it

“a malignant weed with dangerous takeover properties.”

Mustard was actually so invasive that

there was a Jewish law that you couldn’t

plant it even in your own fields because

it would infest everything including your neighbor’s field.

 

So, the kingdom of God is a malignant weed

with dangerous takeover properties.

People are afraid of it, don’t like it.

Maybe even have a resistance to it.

Maybe even a law against it.

The man planting it in his field looks a little crazy,

you would advise him NOT to do it.

But he does it anyway.

And when he does, it becomes this awesome

big plant and the birds take shelter in it.

And the birds may even take the seeds

and drop them around randomly and more can grow.

But it is insidious, and once it establishes itself,

it’s really hard to get rid of.

 

Interesting description of God’s work in the world.

I think most people’s inclination is to say that

God’s work is terrific and awe inspiring, majestic.

Not risky and dangerous and controversial.

  

And Jesus says the Kingdom of God is also like leaven.

The stuff that makes bread rise.

Well, if we think of yeast as this stuff that is

in a neat little envelope that you put in hot water,

then that could be misleading.

Leaven was different in those times.

Leaven was old, fermented dough, like a sourdough starter.

You combined it with the rest of the flour and it would make it rise.

 

But leaven was tricky to use without refrigeration.

If it was bad, it would ruin all the flour you had.

And you wouldn’t know until you tasted it after it was done.

So the kingdom of God is like leaven,

that a woman took and mixed with three measures of flour –

that’s almost 8 gallons of flour.

That’s like 50 loaves of bread.

Almost two months worth of flour.

She could ruin all of it with a little bit of bad leaven.

 

So the kingdom of God is like a woman living

on the edge, it’s a little dangerous.

It looks crazy at first.

You would advise her NOT to do this,

but she does it anyway.

And when she does then there is a terrific bread party,

everyone eats. 50 loaves of bread.

It’s still a little crazy, but that was a really good day.

 

You see these are not rules here.

These are stories, images.

Jesus is dealing with feelings, impressions,

he’s giving us these lines and we’re coloring it in.

 

So how do we identify the kingdom of God?

Based on these parables, when the kingdom of God

is entering into this world, it looks a little crazy.

It looks ill-advised. At first it looks like something

you wouldn’t want in your backyard.

 

It’s not popular. The Kingdom of God – God’s vision

entering our world can look potentially dangerous.

Even a threat. But it becomes something wonderful,

and life-giving, and delicious, but still uncontrollable.

And once it’s in, it’s hard to get rid of.

It’s in there, it changes the landscape.

The paradigm is shifted permanently.

And abundance abounds.

 

I’ll color those lines in with a little history.

I like history if you haven’t caught on yet.

And I think I like it so much because you can’t see the Spirit

working so much in the present tense,

you have to look in the rear view mirror to see it,

and that’s what history is.

 

So, I’ve done a lot of reading on the civil war

and the time leading up to it especially.

And specifically about religious people’s feelings around slavery.

 

Slavery is certainly one of America’s greatest sins and

embarrassments in its history.

And the Emancipation of slaves, and the end of slavery

was certainly a move of the Holy Spirit,

the Kingdom of God coming to the world,

that we can see plainly see now, in the rearview mirror of history.

It was not so clear when they were going through it.

  

If you read newspaper articles, and essays,

and sermons from that time before the war,

like 1830’s on, you can read some essays and

newspaper opinion pieces from Abolitionists,

those people that wanted to end slavery completely,

 

Now everyone wants to see their favorite

hero of history as an abolitionist,

or they want to hear how their denomination was abolitionists,

but it was a very small portion of the population that actually

wanted that.  Most thought compromise was best way forward

or a slow phasing out of  slavery. Even in the north.

Or those in the south wanted to just keep slavery going just as it was.

Many people thought it was just the proper order,

how God had ordained the world to work.

 

And abolitionists were seen by most of the population

of the United States, north and south, as absolute radicals.

They were called extremists, fanatics, lunatics, incendiaries, mad men. Crazy loons.

 

And if we’re honest, the writings of abolitionists

had a pretty hysterical quality to them.

William Lloyd Garrison, one of the leading abolitionists wrote:

 

I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language;

but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen,—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.

 

You can almost hear him pulling out his hair in this

(Even though he doesn’t have much hair)

In contrast, the people opposed to abolition, north and south,

sounded very reasonable, very measured,

like they’re all sipping brandy in a library

This is in contrast from George Fitzhugh a pro-slavery sociologist:

 “At the slaveholding South all is peace, quiet, plenty and contentment. We have no mobs, no trades unions, no strikes for higher wages, no armed resistance to the law, but little jealousy of the rich by the poor. We have but few in our jails, and fewer in our poor houses. We produce enough of the comforts and necessaries of life for a population three or four times as numerous as ours.”

 This is nearly universal of the writings.

Every one of the abolitionists, I’ve read

(except for Frederick Douglass who was always very chill and matter-of-fact) 

basically sounded like the house was on fire, because it was.

And the pro-slavery, or at least the anti-abolitionists

sounded calm as cucumbers.

“We can work this out. Don’t be so radical.”

The kingdom of God coming in the world

looks like a very bad idea at first.

 

I was invited to talk at All Saints at a Lenten

thing they had about community and the

discussion turned to our current times.

And for some reason I don’t remember,

I told them about the hysterical abolitionists.

And someone came up to me later and asked,

“so was your point that we should try and

calm down and be more reasonable”, and I said,

“no we have to be more comfortable with being

seen as hysterical.”

 

The Kingdom of God, the work of God in this world,

is often identified as a malignant weed with dangerous

take over properties. It can seem radical, hysterical, crazy.

It’s a guy planting a danger seed, and like the woman

with the leaven.

 

But we shouldn’t shy away from that.

Because that guy and that woman are the ones

with the courage of the Spirit in them.

The ones that were willing to take the risk.

Like the abolitionists. Very few liked it at first,

but once that thought took hold, once everyone saw it,

that no one should be enslaved, 

that God wanted freedom for everyone, then it took over.

Then everyone wanted to say they were an abolitionist

right from the start.

 

And even when people try and take it out again,

that persistent mustard plant is there,

and the birds are still finding rest in its branches,

and the birds are taking the seeds and dropping them

in the neighbor’s backyard and it keeps growing.

You can’t get rid of it.

 

So, there, I’ve drawn some lines there.

What would we color that in with?

What does the Kingdom of God look like today?

 

And then Jesus gives us another nice image after those.

The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls.

When he finds one pearl of great value,

he goes and sells everything he has to buy it.

Notice the order.

The merchant doesn't sell everything hoping he'll find something worthwhile. 

He finds the pearl first.

And then everything else he has becomes expendable.

That's how the Kingdom of God works.

 

When you catch even a glimpse of what God is doing—

when you see a world where

every person bears the image of God,

where enemies become neighbors,

where the hungry are fed,

where strangers are welcomed,

where forgiveness is stronger than vengeance,

where love proves more powerful than fear—

once you really see that – you can't unsee it.

 

It's like that mustard seed.

It gets into your imagination and starts taking over.

It's like the leaven.

It works its way into every part of your

life until everything begins to rise.

And eventually you realize you've found the pearl.

 

That's why people throughout history

have risked their reputations,

careers, fortunes, even their lives

for the sake of justice and mercy.

From the outside it looks irrational.

Why would anyone give up so much?

Because they have seen something

that everyone else has missed.

The world says they're throwing everything away.

Jesus says they've found the pearl.

 

The Kingdom of God has always looked foolish

to those who can’t see it yet.
It looked foolish when someone planted

mustard in a field where it didn't belong.

It looked foolish when a woman trusted

all of her flour to a lump of old leaven.

And it looked foolish when abolitionists

refused to stop saying the truth about justice, and slavery

and freedom, and the true vision for the Untied States.

The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, 

but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

 

Once you've seen the pearl,

once you've caught sight of God's dream for the world,

there is nothing more valuable.

And maybe that's Jesus' one rule for us today:

 

Don't spend your life protecting the things

that will one day pass away.

Look for the pearl.

And when you find it—

have the courage to let everything else go.

Because the Kingdom of God isn't just worth believing in.

It's worth everything we have.

Don't Be an Eager Weeder

 Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43   7-19-26

 

Wheat and Tares
Ed Morales

Today we have another parable

with another explanation from Jesus.

I told you it was a rare thing for Jesus to give

an explanation for a parable, and now we’ve had two in a row.

But I promise you, it still is really rare.

Don’t expect this from Jesus all the time.

 

So this parable is a pretty simple parable,

someone has planted some wheat, but then

someone else comes in and plants some weeds with it.

So the servants suggest that they should go and pull the weeds out

but the land owner said “no.”

He said if you pull out the weeds, then you’ll lose some of the wheat,

so just let it grow together and when they harvest them,

they’ll figure it out then.

 

I think even before Jesus explains it, it’s pretty obvious:

Don’t try and uproot the bad things because

you could uproot the good things too.

 

And the metaphor for practice is not too difficult either:

Basically, Jesus is telling the disciples not to spend their time

and ministry trying to root out the evil.

Jesus is telling us here that God has allowed

the good and the bad to grow together.

God will figure it out in the end.

I mean, I think this is pretty obvious, right?

 

But of course, through its history,

Christianity has not listened to this obvious lesson at all.

It’s almost as if we’ve willfully ignored this parable.

It seems like Christians have actually

prided ourselves on being “eager weeders”.

The thing that Jesus actually warns us against being.

I mean in the first few hundred years Christianity was

obsessed with people sharing the correct theology.

And if people didn’t align with the church’s teaching,

they would cite them as heretics, deport them,

imprison them, and/or murder them.

 

The Crusades were a series of violent Christian expeditions

sent by decree of the pope in the 11^th and 12^th century

to weed out Muslims and reclaim the Holy Land,

 

The Inquisition were tribunals in the 14^th century

decreed by the pope to weed out heresy,

blasphemy, apostasy and witchcraft.

Using torture and other horrible methods.

 

In even in the US, the KKK was found

as an organization with “Christian values”

that called for a purification of American Society,

meaning weeding out any non-white people,

scaring them and chasing them out of their neighborhoods.

We’ve had lynchings, segregation,  imprisoning Japanese

Americans during World War Two, and other efforts

to weed out the perceived evil, either started or supported by

Christians and their values.

 

The weeding tradition continues and now.

It’s done through sermons and talks and videos,

pastors and leaders never like to actually get their hands dirty.

But it leads their hearers often turn those words

into violence or legislation.

And the eager Christian weeders now seem to be focused

feminists, scientists, immigrants of all sorts –

Latinos and Muslims particularly, and of course,

for the past 60 years or so there’s been an obsession 

with weeding out on gay, lesbian, and especially transgender people,

and of course anyone who supports or speaks up 

for any of these groups of people. Apparently, we all need to be weeded out.

 

Christians are still ignoring this parable

 and trying to root out the weeds. Or what they define as weeds.

And THAT is the big problem: I don’t see any of those groups 

as weeds who need to be weeded out, 

so who gets to determine what a weed is, and who does the weeding?

 

Our history and our present is full of eager weeding 

all around, much of it with Christian leadership, support, approval,

or just silence.

 

The idea of “eager weeding” is that

evil in the world can be identified with a certain individual

or a particular group of people of a certain class,

race, religion, color, or mindset.

 

And if you just get rid of “those people”, whoever

we identify as “those people”, then all will be good.

It’s black and white thinking, dualistic thinking.

It’s either good or it’s bad.

The evil in the world needs to be locked up,

or gotten rid of in order the good to flourish.

 

Now there are people in our world who have done very bad things

and many of them need to be put in prison and separated

from the rest of society. That’s not what I’m talking about.

 

 I’m talking about the habit of Christians to spend

a good hunk of their ministry identifying people that are “bad”.

What, in their mind is evil, and only focusing on that.

And usually the weeds are the outcast of society

who Jesus was definitely a champion of.

 

I told you a couple weeks ago about the teenager

in my church growing up who everyone gossiped

about and said she was pregnant, but she just had a broken leg.

Where did that come from?

 

Because all we heard from the pastors

and from the youth leaders—subtly and overtly—

was about the evil of sex and premarital sex:

don’t make out, and don’t have impure thoughts,

all those feelings are bad, and God disapproves.

venial sins, mortal sins, weed those sins and those sinners out.

 

Everyone was ready to pounce on anyone

who messed up and identify and root out

the bad weed from our congregation

by shaming her and her family away.

And I went to, what I think, was a fairly progressive church

for the 1970’s.

There are a lot of other churches that had a lot more eager weeders.

 

Weeding people. It’s not good. It’s destructive.

And Jesus tells us that we’re  not supposed to do it.

He tells us that weeding out, doing away or banishing the bad

from this world is not our job.

It’s above our pay grade.

 

And even though we’re good, thoughtful, open minded Lutherans,

I think we tend to do the same thing too.

I do it all the time when I’m watching the news.

When I hear about another horrible legislation

or some of the hateful things that people have said,

or I read the comments on social media.

I think to myself if only “those people” were gone, locked up,

then we could get something done in this country.

In reality, I’m an eager weeder too.

I just have my own definition of what is wheat and what is weed.

 

The biggest irony would be today is if we came away from this parable saying: 

“The world would be better if we just got rid of all those “eager weeders”!

 

Christians of all ilk have often strived at being eager weeders.

Either we’ve done it with other people or concepts,

or we’ve turned this dualistic thinking on ourselves.

Against Jesus wishes, we’ve spent an inordinate amount

of time and effort Christians picking at our own weeds.

Trying to achieve some illusion of perfection in our own lives.

Somehow, if we try hard enough, we could become all wheat

 

But Jesus parable here reminds us that

Weeding in a field of wheat does

more harm to the wheat than good.

In this parable, the problem is not

actually with the existence of  the weeds.

The problem is the impatience of the servants to do God’s job.

 

Jesus knows that in our impatience to get rid of the weeds,

we end up doing damage to our own wheat.

Even if we all agreed that the weed are bad,

the weeders become a worse threat than the

weeds we’re trying to weed out.

 

And Jesus knows that if we were to spend all of our own time

trying to purify our own actions and behaving

perfectly and eagerly weeding out all the sin from within

ourselves that we would have little time to spend

on anything else but ourselves.

We could become self-focused and self-centered.

 

Jesus knows that this process of

eager weeding hurts our own integrity

it hurts our own mission,

and it hurts our communities.

 

The point of this parable, I think, is to say this:

Good and evil - The two exist together,

they must exist together on this side of God’s kingdom.

The parable doesn’t try to explain why this is,

(I told you when we were talking about Romans that “why”

is a dangerous theological question)

Jesus only says that this is the way it is,

and how we should behave in the light of that.

 

So what do we do in the face of evil in the world?

Just sit there and let it go and potentially take over?

There are a couple of options that

we can take away from this parable.

 

One thing this parable says to me is that we need

to not be looking to take out people or groups of people

but we should be looking to take out the systems

that create evil in this world.

The root cause of the problem is that the evil one

got in the garden and put their seeds in.

 

So Christians instead of targeting individuals

and groups of people, we could be focusing on

working and preaching and advocating

against the systems that create bad situations

and cause all manner of bad things to happen:

like poverty, economic imparity, racism,

lack of living wage, lack of affordable housing,

the things that cause so much despair and hopelessness.

We should focus on transforming practices and policies,

not weeding out people.

 

Another thing Christians might do is to spend

our time trying to foster the good.

Tending to the wheat, strengthening it,

encouraging the good to grow in this world.

We could spend more time living and

modeling kindness, forgiveness, openness,

understanding, hope, justice, integrity, trust in God.

As disciples, we should be spending our time

fertilizing and fostering good things instead of focusing on the bad.

 

And another thing that I hear in this parable

is that in all of our fields there are a little mix of wheat and weeds.

We remember the Lutheran doctrine

that says that we’re both “saint and sinner”

Good and evil are alive in all of us.

The wheat and the weeds are growing simultaneously.

That means no one is unredeemable. No one is beyond God’s reach.

God is always working on us.

 

And that is the good news of this parable:

Jesus did not come to us for weeding.

Jesus didn’t come to us for purification,

or banishment, or excluding, or dividing.

Jesus came for reconciliation, Jesus came for transformation.

 

Whether someone has had an abundance of wheat

in their life, or an abundance of weeds,

Jesus wants us to know that

God loves all of us and Jesus has hope for all of us.

 

Right now, we live in a messy, mixed-up garden.

where all the good stuff and the bad stuff is intermingled,

working together, growing, changing each other.

And that’s what God wants.

 

It’s not our job to sort it out.

God will do that work. God will sort it all out.

Even though it seems sometimes like the weeds

are winning, God will sort it out.

And what we are right now,

and what this world is right now

is not God’s last word for us.

 

At the present time, the world is both wheat and weed

and we are both wheat and weed.

But when we are finally gathered to God

what God can’t use will all fall away.

And the righteousness in everyone will shine like the sun.

And we will be whole again.