Sermon:  “Look for Holy Love,
a Priceless Treasure”

Prayer:   “May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts and minds here together be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.”

I’ve said before that one way to read the Bible is to hear it as one big love story between God and humanity – that’s my favorite way to read scripture.  But a lot of people, I know, see the Bible as a big, heavy rule book, or policy manual – a kind of moral door stop – or maybe just a long, scolding sermon to make us feel guilty about everything.  And the way this passage from Matthew ends is kind of supports that.  I was cracking up in our Thursday Bible study when I heard this part of Matthew 13 read aloud, because it hit me how the dialogue here between Jesus and his disciples unfolds.  Today’s text is in a section rich with interesting one-liners about the Kingdom of Heaven – “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed,” “The Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast,” “The Kingdom of Heaven is like hidden treasure.”  These metaphors are so rich with meaning:  “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; ⁴⁶on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.

But then it takes this…turn:  ⁴⁷“Again,” Jesus says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; ⁴⁸when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. ⁴⁹So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous ⁵⁰and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. ⁵¹“Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.”  “Yes, Sir.  No more questions.  We do not wish to be thrown into the fire like stinking, rotted fish.  No, Sir. No more questions.”  You know, these lectionary readings today give us excellent examples of texts where the Hebrew Scripture story of Jacob’s love for Rachel, here in Genesis 29, and the Apostle Paul’s beautiful, poetic letter about the love of Jesus for this world in Romans 8 are both practically overflowing with the Good News of God’s love.  I’ll get to them in a minute.  But this passage from Jesus!  I don’t know about you, but a threat like that kind of makes me want to go hide under the bed. 

I was just this morning fixing cereal for breakfast and sorting rotten strawberries from the ones that were still good.  Some of them were kind of halfway OK – you could cut away the bad parts.  But fish aren’t like that.  When fish goes bad, you can’t deny it.  There’s no going back.  There’s no saving it.  I had a friend who went off on a business trip one summer and left her car in long-term parking, and she hadn’t realized that the shrimp she’d gotten from the grocery store had fallen out of one of those, you know, flimsy plastic shopping bags. And so it got left there under her driver’s seat.  Locked in her car in the hot North Carolina sun for 10 days.  The car was “totaled.”  There was no cleaning it.  She never could get the stench out of it.  And so, we have this warning from Jesus that we could actually allow our own lives to “go bad” that way.  It is possible to mess things up so thoroughly we can’t find our way out.  And so, the truth is, by playing the tough guy here in this parable from Matthew, I think Jesus does us a favor.  He reminds us to reach out and accept God’s love for us, to really treasure it.  He reminds us that we should never take Holy Love for granted.

You remember that famous line that Jack Palance has in the movie City Slickers?  It was so great!  We were all quoting it back in 1991, when the movie came out – 30 seconds of Gospel truth about the meaning of life, Old West style.  The tough old cowboy Jack plays asks the “city slicker” Billy Crystal, “Do you know what the secret of life is?  This.” and he holds up one finger.  And Billy says, “What? Your finger?”  But Jack answers, “One thing.  Just one thing.  You stick to that and everything else don’t mean anything.”  “That’s great,” Billy says, “but what’s the one thing?”  And Jack says, “That’s what you gotta figure out.”  And for Billy, by the end of the movie, he figures out his “one thing” is not his career but the love of his wife and kids.  He finds his home life, and not his job, is the “pearl without price” that he most needs to treasure, because that’s where he finds his “Holy Love.”  Have you found that one thing yet for you?  The Good News is you don’t have to be married with children to have it.  There are many places in this world to find “Holy Love” – and one of them might even be this church!

By finding so many ways to talk about the “Kingdom of Heaven,” Jesus is pointing us to a very big love – love bigger even than the romantic love of a great life partner or any single human family.  He’s talking about God’s endless love, love eternal and imperishable – the Holy Love that God pours out for us both in this life and the next.  And this is not love we have to travel very far to find.  God’s Holy Love is as near to us as our next breath, and – mystery of mysteries – may never be closer to us than in our last breath.  When all else is past and done, if we have the chance to look back on our lives and sort out the good from the bad, this truth from Jesus remains.  It is not a threat but a promise – a promise that as beautiful and wonderful as this life can be, our whole earthly life might be just the first act of God’s plan for us, a warm up to greater things to come.

But here’s the thing – DURING our earthly lives, it can be very hard to be patient with God, with God’s timing.  That’s the challenge for us.  How can we stay focused on that “one thing” that most important, according to Jesus – the gift of Holy Love from God to us?  How can we accept the invitation to be in loving relationship with the God who made us, especially when things are not turning out exactly the way we had hoped?

That’s what poor Jacob had to struggle with in our story from Genesis.  Here, you might remember from last Sunday’s story, the poor guy had made a terrible mistake – cheated his brother out of an inheritance and run all the way from his home in Beer-sheba (in the southern-most pasture lands of Judah) to find protection at the home of his mother’s brother Laban more than 450 miles away in Haran, in Southeastern Turkey.  That’s a long way by foot – farther even than our Senior High Youth will travel in their vans when they leave on their mission trip to Orland, Maine, next Sunday – if they turned north in Maine, 450 miles would take them all the way north to the Canadian border!

He went a long way, but once there got a job with Uncle Laban and fell in love with his “graceful and beautiful” daughter Rachel.  Even so, her “bride price” was 7 years of hard labor.  But young Jacob is deeply in love – infatuated at least – and he considers her worth the high price.  He does his time on the farm.  He marries her.  Then, the morning after his wedding, he finds out he’s been tricked by the dad.  He’s been swindled out of the future that was due to him.  He must have been furious.  He ended up with the older sister, the one whom the Bible in this translation, kindly enough, says, had “lovely eyes.”  Other translations of the Hebrew say her eyes were “interesting” or “unusual” – which has left Torah scholars wondering for generations.  “Unusual eyes” as in Elizabeth Taylor’s lavender ones, or “unusual” as in cross-eyed?  In any case, we are left to assume she was not the first choice of a young man with not much more on his mind than his wedding night.  He didn’t have the life experience or wisdom yet to know that a good wife might have more to offer a man than superficial beauty.

But for those who know the whole story, we realize that God had a plan for Jacob’s life.  As was promised to his father Isaac and his grandfather Abraham, he was to become the father of a whole nation – his name would soon to be changed to “Israel.”  (Sneak preview of “coming attractions”: that’s the Bible story for next week.)  His 12 sons came from these 2 wives (Leah with 6 and Rachel with 2) and their two slaves (Bilhah and Zilpah) with 2 sons each.  This is a great text, by the way, to quote if anyone starts preaching to you about the wonderful “family values” in the Bible that say marriage is always be between one man and one woman, those who might accuse us in an “open and affirming” church of slipping from Biblical morality.  You can just say, “Oh yes, let’s turn to Genesis 29, shall we?  Polygamy, slavery, murder – it was all so wonderful!”

Anyway, the point is that nothing could separate Jacob from the love of God for him – not his greed, not his dishonesty, not his disrespect for his father – not this cruel trick at his wedding when the tables are turned on him and HE is the one deceived in the dark.  Jacob has to learn patience, as he works another 7 years to win the hand of his beloved Rachel.  And at the end of his life, I think it’s significant that he asks his sons to bury him not with Rachel but with Leah, the one with the “nice eyes.” Maybe after all those years, he came to learn something about Holy Love after all.

When we get to the end of our lives, as Jesus says, we come to look back and see with something approaching God’s perspective – we can see the Holy Love that we should have treasured all along.  Why not start treasuring that “pearl of great price” today?  Jesus offers his hand to us right now, because the church is said to be the holy bride of Christ – we are his beloved, the ones he promises to love and to cherish until the end of time.

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.

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Genesis 29:15-28

¹⁵Then Laban said to Jacob, “Because you are my kinsman, should you therefore serve me for nothing? Tell me, what shall your wages be?” ¹⁶Now Laban had two daughters; the name of the elder was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. ¹⁷Leah’s eyes were lovely, and Rachel was graceful and beautiful. ¹⁸Jacob loved Rachel; so he said, “I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel.” ¹⁹Laban said, “It is better that I give her to you than that I should give her to any other man; stay with me.” ²⁰So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her. ²¹Then Jacob said to Laban, “Give me my wife that I may go in to her, for my time is completed.” ²²So Laban gathered together all the people of the place, and made a feast. ²³But in the evening he took his daughter Leah and brought her to Jacob; and he went in to her. ²⁴(Laban gave his maid Zilpah to his daughter Leah to be her maid.) ²⁵When morning came, it was Leah! And Jacob said to Laban, “What is this you have done to me? Did I not serve with you for Rachel? Why then have you deceived me?” ²⁶Laban said, “This is not done in our country—giving the younger before the firstborn. ²⁷Complete the week of this one, and we will give you the other also in return for serving me another seven years.” ²⁸Jacob did so, and completed her week; then Laban gave him his daughter Rachel as a wife.

 

Romans 8:28, 31-32, 35-39

²⁸We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose…. ³¹What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? ³²He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?

³⁵Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? ³⁶As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.” ³⁷No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. ³⁸For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, ³⁹nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

 

Matthew 13:44-52

⁴⁴“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. ⁴⁵“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; ⁴⁶on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it. ⁴⁷“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; ⁴⁸when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. ⁴⁹So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous ⁵⁰and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. ⁵¹“Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.” ⁵²And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”