word power
I’m a couple of weeks behind posting my sermons, so now I’m catching up. This sermon looks at the last in Jesus’ contagion of parables in Matthew.
I came across a book in my reading this week whose title would have fit Jesus’ use of parables. It was called How to Do Things with Words. The author of the book makes a claim that words are not merely descriptive in the way we use them; they are creative and evocative: they make things happen. When someone you trust says, “I love you,” they are doing more than giving you an update on their feelings. Those words are full of promises that are lived out, when they are used well.
Words are powerful. And we don’t know what a word means until we know what it does.
What Jesus did with his words, particularly in the parables, was more than just describe how God lives and works on the world. His stories evoke a sense of God’s presence and invite us to be moved, to trust that how things look on the surface are not what is really going on, when it comes to the power of Love. In the shadow of Roman oppression, Jesus talked about peace and justice. In the face of illness and uncertainty, Jesus talked about healing. In the face of hatred, he proclaimed love. The power and promise of these parables, of these words that are more than descriptions, is that God is with us even in moments when God appears most absent.
Words may be powerful, but that is a lot to expect of them, isn’t it?
In this one chapter of Matthew 13 that we have read together over the past three weeks, Jesus told seven parables: the parable of the sower (or seeds, or soils); another story about a farmer who waited until harvest to separate the weeds and the crops; then one about yeast, one about mustard seeds, and then the three on our passage this morning: a treasure found in a field, an expensive pearl, and a fishing net bursting with a fresh catch.
He told the stories one after another, dishing out metaphors faster than people could take them in, or at least that’s how it feels in the way Matthew tells the story. Then Jesus asked a question, which is yet another place where I feel like what gotten written down isn’t everything that happened in that moment.
“Have you understood all these things?” Jesus asked.
They said to him, “Yes.”
That interchange makes me chuckle. Maybe it’s because I spent several years as an English teacher trying to help students engage the power of language and have had any number of moments when I said to students, both individually and collectively, “Do you understand?” just to have them say, “Yes,” in a way that wasn’t terribly convincing.
Sometimes I would answer, “Great. Please, tell me what I just told you,” as a way to see if the words did more than just roll past them. That’s what I think is missing here. I picture Jesus saying, “Great. Please tell me what I said,” and the disciples sort of shuffling their feet and saying, “Well, there was that thing about the seeds. And the pearl! Ooh—and the treasure.”
Then again, perhaps I am selling the disciples short and they answered by talking about how Jesus’ words had taken hold in their lives and changed the way they live. That we are still reading these stories together is a pretty good testament that something like that happened at one point. In Matthew’s account, the whole scene wraps us with these words from Jesus:
“Therefore, everyone who has been trained as a disciple for the God’s realm, is like the head of a household who brings old and new things out of their storeroom.”
The image is of someone who keeps going to their storeroom and bringing out things they need to do what they need to do, things both old and new. It’s another parable, another metaphor. The words we have in our storehouses—in our Bibles, in our tradition, in all that has been handed down to us—are more than descriptions. We are not docents of a museum who task is to make sure things stay well preserved and nothing changes. We are caretakers of an incredible storehouse of resources—of living breathing words—that we can keep coming back to for what we need it the present tense as our circumstances and awarenesses change and grow.
Jesus said to them, “Can you grasp that I am not describing how to enforce the rules or maintain order; I am giving you words that will let the love of God loose in the world, so that when you say, ‘I love you,’ in your words and actions, people will know they can trust it’s real.”
The invitation is to increase our vocabularies, to gather more metaphors, in order that our imaginations might grasp even more about our living, growing, and loving God. Let us not sell our words short by using them to make lists of who’s in and who’s out. Let us not devalue our words by only listening to those who agree with us. Let us not be tempted to think we know all we need to know.
Instead, let us risk new ideas, new metaphors, as we face new things in life (or even old things). Jesus told parables about farming and fishing because he was talking to those who farmed and fished. How then to the images of our lives speak to the presence of God? How can we dig deeper into our words to see what they do and not just what they describe? That kind of word play happens in conversation, in relationship when we are willing to trust and risk with one another.
We are created in the image of a God who is full of surprises, who is larger than all of our imaginations, and whose presence is shot through every layer of our existence, looking for ways to show us how love is at work, even when it doesn’t look like it. Let us live into that image, choosing words that give us the chance to live out that love to everyone around us. Amen.
Peace, Milton
