sermon excerpts: "The Secret World"

(1 Kings 3: 5-12; Matthew 13: 31-33, 44-52)
The LORD appears to Solomon in a dream and offers to grant his next wish, we wonder what the punchline will be. It takes a wise person to know exactly how much they don’t know. And to his credit, the young king seeks a gift that prevents him from becoming a cosmic joke.
He wants wisdom to help him rule. Wouldn’t that be something if our political leaders had such self-awareness?

Solomon wants the knowledge of Good and Evil, which you might recall is the exact same thing that Eve and Adam desired in the Garden in those first days after creation. It should be noted that, here, Solomon wants this knowledge to better serve his kingdom in his ministry as king. Adam and Eve were tempted to gain knowledge for personal gain.

It is a common desire that fuels our faster-paced society that some describe as The Information Age. Knowledge is power, yes, but it is also difficult to understand. Throughout the history of the Bible, people want to know and understand more about God, about the kingdom that is to come.

Jesus’ arrival on the scene didn’t make things easier. Now the rampant questions were about the Messiah, interpreting the ancient prophecies, what will happen next. For the moment, Jesus focuses not on who he is, but on what is at stake. He is directing us all to a way of living and being that would redefine our world.

In thinking of the parables, a comment by musician Peter Gabriel came to my mind. During his Secret World Live tour of 1994, he introduced the title track with the teaser: “Sometimes when you look around, everything seems still and calm on the surface and then you detect a little disturbance. You know for sure that underneath the surface lies some other secret world.”

This is the intent of Christ’s stories – to direct our attention to some secret world that is just beneath the surface of our existence. This is the kingdom of heaven, the Promised Land, just beyond our comprehension.

In all of this, we see that the ordinary and mundane give rise to potential and promise. That hidden within these everyday items is the simple lesson that God’s kingdom is not some distant, heavenly place. It is here, among us and within us. The trouble is we’re not exactly sure what to do, or what it means.

In the parables, we find that these items are tossed aside, buried in the ground, thrown into water. We do not hoard them or keep them to ourselves, they are used, planted, hidden away. This is the life of faith: used and useful, fulfilling a need, active in the present while planning for the future.

That which we are seeking is in front of our faces. It is there closer than we are to ourselves. The kingdom of heaven, of God’s justice, of equality and blessing is hidden before us. As in the revelation of some secret world, the stories of a pearl, of a net, of yeast, of a seed point to another way of being.

Our faith is not some initiation to some secret society with arcane and mystical rites and rituals. We do not enter this secret world to keep it a secret, rather we seek to bring its truth into everyday awareness and consciousness. As in the example of Christ, we bring together the spiritual and the ordinary, the holy and the profane. When our politics and economics and recreation can reflect a full measure of justice, compassion and love, the work of the Messiah is finished and the Kingdom of God has arrived.

In Peter Gabriel’s 2002 concert tour, he introduced the same song with a slightly different understanding: “Sometimes you can see a couple so close together it gets hard to distinguish which one is which. Bits of them disappear into a space that forms between them. This I would identify as the secret world.”

And so too would our understanding of God’s kingdom evolve, mature and change. The heart of our faith is finding closeness and communion with another. This is what Christ modeled for us. Jesus opens a gateway to a secret world that we might glimpse and know, so that we would be inspired to work and change our world to a better one.

As we seek the knowledge and truth, not only of good and evil, but of God’s kingdom, our baptism reminds us of one unchanging, immutable truth: we are not alone, we live in God’s world, secret or not. Amen.