The Kingdom of God | Parable of the Dragnet

Friends, our teaching scripture this morning comes from Matthew

Matthew 13:47–52

chapter 13 verses 47 to 52. It says again the Kingdom of

heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught

fish of every kind. When it was full, they drew it

ashore, sat down and put the good into baskets, but threw out

the bad. So it will be at the end of the

age. The angels will come out and

separate the evil from the righteous, and throw them into

the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of

teeth. Have you understood all this?

They answered Yes. And he said to them, Therefore

every scribe who has become a disciple in the Kingdom of

heaven is like the master of a household, who brings out of his

treasure what is new and what is old.

This is the word of the Lord. It's good to be with you.

If you are new with us. My name is Jared and I'm a a

fair bit shorter than Parker is. There we go.

My name is Jared. I'm one of the pastors here.

It's good to be with you. This morning.

We are going to get to some of the oddity of the passage that

we've just read. But first I want to show you a

picture of Gertrude Stein. This is a picture of Gertrude

Stein by Pablo Picasso. Picasso's nineteen O 6 portrait

of Stein is a painting that she hung above her chair until the

day she died. She sat in a cold room on 90

occasions to have this portrait done of her from Pablo Picasso.

So Gertrude Stein was an American writer who moved to

Paris in 1903, and she spent the next 40 years there writing and

thinking and writing poetry and collecting art.

And she is now most famous for one sentence.

A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

And in their apartment, she and her brother Leo, they were about

30 years old or so. They were intellectuals.

They were relatively financially comfortable, but they weren't,

like, super, super wealthy. And they loved art.

And so they decided to do something that nobody

respectable in Paris was doing at the time.

They started walking in the galleries in the back streets of

Paris, and they started just buying up almost

indiscriminately, every piece of art that they could find that

just sort of caught their eye. And at the time, art was kind of

in a bit of a flux. It was a bit of an eclectic mix,

and it was a moment in the art world when a lot that was being

put out there, a lot that was being painted, was sort of

outside the bounds of what the art world considered good.

And so in 19 O 5, they walked into a salon in the Grand Palais

and they stumbled into an art show where the biggest scandal

of the show was a portrait of a woman with a green face and a

hat that looked like a melting flower garden by a guy named

Henry Matisse. And people hated this picture

when it first came out. But the Steins, they went back

to this art show week after week.

And after five weeks, they ended up buying it for about $100.

And they just kept walking the streets of Paris

indiscriminately picking up pieces of art.

You know, this is a time when art was flooding the streets of

Paris. They stumbled on this back alley

little shop where a former circus clown literally was

trying to sell some paintings by an unnamed 24 year old Spaniard

named Pablo Picasso, The Steins. They bought a famous painting

called Girl with a Basket of Flowers for $30.00.

I don't have a picture of it because it's a naked girl and

she's a minor and I thought that that would not be a good idea.

Gertrude hated the painting at first, but over the next nine

years, working with very limited money, the Steins, they kept

buying paintings. Cezanne before anyone thought

that he was important. Renoir, Matisse.

They ended up with so many Matisse's that they lended out

Matisse paintings to their friends so that they couldn't

display them in their living room on Saturday nights.

They opened up their apartment at 27 Rue de Flore for a weekly

salon, and Picasso came and Matisse came, and Hemingway

would later stop by, and Fitzgerald and Sherwood,

Anderson and Ezra Pound. This became the place to be.

They were walls covered floor to ceiling with art and not every

painting that they bought however made it onto the walls.

The ones that Gertrude had bought that she felt like we're

maybe not quite her flair and not quite her style.

They no longer seem to be alive to her.

There was some paintings that kind of displeased her and you

know, those got consigned to a little backroom that they called

the Salon de refuse the the the salon of the rejected, rejected

paintings in the back corner of their apartment.

So the selection of paintings was always being sorted, it was

always being sort of moved and shifted around, mounted on the

wall, re evaluated. Some would move up to the living

room, some would be back to the refuge.

And the sorting happened slowly over time.

But it could not have happened without this indiscriminate

buying that they participated in.

Most of what they bought is now considered priceless.

The Matisse, the woman with a hat that nobody wanted in 1905,

is now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

So we're going to come back to this again.

The Kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea

and caught fish of every single kind.

When it was full they drew it ashore, and they sat down, and

they put the good into baskets, but they threw away the bad.

So it will be at the end of the age.

The angels will come out and separate the evil from the

righteous, and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there

will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Would you spray with me? Oh Lord, we welcome your

presence. We ask God that you would come

and sort and sift our lives. Give his ears to hear Lord, and

eyes to see in Christ's name. Amen.

So as I'm sure you're aware, this passage is going to need a

little bit of explanation, but we'll get there.

So we've been in this series on the parables, which I'm going to

try to wrap up with a bit of a zinger.

If you were here with us a few weeks ago, Parker preached on

the Pearl of Great Prize following a week of preaching on

the hidden treasure in the field, and he encouraged you and

I to read the next paragraph. How many of you went and did

that in your Bibles? You just opened up your Bible

and you read well. You would have come to the

parable of the dragnet, which is rounded out this way.

Have you understood all of this? They answered yes.

And he said to them, therefore every scribe who's become a

disciple in the Kingdom of heaven is like the master of a

household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is

old. And when Jesus has finished

these parables, he left that place.

So Matthew basically puts the most complex and hard parable at

the end of the collection and basically has Jesus saying, you

got all that right? And they're like, absolutely.

And I'm like, I don't think you did.

So what is actually going on here?

So, friends, the parables are designed to help us lean in.

They're meant to draw us deeper into the mystery of the coming

and unfolding Kingdom in the world.

And at the beginning of Matthew, his disciples asked him, why do

you speak in parables? And he basically tells them that

those who want to see and hear the Kingdom will be the people

who stick around and ask the questions and lean in and things

will eventually begin to make sense is what Jesus says.

Those who have ears to hear, let him hear.

But he also says that those who don't really have the appetite

for it, it's going to be hard to make sense of the things that

I'm saying, says Jesus. And here's the good news already

at the beginning here for you and I is that if our posture is

to stick around, to stay in the room and to keep following the

rabbi who occasionally says some really weird things and tries to

help us understand what the Kingdom of God is like by

telling stories with the occasional unsavory character

like an unjust judge or a tipsy slave owner.

The promise is that somehow all of these different ways of

seeing the Kingdom will accumulate in us something that

comes to be called faith and hope and trust.

It just takes time. And so these parables, they

serve as metaphors and the way that Matthew sort of gathers

them all up and puts them together back-to-back in this

rapid fire setting that we find in chapter 13 of Matthew is

meant to help us understand what the Kingdom of God is like.

The Kingdom of God. This is the primary thing that

Jesus talks about in the Gospel narratives and the way that we

have come to understand what Jesus means when he talks about

the Kingdom of God. Specifically for those of us in

a church like ours, the Vineyard Church, the way that we have

conceptualized what it means when Jesus talks about the

Kingdom of God is a particular theological framework that takes

Jesus to mean that the dynamic activity of God's rule and reign

is breaking into history, into your life and into my life, into

all of the lives around us. That God is actively at work in

the world and in our community and in all of different

situations of your life. And so we live our lives ideally

seeing the world in a different way because God is cultivating

his own desires for the world that he is creating right in the

middle of the one that we're living in.

Does that make sense? God wants the world to go in a

particular direction. He has these deep desires.

He's trying to make the world come into this way.

And God is giving us his desires over time and inviting us to

participate in the rule in the reign of God, breaking into the

present. He's growing in US hearts that

want the things that he wants and works for, the things that

he is working for. And through US, He is doing this

through the ordinary things of our lives, the way we, you know,

love each other, the way we asked for forgiveness or

disperse forgiveness to someone else, these seemingly very

ordinary things. Did anybody ask for forgiveness

this week for anything good? Did anybody disperse forgiveness

this week? OK, these are things that you

should pay attention to, by the way, like, like at the end of

your week, did I ask for forgiveness for anything?

Did I forgive anyone? And if at the end of your week,

you can't think of anything in either of those categories, you

might not be paying attention. So friends, when we sort of

honour one another with our words and we seek reconciliation

as best as we can with the people that we've hurt or who

have hurt us, this is how the Kingdom of God comes.

So friends, the central claim of Jesus is that this reign, this

world where things are operating in line with the desires of God,

which everyone tends to think is coming at sometime in the

future, is actually breaking in from the future back towards

where we live. And it's like leaking out

slowly. That's the picture of the

message of the Kingdom of God that Jesus brings to us in the

Gospels. And what happens is we see

people reacting to that message in all kinds of ways.

You got a Roman centurion servant with no religious

background but the Roman Pagan one that he's been raised on,

believing that Jesus could heal his son from a distance.

And then Jesus praises him for his faith.

While at the same time you have religious leaders and people

responsible for guiding the spiritual lives of the masses

responding with suspicion and envy and concern when they see

Jesus opening the eyes of the blind and causing the lame to be

able to walk. It is a mixed bag of how we all

are responding to this message of the Kingdom of God leaking

into the present. What is this Kingdom like?

The people of surrounding Jesus begin to ask him.

Because it doesn't quite make sense that the ones that we

thought were all about this stuff seem to not quite get it.

And those of us who have been furless from God seem to see

something that others can't quite yet see.

The Kingdom of God is like a sower sowing seed, and the seed

is getting generously and indiscriminately scattered all

around, almost carelessly. But whether the seed takes root,

it kind of depends on the kind of soil, says Jesus.

There are all kinds of people in the world and we are living in

all kinds of seasons in our lives and, and the Kingdom seed

is dropping on particular kinds of soil.

And sometimes that's going to grow and sometimes it's not

going to grow and sometimes it's going to grow in a way.

But later on there are these weeds that are going to come and

choke out the life of the Spirit that God is doing inside of us.

Some of you like, know about the weeds.

Some of you know what the weeds feel like.

You know that God has planted something in your heart and

you're living in a season where it's like, man, I think this

thing's getting choked out. The Kingdom of God is is is

like, is like a little bit of yeast working its way through

the dough or like the tiniest of the seeds in the garden, the

mustard seed, which grows up to be this giant tree where the

birds come and nest. It's like a hidden treasure that

someone finds and sells everything in order to buy in

the field to make it his own. It's like that once in a

lifetime Pearl that when you see it, when you get your eyes

around it, all of the other things in your life of value

begin to sort of fade into the backdrop because this one

particular prize begins to be the thing that you look at.

This is what the Kingdom of God is like.

This is the the story that we hear in the parables.

And I want to close our sermon series on the parables, at least

for now, by saying this. I think the thing that Jesus is

primarily trying to say to the parables is that the Kingdom of

God is coming for everything. It's meant to spread everywhere,

but it's not going to happen all at once or to tighten it up a

bit. Everything and everywhere, but

not all at once. He who has ears to hear, let him

hear. Matthew chapter 13 once again.

Matthew 13 · chapter mention

Again, the Kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into

the sea and caught fish of every kind.

And when it was full, they drew it ashore and they sat down and

they put the good into baskets and they threw out the bad.

So the kind of net that Jesus is referring to in this parable is

what would be called a dragnet, and it's a specific kind of net

that was almost 3 football fields long and it would stretch

across a large portion of the Sea of Galilee.

It was probably 10 or 12 feet on the wings and probably 25 feet

in the middle. And so it was shaped really long

and it kind of went down like this to arc and to sort of model

the bottom of the sea. So get that into your mind.

And three football fields is like 1000 feet long.

And this is basically a wall of netting dragged through the

water by 16 men, 8 on each rope, walking along the shore towards

each other. And a net that size, a dragnet

dragged through the entire water column from bottom up, doesn't

discriminate. It catches everything, every

kind of fish. Everything in its path is

getting swept up in this net that Jesus calls the Kingdom.

It would have picked up a bunch of tilapia, which was the main

kind of fish that they would have been fishing for.

They were actually looking primarily for tilapia.

There were five different kinds of tilapia in that time, and in

that area it was the main stain of the the Galilean diet.

Sardines would have been, you know, side by side with the

tilapia, and those would need to be separated for a separate

processing. You know, we can sell those at

the market. The Romans love their sardines.

And alongside all of the stuff that the fishermen would have

been looking for were all other kinds of fish, catfish, which

really they couldn't do anything with because according to

Levitical law and custom, the catfish would have been

uncleaned or unclean. They were actually, you know,

some of the biggest fish in the sea.

You know, theoretically, it's the thing that, like most people

in Ohio, when they're catching fish looking for catfish.

And I don't know if you've ever tried to eat some catfish, but I

don't like it. I mean, give me some salmon or

some halibut or something like that.

But I don't know how people do it.

If you have a good catfish recipe, you're welcome to invite

me over. So there would have been eels

that would have been caught up into the net, which also were

unclean and they needed to be tossed aside, and all other

kinds of dead fish and diseased fish.

But all of the other things that also would have been resting at

the bottom of the sea, lake bottom debris like sticks and

leaves and. Reeds and branches and stones

and rocks that would get caught in the netting and pottery

shards from broken jars and oil lamps from fishermen who had

tossed over a lamp on the side, and broken fishing gear and and

broken Nets and broken fishing line.

All of it would have been gathered in a dragnet, every

single bit of it. Nothing would have been allowed

to pass through. And so once it got up on the

shore, what would come next is hours of sorting tilapia into

the basket, sardines into this basket, and everything else that

they couldn't eat or that was sort of rotten would get

gathered up and it would get thrown into a fire and get burnt

because they don't want to throw it back into the sea because

they're just going to have to catch it again.

And so they would just burn it. Everyone would have had this

idea in their mind when Jesus said the Kingdom of God is like

a net. The Kingdom of heaven is like a

net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every single

kind. And when it was full, they drew

it ashore, and they sat down and they put the good into the

baskets and they threw out the bad.

The Kingdom of God is coming for everything.

It's coming for everything. It's indiscriminately and

eventually going to gather up every single thing in its path,

the same way that the yeast is going to work its way through

the whole dough. And so many of the parables of

Jesus are talking about the scope or the totality of the

reach of the Kingdom of God. It is broad, it is wide, it is

1000 foot net that's gathering up everything in its pathway.

And theologians, they tell us that Matthew has sort of

stitched all of these various teachings together as a way of

giving Jesus the opportunity to lay out clearly this idea that

whatever part of your life or my life or whatever part of the

world that you inhabit that you think cannot be reached by the

Kingdom, it's coming for you. It's coming for everything.

So Jesus is is asking us to imagine the whole world is a sea

full of various kinds of fish. And the net of the Kingdom is

coming from top to bottom and slowly pulling everything up,

dragging everything in its path to to the shore to be sorted in

some sort of cosmological sorting, which we'll get to.

But here's the thing, if that's happening at a macro level, that

all the fish in this cosmic sea are going to get pulled in by

the net of the Kingdom, what it also means is that on a micro

level, in my own life, it's also going to happen that way.

The Kingdom of God is coming for everything, and the net of the

Kingdom is so big and all-encompassing that it's going

to reach everywhere. So if you were to imagine,

friends, that the net of God's Kingdom is gently passing

through the waters of your life right now, what are some of the

things that you would hope would get caught up in the Kingdom,

like just right now in your life?

What are the parts of my life that hope that you hoped would

get swept up, that you hope will get swept away into the net?

Do you have those things in your life that you're longing for God

to kind of sweep up and help sort you out?

Man, I sure do. Maybe the more important

question might be this. Is there anything that you're

not quite ready to have swept up in the net of the Kingdom,

Anything that you're hoping will just sort of find its way to the

bottom and sort of Nestle in and maybe miss the net?

Maybe the metaphor is going to break down a minute.

But you, you get what I'm saying though, right?

Sometimes there's a sense in which that we have this very

clear cut of what we want to give to God, and then we have

these other things that we're not quite ready to relinquish.

So the people who are surrounding Jesus, asking about

the Kingdom of God, would never have imagined that the Kingdom

of God was something that would come for all of the little

pieces of their lives and touchdown in the minutiae of

their thoughts and desires and their emotions and their hopes.

The way that they, you know, eat and drink and the way that they

play or they don't play, and the way that they work, the way that

they are intimate and with whom they are intimate with.

They would never have imagined that the Kingdom of God would

reach to such places. But the Kingdom is coming for

everything and everywhere. And this language of totality,

it stretches its way through the unfolding understanding of the

Kingdom as the earliest communities are trying to make

sense of how it is that their lives begin to feel as though

they're being sifted by something.

All throughout the letters of the New Testament, the apostle

Paul and other writers are Speaking of the totality of the

Kingdom of God. In Paul's first letter to the

Corinthians, the church at Corinth, he writes this.

He says Then comes the end when he delivers the Kingdom to God

the Father, after destroying, destroying every rule and every

authority and power. For he must reign until he has

put all his enemies under his feet.

The last enemy to be destroyed is death, for God has put all

things in subjection under his feet, meaning Christ, that God

may be all and all. And to the church in Ephesus he

writes, he raised him from the dead, and seated him at his

right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and

authority, and power and dominion, and above every name

that is named, not only in this age, but also in the one to

come. He put all things under His

feet, and gave him as head over all things to the church, which

is His body, the fullness of him who fills All in all.

And pulling from Psalm chapter 8, you put all things under

Psalms 8 · chapter mention

subjection under His feet. And now putting everything in

subjection to Him, he left nothing outside of His control.

At present the writer of Hebrews says we do not yet see

everything that is being subjected to him.

Don't miss that part. We can't quite see it.

But perhaps the most encouraging of them all, therefore, God has

highly exalted him Jesus, and bestowed on him the name that is

above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should

bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every

tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

To the glory of God the Father. Everything is being gathered up

by the Kingdom, every knee, every tongue, everywhere in

heaven, on earth, under the earth, beyond the earth.

But it's not happening all at once.

At present we do not see everything that God has under

His reign. Are you guys tracking with me?

Do you guys feel any part of this like the everything, the

everywhere, but particularly the not all at once part man?

That part is like, come on. The invitation that Jesus is

extending to us in this parable is an invitation to trust that

the long, slow, all-encompassing, indiscriminate

work of God is going to gather up all of the things.

All of the things that we see in the news.

All the world leaders making their plans, all the ups and

downs of the price of oil, the price of eggs, all the ways that

those things are hitting us. All the all the different policy

decisions that are being plotted.

And most certainly all the bits and pieces of our lives and the

ones that we love and the ones that don't love us.

All of it is getting gathered up and the net of the Kingdom and

the Kingdom itself is going to sort the good from the bad, the

things of destruction from the things that give life.

So the parable of the dragnet is often paired in kind of

conversation and theological reflection with another parable

from this same passage. They have the same idea, and I'm

going to read this one. He says, by the way, this comes

just a few sort of paragraphs before the dragnet 1.

He says he put before them another parable.

The Kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed

good seed in his field, but while everybody was asleep, an

enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and then went away.

That'd, that'd be terrible, wouldn't it?

And so when the plants came up and they bore grain, then the

weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the

householder came and said to him, Master, did you not sow

good seed in your field? Where then did these weeds come

from? Where Then he answered, and he

says, an enemy has done this. And the, the servants, the

slaves, they said to him, then do you want us to go and gather

them, meaning the weeds? But he replied no, for in the

gathering of the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with sin.

Let both of them grow together until the harvest.

And at the harvest time, I will tell the reapers, collect the

weeds 1st and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather

the wheat into my barn. Really, Jesus, you want us to

live with all these weeds up in here in my life in the world.

And the particular weed, you know, other translations, they

draw this out more particularly in the Greek.

But the particular weed that the enemy in this parable sows,

those nasty enemies, most scholars identify as a weed

called Darnell or sometimes called bearded Darnell or false

wheat. So Darnell is almost

indistinguishable from wheat in its early stages of growth.

That'll preach a little bit, right?

All kinds of things that are happening that people say are

the Kingdom. They think it's the Kingdom, but

it just might be false wheat. And before we go too judgy on

the world, like the same is happening in our own lives.

There's all kinds of things in our own lives that we think,

man, I, I think I got this licked.

I think I got it down. I think I know what this Jesus

thing is about. And we go along in our in our

lives and then eventually we get to realize, I think I just been

like looking at a bunch of weeds in my life.

So Darnell is the most indistinguishable from wheat.

And these early stages of growth, the shoots look the

same, the blades look the same. You, you genuinely cannot tell

the difference between the weeds and the wheat at a particular

time until the heads form, at which point the wheat head is

heavy and gold and it bends with the weight of the grain and the

Darnell head is lighter and thinner and it stays upright.

Jesus says, resist the urge. Stay with me here to sort

everything all at once. Give the field some time, let

the wheat mature, let the weeds show themselves to be the weeds.

And in the end, it's not even your job to sort it out.

Both the dragnet parable and the weeds among the wheat parable

are both more or less saying that this time that we are in

right now is going to come to an end and there are going to be a

lot of things that need to get sorted out.

And Jesus is using what theologians call apocalyptic

language. It's this language that's rooted

in the Hebrew Scriptures, prophets like Daniel and Isaiah

and Jeremiah. The furnace of fire and the

weeping and the gnashing of teeth are apocalyptic imagery.

It's like a whole genre of a way of talking and thinking that

honestly is completely lost on us.

We have no way to sort of like really interpret what that kind

of language is pointing towards. Like if you have teenagers, you

know that there's a complete vocabulary that has emerged in

the past decade where words have come to mean things and

reference things that I have no idea what they mean.

If you're over the age of 40, there is a different language

happening at a register of the 20 somethings.

Do you, you feel me a little bit.

OK, apocalyptic language kind of works like this.

It's the kind of a insider kind of language.

Jesus is borrowing language from the prophets who used a kind of

language to indicate that there are some extraordinary things

that are going to take place someday.

And many of us were taught to read these passages as literal

furnaces of fire that are going to burn forever with the wicked

inside of them. And I just need to say to you, I

do not think that that is what these passages are saying, and I

do not think that that's what's going to happen.

So we can continue to talk about that part.

Is there going to be a time of judgement where things are going

to get sorted, where good is going to be named as good and

evil is going to be named as evil?

Absolutely, that is going to happen, and it's going to happen

on a cosmic level. It's going to happen about

global and historical events, and it's going to happen for my

life and for your life. There is going to be a day,

Friends, where we will stand before God, and God is going to

separate the things inside of us that are good and holy and

relinquished and surrendered to Him.

And that is the wheat. And there are a whole bunch of

other things that God is going to say that is not good, and

we're going to have to sort that out.

So my reading of this parable and others like it is that what

Jesus is trying to stir up for the people is an imagination to

let the Creator of the world do the sorting and that we

ourselves can rest. That everything and everywhere

is going to get pulled up on the eschatological shore and God

himself is going to sit there and sort out the good and the

bad. Are you tracking with me here?

OK, what is the Kingdom or what can be in the Kingdom, or who

can be in or out or what the task of the Kingdom is or

whether it's with that set of politics or that set of

politics. There is this temptation that we

have to do the sorting right now.

And Jesus is saying that all of that dividing up that you think

is your job is not actually how the Kingdom of God works.

So the friends, this human tendency that we have is that we

want to make judgements too soon about what goes in the net or to

pull things out of the things in the field that you think are now

weeds. But that job is for somebody

else at some other time. And what it's meant to do is

bring a little bit of relief to the pressure that you feel about

the weeds among the wheat and about the bad fish among the

good ones. Everything Everywhere, but not

all at once. One of the greatest temptations

of the modern world is to divide up our life into the things that

we think are spiritual and the things in our life that we think

should be categorized in some other way.

There's an old story of soldiers in the day of Charlemagne

holding their swords in their hands above the waters that they

were being baptized in. I have no idea if that story is

actually true, but it does make me wonder if there are things in

my life that I cling to that I'm not ready to let go of and trust

into the hands of God. You know, things that I've

already sorted as not belonging to the Kingdom are not important

enough to bring into the conversation with God.

And so I just sort of wonder in closing, whether there is

anything at all that you would sort of want to bring into the

net and just say, you know, God, I know that you're coming for it

anyway. Let's just get it done right

now. Would you scoop it up in your

net? Lord, the Kingdom of God is

gently coming for everything, everywhere, and it's not going

to get sorted all at once. You know that thing that really

bothers you about the world or that unjust system that you're

fighting or those people who are doing harm to your people, your

loved ones? You know, keep fighting for

justice. That's the Kingdom of God

working in you. Someone has sown weeds among the

wheat and the Kingdom of God is like a landowner that is

responsible for the sorting of the weeds from the wheat.

The same is about your life and about your spouse's life.

You know the weeds that you think are growing in the lives

of your adult children. Some of you, there's weeds and

wheat growing together and you can trust your kids into the

hands of God. There's a way of dealing with

the weeds that theologian Robert Capon calls the right hand of

power. The right hand of power or

right-handed power is direct and it's obvious and it's coercive.

Sometimes it can be actually really effective.

It's the power of force and control and intervention with

visible results. And it's the power that we

instinctively understand and respect.

And when we imagine God acting in the world, we almost always

imagine God doing it with this sort of right-handed power.

God fixing things. God punishing the wicked, God

rewarding the righteous, God intervening dramatically to set

things straight. Right-handed power is power of a

king sitting on throne, positioning armies all around

that's right-handed power and it's something that we want God

to exert when we pray to God. God, would you just do

something? You guys ever pray that in your

life? Would you just do something, RIP

out the weeds, you know, get out the bad fish?

And Robert Capon's argument is that right-handed power is real,

that God has it, he uses it, but it's not God's preferred mode of

operation and it's emphatically not what the parables are about.

What the parables are about is what Capon calls left-handed

power. It's indirect.

It's hidden. It's paradoxical.

It seems to be a bit weak. It works through smallness and

obscurity and death and loss and failure, and it looks to the

world like defeat, but often looks like faithfulness.

It's the power of a seed buried in the ground.

It's the power of a wife praying for her husband.

It's the power of parents praying for their kids.

It's the power that looks like it's losing because somebody is

dying in the process. And listen, I know enough about

some of your stories to know that some of you are doing

really faithful things that look like death.

It's the power of yeast hidden and flour.

It's the power of a man who sells everything and buries a

treasure back in a field. It's the power of a shepherd who

leaves 99 sheep to go after the 1, and ultimately the power of a

God who dies on a cross and gives up the right to have

everything sorted. Right now this is the story that

we live in France. left-handed power does not look like power.

It looks like weakness and foolishness and waste and

failure. And it operates by going down,

not by going up and to the right.

And it achieves its purpose not by overwhelming opposition, but

by undermining it from below. So come back to this story a

little bit, this painting from Gloria Stein.

One of the things I love about the story about the Stein art

collection is that they bought art almost indiscriminately.

They just kept buying it and storing it, and most of what

they bought had already been rejected by other people.

They prejudged the art the Society of France thought was

good at the time. But the Steins just kept buying

it, and they thought they knew wheat from the weeds.

And it turns out that they were wrong.

The paintings that the Steins bought for hundreds of dollars

in dusty back alley galleries are now valued in the billions.

Curators at the Met spent years tracking down the works from

Stein's collection and the ones in the front room and the ones

in the Salon de Refuge. And listen, don't miss this.

Some of the rejected paintings, the ones that didn't even make

Gertrude's wall, the ones that she thought had lost their

luster and she relegated to the backroom, they turned out to be

among the most important works of the 20th century.

You do not know. The things that you have stopped

paying attention to are some of the most prized and important

things to the heart of God for your life.

You do not have eyes to see, and neither do I.

And this is the story that we live in.

So nobody at the time knew which was which, which was going to be

a bad painting, which was going to be a, a glorious painting,

not even the times themselves. And the sorting had to take

place over time, over a long process.

And some of what was thought to be not so good in the end turned

out to be priceless. So, friends, let me close with

this. I know I'm a little long.

There are things in our lives that have lost their shine and

they do not feel like they are worthy of the front room salon

of your life. It feels like, you know,

whatever God could have done in this area of my life is probably

not going to happen. I'm just going to store this

thing away. I'm not going to think about it.

Just let it run its course. You know, some of you that is

your marriages, some of you that's your addictions, some of

you, it's your longings that are unmet.

And I'll just say I, I know that my wife would not mind me saying

this. There have been seasons of our

marriage that we were convinced we're certainly weeds.

And it turns out it was wheat all along.

It just took time. God was doing something in the

midst of us laying down our life.

I, I hope my wife will agree with me.

Amen. Thank you.

OK, I wasn't calling for an Amen, but I just just realizing,

I thought that's what I think. But He's coming for everything.

The Kingdom is at work everywhere.

And when we come into the presence of God, remembering

that it's not going to happen all at once, we can trust that

God is the one that's going to sort it out.

Invite the worship team to come back up.

We're going to close with worship

ministry, I just want to ask you to think if there's anything

that you have kind of relegated to the backroom, anything that

you're not aware that God is really touching in your life.

Maybe some things that you've forgotten about that you would

like to sort of bring back into your awareness and conversation

with God. We would love to pray with you

about that. I'm also, I just have a sense

that there's some of you that the sort of like, is it really

going to come for everything question.

It just brings up a ton of grief for you.

There are things that you've longed for the Kingdom to touch

and it just hasn't touched yet. And I would just ask for you, if

you're in that situation, if you're just bringing some grief,

I would ask that you would bring that into the presence of God.

We would love to pray for you and we would ask that the

Kingdom of God will come today. And in your life, would you

stand as we, as we head into worship?

If you are in our prayer team, could we just have you come and

make some space to pray for other people?