Let’s start with the absolute best part of the gospel today and that is when Jesus asks the disciples, “Do you understand all of this?” And then they say emphatically, “Yes!” We all know they don’t understand, because they never really understand, particularly when they say they do. So, you’re in good company if you too don’t’ fully understand.

Parables are meant to be ambiguous to get us all to wonder and think. They are made to have multiple points of views to consider, meaning they can be interpreted different ways. You can wonder whether you’re the mustard seed, the bush, or the birds that make their nests. We can wonder, who’s the earth or the field or the pearl or the treasure? Who’s the man who sells everything? Is it Jesus who gave everything for us? Or is it us?

At the center of all these parables is the kingdom of heaven, so what is that exactly? What is Jesus spending so much time talking about. I think of the kingdom of heaven as God’s reality of justice and love being embodied here on earth that has yet to come, but that which we also get to see glimpses in moments of love and grace. From these parables, it seems the kingdom of heaven is an expansive, life-giving reality that starts as something tiny and hidden before it becomes big or totally transforms the thing it is hidden in.

Jesus tells us the yeast is hidden in the flour (hidden is actually a better translation of the Greek), but this is a parable. So, what is the flour? Is it the world? Is it our families, neighborhoods, or communities? What in our world is being transformed by God into a source of life and nourishment? How does this transformation happen? Well, this parable suggests that the kingdom of God is here and available now, but it might very well take our engagement to bring to fruition, like the woman making the bread.

I believe there’s many ways to answer the question about where the yeasty goodness of God’s kingdom is hidden and what it transforms and what our role might be. And we can find God’s pearl of great value in surprising places, like mountains and sunsets or on city streets and subways when we find ourselves surprised by love, beauty, and joy. So, as you hear these parables, your mind might be going in different directions than me and that is 100% valid. The goal of Jesus’ parables is to get us to scratch our heads and think. So, again, when the disciples say that they totally understand Jesus, they seem to be missing the point. These are not math questions with straight forward answers, after all.

So, here’s my interpretation for this week. I wonder if what God most needs to transform in this world is us and what it’s like to be human, meaning our own internal realities.

If we imagine the full expression of the kingdom of heaven on earth will be like, I imagine people will likely feel pretty darn good. We’ll enjoy all the goodness of a world that prioritizes love, justice, dignity for all people, and a thriving planet. But the transformation of the world would also mean that the fear, shame, or sense of inadequacy that can plague us would be gone, as well, right? So, the kingdom of heaven has to unfold inside of us, making us new, as well. There are lots of areas of our world that need transformation. We have lots of places that need the kingdom’s yeast, and our internal realities are also all on that list.

So, what might the kingdom of heaven feel like inside our bodies and in our minds? I read somewhere along the way that the Greek word for salvation, soteria, could also be translated as safety, healing, or spaciousness. I love the idea that one of God’s promises is that we will feel so safe in the world with such a sense of belonging and sufficiency that our experience of God’s kingdom will be or is a sense of internal spaciousness.

So, let’s take a moment and just notice how spacious, or not, we feel in our bodies right now. If you’re like a lot of folks, you may notice some tension around your midsection or some heaviness around your heart or just some tension in your face or neck. Or you may be feeling wonderfully spacious. Let’s just take a moment to notice. What words would you use to describe your internal reality? Is there some transformation you might want to experience there? For a moment, let’s invite in the spaciousness of God to live in our bodies. (Feel free to tune me out and pray for God’s spaciousness and imagine it filling your body and soul. You’ll get the point of the sermon that way, too.)

Thinking of Jesus’ parables again, what if we are among the places where God’s seed is planted or yeast is hidden so that our whole beings and therefore our lives are transformed into places of shelter and nourishment for others? Just the image of being a lovely, healthy tree that supports the life of many hopeful and expansive to me.

But Jesus keeps going with the parables. The next two are about people who found something hidden, something small but so precious that they gave everything they had for the sake of the precious thing. Again, this is a parable and not financial advice, right? And so I wonder about the experience of discovering the treasure of God’s kingdom unfurling in us and what it means to reorient our lives in response to this discovery, not for the sake of hoarding the goodness for ourselves but so that we become places of safety and nourishment for everyone. We can prioritize cultivation of God’s spaciousness in us to become places of refuge, to become sustenance.

So, what about the parable of the net and the fishes. If we continue our line of thinking about the kingdom of God transforming us, anyone who’s done a lot of therapy like me can tell you the process of healing may very well dredge up the good, the bad, and the ugly, right? For example, it’s pretty common for people to believe they are not truly worthy of forgiveness, grace, or love. And frankly, these sorts of destructive thoughts and beliefs should be put in a fire. They do not honor God’s handiwork in you, dear friend. Most likely, a lot of the ways that you feel anything other than spaciousness in your body are grounded in beliefs that Jesus would not agree with and they gotta go, at one point or another for your sake and for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.

Even though I’m talking about the transformation of ourselves as individuals, the kingdom of God within us does not stay inside us. The kingdom of heaven is so much bigger than our mere selves. Jesus gives us the images of a tree from a tiny seed or bread to feed an army from tiny yeast. These images of the tree and the bread are not only large, but are inherently relational. No one can eat 50 loaves of bread alone, after all. Even if the kingdom of God unfolds in us, alongside so many other places, the kingdom that is in us is not just for us. It is for the sake of the world. That sense of spaciousness in us allows our focus to move from our suffering and fears so that we can attend to the needs of others without neglecting ourselves.

In the letter to the Romans, Paul gives us a sense of the scope of God’s reality in relationship to us. He tells us, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, ³⁹ nor 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.” Nothing in the world will separate us from God’s kingdom unfurling around us, but also in us, for the sake of us all.

I truly believe we all walk around with not enough spaciousness in us, not enough soteria, not enough salvation in us on a regular basis. We hold too tightly to our judgements and what we think we know and not tightly enough to what Jesus tells us; that we’re all loved, included, and wanted no matter how much we condemn ourselves or others. The kingdom of heaven begins again and again in small and hidden places, waiting to go crazy with life and goodness when it finds that good soil that is willing to become a new thing for the sake of the kingdom.

Like parables, there’s many ways to talk about the joy of not being separated from the love of God and Jesus. I would bet that each of us would have different ways of explaining why Jesus is important to us. But for me, what I’m most grateful for today is that the work of becoming spacious inside, becoming the tree that supports life, becoming the bread that feeds a village, is not my work to do. In fact, I probably best participate in God’s intention for my salvation by doing what it takes to soften and release how I can cling to judgement and fear, to soften the soil of my being so that the kingdom has room to grow.

I am grateful that life is not all up to me and it’s not all up to you, because God and God’s many, many angels surround us on our way. God’s promise of spaciousness, justice, and goodness in ourselves and in this world remains. It’s here for us. And we are freed, bit by bit from our own constriction, to experience God’s blessed spaciousness in us for the sake of God’s blessed spaciousness and grace in the world. May it be so for each of us.

AMEN