My Blog

Tag: Parables of the Kingdom

  • Sometimes it’s the little things…

    Cicada5I was outside in the garden this morning and noticed a familiar sound,  that of cicadas. Like many of you, I grew up hearing the sound of cicadas in the trees of my yard. Perhaps it is because I became accustomed to that sound at an early age, but I find it both familiar and comforting. However, this is not the case with some people.

    An American pastor was traveling to England on an ocean liner a few years after the Second World War. He and an Englishman struck up a conversation. The pastor learned that the Englishman had lived in London during the war and experienced the terror of Nazi air raids. After the war, he moved to Missouri but was now returning home. He liked living in America but was returning to England because the sound of cicadas was driving him mad. Here was a man who had lived through the horrors of war, air raid sirens, bomb shelters, children running for their lives, and exploding bombs in London, but he was unable to live with the sound of a bug.

    Sometimes it’s the little things that get to us, isn’t it? We often find strength to rise above the big things – a major illness, the death of a loved one, financial woes, loss of a job. But some little things try our patience – a shoelace that won’t stay tied, some grammatical error, a musical selection, a splinter in a finger, someone else’s annoying habit.

    In the Parables of the Kingdom (Matthew 13:31-52), Jesus reminds us to pay attention to the little things – a coin, a pearl, a weed, a widow, an orphan, a hurt. If we are alert and receptive, we may recognize the hand of God at work in the unexpected places and experiences, even the ones that annoy us. God's reign also extends to those places.

    The writer of Proverbs also gives us a word of wisdom in dealing with small things:

    Four things on earth are small, yet they are exceedingly wise: the ants are a people without strength, yet they provide their food in the summer; the badgers are a people without power, yet they make their homes in the rocks; the locusts have no king, yet all of them march in rank; the lizard can be grasped in the hand, yet it is found in kings’ palaces. (Proverbs 30:24-28)

    May God give us grace to remain spiritually grounded and alert to the divine presence, especially when some little thing has claimed our attention!

    Blessings,

    Ron Short Blue Sig Cropped

     

     

     

     

    The Very Reverend Ron Pogue
    Interim Rector
    St. Martin-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church
    Keller, Texas

    P.S. – Here's a fascinating video about the life cycle of the 17-year cicada. I've never seen them in such numbers. The Englishman probably did and that's what got to him. Don't watch it if you are seriously bothered by bugs.

     

  • Looking for God Too High Up and Too Far Away

    The play "Inherit the Wind" is a dramatic account of the 1925 Dayton, Tennessee trial of John Thomas Scopes, a school teacher who taught the theory of evolution in defiance of a state law prohibiting the teaching of any doctrine contrary to the Bible.  The prosecutor was William Jennings Bryan.  The defense attorney was Clarence Darrow. Bryan won the "The Monkey Trial," and Scopes was fined $100. Several days after the trial ended, Bryan died.  In the play, the character representing reporter H.L. Mencken, after hearing of Bryan's death, says to Darrow, "Why should we weep for him? You know that he was-a Barnum-bunkum Bible-beating blowhard." To an agnostic Mencken, Darrow says of Bryan, "A giant once lived in that body. But the man got lost – lost because he was looking for God too high up and too far away."

    In the 13th chapter of Matthew, we find Jesus in the midst of his Gallilean ministry. Jesus had previously employed comparative and figurative analogies, but at this point Jesus chooses to teach in parables.  James A. Fowler provides an interesting explanation of parables:

    The Greek word for "parable" is derived from two other Greek words, para meaning "beside" and ballo meaning "to throw." Literally, then, a parable is an illustrative story that is "thrown alongside" or "placed side by side" a similar or com-parative concept. A parable brings parallel ideas together by drawing a figurative word-picture to illustrate a particular thought. It is often a thought-provoking analogy that leaves the mind of the listener in sufficient doubt as to its application that it stimulates further consideration thereof … This enigmatic nature of a parable allows the story to function as a picto-rial ponderable, which leaves an image on one's mind to be considered again and again. As such, the Biblical parables grate against dogmatism and the fundamentalistic desire to have everything figured out and nailed down in precision of under-standing. When attempting to interpret Jesus' parables the issue is not so much whether we "get it" figured out, as whether Jesus "gets to us" by planting a glimmer of His divine perspective of spiritual realities. The parable serves as a dum-dum bullet shot into our brain, which then explodes and begins to color our thinking in accord with the "mind of Christ." (Parables of the Kingdom, James A Fowler, 1996)

    The parables of the kingdom challenge us to look beyond the obvious in our search for the realm where Jesus reigns and into which he invites us to live abundant lives. We can get lost in our search by looking for God “too high up and too far away.”  God’s realm, as Luke tells us, is to be found within and between us-close in, as near as heart beat and breath and hands touching.  Jesus’ parables call us to look at things in a new way and discover the abundant life we’ve been looking for all along right under our noses, even in the weeds and the dark corners where we'd rather not look.

    Ron

     

     

     

    The Cambridge Singers performing John Rutter's Open Thou Mine Eyes