Saturday, June 20, 2015
Pentecost 3, Proper 6, June 14, 2015
The coming of the
Kingdom of God is the subject of the Gospels in this season. When Jesus speaks of it, He speaks in
parables only — metaphorical images that
give us a feeling for the reality that is beginning to appear. The Kingdom of God is like a seed planted
that grows into a plant producing much fruit, or even into a tree.
The significance of this image is that the seed grows by
itself, without any human help– once it is planted. I interpret this to mean that the Kingdom of
God comes upon us from without. It does
not come naturally out of our world, but it is given by God. The seed, for example, is not of our
making. Nor is the promise. It contains.
There is very little that we can do — nothing. In fact if we can do to make the seed grow or
bear fruit. The mere fact that we,
ignorant as we are of what we are doing, are clever enough to plant the seed
does not mean that we are the source or beginning of the process.
Nevertheless, we do have a role to play: we must plant the
seed: we must be willing to cooperate in a small way, with God's intentions
here. In fact, our cooperation is
indispensable, even though it has next to nothing to do with the process of
germination, sprouting, growth, and fruition.
Still, the whole process needs us.
God will bring the , kingdom.
That's a promise. We have to
trust that promise enough to cooperate with it, in however small a way.
The seed itself contains everything necessary for the future
harvest. All we do is put it in the
ground. True enough, without that effort
the seed would never germinate and grow.
But the planting, though necessary, is only a small part of the
process. Our human effort is not,
itself, the creativity. The, kingdom of
God is entirely the gift of God. Still,
it can occur only with our cooperation.
That doesn't mean that we can take credit for it, any more than the
farmer can take credit for the incredible transformation of the seed into the
plant and harvest.
The agricultural parables show the kingdom of God as a
process in time. The time from planting
to harvest may be understood as human history —history of the material creation., History is a tale told by us humans. "Human", Adam, means dirt. We are the
material creation brought into self-consciousness, and history is the story we
tell about ourselves. That is the way in
which we plant the seed. That is our
small contribution to the process of the Coming of the Kingdom of God. The Promise of the Kingdom, like the fruit of
the plant, can’t happen without the consciousness of the dirt itself, but with
the addition of that consciousness, there is what we call history. Salvation happens in history.
Not a particular history, perhaps, but in the fact of history
itself. I do not propose any particular
theory of history a la Hegel or Marx,
but just that salvation is historical — it occurs in time, just as the plant
germinates and grows to fruition in time.
It is not a deliverance from time, but the sanctification of time. The inner life of private struggle for
mystical transcendence is good and it is part of the Christian life, but it is
not its end. The end is the Kingdom of God come, as we pray, on earth as in
heaven. And that Kingdom is communal:
interpersonal communion, extended to all flesh.
We understand salvation not as the individual Vision of God, but as
incorporation into the living Body of Christ.
Salvation is communal.
It has to do with relationships among people. It is coming together into communion. That communion can happen in this world in
history only.
The agricultural parables show us that the earth and its
history are not to be escaped. They are
not merely the backdrop or the theater of our individual struggles for
perfection. To be left behind. Once we have transcended our ego. And ego-transcendence. The earth and its
history are what the Kingdom of God is all about.
The agricultural parables show us that human life in this
world — human history — the history of material creation becoming conscious of
itself and its relationship to its Creator, is the vehicle of salvation. We are not saved from the world and its
history, but we are saved in it and for it.
And through us, the creation itself is transfigured and saved.
