A Collective Sermon

I'm Pr. Sam LaDue, pastor of University Lutheran Church (UniLu) in Palo Alto, a small, queer-affirming, Stanford-adjacent congregation that takes the Gospel seriously and itself not so seriously. This week I handed the sermon to the room. We broke into four groups, each with one of Pete Rollins' parables from *The Orthodox Heretic* after listening to some of Jesus' parables from Matthew 13, and we let the room do the theological work. What came back was a breath of fresh air and a host of different perspectives.

---

based on Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52, for Proper 12, Year A

How This Worked

Matthew 13 is dense. In a single chapter we get the Sower (which we sat with two weeks ago), the Wheat and the Weeds (last week), and then, in rapid succession this week: the Mustard Seed, the Yeast, the Treasure Hidden in a Field, and the Pearl of Great Price and then more talk of old and new treasure. That's a lot of Reign of God in one sitting.

Pete Rollins is an Irish philosopher and theologian whose book The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales (Paraclete Press) does something strange and valuable: it writes new parables in the spirit of Jesus. They're short. They're disorienting. They don't resolve neatly. They're designed to interrupt the way you thought you understood something. 

So this week, instead of me standing up and explaining what these parables mean or do, I chose four of Rollins' parables that pralleled the parables presented to us by Jesus in the Gospel reading for the day, broke into groups, asked each group to decide how to share their parable with the rest of the room, and then reflect on a couple brief questions to help them gather some noticings about what the parable might be highlighting for us today. While reporting back, I took some time to write some of their highlights down on our Altar. A Collective sermon, taking dimension, at our shared table.

Below: What each group worked with, and some of what emerged.

 
Group One: The Invisible Prophet and the Yeast 

Rollins' "Invisible Prophet" (No. 9 in *The Orthodox Heretic*) follows a prophet whose messenger and message is so beautiful that the hearers admire the beauty without actually receiving the message. The word is present. People are "drenched" in admiring it. Yet, it is simply not visible as word to people not yet prepared to hear it that way, and in the end people joyfully dance their way into destruction.

Jesus' Yeast parable places a small amount of leaven into an absurd quantity of flour. Matthew specifies three measures, which works out to roughly sixty pounds. Sixty pounds. This is not a dinner party. This is a transformation so large it becomes hard to picture.

What came out in the wash: The prophet's message alone won't do it. The yeast alone won't do it. What makes the Reign of God perceptible in both instances is the interdependence of what is small and hidden with what is large and ready to receive it. Rollins, in his commentary: "we hear the word by living it out, rather than merely rejoicing in its eloquence." The leaven has to meet the flour. The prophet has to be heard by people willing to be changed, not just moved. Otherwise you get sixty pounds of flour sitting there, admired, and unchanged. Or, people dancing to their destruction, joyfully, and utterly without the transformation that would provide abundant life.

Also notable: a couple of my members resonated with the challenges of being a woman in the workplace, and the struggles of how or whether you're beautiful, or beautiful enough. This is a whole other sermon I would have loved to have preached... ah, another day!

This group told us Rollins' parable via words, with a brief overview.

​Group Two: Translating the Word and the Mustard Seed

Rollins' "Translating the Word" (No. 3) follows Sophia, who received a vision and whose dream was to print literal copies of scripture for all. However, she does so much work raising money for this project and is, twice over, met with catastrophe. She chooses to spend the raised money on people in need, each time--materially providing relief, care, and sustenance to those around her. Finally, just before she dies, she manages to print hard copies of scripture. But, people say that the most beautiful versions of scripture all along were the first two. The theological move: the word is not transmitted through speech acts alone. It becomes visible only through transformation and relationship.

Jesus' Mustard Seed does something similar. A tiny seed, source of flavor, potentially medicinal in use, grows and transforms into many things over it's lifespan. The Reign of God visible, not through announcement, but through transformation, through interdependence and being many different things at different points in time.

What came out in the wash: ​what begins as an idea or an intuition has to become materially experienced to be real. Rollins writes: "it is impossible to affirm God's word apart from becoming that word." The mustard plant does not announce its sheltering capacity. It just grows, does what it do, and the people and birds find it useful. Is it useful if no one is using it? Manifesting the Reign of God is not a speech act or strict following of one singular idea. It is a participation, diversification, and again interdependence. 

This group told us the story as one member used physical movement via her own self to illustrate. It was quite engaging!

Group Three: Mansions and the Treasure Hidden in a Field

Rollins' "Mansions" (No. 27) catches the disciples dreaming about the beautiful rooms promised in the Father's house. Most are oriented toward those rooms, dreaming about them. But, one person on the outer edges wonders whether there's room for them in this scene. They ask Jesus, quietly, about this- stating tha they dont need or particularly care about mansions. This person discovers that there is space, in fact the space that's there for them is right alongside Jesus. Everyone else missed this, busy seeking and dreaming of their various mansion rooms.

Jesus' Treasure in a Field is the parable I find most confrontational in this set. A man finds treasure buried in a field, reburies it, sells everything he has, and buys the field. He is not divesting for the sake of the poor. He is divesting to acquire new treasure, hopefully more valuable than what he had prior. And this new treasure is literally buried in the ground. Seemingly, he's interested in keeping it for himself, as he doesnt tell the land owner what he's found- he just purchases the land with the intention of personally benefitting. The whole operation is possession-oriented, with no opportunity for those inchoate bits of the Reign of God to take off beyond this individual owner.

What came out in the wash: Particularly noticeable was the sense of being the one on the outside. We fall so easily into what you might call a poverty of affluence, a kind of loneliness that comes not from having too little but from spending all our energy acquiring and possessing. The disciples in Rollins' story, asleep and dreaming of their rooms, miss the simple and enormous thing: there is room for you, and that is where Jesus is. Not in the room you've acquired. In the room that has already been made. But being that one on the outside, with Jesus or no, is also tough.

This group drew pictures to illustrate Rollins' story.

Group Four: Pearl and the Pearl of Great Price

Rollins' "Pearl" (No. 6) gives us a Jesus telling the story of the merchant who acquires the pearl of great price by selling everything to purchase this pearl. A woman listening in the back of the crowd, notes that this is a pradox. Once the pearl is aquired, the purchaser has removed themselves from the entire economy in which the pearl has value. No resources for any food, housing, etc. It's all been spent on aquiring the pearl. The merchant is holding something beautiful and useless.  They can either have the pearl, or have all these other things by continuing to engage in this economy, but they can't have both at the same time. So. they've (intentionally? unintentionally?) divested themselves from the whole entire existing economy, in favor of one pearl being simply enough.

Jesus' version does something similar. The merchant sells everything for one pearl. But a pearl only has value if you sell it. This merchant is done selling. Which means they have walked out of the entire market. The treasure is not the next best asset. The treasure is the transformation that happens when you pursue it with everything you have.

What came out in the wash: Possession does not make someone wealthy. Possession has the power to transform what wealth even means, if what you end up holding is something that disrupts your participation the whole economy you were operating in as a merchant. The group also spoke of whether or not this pearl is shared among many, versus kept for oneself. Rollins wrote: "poverty is not the first step toward the Reign of God. It is the very place where we find God." Not intentional deprivation, mind you, and not manufactured scarcity, but the kind of poverty that comes from voluntarily divesting from economies built on the accumulation and ownership of other people, other lands, other lives (all of which are also built on variations of oppression).

This group gave us the story via overview. It was the closest to the original parable, so they didn't have to work too hard to get everyone to know the trajectory of the plot. ;) 

What All Four Had in Common

As the groups reported back, I wrote key words and phrases on paper as each one shared. That paper was covering the altar. I want to come back to that in a moment.

But first, here is what I noticed across all four stories:

• Something is embodied but not automatically heard or seen. The leaven is there. The prophet is speaking. More is required for the inchoate Reign of God to take form and transform.
• Something becomes visible only through transformation, growth, and interdependence. The mustard seed. Sophia's dream of making scripture available to people. Aiming for one singular goal only and ignoring the whole of the world in the process does not allow for the Reign of God to take shape.
• Something keeps many locked in a holding pattern of possession and valuation, dreaming about rooms in the sky while missing the person right in front of us. It's the person who's never possessed or experienced that level of possession who questions whether there's room, and discovers that room is right beside Jesus.
• And something disrupts the kind of possession focus, not by taking things away, but by replacing the whole existing method of engaging with the economy with something that, once purchased, has no value without re-engaging in the selling (and therefore losing the thing). So, the purchaser stays out of the game if they choose to keep the pearl.

The Reign of God, in all four of these stories, becomes perceptible through embodied participation and interdependent relationship. Economies of possession and spectacle easily obscure what is already present. Divesting from possessive economies is not the path to the Reign of God, as Rollins points out: It is the Reign of God. Or, to put it differently: words of God or Jesus are just words, lovely as they can be. It's the three-dimensionality of living them that makes them uniquely life-giving.

The Sermon Was Already Happening

Back to that paper on the altar.
It wasn't a facilitation trick. It became the sermon, hidden right there in the flesh of the room, made in real time, requiring all of us and this particular morning together to exist. You could try to take it home. You could try to own it. But without all of us and our various particularities, without the specific presence of that room on that morning, it would quickly lose whatever made it matter. (It does, for sure- it's sitting in my office now as I write this...and...without having been there Sunday morning it's near impossible for it to seem meaningful).

That is what the parables keep insisting on: the Reign of God is visible only through participation, real only through interdependence, and it cannot be possessed without opting to remove oneself from many different systems that establish what is or is not valuable.

There are a hundred potential takeaways from a Sunday like this. As I said to the community gathered on Sunday, I am going to let you pick the one you need this week. At the center of all of them, though, is this: the Reign of God is not just an intellectual proposition. It is something bodily, participatory, and already underway. Inchoate in all, and waiting for three dimensionality to grow. And we are invited to notice it, and join in.

with joy,
​Pr. Sam

These sermons come from a living community. Come find out what happens when people who are curious about God (or not sure they believe in God) show up in the same room together. Learn more about campus ministry or Sunday worship. You're welcome Sunday mornings (10 am) at University Lutheran Church in Palo Alto. It's a great place to sit and rest, or chat with a few of the folks who are here. Students also gather Wednesday evenings during the academic year at 6 pm, same openness applies.