Hidden & Mixed In

We found the bolts that held the big desk together. They were tucked into a drawer of the desk. Duh. But still, I was pretty sure I had checked there. At least that is what I told my wife when she asked if I had looked there. I was sure I had. But the drawer was deeper than I realized. Or they were wedged into a back corner. Or it was magic.

Yeah, that’s it. The unexplainable. There is a lot of that when you move. And we’ve moved a lot in my ministry, almost too many times to count. Every time, though, there are those questions that arise. “Who put that there? What happened to the whatsis? What are we going to do with these? Whose is this anyway and why didn’t we get rid of it years ago?” That last one is usually about my stuff. Funny how that works.

But it is like a combination of Christmas and an Easter egg hunt. There are treasures hidden all over the place and you just gotta find them. And they are often in a place you don’t expect. You open a box and wonder why you packed that item in with those things. You open a drawer and find that you had tucked in something that doesn’t really belong there for safekeeping. Power cords and remotes that should have been packed with the items they power are hidden away somewhere else.

OK, it isn’t like we are going to stumble across gold bars or a lost Rembrandt or anything. This is, after all, our stuff. Ordinary stuff. Stuff we know and love or have gotten used to anyway. The point here is not the value of the items, but the fact that they are hidden away in surprising places, in places we should have uncovered by now, in places that are right under our noses.

Our gospel text this week is also about what is hidden in plain sight. But what Jesus claims is right under our noses is something of incalculable value.

There was a rabbinic teaching method called “charaz.” It means stringing pearls, and the teacher would spin out image after image, wisdom saying after wisdom saying, parable after parable in a seemingly random way. It was designed to tell a larger truth by focusing on small details or to talk about a whole by examining the parts. It was describing a picture by telling of a variety of perspectives.

I am sure that the hearers got as frustrated by this style of teaching as we do. “Which is it, Jesus” had to be the demand. Is the kingdom like a pearl or a net? Is it more like yeast or like a treasure in a field? Do we stumble across it or set out with a checklist to find it? Does it work in secret, hidden away from our eyes like yeast in the dough, or does it sprout up like a plant and provide shade and protection like a mustard shrub? Is it something common like a seed or questionable like yeast or valuable like a treasure?

All of these questions and more Jesus would answer with a smile and nod of the head and tell us that we are like scribes bringing out of the treasure something old and something new. And with furrowed brows, we would throw up our hands and grumble. When we pressed him, and shouted out, “Which is it? This or that?” He would say “yes.” You know he would. With a laugh, he would say, “Yes. That’s it exactly!” And he wouldn’t be saying it just to be funny. He’d say it because it was the truth. He’d say it because it was the best answer. Is it a pearl or a net or a seed or a treasure hidden in a field or yeast hidden in three measures of flour? Yes, it is that exactly!! And more.

Talking to Jesus can be exhausting. You think he is out to confuse you. We keep skipping over those verses where it says he said nothing except in parables. I think we skip them because they make it sound like Jesus was just messing with us, and we don’t like that. But the truth is, he really wants us to see. He really wants us to understand. We just can’t do it by thinking the way we usually think.

We have to learn to look under our noses and off to the horizon at the same time. We have to learn to see the ordinary and the spectacular all together. We have to learn to experience the everyday and the once-in-a-lifetime in the same moment. We need to see deeper and trust more completely. We need to value what the world throws away and throw away what the world thinks most valuable.

In short, the kingdom asks us to turn upside down, to stretch and reach and get outside of ourselves long enough to really see the wonder of the universe in a tiny seed. But most importantly, at least it seems to me to be most important, we are supposed to do it with joy.

It is easy to get frustrated when you can’t find the bolts that hold your desk together. We are inclined to blame the others in the house, who you are sure didn’t take the same care that you would have taken in securing a place for them. But it is precisely these inclinations that we need to set aside. Instead, we embrace the challenge, the search, the discovery with joy and with passion.

It is the latter parables in this string of pearls that carry an emotive tag. The first are simply descriptions, reminders that there are forces at work in this world and that though it may at times seem as though God is distant and apart from us, God is in fact at work within us and around us and in the most unsuspecting of people and places. There are seeds pushing down roots, Jesus says, there is yeast raising the bread of human relationships and opportunities. “Trust me,” he says, “it is there.”

But then, as he gets wound up in the telling, he gives us clues about how we are to respond to this, how we are to commit ourselves to the search and the claiming. “In his joy,” Jesus says about the man who finds the treasure. And the merchant sells everything else to possess this new pearl. He sets aside everything he once thought important in order to occupy this new and exciting land.

At times, settling in is tedious and time-consuming. But at other times, it is fun as we get caught up in the joy of making ourselves at home in a new place. Finding treasures we forgot we had, or rearranging the furniture of our lives so that there is room for joy in this place.

It is a choice, says Jesus, for joy or tedium. After all, who knows what else might be tucked away in the back of those drawers. Let’s go and see, shall we?

One discovery in the back of a drawer somewhere is this odd marriage story from the twenty-ninth chapter of Genesis. What in the world do we do with this? And do we attempt to weave it into the pearls that Jesus shares with us in the attempt to describe the kingdom of God? The kingdom is like a man who goes to marry a wife and finds instead her sister. Yikes. This is soap opera material, don’t you think? I mean, the sleight of hand that Laban plays with his daughters and future son-in-law is outrageous, to say the least. There is that simple phrase in verse 25, “when morning came, it was Leah!” Don’t you hate it when that happens?

But it doesn’t happen, not in the real world, apart from “reality TV” or telenovelas. One thing that becomes apparent in reading this text is that the world has changed from the patriarchal, polygamist society represented in the book of Genesis. We need to avoid easy comparisons, to be sure. Yet, if we drill down a little deeper, there are the usual human relationship struggles, jealousy and love living side by side in this story. There is still humanness in this story, despite some of the odder elements.

Our invitation, then, is to find the treasure in the midst of the ordinary. We can look for glimpses of the kingdom alongside or even within the mundane, everyday struggles of living life in a complicated and sometimes broken world. What is declared loudly in this story is Jacob’s love for Rachel and how no labor seems too onerous and no ruse too distracting from the goal of building a life together. At the same time, there is the tragedy of Leah being used and locked into a loveless marriage, and the competition between the sisters becomes painful and real. A human story, to say the least.

Esther Menn on Working Preacher writes:

(https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-17/commentary-on-genesis-2915-28-5)

What we promote when proclaiming this text is not the cultural framework within which the events take place, but that God brings hope even in admittedly messy situations. What seems inordinately muddled by human failing and machinations is ultimately redeemed by God’s presence, which is often hidden and mixed into the ordinary stuff of life.