Pin Art and the Kingdom of God

2 Pentecost Cycle B proper 6     June 14, 2015

Ezekiel 17:22-24  Psalm 92:1-4, 11-14

2 Corinthians 5:6-10,  14-17  Mark 4:26-34

Lectionary Link

Pin Art Toys are perhaps my favorite toys, and we all need toys, don't we to satisfy the curious quest for fun which resides within?  And since Pin Art Toys are my favorite, I am compelled to inflict my play upon you.  Pin Art toys are favorite toys of mine because of how they visibly and in a tactile way illustrates background and foreground.  If all of the pins are in a background nothing is distinguished or stands out.  There is no form or shape, only a flat surface.  Conversely if all of the pins are push forward, nothing stands out or is distinguished.  There is only undefined flat surface.  Definition occurs when there is a contrast in the relief formed by the dynamic between a background and a foreground.

  In the beginning, all was without form and void; all was undistinguished. God spoke and said, "Let there be" and it was.  And God saw that it was good.  And it was God's kingdom.  God's speaking was the Word which was in the beginning of human life as we know it.  And in our beginning with Word the distinctions of values have come to be created; and we have come to understand differences through language.  And the vital but unseen background complements the conscious foreground of what has come to be regarded in our lives through our lives being created by the words of our lives.

  But it has often come to be the case that the world as the kingdom of God has been forced into the forgotten background of human life even though our conscious life exists and resides upon the total Plenitude of God.

  So why did Jesus need to tell the parables about the Kingdom of God?  I believe he needed to do so because the always already kingdom of God’s creation had been forgotten and the values of a creating, just and loving God had been forgotten, for the most part by people.

  The kingdom of men and women had shoved the kingdom of God into an unrecognized background.  The selfish and sinful ways of men and women has become too often the visible foreground and in our pride we can easily delude ourselves to believe that we are self-made, self-created and have the right to push and shove our way to the top of human distinction in wealth, power and knowledge.  Using a baseball metaphor, we often behave like those born on home plate and we are presuming to celebrate that we have hit homeruns.  We forget that God hit us as a divine homerun at creation.

  I think our belief in God's creation means that everything is equally God's.   But with language there has arisen differentiation of values.  Jesus came to remind us that we live and move and have our being in God.  Jesus came to remind us that in the values of life created by having language, we need to understand that God is communicating to us.

  Jesus came to make us aware of the original kingdom of God but also aware that the kingdom of God is still historically relevant in our contemporary lives.  Out of the background of creation God still marks the foreground of human life with efforts to communicate with us and to let the life of God be translated into relevant and accessible human experience.

  The parables which we have read today gives us some insights about this kingdom of God.  The first insight is that the kingdom of God is as obvious and as mysterious as the organic processes of nature itself.  If you and I can simply learn to stop and be in awe with the natural mystery of life itself, we can enter into the experience of worshiping that which is much greater than we are.  Even an atheist has to have natural Wow! moments.  I cut back my basil leaves and Wow! the next morning there are new leaves there.  How did that happen?  I can study plant life for causality answers but there is enough mystery in the fact that it just happens to bring me to the state of awe and worship and recognize something or someone much greater than I am is at work in all things and is present all around.  And that something or someone is at work in sustaining the freedom of everything happening all together.  So, says Jesus, the kingdom of God is as accessible and as obvious as the experience of the experience of the awesome Wow that we can have in the natural world.  In this experience of the awesome Wow, the worship event occurs when the spiritual and natural intersect and we can commune with God and we can know that we reside in a greater kingdom than any controlled environment of our own making.

  The second insight about the kingdom of God is that it occurs through the exercise of the small deeds of faith, the mustard seeds acts of faith.  Faith is when we are inspired by the visions of hope of a future good and we convert the energy of hope into intentional acts toward the fulfillment of the vision of hope.  To illustrate this with the pin art toy:  let us say the hand imprint represents our vision of the evidence of God's love, God's justice and God's good news coming to definition in our lives.  As I slowly press my hand into the back of the pins, a foreground of gradual recognition occurs.  It is slow and deliberate and forms a more recognizable impression as I press my hand deeper into the pin.  And after the passing of time and with the daily every day pressing into the pattern of what might be called character, a fully recognizable hand becomes known.  And if I time lapse it; it would look like this.  This is how the kingdom of God happens; in small incremental in the quotidian, every day life faithful acts with an orientation toward a hopeful future and "voila!" the outcomes become evident and enrich not just one's life but the life of the world.   

And society is preserved by the scaffold support of the trillions of deeds of kindness which are unrecognized because in the human kingdom only the publicized heroes walk on the foreground stage of popularity.  And what the public does not always realize is that it is all of those unseen deeds of faithful kindness which sustain the world.  And Jesus says, "Shhh....don't tell anyone but those small mustard seeds have become the harvest and the crop which sustain the life of people in this world.  Shhh....don't tell anyone because the Caesars and the kings really pretend they are they important ones in the kingdom of humanity, but the kingdom of God realized in the lives of the faithful is really responsible for what is good and right in this world and those with faith, have the discerning eyes to see this and therefore they keep on, keeping on."

  Now what is the kingdom of God Gospel for you and me today?  What is arising from the background of God's creation today to become specific communication of God to you and me today? Out of the back ground of creation, I believe that we can hear this:  God said, "let there be you....and there was you," and God said, "you were very good, so good that you are unique and I threw away the mold.”  And God loved you.   And God said, "I have made you with gifts and with those gifts you can exercise faith toward the hope for love and justice to be made actual in our world with moment by moment acts of mustard seed faith."   And God said, "I gave you Jesus as a brother to remind you that you have always belonged to the family of God in the kingdom of God."  Amen.