July 26, 2026 · Elsa M. Tranfaglia · Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
Elsa M. Tranfaglia starts with a fancy new weeder in a neighborhood of perfect lawns, then works through five of Jesus' parables of the kingdom: the mustard seed, the yeast, the hidden treasure, the pearl and the net. Each is stranger than it looks, and the kingdom turns out to be less a place than a becoming, wherever the influence of Jesus shapes a life.
Transcript
Please join me in prayer. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable unto you, Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.
As some of you know, I am now married to Jack Tranfaglia. When I met Jack, I had been widowed for the second time. As I introduced him to my sons, each said to him the same thing, and I quote. Be careful, they all die. After marrying my mother. That is my long way of explaining to you how and why I have both the blessing and the curse of living on Phillips Avenue here in Rockport. The blessing is that it is indeed a beautiful piece of God's amazing garden and kingdom from Jack's home. Now mine as well. I can see halibut point. It is a very fancy neighborhood for me. And last week I bought a fancy weeder to go with my fancy neighborhood. I bought this weeder for my yard because I have neighbors with perfect lawns. And truthfully, I just don't have the physical energy anymore for making a perfect lawn. And yes, I will and do use my fancy weeder, partly as a thrifty New Englander. Remember, I paid for it. And also because I want to keep the yard in the front gardens in front of the house. Nice for my neighbors. The dog walkers, bike riders, all the passerbys.
And here is the curse. I really don't think or care as much about my yard as some of my neighbors do. Their yards have mold lines that are almost decorative and look like a freshly vacuumed, highly piled, wall to wall living room rug. Full confession my OCD makes me jealous of their perfect yards. And the truth is, I do care what my neighbors think about me becoming part of the neighborhood in this beautiful part of God's kingdom.
which, oddly enough, brings me back to Jesus and his parables about the tiny mustard seed, yeast, hidden treasure, pearls and fishing nets. Called the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of heaven or of God is a constant theme throughout the New Testament and in the Gospel of Matthew. The Kingdom of Heaven is used over thirty times in this week's reading. Jesus describes the Kingdom of heaven in five different parables. It's like a parable party, a parable palooza.
To quote Diana Butler bass, Jesus parables are not like riddles, intellectual brainteasers we need to solve. They are deep searching, challenging stories and questions that come to each of us in our own way. And speak into the different realities of our own lives. Jesus's parabolic, life changing questions are not always easy to hear and understand, mostly because they require a response that engages our whole being mind, heart, body, behavior, our relationships when presenting topics through story, parables, or powerful teaching tools because they are open to individual interpretation. I used to call them the terrible parables when I taught them to high schoolers during confirmation.
So what is Matthew telling us about Jesus? The realm of God. Why the pile on of images? Could there be a summary of many metaphors used by Jesus in other settings? A mustard seed for the farming folks. A measure of yeast for women at the well. A net full of fish for the fishermen. And while I'm at it. A pearl of great price for the merchants.
Jesus refers to the kingdom of heaven as a mustard seed that grows enormous to support birds and other life. It is also leaven, or yeast, used to increase the size of bread. What on earth does it mean to call the Kingdom of Heaven a mustard seed, which, for the farmer back in the day was considered a weed? Why is the kingdom the leaven and not that bread? Why is it a seed and not the tree? A hidden treasure. One pearl of great value. Or a sorting of a full net. Keeping only the good. And throwing away the bad.
Making bread was women's work and disdained. In Jesus's day. Leaven is often taken to be positive in Matthew, but in most parts of the Bible it has a negative side. Leaven or yeast frequently symbolizes sin, corruption, hypocrisy, and false teaching. Early in this gospel, Jesus explicitly warned his followers to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.
In the second parable, the mustard seed creates an ecosystem where other life, such as birds, find a place to flourish and live. It becomes the biggest plant in the garden and the best able to nurture life. What might not be so obvious to us, but was known to Jesus and those around him, is that the mustard seed grows entirely wild. Jesus chooses a seed that, when easily germinate, takes over, gets quickly out of control, and attracts birds into a cultivated area where they are least desired. Also, in Jesus's day, the mustard plant had very important medicinal uses. And yet, there is even more hidden in this parable than agricultural wisdom or medicinal law. The Torah's purity code commands that things are not alike are not to be mixed, including two types of seed. Thus, Jesus exhorts his hearers to defy not only common sense, but encourages transgression of temple religious authority.
Next, Jesus says, the kingdom of God is like a man. While plowing a field finds buried treasure. He quickly covers up the treasure, leaves his plowing, sells everything he's got, and then goes back to the owner of the field and asks him, how much would you like for that rocky, worthless, barren field out there? Call me crazy, but I'd like to buy it. Jesus says the kingdom of God belongs to people like that. Isn't the man who runs out and buys that field under some ethical obligation to full disclosure, or just plain simple honesty.
Then Jesus follows with again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it. In the previous parable it was just plain treasure. Here it is a pearl, a gem formed around an irritating bit of sand covered with unexpected beauty. In Greek, a merchant refers to someone who is a trader or wholesale dealer. Jesus's audience would have recognized this merchant as someone with expertise who knew exactly how to evaluate quality. In the ancient Rome and Middle Eastern world, pearls were considered the ultimate symbol of wealth and status. They were very rare. More valuable than gold and diamonds, and were highly sought after by the elite. But remember, Jesus also said, do not cast pearls before swine. Under Levitical law, pigs were considered strictly unclean, ritually impure, and were despised to a first century Jewish audience. The pig represented the ultimate symbol of corruption and godlessness.
The last of our five parables once more begins with again emphasizing and connecting all the teachings. This time Jesus says, the kingdom is like a net that was thrown into the sea. And when fall is drawn ashore, where the fishermen put the good into the baskets, but throw the bad out. Many of Jesus's disciples made their living as fishermen, and all of his listeners understood that whenever the net was brought to shore, the fishermen did not leave a catch in the pile. They immediately carefully separated what was good from what was bad.
We have repeated promises in Scripture around separation. This goes to a very deep theological root of the nature of God. God is in the business of separating just as from the beginning, God created. God separated light, darkness, water, earth, the Red sea. God even called out a people. They were God's chosen people. This principle is carried over into the New Covenant as well. Jesus offered a parable about separation of tears and wheat. We just heard it last week. All of Jesus's followers and audience knew that the religious leaders of the day, such as the Pharisees, believed they were the sole judges of who was in and who was out. But this parable challenged all that, stating, so it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Only God and God's angels have the authority to judge.
Parables teach us about faith and growth. They illustrate key gospel messages of love, hope and life. Tiny seeds. Invisible yeast. Women's work. A slightly underhanded purchase. Precious pearls. This is how Jesus describes the kingdom of God. This is the kingdom Jesus has bequeathed to us. It is the kingdom he asked us to pray for, and the kingdom in which he has asked us to live out the will of God on earth every day of our lives.
Marjorie Zoet writes. Long ago, Sally McVeigh's book, Speaking in Parables, lifted these simple metaphors into the realm of wisdom teaching. Mcfague asserts that the parables have a triangular relationships and structure. Who's speaking? What's the object? And what twist has the listener heard? Like a poem. There is always an unspoken process how an ordinary item, like a mustard seed, becomes shelter for the birds of the air.
In today's gospel parallels parables, excuse me, becoming is a primary unspoken theme. And truthfully, it's easy to overlook in the text. Images go from one state seed to another fully grown tree. We are left, therefore, to imagine the becoming. How long did it take? Were there setbacks, obstacles, sidetracks. Was it ever sabotaged? Is that the realm of God or is the one who knows the realm of God? Or is it a charlatan, a quick sale influencer, And do we, the listeners, settle on the promised outcome, such as lush shelter? Instead of taking into account and probing the long, ongoing unnamed process of becoming. So much hidden in a simple story.
Jesus teaches the realm of God is a treasure, just like the sound of a baby in worship. The realm of God is a bonanza, and we should go for it with guile, gusto, or abandon because there is nothing we could ever possess that offers more. Rather than anxiously, anxiously pulling out weeds. Perhaps I might become faithfully fruitful instead. Instead of being preoccupied with who is right and who is wrong. Might we all become the most nourishing leaven we can be for a hungry world? For now, for us, the Kingdom of God is not a geographic spot on a map, but rather the Kingdom of God is present. Any place and every place where the influence of Jesus determines the shapes of lives wherever and whenever. Jesus is wisdom. Wisdom, wit, words, love, mold, words, actions, thoughts, and life patterns of any person or group of persons. That is where God's kingdom is made manifest.
We as a church family, this body of Christ, we are at a crossroads. But this church has been in many crosswords before. We are the children of God, privileged to be part of this transition time in our church. During this time, we know we have the presence of God, the good News of Jesus, and the movement of the Holy Spirit. With this divine blessing and the guidance and pastoral care of our new interim pastor, Jim Olsen, may we seek to embody God's hidden kingdom, making the sacrifices to attain the treasure or by the pearl of great price. Trusting in the small daily kingdom acts that so expand and grow into vast trees of grace and compassion, and reaching out in whatever ways we can as fishers of people to enable all to enjoy with us the benefits of God's reign. We are exhibiting to our friends and companions that the gospel brings joy and transformation, not through argument or criticism or even sermons, but by our living in Christ's way. Whatever the contour and embodiment of our church in the future, it will always be composed of people in ministry, people living out of their gratitude for God's gifts and taking sensitive and generous care of each other. Parables are precious and cherry gifts that belong to the Body of Christ. They are ours to not only value, but also to carefully leaven for growing and sharing. Like the owner of a house who brings out his Storeroom, new treasures as well as old.
I close with this question for each of us to answer in our own given way. This coming week. What sacrificial act of love and kindness might God be calling you and me to make that has gospel impact and relevance? The realm of God is indeed a treasure, and our faithful response commands us to declare, let's go for it. Amen.
And before we sing or hear the prayers of the people, we will hear the scripture that you were to hear before I began to run my mouth. Perhaps it'll have much more meaning now, as I flatter myself.