July 24, 2020
This week’s lectionary passage from Matthew offers several different examples of what the kingdom of heaven is like. The tiny seed that grows into a tree. The yeast that expands the grain to create bread. The treasure in a field or the one pearl that are so precious that they are worth exchanging for everything else that one owns. The net that catches the fish that are then sorted into the good and the bad. These images give us much to ponder, and yet any one of them seems incomplete, inadequate. They are glimpses of what we seek to understand, even as it is beyond our comprehension. I don’t read the range of images that Jesus offers here as a complete list, but as an invitation to gain insight through these, and through others that we see around us in the world that we live in. I hear this passage as an invitation to stretch our imagination and our understanding, not to confine it. There may be a glimpse of the kingdom of God in the creative expansiveness of what it means to be church that has emerged so quickly and so forcefully since the COVID-19 pandemic intervened to make so many of our accustomed ways impossible. Surely learning new ways to experience our relationship with God deepens our understanding of the complexity of God’s kingdom (or, as some prefer, “kindom”). And opening virtual doors rather than the big oak doors of many of our beautiful edifices seems to be inviting to some who for whatever reasons may not have felt welcome before. Maybe another way we see God’s kingdom emerging is in all the efforts to acknowledge and work to eliminate racism in our church and our society. As August 1 approaches, may I draw your attention to the United Against Racism website, created by members of our church to promote understanding of the significance of that date as Emancipation Day, in recognition of the British Commonwealth Emancipation Act of August 1, 1834, which formally abolished slavery in Canada. If you want a way of publicly supporting this work, you can download a logo to be made into an iron-on transfer and make your own t-shirt for August 1. Emancipation Day may not be well known across Canada, but Owen Sound, here in Ontario, hosts the longest continuously run Emancipation Picnic in North America. (I hope this year will still count, since their events have been moved to a virtual format in respect of COVID-19 requirements.) The British Methodist Episcopal Church, which is part of the Canadian Council of Churches table with us, provided a strong base to the early settlers in that area. I might not have known about the Owen Sound event except that my neighbour, whose late husband was descended from slaves who came to Canada on the Underground Railroad, has made the pilgrimage there with her children and grandchildren for many years.
A plate belonging to my neighbour
I wonder where you are seeing tiny seeds grow into big plants, or yeast expand the flour it is kneaded together with. Where do you see the kingdom of God emerging these days? Blessings, Nora Nora Sanders is General Secretary of The United Church of Canada.
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