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The Age of Discovery
Matthew 13: 44 – 52 |
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The Age of Discovery Although we seldom think about it, our language is in gradual but constant flux. New words come into use, old words take on new meanings and other words simply drop out of use. If we could take a time machine back to say, 15th-century England, we’d find ourselves among English-speaking people, but we’d have a hard time both understanding them and making ourselves understood. For example, who among us knows what these words mean: forsooth, withal, bilbo, astonied, zounds, wert? They were all part of the vocabulary back then. Even if we went back only to 1860 and stayed right here in the United States, we’d have to learn the meaning of such words as coiner, rantipole, cag-mag, whitlow and bobbish. Here’s a word, however, that we’d probably understand if we dropped back to either of those times: discover. According to etymologists — people who study the origin of words — discover has been in use in the English language since at least 1555 with the meaning of “to obtain knowledge or sight of what was not known.” But of course, the activity to which that word refers has been around much longer than that. You may recall from your high-school lessons that one era of history was referred to as the “Age of Discovery.” That was a period from the early 15th century to the early 17th century during which European ships traveled around the world searching for new trading routes, goods not readily available back home and wealth from foreign lands. During those expeditions, the Europeans encountered peoples and mapped lands previously unknown to them. The explorers of that period included Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, John Cabot, Juan Ponce de León, Ferdinand Magellan, James Cook, Henry Hudson and others. The ship Hudson used in his search for the Northwest Passage was even named “Discovery” and so was the ship Cook sailed on his third voyage. But it is misleading to call that period the Age of Discovery, for discovery is very much a word of our time as well. Our exploration goes on in many fields, including science, medicine, oceanography, outer space and more. In fact, one of our nation’s space shuttles is named “Discovery.” On the individual level, what we often call education or learning is, in fact, discovery, especially when we take facts presented in a classroom and tie them with things we notice in the world around us. The kingdom of heaven Discovery is also a key ingredient in today’s reading, which includes several parables Jesus told about the “kingdom of heaven,” or, as it is called elsewhere in the gospels, the “kingdom of God.” Jesus nowhere described the kingdom of heaven in detail, but if we put together all the things he said in the gospels about it, we find that he was talking about something that had already begun with his coming, but also was something that is more than this physical world. It is a place where our citizenship resides when we commit ourselves to love the Lord our God. Jesus did speak about the kingdom coming in the future with his return, but he also talked about it being already present with him with his arrival at his first coming. At the beginning of his ministry, he said, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near ....” On another occasion, Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.” But he also spoke of the kingdom of heaven yet to come, as when he taught his disciples to pray, “thy kingdom come.” And certainly he meant that both ideas about the kingdom — that it was yet to come and already here — are true. The kingdom has begun and is present in the hearts of Jesus’ followers, but it isn’t here in its fullness yet. The kingdom parables Most of what Jesus said about the kingdom that can be considered descriptive gets at it through comparison, and these parables are no exception. Each starts by saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like …” and then goes on to compare it to some human activity that we can understand. And in the case of two of these parables, the comparison is to discovery. In one, Jesus says “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” That parable refers to accidental discovery. The person was just passing through the field and, quite by happenstance, he finds a treasure. Then, spurred on by this serendipitous discovery, he hurries to acquire legal ownership of the field so that he can have the treasure. Note that he makes a great investment to get it: He sells all that he has. The kingdom of heaven, Jesus is telling us, has that kind of value for our lives. It is worth our investment of all we possess. The second of the parables tells of a discovery that comes about differently. The parable says, “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.” Here the discovery of the item of great value is not accidental. The merchant has been diligently searching for it. But when he finds it, he knows immediately that it is of such value that it is worth selling everything else he has to acquire it. Discovery and the life of faith These two parables remind us that discovery itself plays a role in the life of faith. In fact, I would go so far as to say that God operates in this world in such a way that a primary means of connecting with him is through the seeking-discovery process. It means that some of us weren’t looking for him but found him by stumbling over something he placed in our way. One man who is a big, strong guy tells of the rough life he led as a young man. One night, while trying to walk home after a night of heavy drinking, he fell down and couldn’t get up again. While he was lying there, a voice said to him “What now, little man?” That voice, which the man later realized was the sound of God speaking to him, got him to rethink the direction of his life, and eventually led him to follow Jesus and live a life that blessed others. He was a person who, like the one in the parable, found treasure in a field, and then gave all he had to acquire it.
Others of us are more like the pearl merchant who is
actively looking for something of value, and thus, when presented
the Gospel, realize it is worth surrendering all we have to become
part of the kingdom. We are like those to whom God was speaking in What’s more, God has placed things in life and in our makeup that means we have a need to seek. It’s a kind of “seed” God has planted in us that helps us know that life as we encounter it is not the whole story. That seed, if you will, sets us to looking for something beyond what we can see, looking for that which is higher than ourselves. That seed can lead us to meet Christ, which is the greatest of discoveries, spiritually speaking. But even after that, even after we have been a Christian for a long time, there are additional discoveries we may make. One is that we can find within the faith we’ve had all along great resources for moving closer to God. For example, within the spiritual disciplines we already know about — prayer, Bible reading, solitude, fasting, worship and so on — we can discover new riches. A second discovery we may make is that in times of great stress and pain, we have a presence with us that is a source of strength and help. Sometimes, it is only in truly difficult times that we become aware of how strong that presence is. During World War II, the German pastor Martin Niemoeller was among the prisoners sent to the Dachau concentration camp. On Christmas Eve, 1944, he preached a sermon to his fellow prisoners in which he said, “We are not alone amid the horrors of these years, cut off though we are from the outside world. We are in the hands of God — the God of Jesus Christ who is with us in this dismal and lonely place to uphold and comfort us and keep hope alive in our hearts.” The ultimate reason for hope A third discovery we may make is that the kingdom of heaven is the ultimate reason for hope. And that is incredibly important these days. We can look at what’s going on in the world and find every reason for despair: war, terrorism, illness, crime, natural disasters, global warming, disappointments, shrinking churches and so on. But then we remember that Jesus spoke of a kingdom that is not fully here yet. That means that reality as we experience it is not the final reality. Hope knows that evil, wrong, destruction and chaos have their times, but that their victories are never eternal. Only God’s kingdom is eternal. When we discover that, we have the confidence that it is better to stake our lives on God than to settle for treasures that cannot satisfy us in the long run. This whole life is the age of discovery, and no one ever exhausts all that God has provided for us to find. But the more we seek him, the more we give all that we have to attain the kingdom of heaven, the greater the joy in our lives. |
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