When I was a freshman in college, aside from the trumped up PE class, the remedial calculus, and Introduction to Western Literature, I had to take what was called a “first year seminar.” I think it was a chance for those of us who were new to higher education and the liberal arts to take a step back and think about what all this might be about, think about why we signed off on all those loans and moved in to that tiny dorm room with the girl from West Michigan, before we dove in to the minutia and detailed particularities of our chosen majors and got lost in the parties and clubs and Lake Michigan beach that was just twenty minute drive down the road. In this class, we read philosophy, we read novels, we read speeches and poetry, and one particular, life changing essay by pulitzer prize winning author, Annie Dillard. The essay was called “Living like Weasels.”
Now I’m so very tempted to just stop right now, pull out the essay, and read it for you all and we can call it a day. The essay is beautiful and rich and a far greater testament to the intimacy and the brutality, and the intense passion that is the kingdom of God. But because I am a people pleaser, and I am afraid of being accused of not doing my own homework, I guess I’ll just summarize it here.
Around sunset, Annie Dillard liked to walk a few blocks past her house in the suburbs to a pond, nestled between gated housing developments and the highway. She would go there to sit. To watch. To be.
While there, she encounters a weasel. She’s sitting on a log and thinking her thoughts, and there it is, her first encounter with a weasel. And she has this moment with it. She enters, as Howard Thurman would say, the “genuine” of the weasel, and the weasel enters in to the genuine in her. Suddenly there is no Annie. No weasel. No pond, or sunset, or rotting log. And there is also only Annie, and only the weasel, and only the pond and the sunset and the log.
Weasels are wild and reckless things she says. Unpredictable. They are predators. Ruthlessly going for the jugular at the neck until the victim gives in to the circle that is life.
She tells the story of a man who shot an eagle out of the sky, and when it landed with a thud onto the earth and he ran over to collect his prize, he found, firmly attached to the eagle’s neck, the skull of a weasel. Somehow, maybe it was the eagle looking for lunch, or maybe it was the trumped up vibrato of a wild and reckless weasel, but somehow, there was an encounter between the rodent and the scavenging bird of prey. Did the eagle eat what little it could reach of the weasel while it gripped its neck whatever the cost? Did the weasel simply refuse to let go until it lost everything of what it was except that grip to the neck? And then the eagle carried this millstone of a scull around its neck for the rest of its life, soaring above the tree line, swooping above the waves, nesting in the highest branches always with this weasel, clamped to the side of its neck?
It’s like that, she says. But she never really tells us exactly what the “it” is that she’s referring to.
All the best things are like that though. The best things that can only be experienced through the wonder and intimacy and delicacy and precariousness of the physical things in our everyday worlds.
It’s like this. It’s like that. Jesus says. Annie says. A weasel or a rose or a seed or a pearl. This thing we can’t quite get ahold of is like a coin in a field and bread that is broken, and vines and branches and a sower who went out to sow. That’s what it’s like, this kingdom of God - always at the tip of our tongues, always slipping through our fingers, but always, always leaving some hint, some kind of evidence that it was there or that it’s coming or that it’s here right now. The kingdom of God is like that moment that Annie Dillard has staring eye to eye with that weasel. They’re locked in an embrace of sorts, they’re entranced by the other, they’re intimately connected, and then poof, it’s gone, just like that, “enchantment” broken. She experienced a moment of the kingdom of God, and that made her think of the story of the weasel and the eagle, and of passionate intensity and gripping dedication, and relentless commitment to never letting go. She’s doing what Jesus is showing us how to do in our passage today. She’s looking at the world around her and finding the sacred, the intimate moments, that reveal to her that there is so much more around us than a “simple” drainage pond on the side of the highway. And she connecting it to more stories, more encounters of the world, weaving together likenesses until the warp and the weft combine to make one big tapestry.
It’s like this.
It’s like that.
It’s like a lamp under a bushel basket.
It’s like seed, scattered on the ground, and the guy who throws it out there goes about his life. He sleeps. He wakes up. And somehow, he doesn’t know how, but somehow the seed sprouts and grows and the “earth produces of itself.”
It’s like a tiny mustard seed, that when planted, gets huge and overgrown and out of control and the birds of the air can make nests in its branches. You get enough of these threads and an image of the whole starts to form.
But the most important thing, the most important thing that we have to hold on to, that we must latch on to with our tightest grip, that we must lock our jaws upon, is that question itself. “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?”
Look around you, Jesus is saying, we can’t hold the Kingdom of God in our hands, no more than we could hold water. We can’t put it in a box and say, “here it is! Oh good! I’m so glad that we’ve found it.” We can’t fully understand or name or control this thing that Jesus is inaugurating. We can only experience it, describe what it’s like, point in the direction from where it came, and then keep looking around for more. It’s just one thread. But it’s a thread.
The kingdom of God is like exhausted children telling ghost stories with flashlights under their chins. The kingdom of God is like a cluttered house and the single mom who saves the yogurt containers because they can’t be recycled. The kingdom of God is like those two trees you go past everyday on your way to the dog park. It’s like cats scratching at the bottom of an empty food bowl. It’s like confused disciples and bewildered crowds. It’s like late night Netflix binges and like saying “I’m sorry” and hearing “I love you” for the very first time. It’s ponds in the suburbs and losing yourself in the eyes of a weasel. It’s like latching your whole self to a thing and never, ever, letting go. It’s like remembering how easy it is to forget that all this stuff, all this earth and wheat and leaves and clouds and the stories themselves, are so much like the kingdom that the division between the two things falls away, the “like” disappears, and when we experience it for exactly what it is, there it is, the kingdom of God. We stop seeing the individual threads, and a pattern starts to emerge. The kingdom of God is in that thread, because the kingdom of God is all the threads.
The kingdom of God is like a seed. And the kingdom of God is the seed. Jesus himself is so very much like God in God’s self, that the division between the two blurs. Jesus shows us what God is like. And Jesus is God.
Jesus wants us to approach the whole world, approach him, like that. WIth so much intensity and determination and stubbornness that the divisions we set up between ourselves and all these other things disappear. We become so like Christ that we become “Christians” - or literally, “little Christs.” We grab on to the neck of the kingdom and we refuse to let go, no matter what happens, no matter if this is how it all ends. So that when our story is done, they’ll know what we could never let go of. They’ll know what we were so committed to that it cost us everything we had and everything we are. They’ll see our thread that was necessary to make the whole.
See, Jesus is showing us in this passage that it’s not about “understanding,” or comprehending, or writing a creed or a dissertation about how you know all that right answers. It’s about the experience. It’s about looking so hard for the kingdom of God in this world, in all the fleshy, incarnated, devastating, brokenness of this world, that we can no longer differentiate ourselves from it. The kingdom is in us. The kingdom becomes us. Or maybe rather, we become the kingdom. We weave ourselves so intimately with this world that we become the world.
I know I’m swooping in here with flowery and philosophical language and I’m getting carried away with the imagery and metaphors and the stuff, but really, what I want us to keep looking at, what I want to keep looking for, are all those encounters - encounters with weasels and eagles and seeds and mustard bushes and bread and befuddled people - those encounters where we lose ourselves, for just a moment, where we look into the eyes of the other and we get lost, and thus, somehow, we’re found. We experience this life, this precious and frustrating and anxious and terrifying thing with so much intensity that we see the holy in it all, we see the kingdom, right here, right in front of us, in pianos and candles and pews and hymnals. We see it in the threads. We latch on to this life stuff so tightly that we never let it go, so that when it finally kills us, everyone will know, everyone will see how we made the kingdom of God real in our own lives.
And there’s a resurrection in that. There’s a living beyond our lives and our selves when we fully enter in, when we fully clamp on to that thing that we will give our whole lives to.
And that’s what Jesus did. He fully entered in. He embraced all the stuff. He ate and he drank and felt the sand between his toes. He got dirty and he got hurt and he bled and he looked around and saw the kingdom. He said, “Here it is. It’s like this. It’s this.” Clamp your jaws on that. Look so deeply in that you lose yourself. Give it everything you have. Don’t let it go. Weave yourself fully into that tapestry.
The kingdom of God is like a man, sent from God, who, though in the form of God, didn’t consider equality with God something to cling to, but rather entered in to this world, clung to this world so completely that he was human, he clamped on to all the things that humans experienced, that he was so like a human he was a human, and he died the most human of deaths. He became so human that God exalted him to the highest of places, soaring above us all, so that we can bow and proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord. So that we can grab a hold of him, and never let go. So that we can be a thread in that tapestry of the kingdom of God.
Thanks be to God.
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