A Threat and a Promise

July 28, 2002

Matthew 13: 31-33; 44-50

The Kingdom of God is a concept that is at once inviting and troubling. It is inviting because it seems to be a thing of great value that anyone would love but at the same time it does not seem that just anyone is allowed to experience it. In most of his parables about the kingdom Jesus describes a situation where something has to happen, a person has to do something to inherit this kingdom. In one we read today Jesus says that it is like a person finding a treasure in a field. This is the other distinctive part of the kingdom it also involves some good fortune. But that good fortune has to be acted upon. The man found the treasure yes but then he had to go and respond. In this case he sold all that he had so that he could buy the field where the treasure was found. Of course it seems to be nonsense because if you found a treasure in a field you wouldn’t necessarily buy the field you might decide just to walk away with the treasure. But that is not how the kingdom works it seems. It demands a response that includes one’s whole being in some way. In this case, giving up everything in order to buy the field is the kingdom response according to Jesus.

Now granted, not all parables demand a response that is appropriate and essential to experiencing the kingdom. The mustard seed that turns into a bush asks for no response. The fish gathered in story asks no response. But there is one thing that I think all of them have in common and that is some kind of surprise. The mustard seed is so small but grows bigger. Some fish are discarded for seemingly no reason. There is always some twist in the parables that Jesus told.

I think these twists are designed to get us to think about the kingdom. And even if it is not described in the parable I think these twists also ask a response. I think that is what Jesus wanted to get across to his disciples again and again. The kingdom was not the kingdom until they responded in faith. It has no reality outside of a faith-filled response.

I have a parable to tell today that has been a real parable in my life. It is a true story and I had a specific response to it and that response has made a difference in my life.

Summer always makes me think of Lake Minnetonka. I grew up on that lake as all of you know. My summer was spent swimming and sailing and hanging around down at Deephaven Beach. I was not a religious person at the time. My spirit was fed by the lake and my friends and the good fortune of my life. In the summer of 1971 I was sixteen years old and there is no other time in my life when everything seemed to go so much my way. That spring I went on a cruise with my mother down to the Caribbean. That summer I was chosen to race in a national sailing competition which I nearly won down in Texas. I eventually placed third and have a very nice trophy to prove it. I was also picked that summer to play in a hockey league with the best players from the area. I have the broken nose to prove that. I worked at the sailing school and raced every weekend and on Wednesday nights and when I wasn’t racing I was with my buddies on Jeff Davis’s cool water-ski boat. We would often be out early to beat the waves that would come up in the middle of the day. That way the day seemed endless. Quite a childhood huh? I was the most fortunate of the fortunate. And I was pretty full of myself when I was sixteen.

But two things happened that summer to change paradise. The first wasn’t my fault. Jeff Davis was probably my best friend. He sailed, we water skied, he even played hockey, although he had not been chosen to be in the particular summer league I was in. Jeff Davis as I said had the best ski boat and if we could scrape enough gas money together we could go water skiing.

One day stopping by in Wayzata Bay to get gas and run down to the A and W Root Beer stand where we would always get corn dogs and fries and a gallon of root beer something terrible interrupted our day. On the way back out, after filling up the tank with gas Jeff turned the switch and instantly the two of us were blown over backwards by an explosion. It was a gas explosion and the boat was all of a sudden on fire. Jeff and I jumped up and ran off the dock and into the water. As I was getting up and moving toward safety my mind calculated how badly I would be hurt if the gas tank exploded. It didn’t. The fire department came and besides the two of us having singed eye brows and hair we were shaken but okay.

The story was that the overflow from filling the gas tank had leaked into the boat and a spark from the ignition wire had done just that and so a small amount of gas had exploded and a fire ensued. The fireman who explained this to us said that the tank did not explode because it was full and there was no oxygen present. If it had been half full or anything less than completely full it probably would have exploded. Oddly this was perhaps one of the only times when we had filled the tank. Usually we did not have the money. Who knows how or why we had it on that day.

I marveled at how lucky I was and how easily it could have happened differently. But I ignored the implicit warning and only weeks later another disaster almost destroyed my Shangri-la.

My Dad too had a boat. It was not as good for water skiing and my Dad did not always want his sixteen year old son driving his boat. But sometimes he would let me and on one particular day that summer I had the boat for the day.

We had something planned; I don’t remember what it was. It may have been a sailboat race because I was there and Jeff was there and one other person. We were going to pick up Sarah Burton from her house on the lake in a place called Carson’s Bay. Carson’s Bay is where we lived when I was a little kid. It was a closed throttle area. That meant you had to be going slow enough to not make a wake. We used to yell at the people from the city who had no idea about local boating rules and would race through at various different speeds mostly making a huge wake.

Well as I said I was sixteen and feeling very full of myself. I entered Carson’s Bay that day at just about full throttle. We were going to pick up Sara Burton. Sarah was pretty and nice and someone who I needed to impress. Along the shore there were boats moored, and buoys where boats could be tied. They made for a great slalom course and as I was coming up to Sarah’s house I wove in and out dangerously close to the docks all along the shore.

Of course I was going way to fast and as I swerved around the last boat or buoy I turned way too sharp and Sarah’s dock was at once in front of me and my speeding boat. Again I had this slow motion kind of event in my mind. In fact I saw the accident as if it happened all at once. In my mind I saw it all. The boat crashing into the dock, my friends going flying, the look on Sarah’s face, my head hitting the windshield, I saw the whole thing. But in the same instant I was pulling back the throttle and whipping the boat around so that it did a complete 180 stopping perfectly next to the dock.

It was as close to a miracle as I have ever known. I tell you that I saw what could have happened as though it did happen and then it was changed in an instant. There was no way I should have been able to pull off that maneuver. No way. I was sixteen. I barely ever drove that boat. I don’t know how I was saved from sure disaster. Again I was shaken but just fine. But this time I took notice. In just a few weeks disaster had all but swallowed me up, twice. I was perhaps the luckiest boy alive. But in my sixteen year old mind I knew that it was not enough to just be lucky. This good fortune demanded a response. I started to think that I had been preserved for some reason.

I don’t know if it is true but I know that my willingness to serve God was born that summer and that willingness has served me well. The kingdom has been made real in my life because of my ministry. Miracles I could have never known have come true simply because when I was sixteen I was shown, in very graphic terms how lucky I was and that my life was God’s, and I responded in faith, such is the Kingdom of God.

In Christ Jesus. Amen.