The Goodness of God

Each parable about the Kingdom of God adds a different piece of the picture. The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed or yeast. It may not look like much but is incredibly powerful. It's something of incomprehensible and irrational value. It's something that not everyone will embrace. When we look at each of those pieces, we should get a portrait of what God is doing. It may not look like much. I may not always be the most popular thing, but it is God always at work in our world.

Back in the dark ages of 2024, we did a sermon series called The Throne of God telling the story of King Saul, King David, and King Solomon like it was Game of Thrones and put out into the universe that someone should make that show. MGM Studios (Amazon) and Wonder Project (the guy who directed I Can Only Imagine, Jesus Revolution, and Young Washington) did essentially that or almost, kind of did that. It's a show that puts on screen the way the throne gets contested, the political machinery, and the faithlessness of Saul, but its Achilles Heal is its PG-13 rating.

Not everyone who is in the Bible or gets ancestor status is a role model. Sometimes, we need to learn that God has been working with kind of lousy people all along and so won't be derailed by the kind of lousy people of today. Jacob is one of those people. He's kind of lousy. The Bible is pretty upfront about that. He steals, lies, and plays tricks. Jacob stands in for broken/chaotic side of human nature, and God finds away around.

It's hard to be vulnerable in public. So much of our world runs on pretending to be cooler, more put together, more dramatic, or more interesting that you really are. Trillions of dollars of our economy runs on presenting a highly curated window into our lives. In introducing himself to the Romans, a church that did not know him, Paul chooses the opposite tactic. He presents an honest and unvarnished image of his sinfulness and his need for grace.

At some point while reading Genesis 22, you have to make a fundamental choice. Do you think that Abraham would have made a good serial killer? To phrase it another way, you either think that Abraham believed God was not going to make him kill his son, or you think that Abraham is a degree of stone cold killer that is dangerous to society. If you choose the former, you see a man who understands the character of God, and how, even when the way isn't clear, believes that God will lead him out of the chaos of life.

There's always this temptation to look at God's grace as the ultimate Get Out Of Jail Free card. You know that God loves you. You know, thanks to God's grace, anything can be forgiven. So, we can just do whatever, knowing that it'll be forgiven, right? Right? To quote Paul directly, "By no means." God's grace is amazing gift and a powerful opportunity to change. To misuse the gift is to deeply mistreat someone who love you a lot and sacrificed greatly for you.

We like it when we see Jesus dealing so well and graciously with human chaos. He's so kind and loving. People reject him, harm him, ignore him, sin against him, and Jesus greets the world with love. It's truly awesome. By Matthew 9-10, Jesus begins the process of making it clear that it's not just him who will have to face all that chaos. He sends the disciples out into the world - completely empowered to do what he does - and with the reminder that these humans can be SUPER chaotic. We face the same and should at least approach this with eyes wide open.

Matthew writes a Gospel. Matthew walks with Jesus. Matthew was a tax collector. One of those facts should absolutely shock you. In the Roman Empire, tax collectors were not pedantic role enforcers. They were traitors to their own people who leveraged the the power of the evil empire for their own sordid gain. So, eating with a tax collect ranks right up there with being touched by a woman with a medical condition that rendered her ritually unclean and touching the dead. It shows that Jesus sees beauty where the world often doesn't.

Bang! God sweeps over the waves of chaos, and then, all of sudden, a universe explodes into intricate and beautiful being. The author of the opening of Genesis knew that they were writing the introduction to an anthology of God's early history with humanity, and he opens with a powerful poem - an ode to God's ability to transform chaos into beauty, into something that God can behold and declare good. This creative and transformational power is who God is.