The Kingdom of Heaven is Like..

9th Sunday after Pentecost

July 25^th 2026

Scripture: Romans 8:26-39 & Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, yeast that makes dough rise, hidden treasure or a pearl you’d trade in everything you own to possess, and like a net dragging everything to shore it can hold. These are really odd metaphors to compare to the kingdom of God.. some of them don’t even seem to make sense together. And yet, they all tell us that the kingdom of God is present, but invisible, hidden from plain view, like a seed buried in the ground, yeast dissolved into flour, treasure buried in a field, the perfect pearl pillowed inside a clam, or fish underneath the surface of the sea.

Jesus has already proclaimed many times that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Yet who believed him?! For the average person, the kingdom of heaven couldn’t be SEEN; nothing had changed for the better! Yet some, we are told, trusted.. they left everything to follow Jesus and they witnessed miracles right before their eyes. But even then, the disciples listened to Jesus tell his parables and STILL they asked, ‘Jesus, what does this mean?’ It seems it doesn’t matter whether the kingdom hides from us or hits us square in the face, we are still 99% blind to its existence. But maybe that is part of what Jesus wants us to realize.. that having faith is trusting in what we cannot see and trusting what is yet to be.

The other aspect all of these metaphors share in common is transformation. A small seed, over time, takes root, burst through the ground, and becomes a huge bush, nearly a tree! Yeast, over time, dissolves into the flour and water to become a dough that will rise and transform into tasty bread. The man who found the treasure buried in the field and the man who found the perfect pearl transformed their entire lives to possess their respective gold mines. And while more subtle than the others, in the net there is a transformation, at least for the fish, as you can imagine being pulled from life as you knew it in the sea to life outside the water.

Perhaps we could conclude Jesus is trying to tell us that the kingdom of God is at hand, but it is hidden, and when we find it, we will be completely and utterly transformed. This transformation might feel like the euphoric rush of winning the lottery or the terrifying disembodiment of feeling like a fish out of water. But either way, the kingdom is here, whether we notice it or not. God’s Word is the yeast that is leaven to the world, providing new and abundant life that nourishes more life.

Are Jesus’ metaphors perfect? Do these parables hold up? Well.. when we look around at the world and think, ‘God, where are you!? The world is full of suffering and sorrow!’ I do think it is helpful to recall these parables of the kingdom and be reminded that Jesus DID sort of have an answer for us.. he looks at us with reassuring peace and proclaims that even when the goodness of the kingdom is harder to see at first glance than all the horrible headlines in the news or in our lives, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. 

It’s there, he says, like yeast that becomes invisible in the dough; indistinguishable, undiscoverable, and irretrievable. The kingdom of God (dare I saw the kingdom of Love) is baked into the creation of all things; indistinguishable, undiscoverable, and irretrievable. There is no amount of evil or suffering that can overcome it.. there is nothing that can stop it from rising and transforming into the most glorious, soft and flaky loaf of bread you’ve ever tasted!

But it takes time… just as it takes time for the alchemy of the yeast, flour and water to turn into a sticky dough.. just as it takes time for the dough to rise.. just as it takes time to bake in the oven.. just as it takes time to cool and set.. so too does the transformation from this day of suffering to the new world, where the kingdom will be fully revealed and tears will no longer be shed. The fullness of the kingdom is present from the beginning, but not realized until the transformation is complete.

While this is comforting, it cannot be ignored that Jesus ends these metaphors with what can be interpreted as a horrifying separation of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ fish/aka people. For millennia the Church has used passages like this to scare people straight; using fear as the primary method of transformation. However, I’d like to challenge this narrative. Last week we talked about the parable of the wheat and the weeds and how Jesus declared they should both be allowed to grow side by side. In the end, he said, the weeds will be burned away.

This is very similar to how he describes the fish being caught in the net and the angels separating them between the good and the bad. Just like the wheat and the weeds grew alongside one another, the fish in the sea lived obliviously together in the water, side by side, not distinguishing between themselves. It is not our job to look at the field and judge between the wheat and the weeds no more than it is our job to separate the good fish from the bad. God will take care of that when the time comes.

To some of us this might sound like a relief. Whew, thank God that isn’t MY job! Thank God I can live my life without a judging eye on all my peers! But to others, this might sound horrifying! To be judged at all makes us shake in our boots. To that I say, pause. Wait it out. Transformation takes time. This isn’t the end of the story. Because we know how the story ends, folks. Jesus ends up showing the whole world what kind of judge God is, doesn’t he! How will God judge us? Not by our own accord; not by what WE have done. No, but rather we will be judged by what Jesus has done.. and Jesus gave us life in exchange for his own.

So what exactly do we have to fear if nothing, ‘neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor heights, nor depths, nor ANYTHING ELSE in all creation can separate us from God’s love in Christ?’ I like the way Robert Capon puts it, “Everyone who comes before the Judge has already been reconciled by the dying and rising of the Judge. The only sentence to be pronounced, as far as the Judge is concerned, is a sentence to life, and life abundant.”

Friends, the good news is that the kingdom of God is at hand. Love is baked into the fabric of the universe and when it’s done baking… when it’s done transforming.. the whole world will experience its fullness! We shall feast on its lifegiving goodness and never know suffering nor death again. Even in the smallest of ways, invisible to the blind eye, we are all moving toward this kingdom reality. We need only to be patient in the transformation and train our eye to see the glimpses of the kingdom here and now when we can. Amen.