The Kingdom of Heaven

God is small.

Let me explain.

God chooses to remain hidden in the world. God doesn’t make a show of Godself in fire and brimstone, lightning and darkness, burning bushes, or glory descending. These are all things we see in the Book of the Old Covenant. But these are stories told by a people searching for an identity while in exile in Babylon. These stories depict God as great and grand in the world precisely because that’s how other gods around these people looked.

Yet, when God shows up in the world, when Jesus is born of an outcaste virgin into a manger as a small infant, God shows up small. A newborn deity. Eternity in diapers. God displays God’s kenotic nature right from the beginning, pouring Godself out into the smallness of a baby.

As Jesus grew, he remained small. Even at the height of his ministry, when all of Palestine was abuzz with his deeds and teaching, he remained unknown to the rest of the world, remaining a particular individual from Nazareth. He never took on grandeur, never became a king sitting in a palace, never challenged Rome for the throne. Instead, he was crucified. He died an insurrectionist's death, choosing to accept the cross as his glory.

“He presented another parable to them: ‘The Heavenly Reign is like a mustard seed, which someone planted in their field. It’s the tiniest of seeds, but when it’s grown, it is a huge garden plant and becomes a large shrub, so that birds come from the heavens and live in its branches.’”

Jesus—God—remained small.

This is the secret of the parable of the mustard seed. God and God’s actions in the world are the seed. They are small, tiny changes. Those people who tell you that God moves through power and dominance are peddling nothing but violence in the name of God. God remains small, hidden, and God’s kingdom, God’s reign, is not one of might and colonization.

God’s kingdom is one of slow, steady growth.

In order for a small seed to grow into a mighty tree, you need time. Time passes slowly for the seed. There are moments of exceptional transformation—the cracking of the shell, the push through the soil, the unfurling of the first leaf—but most of the time for a seed growing is slow, quiet, small. Even as the seed becomes a tree, growth is small, steady, unnoticed and unhurried.

This is the way the kingdom comes into the world, the way God chooses to work in the world. Rarely is it with miracles and the splitting of the sky. It’s always about slowness, quietness.

God is small.

But that smallness becomes our shelter.

The kingdom is a place we can find our home, coming to find shelter in its branches. The kingdom has been growing for thousands of years. And, while that time has been filled with the slow growth, it has also been filled with become. In the kingdom of God, there is room for each of us, for all of us.

And this is another truth about God: God is generous.

“He told them another parable: ‘The Heavenly Reign is like yeast, which a woman mixed into three sata of flour until all of it had been leavened.’”

The kingdom of heaven is compared to the yeast—again small, seemingly insignificant—worked thoroughly into the dough. When Jesus told this story, it wasn’t about one loaf of bread. This was enough bread to feed a village. The yeast is worked into fifty pounds of flour.

This matters because God is generous.

The woman in the parable is baking for a feast, baking so that everyone has more than enough bread to fill their bellies. And this is Hos God works in the world.

I want to step away from the formula that the Christian church almost always falls into: blessing equates with money. That’s not God’s generosity. Money is our daily bread, enough to get us by… and sometimes that bread isn’t there. That does not mean God has abandoned you. That does not mean you are not worthy or don’t have enough faith. No, when the cupboards are barren of physical bread, it means that Capitalism has once again made its presence known through the oppression of forced scarcity.

But it is that very concept of scarcity that God’s kingdom worked into a feast of flour stands against.

The bread of heaven, the true bread, is available for everyone and anyone to come and receive. God’s generosity is on display at the Table. See, God doesn’t give out small measures of love. God’s love is extravagant and refuses to leave any part of the cosmos untouched… including every part of your heart.

We are the flour that the kingdom is being worked into. We are the bread that the yeast rises up to feed the whole village. We are the carbs that speak and stand against the forced scarcity of a capitalistic system that oppresses and refuses generosity, looking at it instead as a weakness.

But generosity is strength. Generosity is reaching for another loaf of bread, believing there are fish and loaves enough for us all.

And this is how God works in the world, small and generous.

Once we see this, once we begin to hope it could be real, we begin to glimpse the value of the kingdom of heaven.

“The Heavenly Reign is like valuables hidden in a field, which a person found and hid them again and, in their excitement, went and sold everything they owned and bought that field.”

This isn’t about how we obtain or possess the kingdom; this is when we begin to understand that the value of the kingdom comes from the truth that the kingdom changes everything.

It is hope.

God moves in hope in the world, in us. The value is the hope that is slowly, generously growing in us: hope that things don’t, won’t always be this way. The forced scarcity can be undone by our generosity. The false security of patriarchy can be undone and transformed into the true security of community. The fake structure of dominance made manifest in white supremacy can be dismantled and utterly destroyed, giving way to a non-hierarchal living where the value everyone inherently has is celebrated in all its diversity.

The way God chooses to move int eh world is valuable because it undoes every lie we have been taught by government, school, church, and society. We can be free to live a new way. That matters. That is true treasure.

And when we hope, we can begin to see with new eyes. Discernment is the greatest thing that cultivates through the small acts of God.

“Again, the Heavenly Reign is like a merchant in search of fine pearls. When they found a highly valuable one, they went out and sold everything they had and bought it.”

Here is a truth behind the parable of the merchant and the pearl of great price: with indiscriminate motion, they never would have discovered that pearl. At first glance, it could have looked like any other pearl… but it wasn’t. It was so utterly valuable that it was worth everything else the merchant had.

God discerns what is valuable in the world—the small, the slow, the generous, the hope—and gives it to us in giant measurements so that we can know what goodness is and can begin to discern it for ourselves. When we get curious and begin looking for the good, we will find the kingdom in the most unexpected places, through places so far outside the church and Christianity that we were sure there would be no hope there. Yet we find the yeast of the kingdom has done the slow work of being worked thoroughly into people that we can’t help but understand the value laid out before us.

But discernment isn’t just about finding the good; discernment is about throwing out the bad, the rotten, the putrid, the bad fruit.

As we begin to see with slow, generous eyes, we learn what the putrid does to us. It is not good to let it fester within us. It must be thrown out so it doesn’t rot the good. And it will rot us from the inside out.

“Again, the Heavenly Reign is like a fishing net thrown into the sea, catching all kinds of fish. When it was full, the fishing crew pulled it up on the shore, and after they sat down, they sorted the suitable ones into containers, and they threw the worthless ones away. This is how it will be when the age is complete. The messengers will go out and identify those who cause hardship from among those who live justly and throw them into the fiery furnace; there will be weeping and teeth gnashing there.”

The very things we fight against—dominance, violence, fear—can seep into our lives through language, subtle coping mechanisms, ingrained learned behavior, and so many other ways.

This is the truth of repentance; we—the good and the bad—are caught up together, and it is in that catching that God begins to teach us good fruit from bad fruit by doing the work of discernment and illumination Godself. The Spirit is at work to bring life, and everything that is not life is death.

“So he told them, ‘That’s why every Bible scholar who becomes a student in the Heavenly Reign is like someone who owns a house and pours out old and new things from the storeroom.’”

Learning from the Spirit’s movements in the world, learning to listen to the small, the generous, is what forms us into people who act like God in the world. We are learning to act with smallness, with generosity, seeing the value and discerning good and bad, and acting accordingly.

This is what it means to follow Jesus: to be formed by the Spirit into people who live out the kingdom of heaven in the same way our small God chooses to work in the world.

The temptations of fame, influence, wealth, and everything that catches our hearts, bringing about bad fruit, putrid fish, is what we repent against, for the kingdom of heaven is near.