Sunday, July 27, 2014: Matthew 13: 31-33; 44-52

All it takes is three bars of Mozart. I’m dozing in my chair with music playing in the background when all at once I wake up, maybe even sit bolt upright. Suddenly I’m on safari with Robert Redford and Meryl Streep. I’m managing a coffee plantation; I’m shooting lions. I’m lounging over dinner in a glorious landscape with monkeys watching the turntable of an old record player. I’m flying over the Rift Valley in the early days of aviation, seeing people and animals, mountains and plains from a perspective rarely glimpsed by human eyes. The world of Out of Africa has claimed me, and the opening notes of Mozart’s Concerto for Clarinet in A Major took me there.

Ever since my seminary days, six words of scripture transport me to a landscape just as amazing. I hear Matthew’s “The kingdom of heaven is like . . .” and I pay attention. These words pique my imagination. They signal that what’s coming is far different from the place my spirit goes when hijacked by entertainers or advertisers.

So I let myself be transported to a new world once again via the lean similitudes tucked into Matthew 13. I let mustard seed, leaven, hidden treasure, a pearl, a dragnet, and a householder act as portals. As I enter these parables of Jesus, I remind myself to stay in a right-brained mode, to laugh at incongruities, to refuse to allegorize. I remind myself to approach the parables as playfully as possible, with a receptive spirit. I don’t want to interpret such lovely, tiny gems; I want to wonder about them. I want to open myself to the strange territory these analogies from Palestinian life point to.