Seek First the Kingdom of God (Matt. 6:25-33)
Seek First the Kingdom of God
First UMC of Pocatello
October 20, 2024
Matthew 6:25-34
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The scriptures insist that the kingdom of heaven must be sought after, searched for, and pursued, which means that it begins for us as a hidden thing. In one of his teachings, Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field” (Matt 13:44).
Sometimes the new life that God is manifesting in the world is hidden because it is out there somewhere, and we have to leave our familiar sphere to go and find it. Like Abram and Sarai setting out from Haran to go to a land as yet unrevealed to them. Like Matthew the tax collector leaving his booth to walk the roads of Galilee as a disciple of Jesus.
More often than not, the kingdom of God is right where we are – within us, even – but hidden from view until we come to see so-called ordinary life through the eyes of faith. Jacob falls asleep in the wilderness with his head on a stone and dreams of a ladder rising from that very place up to heaven. A Roman centurion beholds a man who has just died a routine execution on a cross, and suddenly understands that this was God’s Son.
When I began “considering the birds” in earnest about six years ago by buying binoculars and going birding, I began noticing birds everywhere. I know that sounds silly. Of course birds are everywhere! All my life I had been vaguely aware of them. But I hadn’t known that chickadees were everywhere, or titmice, or juncos, wrens, and nuthatches. I hadn’t known that out of the same kitchen window I could witness downy, red-bellied, and pileated woodpeckers. Often, especially in the early days, I would go out to a nature preserve and identify a bird for the first time – maybe a brown thrasher or a catbird – and then I’d come home and start hearing that bird in my neighborhood. Considering the birds added depth to my moment-by-moment experiences. I sought them and found them. I wanted them until, all around me, there they were. Before, there had just been a blur of bird, but now I live in a world with layers of presence, a world where creatures appear individually and vividly, and whose names I know.
God wants us to want him. God wants us to seek him. God wants to reveal himself to us in all moments and in all things. Jesus says so himself. In the very same sermon that he talks about the birds, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find” (7:7). The more we prioritize looking for God, the finer our perceptions of God become. The more of ourselves that we offer to the quest, the greater the rewards along the way. God’s love fills the world, and just as there are many names for birds, there are also many names for that love: gentleness and mercy, compassion and justice, generosity, courage, and hope. It is our joy and privilege as God’s children to learn to distinguish and practice them all. God has placed our craving for divine love at the center of our being.
The prayer book of the Bible, the Hebrew Psalms, affirm that God is worth wanting, worth seeking. Psalm 16:11 – “You show me the path of life; / in your presence there is fullness of joy; / in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” Psalm 63:3 – “Your unfailing love is better than life itself; / how I praise you!” Psalm 90:14 – “Satisfy us each morning with your unfailing love, / so we may sing for joy to the end of our lives.” God can satisfy us. God’s love is unfailing. God will show us the path to his presence, the path that leads to our joy. We are called to pray prayers like that: God, I want you to satisfy me. I want to experience joy. Help me find my way to you. Along all the paths we may take in our searching, down through all the inner depths we may plumb in our seeking, the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray bears good fruit: “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Maybe somewhere along the way you stopped trusting that God wants joy, satisfaction, and fullness of life for you. The longings you feel in the purest part of yourself and God’s eternal longings for you are not in competition. They are in complete harmony. But if the people around you – especially the religious people around you – did not teach you to trust your longing; if they shamed your seeking, silenced your questions, forced you onto a predetermined path of their own creation, then the voices of fear or sadness or suspicion might be threatening to drown out the holy whispers of those deep spiritual stirrings.
“Seek, and you will find,” Jesus says. He does not shame you, silence you, put you in a box. Perhaps today your heart is begging you to really listen to it again. Perhaps the Gospel’s invitation to you today is to courageously cry out “Satisfy me with your love, God!” and feel the cleansing power of naming what you most deeply want. Your satisfying search can begin again right now.
Jesus’ teaching about the birds of the air and the flowers of the field is about two opposing powers: the power of trust and the power of worry. Worry – excessive worry that hardens into anxiety – is one of those “powers and principalities” that Paul wrote about in Ephesians 6. Worry is a force we must struggle against and subdue through prayer. Jesus was so concerned about our worry because he understood its power to waylay our seeking. If seeking is spiritual movement, worry is spiritual stasis. When we worry, we take energy that could be harnessed for prayer, service, and love and we use it to imagine worst-case scenarios about what’s to come, and then to work hard making sure those worst-case scenarios never come to pass.
Jesus knows that our worry, while ostensibly trying to keep us from suffering, actually becomes a source of suffering itself. By trying to protect us from diminishment and death, it drains the present moment of its vividness and joy. When we worry, we give away his moment to get out ahead of the next, we give away today to get out ahead of tomorrow. And when we do that for a lifetime, well, we never really live.
This is why Jesus tells us to seek first the kingdom of heaven. Make that seeking the most important thing, not just in principle but in practice. For the Israelites, it meant keeping one day of the week holy as the Sabbath, offering the first fruits of their fields to the priests, dedicating their firstborn children to God. We also need to consider what it means to place God’s kingdom first in our families, our finances, and our leisure. If all our decisions are serving our great desire for God’s love and joy, and if we trust that God wants us to seek him and therefore won’t let our seeking ruin us, then the dark power of worry can be banished. All these things – our daily bread – will be added to us if we seek first the kingdom of heaven. God knows our needs, our true needs. And God will take care of us.
Jesus gave these teachings to the disciples as a group. He knew that they would need to support one another in their search for the kingdom of heaven, and that they would need to help one another resist the temptation to worry over the future. Jesus was teaching the disciples what it would mean for them to be the Church. They would need to protect one another from anxiety and honor the true desires of each other’s hearts. We are still called to be a people, a community, that prays, “May your kingdom come” and “Give us today our daily bread” and “Satisfy me with your unfailing love.” When the Church’s heart is set on seeking the kingdom of heaven, when that’s our first priority, those of us who show up on any given week struggling to trust God’s provision or struggling to be brave with our longings can be held and supported and re-oriented by the strength of the Body. But if as a group we are anxious, if as a community we are worried about what we will eat and what we will wear and what tomorrow will bring, then we lose the ability to help each other.
I’d like to end today with a poem by Denise Levertov called ‘In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being.’ Her poem affirms that God is all around us, that we are encompassed by God’s loving presence, and that, if we would just let ourselves, we could fly like the birds do, like the saints do, like those who “seek first” do.
‘In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being’
Birds afloat in air’s current,
sacred breath? No, not breath of God,
it seems, but God
the air enveloping the whole
globe of being.
It’s we who breathe, in, out, in, the sacred,
leaves astir, our wings
rising, ruffled – but only the saints
take flight. We cower
in cliff-crevice or edge out gingerly
on branches close to the nest. The wind
marks the passage of holy ones riding
the ocean of air. Slowly their wake
reaches us, rocks us.
But storm or still,
numb or poised in attention,
we inhale, exhale, inhale,
encompassed, encompassed.[1]
In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] Denise Levertov, Collected Poems, eds. Paul A. Lacey and Anne Dewey (New York: New Directions, 2013), 961.