July 2005 by E. Louise Williams
(Click here for downloadable artwork)

Like Heaven
Matthew 13:44–50

“The kingdom of heaven is like....” —Matthew 13:47a

Imagine that you are a fish—just doing your thing and suddenly caught up in a swirling, disorienting motion. You are turned fin over gills in a net that sweeps up you and everything else in its swath. It is both exciting and scary. The net gets more and more full of fish of every kind, edible and inedible, clean and unclean, healthy and sick. But it is also full of all kinds of other things—pieces of boat hulls, old sandals, a tool—things broken or lost or thrown away. Flotsam and fish are caught up in the net’s powerful movement toward the shore.

The kingdom of heaven is like...

There was a man who was a saver. He grew up, during the Depression, the son of a farm hand, deep in the hills of Missouri. He didn’t throw much away. “You never knew,” he said, “when you might need that piece of wire or that bit of two-by-four or parts from that old threshing machine.” What if the sorters on the shore are like that man—picking up what at first glance seems some old piece of trash and seeing instead something of value, something to be saved, something to go into the baskets?

The kingdom of heaven is like...

The sorting will come, but only angels at God’s beck and call dare to do it, and then only at the very end. We already have a glimpse of how that sorting might go. We know who was thrown out to the place where there was weeping and gnashing of teeth, to that hill where they burned the trash outside the city, to that graveyard where people wailed and mourned. An angel was there, too—sorting it out. “Jesus who was crucified is not here; for he has been raised.” (Matthew 28:5–6)

For reflection and discussion: When have you felt caught up in the kingdom of God? How can a congregation be like the net in the parable?

Prayer: Gracious God, catch me up in your kingdom. Amen.