Kelsey's Sunday Sermon

My grandfather was born in Oxford, Nebraska in 1926. He was the youngest of four children born to August and Kate Schleusener. They were a farm family in the Nebraska tradition: they grew crops. (And that’s all they did, which is a strange thing to comprehend for me, a child of the Twitter generation.) They got up early, tended the crops all day long, ate dinner as a family and went to bed. There’s an old joke that the only time farm families stopped working was for church on Sunday and Nebraska football games. Now, Grandpa grew up to be the most amazing man I have ever known – he was the president of a university, he developed technology that changed the face of atmospheric science, he’s in the Hall of Fame in two states. He’s still my greatest mentor, but for the purpose of this sermon, I want to think about him as a kid, before I knew him.

Grandpa’s father, my great-grandfather August, developed some kind of senility when Grandpa was still young. Today we’d probably know exactly what was happening to August and we’d know how to treat him, but when Grandpa was young and medicine wasn’t so advanced, there was no treatment. At the same time that August was declining, Grandpa’s older brother Dennis went to war. That meant that Grandpa, at a very young age, was left to run the family farm.

I can’t imagine what that must have been like – to absorb all of the duties of both his father and his older brother, practically overnight, as a teenager, when your ability to cope with change of that magnitude isn’t even close to developed. But he did it.

There are so many stories I could tell from that period in Grandpa’s life, but one is my favorite. I heard a lot of stories about Grandpa growing up – in fact, I always knew I had really screwed up when Dad would tell me a story about how Grandpa did it better when he was my age. Like all farm kids, the Schleuseners lived for the county fair. The year that Grandpa absorbed the farm, there was a race at the fair: you had to run the length of a football field, drink a whole Coke, and run back, and the first person back won…some kind of prize. Somehow Grandpa knew this race was going to happen and he wanted to win it. So he set up a racecourse. He measured the length of the field. He set up a glass of water at the end of the field, since they were too poor to afford Coke for him to practice with. Every day, after he was done with all of the farm chores, he ran the length of the course and drank the glass of water and ran back. This went on every day for a whole summer leading up to the fair, and of course, as you’re probably expecting, when the fair rolled around, Grandpa ran the race and he won it.

The parables in the Gospel of Matthew today are really challenging and even a little offensive at first light. Frankly I just don’t get it. The Jesus who says, “The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” – this is not the Jesus that I know and love. There’s something more there, and I can’t put my finger on it. When I read this text to Andrew, my fiancé, he said, “When Jesus says stuff like that, I just say, What Jesus?”

Here’s what I do know: Jesus describes the kingdom of heaven like a treasure, like a pearl of great value for which people will sacrifice so much. Ultimately, it’s not about the treasure, the pearl, or those who search. This parable is about the joy of the kingdom of heaven. These parables stress the great value of the kingdom and the necessity of taking the opportunity to gain it. And I don’t think they’re instructions about what people should do to gain it. I think they’re a story about what one person would do. I was on the track team in high school – I ran a few races when I was a teenager. I wanted to do well, and I practiced every day, but I cannot imagine wanting to win a race as badly as Grandpa wanted to win the race at the fair. But when I think about this story, I can taste it. I can feel how important it was, how amazing that must have been for him. That’s what Jesus is trying to describe for us. If a person is willing – is excited – to give up everything they have for something…can’t you just taste how amazing that thing must be? It makes me excited to think about it. The Kingdom of Heaven must be so much greater than we could possibly imagine. It’s so great that we will all be excited to move on from this, what we know, to what will be. And to be honest, I’m really glad that we don’t have to win a race to gain it. J