Communicating the Kingdom of God

“Again the Kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking expensive pearls, who when he found one pearl of great price went and sold all that he had and bought it” (Matthew 13:45)

Our Lord Jesus Christ was an outstanding communicator, because He spoke to the values and needs of those He encountered. To a merchant He talked of jewels. To the farmer He spoke of sowing and fertile earth. To the fishermen He used nets and species of fish to make His point. And to the housewife He talked of housecleaning. To each person He found a way to be relevant. St. Paul grasped that insight when he said that he is all things to all people so that by God’s grace he may save some.

If they were preaching in our days they might fashion parables something like these:

The kingdom of heaven is like a stamp collector who went and sold his entire life’s collection in order to purchase a single precious rare stamp, one of a kind.

Again the kingdom of heaven is like an immigrant bus boy without a green card who rushed back to his one-room apartment and searched everywhere for the Super Lotto ticket worth one hundred million dollars that he had purchased from the deli.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like the boy who traded all of his baseball cards and withdrew his savings in order to have a photo card of Christy Matthewson.

Again the kingdom of heaven is like the teenager who sold her Toyota for a ticket to a performance of “Smashing Pumpkins.”

This is our contemporary society—we may criticize it, we may ignore it, we may choose to treat it with contempt; but this is a civilization created by the Lord in need of salvation. When we shall pass from this life to the kingdom of heaven, our Lord, God and Savior will not ask us why we had not been like the apostles after Pentecost. Nor will He want to know why we were not as brave as the Orthodox Christians during the time of the Muslim persecutions in the Balkans or that of the Communists in the last century. He will ask why we had not been concerned for the salvation of the confused, the frustrated, the self-righteous and spiritually ignorant in the twenty-first century.

Who cannot notice what is happening to western Christianity in our time? With the scandal of clergy pedophilia, the fragmentation of another noble and ancient communion over the ordination of homosexuals to priesthood and episcopacy, the greed of the televangelists and the pandering to any and all forms of sinfulness in the name of modernism and relevance, many looking for an alternative are turning to the East and seeking something of value in the Orthodox Church.

We for our part should ask if we are ready and willing to welcome and embrace the seekers of salvation among us. It’s not our style to go forth two by two like the Mormons and the Seventh Day Adventists; however, when the seekers come to our parishes, are they greeted with warmth and fellowship, or ignored? I’ve heard it said by an Anglican cleric that we Orthodox are like people who stand by their well with buckets ready; but when a fire rages and a house nearby is burning, we don’t make the effort to lug a bucket of water to put the blaze out. Another critic said that we are like priests on Mt. Zion who go about our prayer lives in ignorance or unconcern for the folks in the marketplace (or mall, in modern times) who are searching for something and some One to believe in. Is there a worse indictment than to have it said that we just don’t care?