Kingdom Detectives

Ruling Elder Sara Babcock preached this sermon on July 26, 2026, at Beechmont Presbyterian Church on Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52.

Lord, may the words from my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts be pleasing to you, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

Today, we’re going to be detectives.

Our task this morning is to use the clues Jesus gave us in our Gospel reading—five brief but illuminating parables—to try and learn as much as we can about the Kingdom of God. Here’s what we know so far: Jesus, Son of God, came to Earth, died, and will come again. While he was on Earth, he taught people how God wants people to be through both his public lessons, like the Sermon on the Mount, and his actions of healing, exorcism, and inclusion.

I like what Pastora Marissa said in her email about worship this week:

“The Kingdom of God is not simply a place we go after death or another name for heaven. It is God's active reign breaking into the world through Jesus Christ, bringing reconciliation, justice, peace, healing, and the renewal of all creation. It is both a present reality and a future hope.”

We’re searching in these stories for clues of something that has always been happening, but also maybe clues toward how to be or what to look out for in the future.

At this point in the stories of Matthew, Jesus has been teaching for a while: he’s already given the Sermon on the Mount and has even offered a few parables since then. Jesus often teaches his followers through these brief stories, known as parables, as a way to better illustrate the realities and promises of a life walking with God. However, unlike other sources of information we might reach for, like a Wikipedia article or a nonfiction book, or stories that impart lessons like “The Tortoise and the Hare,” parables don’t always have a straight answer or a clear moral path. Theologian Wendy Farley describes parables as “spiritual creatures” that “tangle us up in the mind of Christ, where nothing makes sense and yet we are consoled by his presence.”

If this sounds confusing, you’re not alone. In a chunk of Matthew 13 that we didn’t read this morning, once Jesus steps away from his public teachings and goes to eat with his disciples, his own disciples ask him to explain the parable he just told to the crowd. These are the people who, presumably, have heard Jesus’s teaching over and over as they travel from place to place, and even they are still asking clarifying questions about parables.

So when I say we’re going to be detectives this morning, I’m afraid we won’t have the satisfying conclusion of the last three minutes of an episode of “Scooby-Doo,” or the final “Here’s how you did it and here’s how I figured it out” speech of a Sherlock Holmes story. But what our detective work can do is help us ask good questions, to flex our muscles of wonder and curiosity, and to ask how God may be speaking through these parables this morning. Are you ready?

First out of the gate, the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. This might sound familiar to some of you; the mustard seed parable is one of the “greatest hits” of the Christian canon. So small! So mighty!

Mustard seeds are, it’s true, incredibly small. But boy, do they grow. The crowds Jesus would be teaching, as first-century Palestinians, would know mustard as a potentially invasive plant that some scholars have compared to the kudzu vine in the American South. I recently heard kudzu described as “the vine that ate the South.” Brought over from Asia in the nineteenth century, it is nearly impossible to keep contained, and once it’s established, it chokes out any other plants in its vicinity. As denizens of Louisville, you have definitely seen it.

So mustard seeds start teeny tiny, then grow to potentially take over everything in an area, and that is like the Kingdom of God. One thing that I think this means is that God’s reign starts small. When you plant a seed, it takes a while before it sprouts, and even more time before it looks like the plant on the package. We, as followers of Jesus trying to understand the Kingdom of God, might have to be as patient as gardeners waiting for plants to grow. This work, this posture, won’t be visible overnight. But in the same way a seed is storing energy and growing roots before it sprouts, we can trust that the Kingdom of God is at work and that it will grow and delight before our very eyes, if we can trust and wait and watch.

Speaking of tiny things…

Our next parable concerns yeast, the living organism that causes bread to rise. Jesus tells the crowd that the Kingdom of God is like the yeast a woman kneads into dough to make bread rise.

Yeast, like the mustard seed, is small. If you’ve ever baked bread or seen the process, you know that yeast has to be fed and then worked into the dough through kneading in order to do its work and make bread fluffy and tall. And, as scholar Anna Case-Winters points out, the word translated in the NRSV as “mixed in” is more akin to “hid” or “hiding”—so the yeast is “hidden within” the flour.

I think this is an important distinction that helps us understand what the Kingdom of God is like. Yeast shares with the mustard seed that it is physically small with a big impact, but the text explicitly describes yeast as “hidden” within the flour. The work of the Kingdom, then, is not always out in plain sight, though its impact is clear.

It’s also important to point out that, whereas the mustard seed is sort of thrown in the dirt and then grown, yeast takes human hands to come to its full potential. In order for yeast to be evenly distributed, to make a really good loaf of bread, you’ve got to knead it. It’s hard work—and, as the parable states, often a task that fell to women in Jesus’s time. In a traditional kingdom or empire like Rome or, say, the United States, the work of the state is generally—ideally—in the public sphere. It involves political speeches, wars, or commerce. In this vision of the Kingdom of God, however, Jesus compares the work to a domestic task of service.

Yeast does its work away from the halls of powerful people, but it is available to anyone who wants to take the time and put in the effort to knead a really good loaf of bread. And the people who do this work are ordinary, not offered the same opportunities as kings or politicians to shape their world.

All right, detectives, what clues have we learned about the Kingdom of God so far? It’s found in the smallest seeds and flakes of our world, but can grow to be surprisingly large and impactful. It might require patience for us to see the work it is doing. It might be hidden at first. It is the work of ordinary people. And, like kneading bread, it takes our own hands and effort to bring it to its full realization.

The next two parables offer a very different vision for the Kingdom of God. In the parable of the treasure, the Kingdom of God is like treasure found in a field, which is so good that the finder buries the treasure again and then spends all his money to buy the land with the treasure on it. In the parable of the pearl merchant, the Kingdom of God is a merchant who, upon finding one really great pearl, sells all his other pearls in order to buy—and presumably keep—this one pearl. Totally normal behavior.

Biblical scholar Douglas R. A. Hare suggests that, while the first two parables shed light on the nature of the Kingdom of God, these two parables instead highlight the human response to the Kingdom. Our clues here tell us not just about what the Kingdom might be like, but how the faithful should act in this reality.

With that in mind, let’s go back to the treasure finder. We don’t know much about the identity of this person, only that they seemingly stumble upon a treasure that is like the Kingdom of God—a pretty great treasure. They recognize the value of the treasure, so much so that they are willing to sell everything else they own to keep it nearby.

But here’s what I find curious about this parable: the treasure stays buried. The finder keeps it close and is willing to sacrifice for it, and then goes back to their normal life? They don’t shout about their cool new treasure from the rooftops. They don’t display the treasure like a roadside attraction and invite people to come see it. Nor do they sell it or seem to do anything to get a financial return on their investment in the treasure. So what was the point? And what does this mean about the Kingdom of Heaven? What clues are here for us?

I’d like to suggest that one thing this parable shows us is the importance of discernment—of knowing what is important to you or your community. How many others might have walked by the treasure and not discovered it? Or not seen its value? The finder knows the importance of the treasure and immediately takes action, but how did they know?

Discernment is basically a fancy word for understanding your choices and choosing among them. It’s about knowing who you are and what you need, and then making decisions according to that knowledge. In Christian spaces, discernment is also about trying to understand what God is doing with us, with the church, and in the world. I think that the parable of the treasure tells us, in part, that understanding the Kingdom of God is about discerning what is valuable to us and then choosing every day to keep it safe.

The treasure is a clue about the Kingdom of God because we, as the finders, recognize it and organize our lives around it. When we listen for God’s influence in the world and seek to learn about—or find—God’s Kingdom, we are learning how to be followers of Christ, and we hold on to these lessons like the finder holds on to the treasure.

The parable of the pearl merchant similarly has to do with material value and knowing what is worth an investment. But unlike the parable of the treasure, Jesus tells us that the Kingdom of God is like the merchant—the person, not the item. How is the Kingdom of God like a pearl merchant? And who, or what, is the pearl?

Like the finder of the treasure, the pearl merchant sells everything they have to buy one really great item, which, it must be said, makes them a pretty bad merchant. Merchants are supposed to have, you know, inventory—stuff to sell. Those who deal in one specific item, like pearls, even spend a lot of time learning about their items. They have to be skilled in the shapes, colors, and values of all pearls in order to stay in business.

That’s a clue, detectives. If the Kingdom of God has something to do with a merchant, that means that the Kingdom knows what it’s looking for and what it’s about. It makes me think about other things Jesus says about being fishers of people or shepherds.

These two parables tell us something about how the Kingdom works and how we can interact with it: like the finder of treasure, we see and acknowledge the value and importance of the Kingdom of God; and, like the pearl merchant, the Kingdom of God recognizes our unique wonderfulness right back.

In the last parable of this text, the Kingdom of God is like a net. And not a little butterfly net that might catch a fish or two—the dragnets of the ancient world were big contraptions that would catch, like the text says, anything and everything in their path. And, like in the parable of the weeds that Pastora Ale discussed with us last week, Jesus goes on to describe how some fish are thrown back. But our task today is to better understand the Kingdom of God, and in this parable the Kingdom is the net—not the thrower-backers. What clues are here for us in this net?

Jesus is clear that the Kingdom-net catches fish of every kind, which I think is a pretty significant clue that the Kingdom of God is open to everyone. And, frankly, I struggle with that. Because here we are, doing all this detective work and listening closely and reading between the lines of these parables, only to learn that probably some other people are getting caught up in the net too? And that’s what’s supposed to happen?

We’ve done all this work: we were patient, like the mustard seed taught us; saw the hidden yeast; knew the value of the treasure; and sussed out the riddle that the Kingdom was the merchant, not the pearl—I’m pretty smug about that one, to be honest. And now we’re learning that maybe none of that work was as important as making space for all kinds of fish—I mean, people?

Well… I told y’all this ending might not be satisfying. Because, yeah, I actually think that’s exactly what Jesus is saying here. If we’ve been learning about the Kingdom of God so that we can better participate in its work “on earth as it is in heaven,” it is absolutely in service of welcoming different kinds of people. We’ve been detectives this morning, but not to be smug about knowing more than other people or in order to separate ourselves from people who might not have the time or capacity to suss all of this out.

No, we are detectives because part of being called into the Kingdom of God is about learning how to make room for everyone else. That’s the project. And it’s going to take everything we’ve learned—all the clues we gathered—to do this: the patience and faith that things are happening below the surface; the ability to see the importance of what is hidden; the discernment to know what is important; the confidence that comes from knowing we were chosen; and, ultimately, the wisdom and humility to make space for others.

Thanks be to God.