“What We Love” – (text) – and on YouTube
Rev. Paul Sprecher, First Parish Bridgewater, Sunday February 21, 2016, 10:30 am

Reading “The Pearl of Great Price,” Amy Jill-Levine
“The kingdom of heaven is like a man, a merchant, seeking fine pearls; on
finding one pearl of extremely great value, he went and sold all that he had and
bought it.” – Matthew 13.45–46
The merchant has found what he wanted, although until the moment of the find,
he did not realize his true desire. He has reconceptualized both his past values and
his future plans; the “magnitude of the life change” is paramount; he is no longer
what he was. [Once he has found the one pearl, he is no longer buying and selling
– he is no longer a merchant.]
By the standards of the status quo—whether in first-century Galilee or twentyfirst-century
America—the merchant has acted in a reckless manner. The
merchant, however, sets up alternative standards not determined by society, but
determined by something else, whether his own desires or a heavenly prompt. He
really is “countercultural.” He defines his treasure in his own terms. He is able to
recognize what for him has true value, and he can do what he needs to do in order
to obtain it.
The pearl the merchant obtains is not simply the best of the lot, the one among
the many. It is qualitatively different, singular, exemplary; it points beyond the
concept of “pearl” to something new, something heretofore unseen and unknown.
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There is a transcendent quality, a mystery, to this pearl. And so the parable
provokes.
Our erstwhile merchant first raises questions of our own acquisitiveness. We
are continually seeking, whether the object is fine pearls, a new job, another
degree, or spiritual fulfillment. But each time we find our goal, it turns out to be
ephemeral. There is always a new necklace, a new career, a new form of study, a
nagging sense that we have not done what we need to do. We flit from desire to
desire, never permanently fulfilled, always somewhat discontent. The merchant’s
actions show that knowing one’s pearl obviates all other wants and desires.
Not only can the cycle be broken; the merchant demonstrates that one can step
out of it entirely.
The issue isn’t relative value; it’s all or nothing. Thereby, the parable asks: Can
we assess what is of ultimate value in our own lives, not simply in terms of
relativizing, but in terms of ultimate concern? More, it asks: Are we willing to step
aside from all we have to obtain what we want?
…. And so we ask: Do we take stock of our priorities? What is our image of
the kingdom? What, really, do we want? The parable consequently asks us if
searching for pearls, searching for commodities or multiples or stuff, is worth
pursuing.
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It is good to know that there may be something out there, beyond our
imagination, that demands our recognition of its ultimate value. It is good to know
if our definition of what constitutes the kingdom of heaven is healthy or harmful.
Not all pearls on the market are cultured; some are fake, although their cost can
be exceptionally high as well.
Sermon “What We Love” Rev. Paul Sprecher
Amy Jill-Levine studied the parable of the pearl with some of her students; she
describes the scene:
On Monday evenings during the school term, I either teach or facilitate a
Divinity course at Riverbend Maximum Security Prison, where Tennessee’s
death row is located. The first year I taught at Riverbend, the class—twelve
Riverbend inmates and twelve Vanderbilt students—studied the Gospel of
Matthew; after all, Matthew’s Gospel contains the parable of the Sheep and the
Goats, which talks about visiting people in prison.
When discussing Matthew 13.45–46 with my students—some candidates for
ordination, others serving life sentences—I asked: What is your pearl of
supreme value? For what would you sell everything you own? ….
One student in the Graduate Department of Religion mentioned the doctoral
degree. The desire for a Ph.D. was for her an irritant of sorts. She had already
earned a Master’s of Divinity and had planned to go directly for the Ph.D. in
New Testament, but life intervened. She married a pastor, had children, and
served as the minister’s wife (a professional role). She continued her education
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whenever she could—seeking pearls on Amazon, the History Channel, or in
online courses. Her husband discouraged her; he already had a Doctorate of
Ministry (D.Min.) and felt that one doctor in the family was sufficient. She
persevered. Seeking more information, she came across the website of
Vanderbilt’s Graduate Department of Religion and decided to apply. Not only
was she accepted; she was awarded funding.
For various and very good reasons, entering the program coincided with the
end of her marriage. That night she explained, and here I paraphrase: “I never
expected to find myself here, but when the graduate-school offer came, I did
what I needed to do to accept it. I gave up my home and my status as
‘minister’s wife’; I took out loans; I took back my original name. I do not know
what will happen at the end of this program, but that does not matter. I am
doing what is right for me. I have my pearl.” Most of us, I suspect, would not
have had the courage to change our lives, our identities, for the sake of what we
most want; we may not even know what the final goal is. This student showed
the daring, the courage, that many of us might lack. She redefined herself.
One of the Riverbend students responded with the single word, “Freedom.”
He would do what it takes—confession to rather than denial of his crime, anger
management courses, psychological tests, and so on—in order to increase his
chances of parole. He realized what he wanted, freedom, only when he realized
he did not have it. When and if he obtains it, he intends to break the cycle of
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crime and incarceration. With his sentence flattened or pardon granted, he is no
longer the “insider” or the “criminal,” but the “free man” who needs to form his
own new identity. When I drove home that evening, with the searchlights and
the barbed wire reflecting in my rear-view mirror, I realized that this student’s
“pearl” is something I take for granted.
Another Riverbend student said, “Safety.” He will invest all he has in order
to ensure that he will not be knifed in the chow line or attacked in the shower.
Again, his pearl is something that I had not considered.
And a third said that when he came into prison, he lost all that he had—his
property, his clothing, but also his identity, his dignity. He had to construct his
own pearl, layer by painful layer, tear by tear, and see what was really
important.
Here is one final interpretation. I do not think it is quite what Jesus had in
mind, but it does fit the question of ultimate concern. The word for “pearl” in
Greek is margarita, a recognition that can bring new meaning to the expression
“pearly gates.” When I mentioned this translation in class, one of my students, a
recovering alcoholic, explained how the margarita, the drink, was her pearl of
complete value. She sold everything—home, food, family—for the drink.
[She concludes: ] And so we ask: Do we take stock of our priorities? What
is our image of the kingdom? What, really, do we want?1
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Jesus offered many analogies and metaphors in his parables to describe what he
called “the Kingdom of Heaven.” He spoke of mustard seeds, lost coins, lost
sheep, a lost son and a pearl of great price. The very plenitude of comparisons
suggests that what Jesus is pointing to is obscure and that it needs to be clarified
from many angles. It is clear that the Kingdom of Heaven Jesus is speaking about
is both present – “the Kingdom of Heaven is among you,” he says, and also
prospective, something that already is and is also developing, growing, becoming
more complete as we live into it. Jesus is not talking about heaven or what
happens after we die; though occasionally does refer to heaven as a place we go
after we die. But it’s clear that when he speaks of the Kingdom of Heaven, he’s
not referring to that. He’s talking about what other religious traditions refer to as
the “eternal now,” a way of living that is possible here and now, a way of being
that experiences something like our notions of heaven in the present rather than in
the future. This is not about pie in the sky when you die – it’s about what has
already started but will continue to grow and develop.
This quality of being present now while also unfolding into the future is part of
why so many parables and metaphors were offered by way of explanation; and the
very multiplicity of images opens the way to various distortions of the concept.
One popular understanding takes the name “millennialism” from images of a future
golden age expressed elsewhere in the Bible and anticipated first by Jews and later
by Christians – a kingdom where the lion will lie down with the lamb as foretold
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by the prophet Isaiah, or of the eternal golden city of Jerusalem from the Book of
Revelations. The notion that humans can bring about this millennial heaven on
earth by violence has led to numerous catastrophic conflicts by religious zealots
over the centuries, starting with the uprising against the Roman occupiers by the
Jews beginning about thirty years after Jesus was crucified, which resulted in the
destruction of the temple and of the whole city of Jerusalem. The death of Jesus on
a cross was in fact one of tens of thousands such executions carried out by the
Romans to serve as examples to anyone who chose to rebel against their rule of
their kingdom. When the Romans re-conquered Jerusalem from the Zealots in the
year 70 A.D., the area all around the city was completely denuded of trees – they
were all cut down to make crosses on which to crucify rebels.
Another Jewish millennial spasm began some sixty years after the destruction
of Jerusalem; after the Romans put that rebellion down, they expelled almost all
Jews from the land of Israel. There were a number of such attempts to bring about
the Kingdom of Heaven during the Middle Ages and after. One of the most
dramatic occurred during the time of Luther in the city of Münster, which was
declared by its leaders to be “the New Jerusalem,” the Kingdom of Heaven on
Earth spoken of by Jesus in his parables. That attempt, too, was crushed with great
loss of life.
We can also find traces of this millennial dream in the construction of modern
utopias large and small, most notably in the notion that Communism would enable
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the creation of an earthly paradise in Russia or in Cuba among others. Attempting
to bring about these utopias by violence has always resulted in mass killings and
very little of heaven.
Sometimes it helps to step outside of our Western religious traditions to shed
light on teachings that have become clichéd. Mystics of many traditions speak of
and strive to exemplify the elusive concept that Jesus called the Kingdom of
Heaven. Rumi, the 13th Century Muslim poet of the Sufi tradition offers this
image:
An ant hurries along a threshing floor
with its wheat grain, moving between huge stacks
of wheat, not knowing the abundance
all around. It thinks its one grain
is all there is to love.
So we choose a tiny seed to be devoted to.
This body, one path or one teacher.
Look wider and farther.
The essence of every human being can see,
and what that essence-eye takes in,
the being becomes. Saturn. Solomon!
The ocean pours through a jar,
and you might say it swims inside
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the fish! This mystery gives peace to
your longing and makes the road home home.
And so in his own life, Rumi chose to live in the beauty of what is while
opening himself to “the road home,” the road which is itself “home.”
Opening ourselves to the beauty of this world – the vastness beyond our own
little grain of wheat – also opens us up to the greater beauty we can be part of
creating. Rebecca Ann Parker from our own Unitarian Universalist tradition says
The down-to-earth beauty of this world compels our ethical response, a way
of being that the great religious humanist Albert Schweitzer summed up as
“reverence for life.” Many of the world’s religious traditions inform our
understanding of this insight. “Let the beauty we love become the good we
do,” the Muslim saint and poet Rumi cried. Native American spiritual
traditions call for noticing the beauty before us, behind us, within us, and all
around us. These traditions cultivate careful attention to the character of each
living thing so that we can relate appropriately to the power of life and honor
“all our relations.” Some Buddhist meditation practices, similarly, foster a deep
awareness of the “just-so-ness” of things.2
Clarence Skinner, the leading Universalist theologian of the early years of the
Twentieth Century, wrote these words even while World War I was raging:
We accept the world for the joyous place it was meant to be. We like it, despite
the fact that belated theologians look upon it with inherited suspicion…. Let us
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smash the injustices, tyrannies, the sins which imprison us and speed those
readjustments which will make life here and now justify our hopes.3
So this pearl of great price that the merchant found and for which he sold
everything else points toward a state of being that satisfies a longing within us for
something now that also points to the future. It is enough. It is our highest
aspiration. It is a state in which we can love what is here and now while making it
easy and possible to take our part in the great work of what is yet to be. It enables
us to look out from the bunker of everydayness – the tiny grain of wheat we
possess – toward the possibility of loving wholeness; the mystery; an openness to
uncertainty; an openness to wonder; toward the pearl of great price. And this is
enough, as Rumi tells us.
So what is your pearl of great price? What is your place in this great swirl of
life and love and joy and possibility and being part of a future that is yet to be?
What for you is enough? Have you found that place in yourself that “makes the
road home home?”
The poet Mary Oliver says:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
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Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
May it be so, and Amen
1 Matthew 13.45– 46, in Levine, Amy-Jill (2014-09-09). Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic
Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (p. 127 and passim). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
2 Rebecca Ann Parker, “Our Work for Social Justice,” The Unitarian Universalist Pocket Guide,
Boston: Skinner House Books, 2012, pp. 62-63.
3 Parker, p. 61.

Topics: Desire