Let us come before God in prayer. You are for us, oh God, who is against us. It is you, oh God who makes all things right. Who is there to condemn us. (Response …)
Likewise the Spirit helps in our weakness (Response …)
And you oh God searching the heart knows what is the mind of the Spirit (Response ….)
We come knowing there are things we wish we had never done, things we wish we had never said and so many things we wish we had done, things we wish we had said. (We) Bring them before you. Who will separate us from the love of Christ. Though hardship or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword. Now in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor rulers nor things present or things to come, nor powers nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Thanks be to God. Amen.

As it's Bible Sunday may we just start with one of those short prayers of the Bible Society. Let us pray.
Loving God as we read from your word help us to learn from it and then live by it, to the glory of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

Now the first bible reading today. It is taken from Genesis, Chapter 29, Verses 15 to 28 and is a story of love and intrigue and beguilement. Genesis, Chapter 29: 'And Laban said unto Jacob "because thou art my brother shouldst thou therefore serve me for nought. Tell me what shall thy wages be". And Laban had two daughters. The name of the elder was Leah and the name of the younger was Rachel. And Leah's eyes were tender but Rachel was beautiful and well favoured. And Jacob loved Rachel and he said "I will serve thee seven years for Rachel, thy younger daughter." And Laban said "It is better that I give her to thee than that I should give her to another man. Abide with me". And Jacob served seven years for Rachel and they seemed unto him but a few days for the love he had to her. And Jacob said unto Laban "Give me my wife for my days are fulfilled that I may go in unto her". And Laban gathered all the men of the place and made a feast. And it came to pass in the evening that he took Leah his daughter and brought her to him and he went in under her and Laban gave Zilpah his handmaid unto his daughter Leah for a handmaid. And it came to pass in the morning that behold it was Leah. And he said, Jacob said to Laban "What is this that thou has done unto me. Did not I serve with thee for Rachel? Wherefore then hast thou beguiled me?" And Laban said "It is not so done in our place to give the younger before the first born. Fulfil the week of this one and we will give the other also for the service that thou shalt serve with us yet seven other years". And Jacob did so and fulfilled her week and he gave him Rachel his daughter to wed.'

The Gospel reading is taken from Matthew, Chapter 13, Verses 31 to 33 and 44 to 52 and it is about Jesus telling parables of the Kingdom of God: 'He put another parable before them. "The realm of Heaven" he said "is like a grain of mustard which a man takes and sows in his field. It is less than any seed on earth but when it comes up it is larger than any plant. It becomes a tree, so large that the wild birds come and roost in its branches". He told them another parable. "The realm of Heaven" he said "is like dough which a woman took and buried in three pecks of flour till all of it was leavened."

Then verses 44 to 52: "The realm of Heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. The man who finds it hides it and in his delight goes and sells all he possesses, and buys that field. Again the realm of Heaven is like a trader in search of fine pearls. When he finds a single pearl of high price he is off to sell all he possesses and buy it. Again the realm of Heaven is like a net which will swill into the sea and collected fish of every sort. When it was full they dragged it to the beach and sitting down they gathered the good fish into vessels but flung away the bad. So will it be at the end of the earth. The angels will go out and separate the evil from among the just and fling them into the furnace of fire. There men will wail and gnash their teeth. Have you understood all this?" They said to him "Yes". So he said to them "Well then every scribe who has become a disciple of the realm of Heaven is like a householder who produces what is new and what is old from his stores".

I've recently had holidays and during the holidays I try and get to the Fremantle Pool every morning and do an hour of aquarobics and there are four of us who are schoolies and we sort of delight in this being able to go every morning. A couple of them are brave and get up and go to the 6.00am class but I am sure I'd never cope with the rest of the day if I did an hour's aquarobics at 6.00am. It might be a bit of a rush getting to school. But as we were sort of there enjoying the sunshine and even in the middle of the rain, somebody said "This is the Lotto life" and I guess that's the dream of many people. All those wonderful ads on television. The Lotto life. Everybody has their own particular dream. I'm sure none of you at least would admit to buying Lotto tickets. Maybe some of you do but all of us probably have some sort of dream of what life could be like.

Why don't you think about that for a moment. Think there's a life full of ease and sunshine? A life full of a full table? Maybe it's a life where everyone's happy. I'm not quite sure what that means. But I think all of us have a dream of what we'd really like to be doing. If the situation were perfect then this is what it would mean for us.

I asked the Year 8s when they started this week looking at what the Kingdom of God might mean in Jesus' teaching to describe their perfect world. And it was quite interesting that just about all of them came up with a world where there was peace, there was no war, there was no sickness, no death. Some of them said and I said "how are we going to fit if people keep having babies" - "Oh there would be room for everyone". There'd be no people that are hurt, no-one would upset anyone else. A couple of them said there'd be no broken families and I guess that probably is the basis of most of our hopes. The idea of a world of peace and justice has been there through the Hebrew scriptures and then into the New Testament. There's always this dream. And usually this is called the Kingdom of God.

Matthew tends to talk about the Kingdom of Heaven because he respects the Jewish way of thinking about God and not mentioning the name of God. So the word Heaven isn't that realm above the clouds, which I'm sure is totally boring. Have you ever been turned on by sitting on a cloud and playing a harp for eternity? I much prefer the idea of the Heavenly banquet with all the nations of the world sharing in great food and great wine. Much more exciting. But whenever we start talking about the Kingdom of God we can only talk about it in pictures. Lions lying down with lambs. I thought that was wonderful and somebody said that that would mean that the lion had to change their whole being. They could no longer be a lion because lions have to eat meat. So nothing can be perfect.

I don't think anything we can imagine can quite give us the full picture of what God's Kingdom of justice and peace, the rule of God would really be like. We get glimpses, it's a bit like having a crystal. One moment you see light on one side and then it changes and the light goes somewhere else and we get a different view. I think that's what's happening in Matthew's Gospel. He gives us lots of little pictures. The Kingdom of Heaven is like …. It's like something worth working for. Find the treasure, I'm not sure about the morality of hiding it and buying the field but that's not the point of the story. But somebody who was willing to give everything they had, everything they had ever worked for to buy this field to obtain this treasure. And there was something discovered on the way, the pearl of great price.

I've got a set of pearls at home which my aunty gave me on my 16th birthday. I don't know whether they're valuable or not. They're valuable to me because she gave them to me and she said "I'd like you to have this" and she died fairly soon afterwards. I think I was wearing them one day and another aunt said "Where did you get those pearls?" and I said "Oh Aunty Harriet gave them to me". And she said "Oh they're those pearls. I remember when she bought them". But she refused to tell me the story about them. Obviously I think they were not meant to be bought or they were a little extravagant in that household, so I have some pearls which are a little bit of a treasure. Can you imagine somebody up in Broome searching for pearls and suddenly finding one that was worth more than the whole collection? Being willing to give everything for that one pearl.

And so we have something which is seen of great value, something which is worth giving up everything else for. We also know that the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God can grow beyond our imagination. Tiny mustard seeds which grow so big. I always thought of mustard as a herb and in Newman I had a herb garden, just beside the shed and I planted parsley and mint and all the bits and pieces and I planted the mustard. By the time we finished there was only mustard in the garden because it was taller than the shed, so I had some picture of what it was like. I'm not sure that the birds could make their nests in it but it certainly was a very big plant from a very small seed.

So Matthew was saying that Jesus suggests that the Kingdom of Heaven might have very small beginnings but it's beyond our imagination where it might grow. It's also like something which is small, it's unseeing, a bit like the blue dye. It's put in the flour as yeast and it grows, the flour expands and we get wonderful bread. One of the girls at school was talking about her lunch last week and I said "That's lovely bread" and she said "Yes my Mum makes it. She makes two loaves a day." And I said "Oh have you watched it rise?" And she said "No because I have a breadmaker". And so it's all mystery. I said "One day try and make some bread, mix the flour and some sugar and some water, put the yeast in and then put it in the sun and you can see how it grows." So I don't know what her poor mother is going to do if she goes home and asks to do that but I think that idea of the yeast infecting the whole of the mixture and helping it grow is really a story of hope for each one of us.

The Kingdom of God may seem small and impossible but the seeds are there. The seeds can influence and effect everything that's around us. The Kingdom of God is not something out of this world. All the examples Jesus gave were things which were part of every day life. The people didn't have to go to church to suddenly discover the great treasure. They were doing their normal everyday work and there it was right in front of them. I'm sure that all of us can find the Kingdom where we are doing what we normally do, perhaps questioning what we normally do and looking harder for things God has given us every day. The seeds of the Kingdom are there and we can help nurture them and it can go through us and beyond us. God's Kingdom of love and joy and peace can permeate this world.

I think the example of what God can do with a not very good situation comes from the Hebrew scriptures. It's a little like selling all for what you really want except I don't think poor old Jacob sold his first bride so he could get the other. He sold his labour instead. Can you imagine what it must have been like? Fleeing from your home because you tricked your brother out of the inheritance. You weren't quite game to go back again. And so you end up in the land of your grandfather. Your mother has suggested it might be good to go over there and get a proper wife because she would have come from the right tribe and she would have been a bit more the right sort of girl. Not like the ones in this new land to which they had gone.

And so he goes, meets his relative Laban and sees that there are daughters, there are little echoes of many stories in the story of Jacob at the well. We see it again in Moses. Yes the well was the place to go and meet the young women, a bit like the nightclubs are today. But here he was falling madly in love with Rachel who was so beautiful and he worked seven years to take her hand and then his father-in-law tricks the trickster. He's tricked his brother and so his father-in-law plays a trick on him. He wakes up the morning after his wedding night, presumably he enjoyed it, and it's the wrong woman. So he has to work another seven years. We are not quite sure about the oldest girl. Some people say she has beautiful eyes, other people say the translation might mean that she had weak eyes or perhaps vacant eyes but obviously the poor older daughter wasn't quite good enough for any man and so Dad had to marry her off. It's a story of incest in some ways according to some parts of Leviticus, being married to two sisters at once. But it's a story of the people of Israel. It's a story of God who was able to be there in the midst of things that aren't perfect and bring something good out of them. The story of a beautiful woman and an older sister.

It's also the story of the twelve tribes of Israel. Not only did these two women provide children but so did their servants and so we have the twelve children whom the two favourites of course were the sons of the favoured wife. You can imagine why the rest of the brothers weren't too happy about poor old Joseph. He was sort of the favoured son because his Mum was the most beautiful mother of the whole four women. But these twelve tribes of Israel are part of our history and part of the history of God's work within the real world. Not waiting for things to be perfect, not waiting for the right situation. But the work of God and the love of God and the purpose of God was there through that whole story of the Hebrew people. Through all of the tribes of Israel. Not just those of the favoured tribes.

We all live in an imperfect world. We all have dreams of what life might be. In the midst of the imperfect world when we grumble and wonder what we're doing, why are we working so hard? Why haven't we got work to do? Our situation could be better. We need to ask the question, what is most important for us? What would the Kingdom of Heaven be for us?

There are many songs and stories about people's regrets at the end of life of "I wish I'd spent more time on this or that or the other". It's usually "I wish I'd spent more time with my family, it's too late now they're all old and grown up". I think many of those stories are romanticised because realities of life and food and shelter are always there. Life will never be perfect but times come when we need to question everything that we are doing and saying "Is this worthwhile? What am I really willing to spend all of my energy about? What is most important to me? How can I help bring in the Kingdom of God?" God is there in the midst of life. God is there in the midst of everything we do. How can we work with God to bring about the Kingdom of peace and justice.

I heard last night of a business where people are invited to share where they're at before the meeting starts. I was quite amazed because most places I know, workplaces, you pretend that there is nothing wrong in life. You are there at work and you are going to work your hardest and please the boss and too bad if there's chaos at home or you're in the midst of a disaster. That doesn't exist. This man was saying at every meeting they say "Well I didn't sleep last night because my 17 year old daughter didn't come home until 2.00am and I was worried sick and I'm still feeling really tired and a bit frazzled about the whole situation". And somebody else might say "Oh I had a wonderful day because….." (I was going to say the Dockers won but they didn't last night did they?) But all sorts of things affect us and yet we pretend that these aren't real. These people saying that they are actually recognising that they are human beings involved in the workforce.

It seems to me that part of the beginning of the Kingdom of God (is) where we recognise that everyone is a human being, not a cog in a machine and everyone who is involved in war, those who shoot people, those who are shot, are human beings and loved of God.

How do we see people as lovable humans in the midst of this chaotic world? Perhaps that is the small seed with which we can start. Recognise that each and every person is loved and is to be loved by us, not to be categorised but to be sought out and nurtured and cared for. Perhaps that is some change which can come in the world if the whole world suddenly starts seeing that as humans we are very important. We are imperfect but we are the stuff of which the Kingdom of God is made.

Let's sing the hymn about the Kingdom of God "The Great Love of God", Hymn No. 105.
(Hymn)

Loving an Almighty God we bring to you these gifts as a symbol of all that we are and all that we have. Use these gifts for the sake of your Kingdom. Use us too. We bring before you our concern for your realm knowing that you know the things that are wrong, your heart is breaking through the breaking of the hearts of people here. We pray for the people in Fiji, for those people who were on the aircraft, for the families of those who lost their lives. We pray for families who are in such distress that the easiest way seems to take their life and the life of their children. We pray for areas of war. We pray especially for the people of East Timor, the people from Kosovo who are looking at going home, and those who are staying here. We pray for the leaders of the nation that they may seek justice and peace. Share the resources you have given us so that all may have enough. We pray for the leaders of our own nation, that truth and care may be the cornerstone of their decisions. Almighty God we bring before you our love and our concern for this congregation. We know you are there with those who are sick, and those who are anxious. Be with each one of us in the week ahead. Amen.

Hymn No. 480.
(Hymn)

(The following paragraph is very faint and difficult to understand).
Go in peace, knowing that the Lord is God. *************. Be mindful of the covenants made for ever, the word commandeth for a thousand generations. The covenants the Lord made with Abraham ************* ************ ********* everlasting covenants. Go in peace, knowing that nothing ************* for the love of God. The nature of our Lord Jesus Christ *** upon you, the love of God ***********, the **** of the Holy Spirit, the pride. We encourage you this day and all your days. Amen.
(Hymn)

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