Texts: Genesis 29: 15-30; Matthew 13: 44-52

The temptation to engage in dishonest trading seems to escape few people who have access to what is usually called inside information. This past week a former beauty queen Danielle Chiesi, a key figure in a federal investigation, was sentenced to 30 months in prison for using her contacts with IBM and Advanced Micro Devices executives to gain insider information which she passed along to her own business associates. Over the past 18 months, 46 of 49 hedge fund managers charged with insider trading have either been convicted or pleaded guilty to such charges. It seems like the only difference between the inside information that Laban and his family had and today was the end product. Then it was a woman; today it's just money. Greed seems to always play a role, whether it was Laban's desire to extract more time from Jacob or whether we're talking about millions.

Of course, Jacob was no poor, innocent victim having cheated his older brother Esau out of his birthright with the collusion of his mother Rebekah. And if we go even further back into the family history, we see that envy and the desire to have it all belong to one's own offspring drove Sarah to have Haggar and Ishmael thrown out into the desert. Abraham, of course, was no saint himself, having passed his wife off as his sister because he feared that he would be the target of assassination. And Isaac did much the same thing when faced with the men of Gerar. Both men also took advantage of the hospitality of the lands they visited to enrich themselves. Little seems to have changed.

Just as the story from Genesis is about one man's vision of a treasure above all treasures -- the woman he loves -- this morning's reading also is about treasure of a sort. At first, the parables in this morning's reading seem strange. The first one is about a man who has by accident found another's treasure in a field and has bought the field so he can have the treasure. Sounds a bit like insider trading, doesn't it? Then we are told that the Kingdom of God is like a pearl of great price that someone has sold all that he or she has to obtain. Then finally, we are told that the Kingdom is like a net thrown into the sea and all varieties of fish are captured in the net but then sorted out, the good from the bad. Finally, we get the weeping and gnashing of teeth in this apocalyptic message.

How do we in the twenty-first century make sense of the metaphors in these passages and what do we do with the apocalyptic thinking that was clearly part of Jesus' world view? In some sense, it is a question that we always ask when confronted with verses from Scripture that don't seem to make sense in our age. One commentator noted that one could look at the treasure in the field parable as searching for the truth and then finding it. I suggest another option for this verse. The verse doesn't refer to the finder searching for buried treasure but finding it almost by serendipity.

Because I am such a klutz, I pretty much walk looking downwards towards the ground so I don't trip over anything. It's really amazing what one sees on the ground – besides litter, that is. First, over the years I have found hundreds of pennies. Now, a penny may not seem much in today's world, but I have an old Pinch bottle – Pinch was Bob's favorite Scotch – and over the course of a year or so, it gets filled with the pennies I happen to see and pick up. Every once in a while, besides litter and the pennies, I see something else. I have seen bills and picked them up and found a wallet or two that I was able to return to the owners. I think that one way to look at this verse is to realize that we don't necessarily “find” the Kingdom by searching but by accident. Sometimes it just finds us.

The pearl is an easier metaphor to understand because if the Kingdom of God is that important, we will sell all that we have to obtain it. It's not really that different from Jesus' injunction to the rich man: Sell all that you have and give to the poor... and the rich young ruler walked away for he had many possessions. Here the parable means that the Kingdom is of such value that it's worth giving up everything else.

Then we get to the parable about the fish in the nets. First, the nets are cast and every kind of fish is caught up in the net. The catch is taken to shore where the fishermen begin separating the good fish from the bad. “So it will be at the close of the age,” Matthew's Jesus says. “The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.” Let's look carefully at that sentence. Of the 13 times the phrase weeping and gnashing of teeth is used in Scripture, six occur in Matthew; Luke and Mark use it only once and their references are similar to Matthew's other references. Namely, when people are cast into the outer darkness. The phrase is also used in Psalms, in Job describing how the Lord has turned against him, and in Lamentations describing how the enemies of Jerusalem behave towards those left there.

Palestine in the time of Jesus was a country in tremendous turmoil. Judaism had changed as a result of the Babylonian captivity; influenced by the religious mix that existed in Babylon itself and in other Mediterranean societies, Judaism began to develop an apocalyptic eschatology. Those two fancy words mean that Judaism began believing that God would end the present age and usher in a new one that would provide for a host of different outcomes, depending on the believer. Some only looked to the end of the age for the re-establishment of David's Kingdom and “pure” Judaism; others, like the Essenes, believed in a more spiritual outcome; still others like the early Christians believed that the “present age” would end soon and Christ would establish his kingdom. The latest version we had of this was the May 21st date. I happened to see a sign in front of a garden center the following week: “The world didn't end; you still have time to plant your garden.”

Drawing meaning for our lives today from Scripture is no easy task. But let's look at how we can find something that makes sense for us from these three short parables. First, a parable is not intended to be all inclusive, but an example. Matthew's Jesus uses many images for the Kingdom. In the first one, we can see that Kingdom of God is serendipity, its grace descending on us when we least it. It's finding the extraordinary in ordinary things. Think of what seems to ordinary in your life and how something extraordinary comes out of it, almost by accident.

Also consider what is most important in your life, what you would be willing to give up everything to have or to keep. That's the pearl of great price, as it's so described in Matthew's Gospel. Sometimes, of course, we choose the wrong pearl, as did Danielle Chiesi. Fortunately for her, she'll only have to give up thirty months of her life, unlike Bernie Madoff who, beyond his sentence, lost his son Mark who, despondent over the impact of his father's deceit, hanged himself. Mark and his brother Andrew were actually the ones to notify authorities when they discovered their father's fraud. How dreadful to lose not just time but a life over nothing more than pure greed. Choose your pearl carefully.

Greed: it has caused and continues to cause so much harm in our world. There are bad fish, to be sure. The question then becomes what we as a society will choose as our values and how we will measure actions against the values we choose. If money and our property represent what is most important to us then our society will reflect that – and unfortunately, it seems to reflect just that. Just consider the so-called debate on the debt ceiling. First, even liberal old me is appalled that we have to borrow so much money to keep running, but that's what happens when a government runs two wars while giving tax breaks to multinationals that continue to outsource jobs in Hyderabad, oil companies that run shoddy operations causing the loss of life and pollution, and turns a blind eye to mortgage corruption and contractor fraud. Whatever else you may think of Clinton, he left us with a surplus that ended up being squandered.

The question for us as a society is what values we will choose. Do we cut funding for services for the poor while letting business off the hook? It's just crazy watching the budget debate in Congress. As we cut back more and more, taxes from those who would pay in if they could find jobs continue to dwindle. What we really need is a total reorientation of our national thinking. The right wing with their so-called Christian values would let the poor starve while peeking in your bedrooms.

We've lost not only our direction but our sense of honesty as well. The hedge fund inside traders and their associates get two to three year sentences – Madoff is the exception here. Even Michael Milkin – remember him? – although first sentenced to ten years, his sentence was reduced to two and he served 22 months. Granted, Milkin and many others will never be able to trade on Wall Street again, but the culture is one that says, “It's okay if you don't get caught.” The real crime, it seems, is getting caught, not fleecing people. The question for us is whether we will turn around – that's the literal meaning of repent – and choose to be honest traders.

Let us pray: You, O Lord God, who gave us the ability to decide right from wrong, help us to turn our lives around so we may more truly reflect your call to us through Jesus who offers us the grace to experience the extraordinary, the opportunity to grasp the pearl of great price, and the ability to choose good fish. Amen.