Good morning, church.

It's good to be with you this morning.

It's early, isn't it?

I mean, it's, what is it, 1024 and 48 seconds.

Well, it's good to know.

I like to be precise like that, and so I'm glad to be here and be with you today and celebrate this Sabbath day.

I appreciate Jim's invitation to me.

Jim and I have been in a covenant group for several years, and

We're going through a rough patch.

One of our dear friends and Covenant Group members, Jerry Tankersley, formerly the pastor at Laguna Presbyterian Church, passed away just a few days ago, as did our other dear friend, John Huffman, from St.

Andrews Presbyterian in Newport Beach.

So it was kind of a double hit for us, but we know they're in glory.

And as we grieve, we rejoice with them.

You know, Jim invited me in part because I'm now retired.

And I'm still trying to define what that word means.

I've been retired for seven years.

I left the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant in Costa Mesa back in 2017.

And I'm working on a bunch of projects, as you'll hear in a few minutes.

But as I have come to this place in retirement, I've decided how important it is to continue my study of God's Word.

and to read the scriptures every day.

And so I've decided to make as a theme for my own personal studies, the parables of Jesus.

So you're going to be the beneficiaries as the first reflections that I have on these parables as I've come to study them.

And I'd like to start with a parable that takes us into very ordinary life settings.

Simple stories that have an intention behind them.

These stories Jesus tells are meant to draw us, the readers and hearers of these stories, into the story itself.

So be ready for that.

Be ready to be captured.

I want to take for us, in the 13th chapter of Matthew's Gospel, let's see if I can move these slides right along.

And there we go.

Okay.

Now the 13th chapter of Matthew's gospel is one of the very early parables that Jesus uses.

And they're very short and they're very simple.

There's two of them.

Listen for God's word.

The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid.

Then in his joy, he goes and sells all that he has and he buys that field.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls.

On finding one pearl of great value, he went and he sold all he had and he bought it.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Parables.

We don't hear that word very often, but parables in biblical theology are those stories of ordinary life that all people can relate to, that Jesus uses in his preaching.

The first parable that he uses here is about a man who unexpectedly comes across a buried treasure in an open field.

Now we've all been in an open field, I'm sure.

Either to cross over to a place where we got to get to, like we take a shortcut across this barren wilderness of a field to get to our destination.

Or when we're young people,

There's a field somewhere in our neighborhood and we go to that field.

And I remember as a kid, I was growing up in Bellflower, that's north of here.

And we had this huge open field with railroad tracks that went right through the middle of the field.

But the field was vast and it was barren and it was dirt and it was overgrown shrubs.

And we would go into that field and we would build fortresses.

We'd play cowboys.

And I always wanted to dress up as Roy Rogers.

And so I had my guns strapped to my hips and my cowboy boots and my cowboy hat.

And I played Roy Rogers and we went into our fortresses and we climbed trees and hid behind bushes in this open field.

We've all been there.

But you know, these open fields in the first century were for people who had no place to put their valuables.

They didn't have a bank.

They didn't have a secure holding place someplace so they could keep them safe and secure.

So they would go and they'd dig a hole in an open field and they'd bury their treasure.

Walking around in this field,

This fellow sees something curious, and he hurries over to see what it is, and he digs it out.

And in his joyful excitement, he finds it's a buried treasure.

He goes home.

He buries it again, looks around, see if anybody's watching.

And then he goes home, and he puts all his money towards buying that real estate.

In the second parable Jesus uses, this is a merchant in search of beautiful, valuable pearls.

Like diamonds, one day he comes across something far greater than he had even imagined.

Again, he sells all he has, he buys this valuable pearl, and he makes it his own.

Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like this.

Hmm.

What do we learn about the kingdom of heaven?

First of all, we learn that the kingdom comes as a surprise.

Now, how many of you here like to be surprised?

There's a few of you around.

That's what I figured out.

We have one in the choir, two in the choir, three in the choir.

Okay, four in the choir.

Okay, you're in a minority.

Because most of us, the polls tell us, we don't like surprises.

We just don't like them.

Because, well, they come in two forms, basically.

There's welcome surprises and

Like, Claire, if you went out and bought your best friend, oh my gosh, if you went out and bought your best friend something that he or she really wanted, that would be a welcome surprise, right?

We're ready for that.

But then there's the other kind of surprise.

I have a friend who's going to be 85 next week.

And she has made it a point to go around to all the small groups that she meets with.

And she says, I got a birthday coming up in a couple of weeks.

I don't want to know about it.

And if you ever think about throwing a surprise party, forget it.

I don't want a surprise party.

Well, why do we not want surprises sometimes?

Perhaps it's because it takes control of the situation out for us.

We no longer have control, and when the brain senses that coming, it doesn't know what's coming, and anything can happen, and a surprise feels more like an ambush.

We don't like those.

But these two parables here mention welcome surprises, at least at the outset.

As I was thinking, I realized that so much of our experience of faith as Christian people is surprising.

We get that even in early scripture from Genesis 1 forward.

Those first pages, Genesis 1 explodes with the creation of God creating with his word out of the darkness and the void before our eyes.

Surprise continues with Adam and Eve, with Noah, with Abraham, with David and the prophets who followed him.

And as we learned in Sunday school, so many new and unexpected things happen in the gospel story.

But then, you know, going back to the Old Testament, how many of you remember, this is going to date us, it really is.

How many of you remember seeing Charlton Heston in the movie The Ten Commandments?

Anybody?

Oh, man.

And when he goes out, when he goes out and holds the staff, the snake, before the sea, and the sea spreads before him, the whole theater went, oh.

It was a surprise.

And I can only imagine what it was like for the people of Israel as they faced the sea before them and the Egyptian army galloping to capture them from behind.

It was a surprise.

And then in the gospel stories,

It's one after another surprising events.

I mean, we read them now and we've heard them so many times they're not surprising.

But you can imagine for these disciples and for the people who follow Jesus, it was whoa, one aha after another.

And then comes the surprise of the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus, the growth of the church,

So many surprises, one after another.

And in my life, one of God's surprises came when I retired.

Ruth and I were getting ready to retire, as we had sort of thought about what that was like.

And I was invited to be the producer of a film.

And so in 2017, 18, and 19, I helped produce a film, and it's now available on Amazon Prime, Salt and Light, The Miracle in Hollywood.

Get it today.

And then that was so successful that we decided we'd do another film.

And so we did a second film.

This one was a documentary on the life and ministry of Henrietta Mears.

the director of our Sunday school at the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood.

Now, Marilyn Clark is here today and she will testify to you the effectiveness and the impact that this one woman had on our lives.

Now, Marilyn's a little bit ahead of me in years, but she reaches back and she remembers what Henrietta Mears was like.

She was an amazing woman that had an impact on people like Billy Graham and the

Bill Bright and Jim Rayburn of Young Life and Dawson Trotman of Navigators.

She was the founder of Forest Home.

Some of you have been to Forest Home here in the San Bernardino Mountains.

And she was the woman who started Gospel Light Publications.

We've all read from those books.

So we made this film, and it's now available on Amazon Prime.

Get yours now.

But we can both relate to what that was like growing up in her ministry.

And then as I grew, I became involved in a college group at the church.

And as young adults, taking Henrietta Mears' inspiration, we learned the scriptures together.

We learned about prayer and using our talents in discipleship and art and music.

We watched our faith grow as we responded to the call of God.

Day by day, my courage and self-confidence and creativity grew.

And I realized my life was becoming so much fuller and more focused.

I felt like a new person.

And soon I met Ruth and we were married and I began pursuing a call into ministry.

And here we are, 50 years later, dare I say so.

After so many surprises, I find I couldn't even have imagined all of this earlier on.

But you know, the kingdom of God is expected to be surprising.

I believe God is doing something unpredictable and robust and fulfilling in our lives even this day.

I'm seeing it as I'm involved with churches and pastors.

Oh, this is about the film.

I'm sorry, I should have skipped a slide there.

This is about the Mears film that's available to you.

And I believe...

Becky has a copy and you're going to see it here.

You'll be able to see it here if you don't see it on Amazon.

But these are my friends as I become involved with churches and pastors in Syria and in Lebanon.

Brothers in the Lord in very, very hostile places, even as we speak today.

And I've been inspired by the surprising way these churches have responded to their crisis.

Only a few days ago, we gathered as a network.

I'm part of a national network of pastors and churches that support the church in those two countries.

We got together for our annual gathering in, of all places, Cheyenne, Wyoming.

And we Zoom called across the seas

to our partners in Syria and Lebanon.

And it's amazing to hear them talk about the situation they're going through.

Under fire every day, being attacked by Jewish forces from the south and the various Hezbollah and others from the north and

And a new government that's been taken over.

It's just an amazingly fluctuating situation.

And they don't know what's going to happen to them.

But they are the church of Jesus Christ.

And they stand.

And they are surprised every day at the faithfulness of God.

It's amazing to hear them talking.

You know how they describe themselves.

They say, we are a church, we are a people in exile in our own land.

But you know what they reminded us of as they told us these stories?

They remember Jeremiah's prophecy, the one that Claire read so eloquently earlier on.

God is doing a new thing.

Forget the things of the past.

And they count themselves, they do, as survivors, serving the Lord with each new day.

Because no matter our circumstances, God is ready with the unexpected, the surprise in-breaking of his kingdom.

The kingdom of God is about surprise.

Secondly, the kingdom of God brings an overwhelming joy.

That's a wonderful theme.

We sang about it in one of our hymns earlier on.

The theme of joy is present in both of these two parables that Jesus tells.

The man who happens to come across this treasure while hiking through a field

When he discovers the treasure, he's filled, it tells us, with unrestrained joy.

The merchant has searched all around for choice pearls.

He's sought after these, perhaps even for a living.

He's not looking for just monetary value, but for the sheer beauty of them, to handle them, to admire them, to show them off.

And suddenly,

There it is, like the hope diamond.

He's blown away in his joy.

Again, Jesus says, the kingdom is like this, a wonderful, joyous surprise.

So overwhelmingly pleasing, it's beyond anything we could even imagine.

I'm reminded about this musician who came to see us in Hollywood.

It was the 1960s, the late 1960s, or even early 70s.

And we had this ministry in the streets out of Hollywood Presbyterian Church inspired by Henrietta Mears, I might add.

And the whole world had come to Hollywood.

I'm not even sure why.

Well, I can guess why.

But anyway, they were covering the streets of Hollywood.

And we met Vern.

with his guitar and the clothes on his back.

He came and he was sitting on Hollywood Boulevard playing his guitar.

He had arrived from Denver a searcher looking for something more.

He wasn't sure what it was.

He loved music, but he knew there was something more to his life than what he had experienced to that point.

And as we sat and interacted with him and played music with him, his heart was opened and he came to trust Jesus Christ for the first time in his life.

He became part of our community in Hollywood.

He lived in one of our crash pads.

But every day he would come to the church and he'd head down to Hollywood Boulevard with his guitar slung over his back.

He'd find a corner and he'd start singing.

of this great joy that he had just experienced.

He started writing songs and singing them right on Hollywood Boulevard.

And people would gather around him just to hear him sing and to witness this charisma of joy.

It was amazing to see Vern every day.

And then in the cold of December, we went down to the beach in South Bay and

Don Williams on the left and me on the right, that's one day what I looked like, burned in the middle.

He just had this just exploding joy, always.

And this is just after he was baptized.

He was so excited.

Then we worked together in Hollywood for several years before we went our own ways.

We had all been undeniably changed by this joy.

changed for the rest of our lives.

As we respond, we enter in by faith and trust what God has for us.

We take the next steps.

Sometimes they're harder, they're more difficult, challenging, even painful.

But we remember this treasure and we remember this joy that carries us through it all.

We trust Christ each day.

But you know, this discovery doesn't simply mean we go to heaven when we die.

That's how many in the evangelical church have come to believe.

Oh man, we can just kind of... Man, I'm glad because when I die, I'm going to go to heaven.

Well, that may be true.

There is something that calls for an active response now.

in this time.

For we are each called to be partners with Christ in the unfolding of God's kingdom, trusting him for everything that happens in our lives this day forward.

So what happens is this kingdom sweeps us into a complete life response.

Because I mentioned earlier

Parables are designed to get a response from the people hearing the story.

As they draw us into the story and into reliance upon the Lord of the kingdom.

If we have ears to hear, we respond as the parables characters respond.

And we give everything we have, everything we are,

It's a total buy-in.

That's the appropriate response.

But I also notice in these parables that the characters in each of them are searching, even from the beginning.

They're not dormant.

You're either the man kicking through the field, the open field, or you're the merchant looking for the pearl.

We are seeking life.

what it might have ahead for us.

And then as we discover the treasure, we actively turn over all we have and all we are in order to use and appreciate this treasure.

There's a French painter that I love to look at, James Tissot.

He's a French painter, lived many years ago

And as we notice the followers of Jesus in the gospel story, these are disciples who come and who've been called to respond in full.

They were fishermen and tax collectors and women who choose to accompany him.

Jesus, the Incarnation,

The emotional, the savior of the world is not just an emotional inspiration or a new idea that kind of tweaks how we live out our vocation or shape our values in some ways or even our attitudes.

This discovery is so overwhelming, it captures everything about all of us.

Our work, our relationships,

our time, and our resources.

Give it all away because the treasure has so impacted us.

I notice on your bulletin board outside that you're following the very successful series of The Chosen, a production by Dallas Jenkins based on the gospel story.

And it's Jonathan Rumi who plays the character of Jesus.

And as Jonathan tells us, he had surrendered, before he was offered this role, he had surrendered everything in his life to the Lord, with the exception of his acting career.

He had been living in Los Angeles for eight years.

He was nearly broke, as most actors are.

And Jonathan tells of one day in May of 2018, he woke up and he realized he was overdrawn in his bank account by $100.

He had 20 bucks in his pocket and just enough food to last for a day.

Had no work in sight.

He had maxed out his credit cards.

He literally didn't know what his next step would be.

So he went before the Lord and

He poured out his heart in asking God, what happened?

You see, he had always felt that God helps those who help themselves.

Some people even think that's scripture.

It's not.

So he prayed before the Lord that day and he said, if there's something else I should be doing,

If there's some area in my life that I need to look at and re-examine, what is it?

Because this is so hard for me.

He literally said in a very anguished way, I surrender.

I surrender it all.

He realized in that moment that in other areas in his life he had allowed God in.

But when it came to his career, he thought, I know better.

I've got this, God.

I've lived in Hollywood now.

I'm an actor.

Don't worry.

It's Hollywood.

I know Hollywood, God.

But then he left his apartment.

He went for a walk to collect himself.

He bought a breakfast sandwich with the money he had left.

Later that day, he went back to his apartment

He looked in his mailbox, and there were four checks in the mail from work that he had done earlier.

A breather.

But then shortly afterwards, Dallas Jenkins, the writer and director of The Chosen, called him and offered him the role of Jesus.

Jonathan's life has never been the same since.

He found that God had been in this all along and he was waiting for Jonathan to respond.

He discovered life is not about God helping those who help themselves.

Life is about God helping those who rely on him.

Maybe that's an aha moment for all of us.

God not only reveals himself in this surprisingly joyous way, but he presents himself with a new vision as a new vision of life.

When our reality shifts and opens up to new thoughts and new creativity, and we actually see life from a new perspective.

For some,

We stumble across the kingdom in ordinary circumstances like the man in the field.

But then something catches our attention and we're drawn in and we dig down deeper into the moment.

And in a sheer surprise, we find something we really have longed for for a long time, even something more than we anticipated.

Joyfully, joyfully, we do whatever it takes

To possess this treasure.

For others it comes after a long searching.

Like the merchant.

We know something of what we're looking for.

But it's not showing up for us.

It seems always to come up short.

But then it appears.

We know it's something new and different.

It's a striking discovery.

And everything shifts almost at once.

We found the great pearl.

Far greater than we've even imagined.

And we turn over whatever it takes to possess this treasure as our own.

You know, I've seen that happen in people's lives opened to the fullness of God and how compelling it can be.

Imagine this.

You're a student at a large university and you play football.

UCLA, and you make the grade of All-American for three years before you graduate, and you're chosen in an NFL draft by the Los Angeles Rams number one.

That happened to a friend who I worked with early in my ministry who thought that being a successful football player was what he'd been searching for.

But then he came upon the great treasure of the gospel.

And his heart was so captured by Jesus Christ, he sensed God was calling him into the ministry, the Presbyterian ministry.

And he turned down the Los Angeles Rams in a career in the National Football League.

Can you imagine that?

He went on to serve for 50 years.

as a pastor in the church.

That's how God captures our hearts.

And it's not simply that we are saved so we can go to heaven when we die.

This new life God promises for us begins immediately.

And we become part of God's developing kingdom, the work that he is doing in our world right now.

And the amazing thing is this.

Jesus said it himself in John chapter 14.

As we trust him, we will do the things, the very things that Jesus did.

And Jesus says, even greater things you will do.

Where are you this morning?

Are you a seeker?

Are you searching for life this morning?

Or what's next for you?

Perhaps you've been a Christian for many years.

You've been involved in many ways in the church.

Or maybe you've had a toxic experience in the church.

Maybe you haven't found the initial treasure yet.

You haven't even trusted God with your life in Jesus Christ.

I urge you this day.

Keep yearning.

God is still planting treasures and fine pearls for you to discover.

No matter how old you are or what your experience in the church has been, God has a life ahead for you that you never could dare to have even imagined.

Jeremiah was right.

God is doing a new thing.

And he has invited you and me to be part of it all.

To his glory.

Would you pray with me?

Lord, amidst the clamor and the pandemonium and the bedlam of life, may each of us realize that you are here to be found

You're not to be hidden.

You're to be found.

And that you have an amazing treasure for each of us.

Lord, this day, we place ourselves, all of ourselves, in your hands.

We ask this in the name of the Messiah Jesus, our Lord and Savior.

Amen.

Amen.