This morning I would like you to think about everything.
But because we only have about seven minutes just now to think about everything, let me suggest a way to start. Imagine a leaf. It might be a leaf from the tree that grew from the mustard seed. A green leaf. Imagine looking more closely so that it fills your field of vision. You might see little bugs and caterpillars and hairs on the surface of the leaf. Now more closely still, with a microscope. You can see the veins of the leaf, and the sap. Turn up the magnification and you can see the cells. Turn it up further. And eventually - but no microscope could do it - there are the atoms of the molecules of the chlorophyll that makes the leaf green, and the phloem that extracts sugar out of the sunlight, and the xylem that stops the leaf falling apart. And within the atoms, spinning round like planets, there are invisible particles like a whole unimaginably tiny galaxy; those are quarks: there are six sorts of quarks, and the sorts are called flavours, and the flavours are up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom.
Now zoom out. Zoom out until it looks like a leaf again. And further out until it’s a little speck. You can see the tree. And the forest. And the horizon beyond the forest. And the curve of the planet the forest is on. And the continents and the seas of the planet. And the other planets, and the star they orbit, and the neighbouring stars that are thousands of lifetimes away, spinning round each other like the tiny invisible particles of the atoms of the leaf.
And that was just a leaf. You must think of the rest of everything by yourselves later. You may become very wise, like Solomon, or you may find that you have to stop and lie down in a darkened room.
Why should you try to think about everything? Because these are the parables of everything. A great tree. The whole of three measures of flour. The whole field. Everything the merchant had. A net full of all kinds of everything - Matthew doesn’t even say ‘all kinds of fish’, just ‘all kinds’. Everything in the sea. And Paul is also talking about everything: He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?
What happens to everything? What is the mystery, the hiddenness, of everything?
It is given up, like the merchant’s possessions. It is utterly transformed, like the leavened flour. It is buried, like the seed and the pearl and the treasure. It is given life. Something is hidden in it. Something shines out of it. It isn’t the kingdom and the kingdom is in all of it. All of it is mixed together and it is all gathered for the fisher-angels to sort out.
Maybe you draw the line at going home to think about the entire universe. So try this other way of thinking about everything. God’s call to us is to the whole of what we are; God’s gift to us is of everything God is.