“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it (Matthew 13:45-46).

What is the Kingdom of God like? Perhaps it’s like a man named Sam who woke up one morning and took his coffee out on the porch to look at the sky, and even though the sky was lovely, he recognized that today would turn out to be just another day.

Sam had hoped life might end up good. He knew that life can go wrong. But he’d never expected it to turn out so bland, so empty, just puttering by, year after year.

Sam sat on the porch and thought about his two almost marriages. He knew he was no great catch in terms of romance. He had hoped being kind and decent and hardworking would count for more. When he was twenty-three he fell in love with Emily. She seemed to feel the same. They decided to get married. But Emily broke it off, five weeks before the wedding, saying she could not marry him. She never did say why. At twenty-seven Sam somehow found the nerve to try dating again. After he and Vicky had been seeing each other for six months, he asked her to marry him. She asked for a week to think about it. Then she said No. And that, Sam thought to himself, pretty much sums up my life.

Sometimes a memory flashes in your mind, something from long ago comes to you with intense clarity: some event you hadn’t thought about for years and years. As he sat on the porch feeling vaguely sorry for himself, that’s what happened to Sam. He remembered something. He remembered cashew pie.

It had been November, the year he’d been a junior at Ohio State. His mother had telephoned him to advise him not to come home for Thanksgiving. She and her current boyfriend were going on a trip, she said, so there wasn’t a lot of point in Sam coming back to New Jersey to stay in an empty house. So Sam had arranged for special permission to stay over in the dorm. The dining hall would be closed, but he figured he could buy some bread and peanut butter and bologna.

But the Monday before Thanksgiving a guy from down the hall — his name had been Bill something, or maybe Bob — this guy had asked about Sam’s Thanksgiving plans. Was he taking a big trip, or heading home to see the folks, or what? Sam didn’t really feel like explaining that his mother had gone to Florida with her boyfriend, so for Thanksgiving Sam would be eating a bologna sandwich in his dorm room. Trying to sound nonchalant, Sam had said, “Oh, I’ll be staying here on campus for the long weekend. You know, it will give me a good chance to catch up on some of my coursework that I’m behind on.”

The fellow — what was his name? — Burt? Bart? It started with a B, Sam thought, or was it maybe a P: Paul? Pete? — the fellow’s eyebrows bunched up in concern, and he blurted out, “Look, Sam, why don’t you come stay with my family for Thanksgiving? You’ll get one of the great feasts of all the western world.”

Sam had been embarrassed, and he said, “Oh, no, I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t impose on your family like that … ”

But the guy had laughed and said, “They’ll love it. Look, it would even be a favor to me. You could help with the driving. I’ve got a killer test on Wednesday, I’ll be cramming all Tuesday night, you’ll probably save my life from falling asleep at the wheel. What do you say? Come on.”

To his own surprise, Sam had agreed. They’d left at 3:00 on Wednesday afternoon, and headed northwest from Columbus. Sam drove till suppertime while his friend slept. They stopped to grab a burger. Then they drove on, with Sam as passenger now, out west of Chicago. Somewhere Sam fell asleep, and when he woke up they were pulling into a driveway in front of a red brick house. Sam looked at his watch. It was a little after 11:00 pm.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“Home,” said his friend.

Sam met the family, a mother and father, a younger brother. The mother said, “Are you boys hungry? I’ve made some soup. And then I’ll bet you’re about worn out from all that driving, and ready to hit the hay.”

The next day, Thanksgiving morning, they fed Sam a big country breakfast. “Eat hearty, son, you’ll need it,” said the father. Later that morning Sam helped stack three loads of firewood. At about 2:00 they said it was time for the men to head to the church to set up. Sam didn’t know what “setting up” might mean. He didn’t have much experience with church. But his friend and his friend’s father and brother were putting on their coats, so Sam grabbed his, and they went out the door and drove to church.

At the church they went into a large room with closets at one end. They opened the closets and began pulling out tables and chairs. Other men were coming in. They set up thirty-six tables, with eight chairs around each table. Then they put four tables end to end, left a space, and set four more tables end to end, near the kitchen, for all the food.

Women were arriving, mothers, grandmothers, bearing platters and roasters and dishes. Turkeys and hams. Mashed potatoes. Baked potatoes. Sweet potatoes. Vegetable casseroles. Pies. Sam watched them set out the pies. Pumpkin pies. Mince pies. Pecan pies. Apple pies. And then: he stared at the two pies one woman had just set down. Were those cashews?

The woman laughed and said, “No, probably not. I believe just me and my two sisters make it, here in our church. But it’s famous as part of our Thanksgiving Dinner, anyway.”

A white-haired man moved to the microphone. He bowed his head, and in a leathery voice he began to pray. He thanked God for the food, and for the hands that had lovingly prepared it. He thanked God for Thanksgiving Day. He thanked God for the legacy of family members who had died, whose memories lived on in people’s hearts. He thanked God for all the generations represented among those gathered here.

Sam had heard people pray over a meal perhaps ten times in his life. He knew that wasn’t a lot of experience. Still, it seemed to him that the old man was taking quite a bit longer to say grace than other people usually seemed to need. The man gave thanks to God for this annual church family reunion, and for the blessing of having special guests among them; and he named six or seven names. He gave thanks to God for Sam Forrester. Sam had never heard anyone give thanks to God for him, and his soul felt wondrously flooded with the feeling of being beloved, somehow beloved by this old man and by this crowd of strangers. And the man concluded his prayer with intense gratitude for the depth of God’s eternal love for them all, established forever in Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

Everyone else echoed that Amen, and then they ushered Sam and half a dozen others to the head of the line as honored guests, for this wondrous Thanksgiving feast with all these church people. The food was so fine. The finest of all was that cashew pie. Sam remembered that cashew pie: the best pie he had ever eaten.

Sam hadn’t had the money for tuition the following spring, so he took time off, planning to work and save his money till August and get back to Ohio State in the fall. But he never did make it back. And now he couldn’t even remember the name of that gracious classmate who had invited him home for Thanksgiving — Bruce? Barry?

Sam sat on his porch, drinking his coffee, and felt the most powerful longing for cashew pie, and for a community of thanksgiving that welcomed a guest they had never met before and gave thanks to God for him, making him feel more at home than at any other time in his life. And he thought, “There’s got to be some way of finding those people. If I could do that, I think I’d go there today, just to be part of that family again, and have another taste of that cashew pie.”

But Sam was stumped; he couldn’t remember the name of his classmate, or the name of the town: in fact, he wasn’t sure whether it had been western Illinois or eastern Iowa or perhaps southwest Wisconsin. How could he even begin to look?

In today’s reading we heard how Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is like a merchant buying pearls, who one day found the best pearl in the whole world and then sold everything he had in order to buy it. That might have become Sam’s story, if he had known the stories Jesus told, because just for a moment he saw himself quitting his job and going out to the towns of that region west and north of Chicago and asking if anyone had ever heard of the church where they served cashew pie for Thanksgiving Dinner. So what if he had to ask in a hundred different towns? Sooner or later there would be someone who had heard of it, and he’d find those people again. And wouldn’t that be worth it, he thought, to feel again like part of that astonishing extended church family, like he had felt it for a few days, so many years ago? And then Sam just shook his head, and dismissed the idea. It would never happen. And yet, if only it could …

Jesus told a lot of stories about the Kingdom. The Kingdom of Heaven is like ten bridesmaids at a wedding. The Kingdom is like a boy who left home, ran out of money, and was lost and hungry and wishing he could go back. The Kingdom of God is like a farmer scattering seed across the fields. The Kingdom is like a woman making bread.

If you’re looking for entertainment value, these stories don’t have much. This woman mixed some yeast into a big batch of bread dough, and then the dough rose. It’s not a plot that will keep you on the edge of your seat for two hours at the movies.

But Jesus didn’t make up these stories in order to be entertaining; instead, he made them up to give us a place where we can hear God speaking to us. When Jesus tells a story, it’s set up so that you can recognize that the story is about you. When you find the place in a Bible story where you say, “Yeah, that’s me” – that’s where you can hear God telling you something about your life that you need to know.

This morning we read how Jesus said the Kingdom is like a pearl merchant, and when he found one pearl of exceptional value, he sold everything he had in order to buy that pearl. That was the entire story.

But brief as it is, I can hear this as a story about me: I can find my point of identification as that merchant, because I recognize that in Jesus I have encountered someone who is so worthy that I really could contemplate giving up everything – all that I have, all that I am – for the sake of seeing his kingdom fulfilled in my life, and in the world. To sell it all, in order to buy this one pearl of immense value: that would be so challenging. And yet I can see how the merchant maybe really could do it. The Apostle Paul seems to have had something like that in mind, when he wrote in Philippians 3:7-9, “I regard everything as loss compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” When I listen to Jesus telling this story about the Kingdom, I just might find a very compelling point of identification with that merchant, and think, “Please Jesus, take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to thee.”

That would be a fine possibility. But it’s not the only way to listen to this story.

Suppose that when Jesus told this story, he found his own point of identification as the merchant, and saw you and me as the pearl? That would make us the prize so valuable Jesus sacrificed everything he had in order to purchase us. Hebrews 12:2 puts it this way: because of the joy he felt when he considered us, Jesus set aside all the glory of heaven in order to accept his own death on the cross, dismissing as insignificant its pain and shame. He saw us, and loved us: when he saw you, you were beloved of Jesus: and so he gave up everything he had in order to purchase a pearl like you. Before we ever figured out that Jesus was the one we needed to find, he was already searching for us.

What is the Kingdom of God like? Maybe it’s like a guy named Sam, as he got home from work after another drab day in a life that would always be drab. He came in the door and tossed aside the mail — just more bills and ads — and then a real letter fell out. Sam opened it. It was from someone named Brad MacGregor — wait! yes! that was the name of that classmate from Ohio State! Brad wrote that he’d been reminiscing with his mother, and she asked, “Whatever happened to that nice Sam Forrester who visited us that one Thanksgiving?” So Brad had tracked down Sam’s address through the Ohio State alumni office. Now he needed for Sam to write back, so that Brad could tell his mother how Sam was doing. Oh, and by the way, did Sam remember that cashew pie he had liked so much way back then, which was made from the secret recipe only those three sisters had? Brad had married the daughter of one of those sisters: which meant that recipe for cashew pie was now in Brad’s family. So if Sam ever got out to Iowa, he should come have some. They had a guest room ready for him.

Sam looked in the yellow pages, and then dialed the 800 number for one of the airlines. He just thought he’d check what flight schedules might be like, from New Jersey to Iowa.

What is the Kingdom of God like? It’s like a merchant seeking fine pearls. It’s like cashew pie, served at a great feast where they welcome in lonely souls and make them part of the family. The Kingdom of God is like when you realize that if you gave up everything for the sake of following Jesus, it would be worth it: and it’s like God bringing an invitation to someone whose life feels so empty, to come be part of a community of thanksgiving where you are beloved.

What is the Kingdom of God like? It’s recognizing that you are beloved: indeed, that Jesus thinks of you as a pearl of great price, for which he gladly gave up everything he had. Because you – yes, you! – are beloved of Jesus, forever and ever. Amen.