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Leaves of the Kingdom
I remember helping my children with many school projects when they were young. One that stands out was a fall nature collection in third grade. While looking through scrapbooks recently, I found a page with a perfectly pressed specimen under a plastic page protector identified as “a brown leaf” in my son’s 8-year-old handwriting. It brought back memories of simply walking through our yard, looking down at all the leaves around us. I’m not sure why, but of all the wonders to be found in the world, this moved me – a brown leaf is worthy of admiration. It’s beautiful!
I tend to love the extraordinary and overlook the ordinary, but looking at that leaf reminds me to see with fresh eyes all that we see daily, all that we may shuffle through, step upon, without a thought.
Since my brown leaf revelation, I’ve bugged others to tell me what such a leaf signified for them. Some saw it as the lowest common denominator, others as something whose work was done. With my mom, I reminisced about raking up and jumping in piles of brown leaves with my grandfather and then setting them on fire. A friend connected brown leaves with grief, loss and death. I imagined an autumnal still-life painting with goldenrods, asters and brown leaves. And while we Christians like to decorate our homes with evergreens at Christmastime, perhaps brown leaves might better represent the fullness of the life of the one whose birth we honor.
Jesus Himself honored the ordinary. In parables, He spoke of the kingdom of heaven's miraculous potential to spread by referencing common leaven (Matthew 13:33) and the tiny mustard seed. (Matthew 13:31-32) He called His faithful followers “the salt of the earth.” (Matthew 5:13) And when He wanted to wean these followers from caring about what they wore, He asked them to “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. (Matthew 6: 28-29) Yeast, salt, flowers – all commonplace things.
I like to think if Jesus kept a scrapbook, He would have had a page with leaves because His eyes were always open to the heaven falling on Earth all around us. Just look around and you too will see the kingdom in the simple and mundane.
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