Spiritual Hiccups - Church: A Wild and Crazy Place?

Looking at today's gospel with its varied images of the Kingdom - a treasure that prompts someone to sell all he has to acquire it, a pearl of such value that nothing else matters to a pearl merchant, and a net that scoops up fish of every kind, both good and bad - I wondered about such images and the Church I have grown up in and now serve.  My tradition says that one of the core purposes of the Church is "the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world."  Are we exhibiting the Kingdom Jesus speaks of in this parable?

The first two Kingdom images suggest something that totally reorders lives.  The wonder, beauty, and unsurpassed value of this Kingdom moves everything else down on the priority list.  Everything gets reorganized around the pursuit of this Kingdom.  This speaks of a kind of passion and energy that I typically see in two places: when someone falls totally and completely in love, and when someone gets completely given over to some cause. 

The net images seems totally different.  This seems to describe a large, diverse, even motley gathering that is not very selective, leaving the sorting out process for later. 

I realized this is just one short set of verses, but based on these, a Church that exhibited to the Kingdom to the world might be a place of extremely vibrant and strong passions, as well as teeming with variety and even a bit of confusion.  It would be, to borrow a phrase, a wild and crazy place.

But in my experience, "wild and crazy" seems one of the least likely phrases that anyone would apply to the Church.  In our defense, we Presbyterians also learned another phrase, "decently and in order" from the Bible.  But I sometimes wonder if we didn't take it a bit too much to heart.  Maybe we could stand to balance it with a little more "wild and crazy."

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