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Kingdom of God – Page 5 – Salvaged Faith

Already/Not Yet

Every Friday night we have dinner with the family – as we all set the table and prepare for everyone to come to the table and sit, and especially as all of the food is there and we are just waiting for the time to pray, my niece and nephew like to sneak bites from the food being set at the table.

The table is one of my favorite images of the kingdom of God… a great big huge table where are all welcome, all are loved.
And the amazing thing about the Christian community that is born out of the ministry of Jesus is that we today are like those little kids at the dinner table – and here and there we catch a foretaste of the glorious banquet.
In the Acts of the Apostles, Luke’s entire goal is to write down what happens to the disciples after Jesus leaves them. His goal is to document those early days of ministry, the birth of the church, the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God.

And if you went home and spent some time just reading straight through the book – you would find that it reads a lot like a journal. While the beginning chapters recall the story of what happened before Luke joined up with the band of disciples, the rest of Acts is Luke’s personal account of what happens in each leg of their journey. It is his personal witness to the Kingdom of God that has already taken root in the world. And, it is his testimony that the Kingdom of God was not yet fully in this world.

Now, the Kingdom of God is a phrase that we hear quite often.

John the Baptist preached that the Kingdom of God was at hand… just as he was preaching that Jesus was about to enter their midst.

When Jesus healed the sick, he said that the Kingdom of God has come near you. (Mt. 10:7)

But also on the gospels we hear all sorts of stories and parables that tell us funny things like the kingdom of God is like a tiny seed, or like yeast, or a priceless pearl. (Mt 13)

We hear things like the kingdom is hard for the rich to enter, but that it already belongs to little children.

We hear that the kingdom is something we are supposed to seek out, but that it’s not necessarily outside of us, but within and among us (Luke 17).

But I think the most confusing thing is that the kingdom has already come among us… and that each week, we pray for it to come in the Lord’s prayer.

The Kingdom of God is already here, but not yet fully here. This morning, I want to help us to see three ways that the Kingdom of God is already… but not yet.

Our first already/not yet has to do with the one we worship.

Already… Christ, the bearer of the Kingdom has been among us.

As the Acts of the Apostles begins, Luke reminds his reader that there is a whole other book that was written about the ministry of Christ from the beginning until the day when Christ ascended into heaven. But just in case they forgot the last bit of that story, Luke tells it again.

Jesus suffered for us and died for us and then by God’s power he showed up again – alive as ever and for forty days he stayed with the apostles. And he taught them about his Kingdom.

It was a kingdom that they had witnessed when the hungry were fed and the blind were healed and the oppressed were set free. It was a kingdom whose power was Jesus. The kingdom was where Jesus was.

And after forty days, Jesus takes his disciples out of the city and they begin to think that this is the moment they had all been waiting for. One of them cries out – Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom?!

Not yet…. The response Jesus gives is that it is not for us to know the times for these things. Not yet is the Kingdom fully come. And as a sign of that fact, Christ is lifted up before their very eyes – not to initiate the Kingdom of God… but he is taken away from their sight. Not yet, is the Kingdom of Christ fully present among us.

What we are left with are promises… the promise from Christ that he will be with us always. The promise of the Holy Spirit – the comforter and advocate who bears within us the seeds of the Kingdom. And the prophetic witness we have in the pages of Revelation that remind us that just as Christ came to be with us once… In the new creation, God will come and be with us again. “See,” the prophet John writes, “the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with him.” (Rev. 21:3)

As the church, we are sandwiched between these experiences of God. We carry with us the memories of Christ’s life and teaching and death and resurrection and we witness to these things. We share the story. Just like kids at the dinner table who sneak a piece of broccoli out of the bowl and quickly pass it to one another – we are eager and excited about this glimpse. But at the same time, we wait. We long for the time when all things will be ready – when all will be present at the table, and when God Godself will be with us.

Our second already/not yet has to do with life and death in the Kingdom of God.

Already, the disciples have witnessed how Christ brought back to life children who were dead and his own friend Lazarus. Already, the power to heal in Jesus’ name has been transferred to the disciples. Miracles have been seen everywhere – including the most amazing miracle of all… Christ died for our sins and then was raised from the tomb. Sin, death, and evil have been defeated for ever more! As we follow the apostles through Luke’s account in Acts – we see signs and wonders of more healings and resurrections, of life and life abundant!

But not yet… Lazarus would eventually die once again. Each of those apostles would all be killed proclaiming the new life of the Kingdom of God. In our own lives today, we experience suffering and pain, death and loss. We grieve, we weep, we mourn.

Brandon’s great-grandma passed away on Thursday at the age of 99 years. She lived a long full life, but we have all been acutely aware for some time now that at some point, her body would fail and she would no longer be with us. Death is the reality of human life. And when it comes, it is not always a sad thing.

Not yet have the promises of the Kingdom of God been fulfilled. For we hear in Revelation that the time will come when the new heaven and new earth are among us. And in that time and in that place, Death will be no more. Reality as we know it, with its cycles of life and death and life again will be no more. There will only be life. Life abundant.

As the church, our foretaste of that life comes when we baptize little children and we place them in God’s hands. Our foretaste of that Kingdom life comes at the altar table when we eat the bread of life and the cup of salvation. Our foretaste of that Kingdom comes at every single Christian funeral… when we carry our fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and friends across the threshold of death and place them into God’s hands. As the church, we proclaim the reality that death has been defeated, even as we are standing beside the grave. Like little children who stand on their tiptoes and peer over the edge of the counter, we see the dessert that awaits us. We know the truth of the end of our stories. This morning at our graduation breakfast, Wilda shared the story of a woman who wanted to be buried with her fork because she knew, that the best was yet to come.

Our final already/not yet has to do with the joy of the Kingdom of God

Already, we know that when we abide with Christ, when we join in the fellowship of other Christians that we experience joy. As Christ gathered with his disciples in the upper room before he was betrayed he breathed into them the spirit of peace. And we hear stories from the first books of Acts about the joy and the community, the singing and the fellowship that the early Christians experience.

Whenever two or more are gathered, there Christ is among them. We support one another in our walk of faith and together we know the good news of the Kingdom of God.

But not yet fully. There are difficult days. There are times when our church brothers and sisters drive us batty. We argue and fight. We have our ups and downs. We join together as the Christian community around the dinner table, but before we eat, we must confess all of the ways that we have hurt and neglected one another since we met last. Our lives are not yet perfect, and our joy is not yet complete.

And to be sure, there is much that takes away joy from our lives. There is sickness and pain. There is oppression and want in our world. We turn on the television sets at night and the last thing that we find there is good news. To put on a smile and pretend that everything is okay and that we are happy in the face of all of that trouble is dishonest and hypocritical.

In the inbetween time between the already and the not yet, the church has the blessed opportunity to find joy among one another. We share what we have and experience true fellowship. But at the same time, united by our faith and the joy of what God intends for us, we can confront the pain and suffering and injustice of the world with a rightous anger. We can speak out against those places where God’s joy and peace has not been made complete, we can weep with those who suffer, and we can hold forth a vision of the day that is spoken of in Revelation – the day when weeping and crying and pain will be no more.

We gather today as children before the dinner table. Gradually, pieces of the meal are being set for us. And here and there we catch a wiff of the banquet, we sneak a taste of the bounty, we eagerly await with one another the glorious feast that awaits us. But we wait… until what we see already becomes the glorious feast that is yet to come.

levels and dimensions

 Last month at our county ministerial alliance gathering, we got to chatting about the books we were reading.  One pastor mentioned a book – and of course the title escapes me – but it had something to do with how we invite people into deeper discipleship. I actually think that it was “Simple Church: Returning to God’s Process for Making Disciples” but I’m not 100% positive.

Our conversation from this point talked about the process for making these deep disciples.  We talked about Saddleback Church’s Baseball Diamond metaphor… which probably comes from somewhere else first.  We talked about the process at one local pastor’s church of moving from an attender to a participator to a server… well, that’s not exactly how he phrased it, but it’s moving from simply being there to going deeper in your involvement and then giving back in some way. 

It was all about process and movement and how to move people, how to encourage people to not just stay at one level in their spiritual growth, but to… grow!

I left the conversation thinking about the fact our congregation hasn’t had a discussion about our discipleship process.  People come to church and we try to get them to join and then… well, pray they get active. It’s kind of sad to type that out, but it’s probably the truth.
I left the meeting and picked back up the book that I had been reading, “This Beautiful Mess: Practicing the Presence of the Kingdom of God” by Rick McKinley.  And the very chapter I was beginning had this to say: 

When I first became a Christ follower, I was invited to a Bible study… Bring it on, I thought.  I was all for it.  I devoured that one and soon moved on to the next, and then the next one after that, and the next one after that… But there was no end to it.  All I ever arrived at was a new level that needed reaching.  Now you might recognize yourself in my spiritual striving, or you might not.  But I see that kind of striving and competitiveness everywhere… churches especially. Pastors and lay leaders love to talk about advancing the kingdom, about building the kingdom.  It is as if Jesus said, “My kingdom is a pile of lumber on the truck in heave, and I need you boys and girls to get a hammer and help Me nail this thing together.  Could ya?”

But he didn’t… He said, “The Kingdom is…”

… What if I told you that the the world is broken and that WE are God’s answer to the world’s problems?… You yourself – and all that you can do – are crucial to the future of the planet.  Just like you secretly, humbly, all along expected.

Of course, it’s not true. The kingdom is. That’s it. Jesus does not need you or me to nail it together.

Kind of throws me off.  I like thinking in terms of levels of achievement… if I work hard and do the right things, I can move to the next level… Levels of spirituality are perfect for a culture that deifies the individual.  Our world is focused on self; the kingdom is about the other.  It demands that I notice others, love others, pray for them and serve them. “Levels spirituality” does not.  It allows me to do it myself, by myself.

Jesus hates levels spirutuality. All it does is reinforce the lie that started way back in the beginning – the one that says I can be like God. (pgs 56-58)

So, I spent the morning talking about and embracing this idea of levels and growth through a process and then Rick McKinley turns the whole thing upside down and on its head and says – no.

Of course, it’s not necessarily an either/or.  It’s a both/and.  We are called both to just be in Christ’s kingdom and we are called to take up our cross and follow. 

In spite of my Wesleyan roots, I think I tend to really hold fast to the being of discipleship.  Wesley had a fanatical desire to grow in his spirituality and had all sorts of “methods” for doing so.  Fasting, prayer, visiting the prisoners were all steps in the process of becoming more like Christ. There was the whole idea of sanctification… that we actually COULD by God’s grace become more and more like Christ. 

But what I think that in spite of all the doing of discipleship, the early Wesleyans were also putting themselves in situations and among people where they could BE in the Kingdom.  They was seeking out the poor – or they were the poor, the sick, the imprisoned. They sat with the people Jesus loved.  They loved them.  They did what they could for them, but the relationships were important.  When they asked, “how is it with your soul?” they meant it.

Again from Rick McKinley:

…God isn’t measuring anything.  He only wants us to live in a dimension that is already there.  He is simply inviting us to be a part of what He is already doing… What I am realizing after a few years of leaving the levels is that our eyes begin to see differently.  We notice the kingdom dimension of life, but slowly… seeing the kingdom may take a few seconds.

My hope as a pastor is not that I get someone to achieve higher levels of discipleship, but that I can love them.  My hope is that I can love them and offer them the opportunity to see the world with new eyes.  To see the world as Christ sees it.  To see the broken and hurting things and to love them.  Yes, there is a goal to be reached  – a time when that hurting and suffering and pain is no more… but that is not for me to determine.  I can simply be in the kingdom and let Christ’s love flow through me.

“this beautiful mess” part 1

I have been trying to read more.  There are far too many books on my shelf – delicious books – just waiting to be picked up and devoured.  So I decided to start with Rick McKinley’s “This Beautiful Mess.” 

The writing style just draws me in… it’s conversational and pulls me in.  But even more than that, he speaks to the core of my longing for the Kingdom of God.  As he starts out the book, he describes it as a “permission slip… get out of religion free.”   He invites us to recieve the book “not as the last theological work on anything, but as a well-intentioned, God-loving invitation to go and grow and be where you haven’t before.”

And then, McKinley takes those pithy sayings that drive me nuts and transforms them into solid truth in a way that I wish I could do.  For example:

…when our lives are all about us, the appeal of that kind of bumper-sticker dumbness is irresistible. “Christ in you, the hope of glory” gets turned into a tool of the self to assure my business success instead of a promise that brings peace to my soul when all hell breaks loose.

Peace to my soul when all hell breaks loose.  That’s what I’m craving.  Yeah, it would be nice for the hell not to break loose at all.  But it does and it will and Christ never promises that we won’t have trouble.  Maybe that’s what I was getting at a few weeks ago when I blogged about my car accident.  I never expected that an accident wouldn’t happen.  I never expected to be so protected by the hand of God that no trouble would ever befall me.  I do expect that Christ will be with me through even the darkest valleys, however.

I have now been in ministry to the congregation I serve for two full years now.  Maybe it’s because I’m young, or don’t yet have the self-confidence in my own vocation, but it’s taken me this long to be able to challenge some of those simplistic and pithy characterizations of God.  I find the confidence to do it in sermons – mostly because the Holy Spirit is at my back… or rather, I pray over my texts that she will be.  I just don’t go into other conversations in the same way… and I should!   Perhaps with more prayer and with more confidence in the God who gives me the voice to speak, I can continue to affirm the faith of my people while at the same time giving them a “get out of religion free” card.  I can give them an invitation to think deeper and to go where they haven’t been before, to move beyond Jesus and me in heaven by and by to Jesus and me and the poor with my sleeves rolled up here and now. 

It’s not an either/or.  I’m foolish to paint it that way.  It’s a both/and.  Breathing IN and Breathing OUT.  Letting Christ be King… but King of his own Kingdom and not the ones we create for him.  Changing our allegiances.  Challenging the politics of it all.  And doing all of that with grace and humility.

what are we saved for?

What is your understanding of a) the Kingdom of God; b) the Resurrection; c) eternal life?

As I think about this question, the words from the funeral liturgy keep coming back to me: In the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ. In the past two years, I have buried many individuals that I never had the chance to know in this lifetime. Our denomination is a bit more inclusive that some of the others in our community and so I am often called in to lay to rest people who have had no faith affiliation. In many cases, I am not sure at all what was in their hearts about God.

This question for me is about redemption and about who receives it and about when we receive it. In the resurrection of Christ, we glimpse the radical and transformative power of God. It is not something that we can harness, grasp, or earn apart from the gracious act of God. That power is what re-creates not only individual lives but the entirety of God’s creation and when we talk about the completion of that transformation – we are talking about the Kingdom of God. We began to see glimpses of that reality through the life of Christ and we participate in that Kingdom now only through his power. How it will be finished, when it will come, what it will look like is completely beyond us, yet we are still responsible for embodying that kingdom sacramentally here and now in our own lives.
So when I stand before a family and I place my hand on a cold metal casket and say the words, “in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ,” I am placing that person in God’s hands. I stand there as a witness to the power of God to redeem. I stand there as a witness to the fact that Christ holds the keys to hell and death. I stand there as a witness to the hope I have for that person’s life – a hope that carries beyond their death. This past summer, I was profoundly impacted by the words of German theologian, Jürgen Moltmann. He said, “…if a life was cut short, God will bring what he had begun for the human being to its intended end and death cannot hinder God to do this, because God is God, and cannot be overcome by death.” So I cannot know the future of the man or woman I bury, but I do have sure and certain hope in the Lord of the Kingdom of God and the power of God’s transformative love and the promise that all things will be made new.

Touching and Tasting God’s Love

What is the meaning and significance of the sacraments?

In the sacraments of our church, ordinary things like bread and grape juice and water become vehicles of God’s divine grace. We gather as a community not only to acknowledge God’s presence with us, but we are each able to reach out and experience for ourselves the holy. We feel the cool water of cleansing beneath our fingertips. We smell the loving warmth of freshly baked bread. We taste the sweetness of God’s grace. We hear the water being poured out like streams of righteousness and hear the bread of heaven being broken for us. We see into the eyes of our brothers and sisters and find Christ there. Our sacraments not only remind us that God-is-with-us… the sacraments enable us to experience God-with-us, Emmanuel.

In baptism, we are washed clean of past transgressions and we are marked as children of God. We are given new life through those waters – a life that begins in community. In the sacrament of communion, we are not only reminded of the covenant Christ made with us, but invited to participate in its coming – we experience a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. Time stands still when we invite God’s sacramental presence into our lives and we are swept up into the divine reality. But the sacraments are not merely mountaintop experiences – both of these sacraments transform us so that we become different. We become initiated into the priesthood of all believers and in the confirmation of our baptisms take vows to resist evil and injustice and oppression. We pray that we might be for the world the body of Christ, redeemed by his blood. The sacraments call us into the world.

The Other Two… Christ & the Holy Spirit

What changes has the practice of ministry had on your understanding of a) the “lordship of Jesus Christ,” and b) the work of the Holy Spirit?
In my ministry, my understanding of the lordship of Christ has not changed much at all, but I have had the opportunity to preach and teach the Kingdom that Christ brings. Some of the sermons that made me the most nervous throughout these past two years have been those that have dealt with this very topic. And yet, in everything I do, I have tried to stretch our understandings of who Jesus is beyond merely our personal salvation. We have talked about priorities, we have placed Christ’s Kingdom alongside nationalism, we have been reminded that Christ came not with a sword but in a manger, and that we follow a lord who calls us to follow him to the cross. But above all, I am constantly reminded that our lord died so that we might all have life and life abundant.

My understanding of the Holy Spirit, however, has been dramatically deepened. While before I may have theoretically thought of the Spirit as the agent of life and creativity, every Sunday as I stand to preach, I know that the words that come out of my mouth are there only through the Spirit’s prompting. As I held my newborn nephew this fall, I was dazzled by the gift of life. As the youth that traveled with me to Tennessee for a mission trip this past summer stood in front of the congregation to tell their stories, I saw the Holy Spirit lighting a spark in their eyes and changing them forever. As I witnessed a great-grandmother say yes to a call from God and become a lay speaker in our church and then preach with less than a week’s notice – the Holy Spirit was there working. She gives us life and helps us to grow more into Christ’s likeness each and every single day.

Hope or Despair? Birth Pangs of the Kingdom

As I started exploring and reading our texts for this week, I was instantly transported back to my best friend’s kitchen – 1997. I was a sophomore in high school and my family had recently started going to church. I knew the basics of the Christian faith, but was becoming aware of how muc more there was to the bible.

The late 1990’s was a time of religious fervor – at least as far as I remember them. Mega churches were just starting to be noticed, the Left Behind Series of books were on everyone’s reading lists, and in my high school bible studies and prayer meetings were popping up all over the place. Oh – and the year 2000 was on the horizon and no one quite knew what to expect.

For the most part, I was a typical high schooler and oblivious to what was going on in the rest of the world. Living in rural Iowa, that scope of vision was even smaller. So as a new Christian, sitting in my best friend’s kitchen, my entire world was rocked when my friends and One of their moms started talking about end times prophecy.

I can’t remember why we started talking about it, but before I knew it they had pulled out these time lines and charts and bibles and were explaining to me what order things were going to happen for Christ to come back again. They talked with such certainty, such confidence, and I remember feeling nothing but lost.

In fact, my stomach turned as visions of the world being destroyed passed before my eyes. I remember feeling clammy when I thought about billions of people dying in the tribulation. I was terrified by descriptions of the seven seals being opened.

Perhaps most of all, as I sat on that kitchen stool, I remember how unprepared I felt. My friends knew all of this information – but more importantly, they believed and were confident in the face of impending doom! I, on the other hand, was uncomfortable, had questions I was afraid to ask, and if they were right, I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to be among the faithful. That assurance they felt that told them they would escape the troubles… yeah, I didn’t have that.

I mostly avoided talking about it with my friends, but I nearly gave up on Christianity after a series of those conversations. I started reading the Left Behind books and I was so upset by them I stopped a few books in. The picture of God that was presented by them and by all of this prophecy just didn’t match up with the God I had met in my United Methodist youth group. There we talked about love and grace and forgiveness and becoming a new creation… and all I could see in what my friends were so sure of was judgment and destruction.

In some ways – we get that same kind of feeling from our gospel text this morning. We are told to be alert at all times so that we have the strength to escape from all of these things that are about to take place. We are told that people will faint from fear of what is to come because the heavens will be shaken. I hear a lot of doom and gloom in these few passages that come to us from the gospel of Luke.

But I hear these words very differently today than I did ten years ago. After we got past the Y2K scare and I started reading the Bible more, I realized that the sure and certain scenarios presented on those time lines in my friend’s kitchen weren’t the only possibility presented to us in the Bible.

As we have talked about in Sunday School recently – I started to see that Revelation isn’t a schedule for the apocalypse but a book of hope in secret code for a community being persecuted. I have now read just as many verses in Paul’s letters that talk about not knowing what is going to happen in the future, as I have the ones that seem to have the inside scoop. And – perhaps more importantly – I have started seeing the scriptures as a whole, and not in isolated verses.

When we look at the entire scope of the scriptures – we see the story of a God who created us out of love and has been continually yearning for relationship with us. We see the story of a God whose response to our endless denial was to come and be born in our midst. We see the story of a God who lived among us to show us the path of the righteous, and who died so that we could follow him. We see the story of a God who is not interested in scrapping this world and starting over, but who re-creates and redeems and transforms even the heavens and the earth.

Read in light of that story – these verses in Luke sound very different. People will faint and tremble not because terrible things are looming – but because they THINK terrible things are looming… they don’t understand what is happening… they don’t understand the signs.

About a year ago – my husband and I had some of our own signs to decipher. We go over to his sister’s house every Friday night to have dinner with their family. It is a wonderful time to eat good food and play games and hang out with our niece and nephew. A couple of weeks went by and I started to notice that my sister-in-law had stopped having her usual glass of wine with dinner. Then I noticed that she was eating less and less at our meals and was tired and seemed to be losing weight. And I started to get slightly worried, because I didn’t understand what was happening. Was she sick? Was there something that we should be concerned about?

And then the announcement came – Bevin was pregnant! She had stopped eating and was losing weight because she had such terrible morning sickness. She was tired because there was new life growing inside of her!

I had completely misread the signs.

If we go back a little bit further in Luke, chapter 21 this morning, Jesus is trying to tell his disciples not to be afraid by what might come next – by what appears to be happening around them.

They ask him for a simple answer – when are these things going to happen? How will we know? And in response he tells them not to listen to those people who say that the time is near. He tells them not to be afraid by the signs of the times. Or as the Message translation puts these verses: “When you hear of wars and uprisings, keep your head and don’t panic. This is routine history and no sign of the end … nation will fight against nation… over and over. Huge earthquakes will occur in various places. There will be famines. You’ll think at times that the very sky is falling.”

But those are just the outside symptoms. They are similar to the things I was seeing in my sister-in-law: weight loss and not eating and I thought something was wrong because I misinterpreted the signs.

Jesus goes on to talk about a particular time when it will seem as if all is lost, or as the Message bible puts it – “everything will come to a head.” And at that moment – when things appear to be their worst, when all appears hopeless – that is when the Son of Man – that is when Jesus will be seen.

I think all of this would be a whole lot easier to understand if Luke didn’t leave out and important detail. I think he left it out because Mark and Luke have almost identical passages. If you look at Luke chapter 21 and Mark chapter 13 – there are many similarities except for one… after Jesus reminds them that there will continue to be wars and natural disasters he says: This is but the beginning of the birth pangs. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.

I was with a group of pastors a few weeks ago in Indianapolis and we were reading this exact same passage in Mark. One woman spoke up and said – I’ve had five children… I know exactly what Jesus is talking about!!! It always seems to be the worst, it always seems like you just won’t survive, right before your child is born. That’s when the pain is the worst and that’s because you are growing and stretching and waiting for this new life to emerge. That’s a really different way to understand this passage.

Paul talks about the groaning of creation, he talks about the birth pangs and waiting for redemption and if we think about God’s Kingdom being born in our midst, its going to take a little bit of change and transformation. Things will be shaken up a bit just like when birth happens in our lives.

We could look around us at the melting of the icecaps and tsunamis and tornadoes and the strange weather we have had this past year and we could be worried about the end. We could look at the violence in our own community – much less in the world – in this past year and think that we are on a downhill slide into immorality and destruction. We could look at the wars we are engaged in – especially in the middle east – as signs that all is lost… as the impending day of judgment and doom.

Or we can listen to the scriptures. In our passage today, it says Stand up and raise our heads because what is coming is not destruction – but redemption. What is being born in our midst is the new creation.

Today is the first Sunday of the Christian year.

Today is the start of a season of hope in the midst of despair, the season of light when everything appears to be dark.

If last week we prayed for Christ the King to come on earth – then today is the day that we start looking for the Kingdom.

Today is the day we look around and see the signs of the kingdom everywhere. We see it in the hunger that young people have to understand and learn more about who God is. We see it in the hunger we experience as we gather to worship and pray. We see it in that spark of hope that is in our hearts – even though we could look at the world and think radically different things.

I think in many ways this church understands that because two years ago you were faced with a tough decision. You looked around and church attendance was declining and you had to decide if you were going to go to part time or stay with a full time pastor. Some churches in that situation would have said, well – we are pretty much hopeless.

But you said that something new is being born in our midst – and we are going to wait and see what happens. That’s why we light this candle today. We light this candle remembering that hope is just around the corner that the promises of God are almost in our reach. That all of the groaning and birth pangs around us are merely getting us ready for what is to come. There is no fear to be had. There is no trembling on this day. Because God is coming near to us. God is coming and so let us stand up and raise up our heads and await the glory of our King. Amen and Amen.

Where is the Kingdom?

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be they name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven…
Thy kingdom come on earth…
That little tiny phrase is one of the most subversive and radical things that we can say as Christian people. And we say it every week. Too often, we rush over the words, practically tripping over them to get to the end, because we know the Lord’s Prayer so well.

We know the Lord’s Prayer – we know how to say it – we know the comfort that it brings to our lives – and yet do we really know WHAT we are saying?

Thy kingdom come on earth.

Early Christians were accused of terrible things by those who didn’t understand their worshipping practices – but something they were correctly accused of was sedition and treason. They openly confessed in the face of an empire that they belonged to the Kingdom of God, that their citizenship was in heaven. And some were willing to die rather than to worship or honor an earthly king.

They got these radical ideas from the gospels. As Daniel Clendenin reminds us:

“The birth of Jesus signaled that God would “bring down rulers from their thrones” (Luke 1:52). In Mark’s gospel the very first words that Jesus spoke announced that “the kingdom of God is at hand” (1:15). John’s gospel takes us to the death of Jesus, and the political theme is the same. Jesus was dragged to the Roman governor’s palace for three reasons, all political: “We found this fellow subverting the nation, opposing payment of taxes to Caesar, and saying that He Himself is Christ, a King” (Luke 23:1–2).”

Thy kingdom come on earth.

In our gospel text this morning, that is where we find Jesus – standing in Pilate’s headquarters, and being asked a plain and simple question: Are you the King of the Jews?

When Jesus gets tricky, responding with questions instead of answers, Pilate finally comes out and says it…. I have no idea why you are here – What have you done?

When you think about the big picture, It’s almost a laughable question… asking the King of Kings and Lord of Lords why a little provincial governor should be worried about him? Asking the one who is and who was and who is to come if he is a threat to the empire.

Jesus responds the best way he can. My kingdom is not from this world. If it was, then those who followed me would be fighting tooth and nail to protect me and keep me from being handed over to you. But my kingdom is not from here.

Thy kingdom come on earth.

We know how the Roman and Jewish leaders responded to that statement. Jesus was mocked and beaten and crucified.

Had he been just a revolutionary… had his kingdom originated in the stable at Bethlehem… had his goals merely been overthrowing the Roman occupation of Israel… that would have been the end.

But his kingdom is not from here.

His kingdom is not something that can be mapped out on a piece of paper. Its borders cannot be easily drawn. And contrary to much of our contemporary sentiment, it is not a place that we go to after we die.

No, we pray every week: Thy kingdom come on earth.

The Kingdom of God may not be from here… but it certainly is for here.

For the last two thousand years, Christians have tried to bring the Kingdom of God to bear in their lives. There are times when we have been wildly successful – and there are times when we have failed miserably. There are times when in the name of Christ our King we have brought hope and joy and peace to the lives of our brothers and sisters. And there have been times when we have subverted Christ as King for our own purposes to seek power and money and land at the cost of our brothers and sisters.

If we are going to be daring enough to pray for the kingdom to come on earth – we had better understand what we are praying for.

In the Kingdom of God – the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

In the Kingdom of God – you love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength.

In the Kingdom of God – you love your neighbor as your self.

In the Kingdom of God – you forgive one another 70×70 times.

In the Kingdom of God – our ruler is the one who gets down on his hands and knees to wash our feet like a servant.

In the Kingdom of God – the widow and the orphan and the stranger are honored guests at the table.

I pray week after week for that kingdom of God to come…

But there are a lot of days when I listen to the news or read a story in the paper and I lament how far away from the Kingdom we really are. I want to be in that place where love and grace and mercy rule – rather than money and influence. I want to make my home in a land where nations stop rising up against nations and don’t learn war anymore. I want to go there – to where the Kingdom of God has taken root.

But where is that place? Where can we find it?

Even living on this side of the resurrection we see only glimpses.

One particular glimpse came when I heard a friend tell about having communion with Christians from Mexico. He was on a trip to the borderlands between our two countries and Christians from the United States and Mexico met on the border to worship with one another.

They sang songs of praise to God in their different languages. They prayed to the One who rules all nations. And they did so without ever being able to see one anothers face.

You see, there was a wall between these two groups of people. A wall so high they couldn’t see across. A wall that human hands had built. But they gathered in that place to worship a God whose Kingdom has no borders. Their songs and voices carried over the walls. When time came to share communion, they lobbed huge chunks of bread over that wall so that they could share of one common loaf.

Thy kingdom come on earth.

Those believers at the border didn’t wait for the Kingdom of God to be a fully present reality – they just let it take root in their hearts. They invited Christ in as King and then lived their lives accordingly. .

After all, that is the kingdom described in our reading from Revelation… The One who loves us and frees us from our sins by his blood made US to be a kingdom.

In, “Listening to your Life,” (page 304), Fred Beuchner writes:

“…the Kingdom of God in the sense of holiness, goodness, beauty is as close as breathing and is crying out to be born within ourselves and within the world; we would know that the kingdom of God is what all of us hunger for above all other things even when we don’t know its name or realize that it’s what we’re starving to death for. The Kingdom of God is where our best dreams come from and our truest prayers. We glimpse it at those moments when we find ourselves being better than we are and wiser than we know. We catch sight of it when at some moment of crisis a strength seems to come to us that is greater than our own strength. The Kingdom of God is where we belong. It is home, and whether we realize it or not, I think we are all of us homesick for it.”

We are homesick for it and yet it is as close as our next breath.

Thy Kingdom come on earth.

Thy Kingdom, Oh Jesus, come on earth and be born in my heart… transform my heart.

Thy Kingdom, Oh Lord, come on earth as we are all awakened to your call.

Thy Kingdom, Oh Holy Lord, come on this earth and pull us beyond the borders we have artificially made.

Thy Kingdom, Oh Lord and King, come on this earth and root all of our actions in the care of your creation.

Thy Kingdom, Radiant King, come on earth and help us to show that love and compassion are stronger weapons than all of the guns in the world.

Thy Kingdom, Blessed Ruler, come on earth and let us find the boldness to feed and clothe and heal our brothers and sisters without waiting for the government to help.

Thy Kingdom, Glorious King, come on earth and make us uncomfortable. Don’t let us be content with peace in our hearts until your peace truly reigns over the nations.

Thy Kingdom, Ancient of Days, come on earth and turn our allegiance from brand names and politicians and flags and nations to the one who is and who was and who is to come.

Thy Kingdom, Crucified God, come on earth and help us to imagine and embody life on earth, here and now, as though you are king and the rulers of this world were not. Help us to imagine our lives if you truly ruled the nations and not Barak Obama, or Wall Street, or Kim Jong-il, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or Queen Elizabeth.

As Daniel Clendenin rightly says – “every aspect of our personal and communal life would experience a radical reversal. The political, economic and social subversions would be almost endless – peace-making instead of war mongering, liberation not exploitation, sacrifice rather than subjugation, mercy not vengeance, care for the vulnerable instead of privileges for the powerful, generosity instead of greed, humility rather than hubris, embrace rather than exclusion, etc. The ancient Hebrews had a marvelous word for this, shalom, or human well-being.,”

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.