The Kingdom of God Is Among Us

The Kingdom of God Is Among Us

Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is among us.  Luke 17:20  Or perhaps he said that it is within us.  Either way, it doesn’t matter.  Either way he said the Kingdom of God “is.”  Not that it will be.  That it is.  And either way in locating the Kingdom of God Jesus pointed to us.  He didn’t point to God.  He didn’t point to heaven.  He didn’t even point to himself, although his signs or miracles clearly point to an in-breaking of the Kingdom into the world.  He pointed to us.  Jesus said the Kingdom of God is not will be, and he said that it is among or within us, and Christianity has gotten Jesus’ message about the Kingdom of God almost completely wrong almost from the beginning.  Christianity has gotten Jesus’ message about the Kingdom of God wrong at least since Christianity became Christendom, at least, that is, since it became the established faith of empire in the fourth century CE.  We’ve been told the Kingdom of God is really the Kingdom of Heaven (Thank you Matthew!) and the Kingdom of Heaven really means Kingdom in Heaven.  Or we’ve been told that the Kingdom of God may come to be on earth some day, but that day won’t happen until the Parousia, until the Second Coming of Jesus, that hoary Christian belief that denies the significance and the validity of Jesus’ first coming.  Yet Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is among us.  Is, not will be.  Us, not heaven.

In his essay “The Mystery of the Gospel,” which is Chapter 1 of his book Waiting for Gospel, the Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall says that gospel isn’t something that we are to construct, it is something that has already happened.  It is something that God has already done.  Gospel, Hall says, is.  Not that it will be.  It is.  Now.  Already.  We just don’t know it.  Hall’s words reminded me of Jesus’ words from Luke and got me thinking again about a thought I’ve had many times before.  It’s a thought about how we are to understand the Kingdom of God and the Good News, the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  That thought goes like this.

The Kingdom of God  already exists.  It is already the ultimate reality of the world.  We humans of course create our own reality.  What we take to be reality is entirely of our own making.  Trees aren’t green.  They reflect certain wave lengths of light that our brains make green.  Green isn’t an objective reality, it is something our minds create.  A glorious mountain vista isn’t beautiful.  It just is what it is.  Our brains react to it with a sense that makes us appreciate the vista and call it beautiful.  Beauty isn’t an objective reality, it is something our minds create.  I don’t know the objective reality of the people in my life or in the world.  I don’t know the objective reality of what I read and hear about world history and world events.  I know only that I perceive them, and I make my perception of them my reality.  Does my perception that I call reality correspond in any meaningful way to some objective reality outside myself?  I don’t know.  I can’t know.  I have no way of knowing because my perception, which is entirely internal and subjective, is all I have.

The Kingdom of God is already real, but we humans constantly create a reality that is radically and tragically different from the Kingdom of God.  We take what we experience as the injustice, violence, environmental destruction, oppression, and exploitation of which we hear so much as reality; and we make it our reality.  We say those things are what is real.  O yes, we also say that love, care, compassion, justice, and forgiveness are real to some extent, but they aren’t enough for us to overcome our created reality of violence and oppression and to live in the Kingdom of God.  The Kingdom of God is already here.  It is already real, and we live as though it weren’t.

God calls us to live in the reality of the Kingdom of God not in the alternative reality that we call the world.  God calls us to live as though the values of the Kingdom of God were already the universal values of the world for, really, they already are.  Is there injustice in the world?  No matter.  Live lives of justice.  Justice is part of ultimate reality.  Is there violence in the world?  No matter.  Live lives of nonviolence.  Nonviolence is part of ultimate reality.  Is there judgment, condemnation, and punishment in the world?  No matter.  Live lives of acceptance and grace.  Acceptance and grace are part of ultimate reality.  God says:  I showed you what my Kingdom is when I sent you my Son.  He told you.  He showed you.  He told that that my Kingdom is already your reality, that it already is among and within you.  So listen to him as I told you to do at the Transfiguration and live in my reality.  Make the Kingdom of God your reality.  We must stop waiting for God to do it, for God has already done it.  We can’t wait for others to do it, for it is up to us to live it.  How do we make the Kingdom of God our reality?  We just do it.  We decide to do it.  We choose to do it.  We stop living by the worldly reality that we convince ourselves is real and starting living by the ultimate reality of the Kingdom of God.

The world will think we’re nuts of course.  They’ll say you’re not being realistic, not realizing that we are living the ultimate reality and therefore are being the most realistic people of all.  They’ll say nonviolence doesn’t work.  No matter.  In the world’s terms it often doesn’t, not that violence does.  In the Kingdom of God nonviolence works, and more importantly in the Kingdom of God nonviolence is just what’s right.  So that’s how we live.  They’ll say oppression and injustice are unavoidable in human society.  No matter.  In the world’s terms they may be unavoidable, but they don’t even exist in the Kingdom of God.  They’ll say we can’t afford to save the environment.  No matter.  In the Kingdom of God we know that we are stewards not dominators of a world that belongs to God not to us, so we save the environment.

How do we make the Kingdom of God a reality on earth?  By realizing that it already is.  By realizing that we all create our own reality.  By simply deciding to live the Kingdom life rather than the worldly life.  There’s no need to wait.  There’s no use in waiting.  Jesus said the Kingdom of God is among and within you.  It’s already here.  So let’s live it.  Now not later.  It’s the only way to make it real.

© Thomas C. Sorenson, 2013  All rights reserved.

Love Your Enemies

This is the sermon that I gave on Sunday, May 12, which was Mothers' Day in the US.

Love Your Enemies.  Really?

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

May 12, 2013

Scripture:  Matthew 5:43-48

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

I was going to start this sermon by saying that no one ever said that being a Christian was easy, but as soon as I thought that I realized that I couldn’t say it.  It’s not true.  A great many people think that being a Christian is very easy.  A great many pastors and preachers present Christianity as being very easy.  They say:  Realize you’re a sinner.  Repent.  Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior.  Done.  Problem solved.  You’re saved, and now you can relax.  Easy.  So I can’t start this sermon by saying that no one ever said being a Christian was easy.  People make being a Christian—of sorts at least—easy all the time.

Which absolutely does not change the fact that being a Christian, a real Christian, a truly faithful Christian, isn’t easy.  It just isn’t.  It isn’t because being a Christian means more than anything else following Jesus.  Not believing the right things about him, but following him.  Believing in Jesus is easy.  Listening to him and living the way he taught and showed us is hard.  It’s really hard.  It’s really hard because the life that he taught us and showed us turns everything we understand about the world on its head.  Do you know what a revolutionary is?  A revolutionary is someone who wants the world to revolve, to turn.  To turn upside down.  Jesus was a revolutionary.  That kind of revolutionary.  His teaching turns the world upside down.  He wants us to turn our world upside down, and that’s not easy.  It’s really, really hard.

Many of the things Jesus tells us to do are hard, but today I want to talk to you about what may be hardest of Jesus’ teachings of all.  We just heard it.  “Love your enemies.”  I don’t know what your reaction to that teaching is, but mine is:  Really?  You’re telling me to love my enemies?  Really?  You’re telling me to love people who hate me?  Really?  You’re telling me to love people who want to kill me?  Really?  I don’t want it to be true.  I don’t want Jesus to have said it.  It makes no sense.  I don’t love people who hate me.  Almost no one loves people who hate them.  We hate those people.  That’s the only sensible thing for us to do, to return hatred for hatred, isn’t it?  People have always done it.  We can’t not do it.  Really?  You want me to love my enemies?  Really?

“Really?” has pretty much been the reaction of virtually all of Christendom since very early in the history of our faith.  At least since Christianity became the established religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE Christians have asked Really? about Jesus’ commandment to love our enemies.  For the most part Christians have answered their Really? with a no, not really.  Jesus’ love your enemies commandment is one of his most widely ignored and disregarded sayings.  Christians on the whole have not loved their enemies any more than any other people have.  O yes, sometimes we convinced that we were loving our enemies even as we have tortured and killed them.  We did it because we love them, we’ve said.  We did it for their own good, we’ve said.  We did it to save their souls, we’ve said.  Or we say we love the sinner and hate the sin as we have condemned and excluded people different from us.  Mostly, however, we don’t even bother with such pretenses.  We just hate our enemies as much as anyone else does.  We certainly don’t love them.  We ask Jesus Really?  We’ve got to love our enemies?  We answer for him no, not Really. 

Yet there his commandment of love is.  Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you he says.  We don’t like it.  We ignore it.  But today I ask:  What if we were to stop ignoring Jesus’ command to love our enemies and lived into that command instead?  What would that look like?  What would we have to do?  How could we start?  In one short sermon I can’t do more than suggest a starting place, and here I think is a good one.  The Church of the Brethren, one of the historic peace churches that has not turned its back on Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence the way most of Christianity has, puts out a bumper sticker that reads:  “When Jesus said ‘Love your enemies,’ I think he probably meant don’t kill them.”  Yeah, probably.  Don’t you think?  Don’t you think that love means at least don’t kill? 

There is no doubt that Jesus preached and lived radical nonviolence.  His directive to us to love our enemies is part of that teaching.  Christianity has mostly forgotten that teaching.  At least since establishment in the Roman Empire of the fourth century CE Christians have been at least as violent as any other people.  In our country today most of the gun nuts who run the NRA probably think of themselves as Christians and see no disparity between their dystopian world in which everyone carries an assault weapon and Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God, so thoroughly has Christianity turned its back on Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence.  Yet surely love your enemies means at least don’t inflict violence upon them. 

Today is Mother’s Day, and many of you may be unaware that the roots of Mother’s Day in this country lie in the anti-war movement.  In 1870 Julia Ward Howe, one of great witnesses for peace and for justice in our country’s history, wrote and issued her Mother’s Day Proclamation.  Hallmark would not have approved.  It isn’t sweet.  It isn’t sentimental.  It isn’t about giving cards and flowers and chocolates and going out to dinner, as nice and as appropriate as those things may be.  It is about peace.  In that Declaration Howe said:

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or tears!

Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, ‘Disarm, Disarm!’

Howe went on to  call for an international women’s congress to be held to “to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”  Mother’s Day wasn’t officially established in this country until 1914, ironically (and tragically) the year World War I began in Europe, and it had by then already lost its connection to the peace movement.  But that’s where its roots lie.  It’s about time we rediscovered them.

Today we honor the love and care that, we pray, all mothers will have for their children.  We know that not all do, and we stand with the victims of abuse and neglect in the cause of justice.  We pray for them healing and wholeness of life.  But all people have mothers.  Our enemies have mothers.  We’ve all see the heartrending pictures of mothers in inconsolable grief over the deaths of their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons killed by acts of violence, killed most of all in war.  Perhaps if war is ever to cease in this world it will be the mothers who stop it.  Mothers who know that no cause is worth the death of a beloved son or daughter.  Mothers who know that violence never brings peace.  Violence never brings justice.  Violence brings death and dismemberment and pain and emotional suffering and grief.  Perhaps it’s the mothers who know that most of all.  Maybe they will lead the way to a recovery of Jesus’ difficult commandment:  Love your enemies.  Today we can say:  Love your enemies, for they too have mothers. 

Of course it’s not easy.  No one ever said loving your enemies was easy.  No one who knew anything about it ever said that nonviolence was easy or safe.  The world teaches us to hate our enemies.  It teaches us to kill as many of them as we can.  Jesus teaches us the opposite of that worldly wisdom.  He teaches us the wisdom of our nonviolent God.  He said to those he knew in life and he says to us now:  Love your enemies.  He didn’t say it was easy.  He just said do it.  Will we?  Amen.

Called to Transformation

This is the sermon I gave on May 5, 2013, to which some have responded favorably.

Called to Transformation

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

May 5, 2013

Scripture:  Acts 16:9-15;  Revelation 21:10, 22-26, 22:1-5

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.   Amen.

Some of you already know this from Facebook, but last Sunday after we got back from Wenatchee, Jane and I got a dog.  He’s a new dog to us although he’s almost eight years old.  He lived right around the corner from the church, and he needed a new home.  He wasn’t being abused or neglected by the woman who owned him, who was also his breeder; but she couldn’t keep him and needed to find a good place for him.  I got to talking to her a couple of weeks ago as I was walking up to 7-11 to get something to drink, and Jane and I ended up adopting the dog.  Some of you have seen his picture on Facebook.  He’s a Pembroke Welsh Corgi—that’s the kind without a tail.  His name is Ringo, because he has a ring of white fur around his neck.  He’s a sweetheart, and we’re delighted to have him.  Especially Jane, who’s the world’s biggest dog sap—but that’s a story for another day.

Ringo probably doesn’t know it yet, but he just landed in a bed of roses.  I don’t like to brag, but Jane and I are really good dog owners.  We love dogs.  We know what they need, and we make sure our dog has it.  We walk our dog at least twice a day.  We make sure his diet is healthy.  We take him to the vet regularly for checkups and vaccinations and whenever something might be wrong.  We pet him and play with him a lot.  We’re even having our little back yard fenced so Ringo can go outside by himself when he wants.  Mostly, we love our dog.  Ringo probably doesn’t know it yet, but his world just got pretty much completely transformed for the better. 

Ringo is experiencing transformation into a world that will be really good for him, yet of course he’s still a bit stressed by it all.  He knows he’s in a new place with new people, but he doesn’t know why.  He’s a dog, and you can’t really explain those things to a dog.  So he’s still a bit nervous, a bit edgy.  He hasn’t really settled into his new environment yet.  He doesn’t yet fully know our routines and patterns, and that makes him a bit uneasy.  The transformation that he’s experiencing will be really good for him, but he’s resisting it a bit.  Just a bit, not a lot; but he’s still resisting it a little, and he’s still a little uncomfortable with it.  That’s to be expected, and it will pass; but for now Ringo is finding transformation a bit difficult.

Ringo’s a dog, but he’s not the only creature who finds transformation difficult.  We humans find transformation difficult too.  We resist change.  We resist renewal.  In my line of work we call the phrase “We’ve never done it that way before” the seven last words of a dying church, but people in churches say it all the time because they don’t like change.  Institutions like churches, and governments, and just about every other kind of human institution, resist change, but so do we individually.  Psychologists tells us that things like changes in primary relationships, changes of employment, moving from one home to another or from one town to another, are among that most stressful events in a human life.  They’re stressful because we don’t like change.  We like things to stay the way they are.  Of course, not all change is beneficial, but we pretty much resist all change, even change that is beneficial.  In other words, we resist transformation.  We find change and even true transformation frightening.  They make us nervous.  They make us tense.  So we resist them.  Staying where we are is almost always more comfortable for us than is any kind of change, any kind of transformation.

We resist transformation, and that’s unfortunate.  It’s unfortunate especially for us Christians because the Gospel of Jesus Christ is nothing if not a call to radical transformation.  In our Gospels Jesus more than anything else calls us to transformation.  He calls us to transform our hearts and minds.  He calls us to transform our lives.  Then he calls us to transform our world.  Jesus calls us to build the Kingdom of God.  He calls us to build it from the inside out, starting with a transformation of our hearts and ending with the Kingdom of God fully realized on earth.  That is transformation writ large, and Jesus calls us to do it.

In our two scripture readings this morning we have images of transformation.  In our story from Acts Lydia is transformed.  Her transformation is symbolized by her baptism, which comes after she accepts Paul’s teaching about Jesus Christ.  She brings the Apostle and his teaching into her home and into her life.  She is transformed.  Our reading from Revelation is an even clearer picture of transformation.  It is a vision of a world living in immediate, direct relationship with God and Jesus Christ.  In what Revelation calls the new Jerusalem there is no need, metaphorically speaking of course, of sun, moon, or lamp because everyone lives in the light of God, so close is God to all the people and all the nations.  Revelation gives us a vision of a world transformed from living apart from God to a world living intimately with God.  If that transformation were ever really to happen, the world would be a very different, a radically transformed, place indeed.

Jesus Christ calls us to transformation.  He calls us to live the life of the Kingdom of God even now when that Kingdom is so incompletely realized here on earth.  He calls us to live lives that reject violence, lift up the lowly, include the excluded, and live in tight communion with God.  He calls us to live the life of the Kingdom of God as if God’s Kingdom were already fully a reality among us.  He says the Kingdom is among us, and he calls to live the way of the Kingdom rather than the ways of the world.  In Christ we are in the world, but we are called to be of the Kingdom.  We are called to a new way of being that turns the world’s ways of being completely on their heads.  We are, in other words, called to radical transformation. 

We are called to radical transformation, and most of the time we say no.  Most of the time the thought of changing nearly everything about the way we live is too uncomfortable.  It is too scary.  We think we’d lose too much.  Most of us here are pretty satisfied with our lives the way they are.  We’ve accepted the way the world is.  We support candidates who take our country to war and spend nearly as much on the military as the rest of the world put together.  We don’t want to pay taxes for social programs that benefit people we don’t know.  We consume at a higher level than any other people in the world, eating up much more than our fair share of the world’s resources.  We like all of those things.  We don’t want to change them.  We so don’t want to change them that we mostly don’t even hear Jesus’ call to us to change them.  We think he’s talking about how we get to heaven, not about how God wants us to live on earth.  He isn’t, or at least he isn’t primarily.  The Kingdom of God that he proclaimed is not an earthly kingdom, but it is on the earth not in heaven; and God calls us to the transformation that is necessary to make it an earthly reality.

Ringo will get used to his new home.  I think he will be very happy in his new home.  It’ll take some time, but he’ll get there.  Will we ever get used to the new home to which God calls us?  Will we ever truly become Kingdom people in the midst of the world?  I’m afraid that’s a lot less likely than Ringo coming to like living with Jane and me.  We humans are a lot more resistant to transformation than dogs are.  We’re so good at thinking up all the reasons why we can’t and don’t have to follow God’s call.  What we think are reasons are however really only excuses, and God’s call is still there.  It still pains God that we respond to it so weakly.  We are called to transformation.  Do we hear?  Will we follow?  Amen.