The First Sunday of the Kingdom

Ok, I reckon I should be back on track by now. I hope you enjoy this one. :-)

As we move into the special time of the year we call the Kingdom season, we can see how the great span of ordinary time is behind us – this is my favourite time of year – it isn’t merely the time when I write my list to Santa, and hope that I have been a good boy, it is the time when I can really think about my faith, and what I have done in the last year.

As the church season changes, it appears that the weather seems to have changed to a different season, as well. We are moving towards the prayerful and thoughtful time of Advent, but before we get there, we can enjoy this the Kingdom Season – the time when we think about the Kingdom of God – and whether the world has moved closer to it or further away this year.

The phrase ‘Kingdom of God’ occurs in the New Testament more than 100 times and refers to the reign or sovereignty of God over all things. This was in contrast to the reign of earthly powers, especially the Jewish Temple State and the Roman Empire, which occupied Nazareth and Capernaum, where Jesus lived, and, most notably, Jerusalem

Throughout the History of our faith different people have expressed the idea of “the kingdom” in different ways. Eusebius identified the Kingdom with the monarchy, Augustine saw a merger of the church and the Kingdom. Many others have given us their own ideas of what it might mean. However, today, I don’t think it is a difficult concept at all. It wasn’t for Jesus, when He spoke of the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven, He always assumes His listeners know what the means.

Jesus assumes his hearers understand the Kingdom foundation that was laid in the Hebrew Scriptures. When Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of God/heaven (both meaning the same thing) he speaks of the time of the fulfillment of the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants. A time of a restored earth where the faithful will worship and serve their God forever under the rulership of a righteous leader of the Davidic line. This was the Messianic hope of the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures and was carried over and echoed in the words of John the Baptist, Jesus, Peter, Paul and others in the Greek Scriptures.

This isn’t difficult to understand;

Don’t millions upon millions of people pray this day for a better tomorrow, when the earth will be under compassionate, fair and equitable rule?

Don’t millions of people cry out for a future free of war, violence, oppression, drought, famine and disease?

In the Gospel reading for this morning – as soon as the man understands the importance of loving his neighbour as he loves himself, Jesus tells him that he is not far from the Kingdom of God.

Jesus often spoke of the Kingdom of God as the theme of his gospel as well as the destination for the righteous in the end of days. Last week we heard Jesus' words in his the Sermon on the Mount shows that the reward for those who follow the "beatitudes" are rewarded with the Kingdom of God/inheriting the earth/comfort etc.

Matthew 19 gives an account of Jesus equating popular terms such as "eternal life" and "saved" as the same thing as entering the Kingdom of God when it is established upon the earth. Jesus even taught his disciples to pray: "Let Your kingdom come, let Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." defining just what the Kingdom will be - the time when God's will is done on the earth as it is done in heaven.

God’s people still cry out in the darkness of this present age – for justice, change, revolution, and the Kingdom of God.

So what can we do as Christians to put this right? What can we do to make it all right? Why hasn’t anything been done already? These are the thoughts for the Kingdom Season.

Back in the 3^rd century St. Cyprian wrote to a friend named Donatus,

‘This seems a cheerful world Donatus, when I view it from this fair garden under the shadow of these vines. But if I climbed some great mountain and looked out over the wide lands, you know very well what I would see; brigands on the high road, pirates on the seas, in the amphitheatres men murdered to please the applauding crowds, under all roofs misery and selfishness. It really is a bad world, an incredibly bad world.

Yet in the midst of it, I have found a quiet and holy people. They have discovered a joy which is a thousand ties better than any pleasure of this sinful life. They are despised and persecuted but they care not. They have overcome the world. These people are Christians and I am one of them.’

Some 1700 years have passed since those words were written, yet the dark picture that Cyprian painted of the world perhaps hasn’t changed too much – there may not be amphitheatres, there may not be pirates, but any of us can turn on the television and see enough evidence around of things which are very wrong in the world.

I wonder however whether the picture that Cyprian painted of the Christians is quite so recognisable in our Churches today. Cyprian describes Christians as a quiet and holy people, and it is to that sort of people that Paul wrote to in his letter to the Thessalonians. Cyprian writes of a people who despite persecution and hatred, have discovered a joy a thousand times greater than anything else they could find.

Perhaps we have been passed down the wrong idea as Christians? Perhaps the joy from knowing Christ as our Saviour should have been translated not into a Holy comfort, and a willingness to put up with wrongs. But perhaps as Christianity grew it should have been translated into a call to action? We aren’t persecuted now, so why are we still quiet and Holy, when we could be loud and demanding?

I don’t know, but it seems that the Kingdom of God is as far off now as it ever was.

And what about a holy people – Cyprian was writing about a people who were set apart, decent, honest, kind and thoughtful – and I think Christians still are today – however it is often not the impression many people have of the Church. I read a story once of a man who was teaching people to be ushers at a large Church, and he said, ‘Remember, that we have nothing but good kind Christians in this Church – until you try to put someone else in their pew.’

The message of the Church is often perceived rightly or wrongly as a message for an elite group – a group to whom only certain people are welcome – but the Church must be welcome to all – we must seek to echo the sentiments of a notice put outside a Church in the Bronx in New York, ‘Do come in – trespassers will be forgiven.’ The Church throughout this country has been so tarnished by years of indifference and judgmental behaviour that we have a lot of ground to make up.

Christ calls us to be a light shining in the darkness of the world, the light that is Christ shining through us. And too often we can lack the joy of faith – the joy of knowing that we are serving and worshipping a God who loves us.

I’ll finish with this illustration. We can think of the story of a hundred concert pianos. If you tune the second piano to the first, and the 3^rd to the 2^nd, and the 4^th to the 3^rd and so on until you have tuned all 100 pianos, you will by the end have discord and disharmony – but if you tune each piano to the same tuning fork, you will have unity and harmony.

And that is true of the Church – when we tune ourselves to other people we will so often have discord and disharmony, but when we tune ourselves to Christ, and him alone, then we will have unity, unity of love and unity of purpose