Hilton Head Island, SC – September 24, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 13:44-50; Luke 17:20-21
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “The kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” – Luke 17:20 (RSV)
“The kingdom of God” is a term that is used by Jesus dozens of times in the Gospels of Mark and Luke. It is used only a couple of times in Matthew and John. Why, I don’t know.
On the other hand, Matthew tells us that Jesus used the term “the kingdom of heaven” many times. But in every context in Matthew in which Jesus used those particular words, Matthew seems to have meant exactly what Jesus meant when he was quoted using “the kingdom of God” in Mark and Luke.
Frankly, I wish Matthew had always quoted Jesus with exactly the same words that Mark and Luke used. It would have made the concept of “the kingdom of God” much clearer to Christians ever since the first century. As it is, this important idea is a continuing muddle to many.
“The kingdom of heaven” inevitably connotes a future reality. Heaven presumably exists in eternity. For those of us who are living in time, as opposed to eternity, we cannot enter “the kingdom of heaven” until we die. A nineteenth century Gospel song says, “In the sweet bye-and-bye/ We will meet on that beautiful shore.” Biblically, “that beautiful shore” is on the other side of the Jordan River. In other words, either it is “the Promised Land,” or it is “heaven.” Thus in the popular understanding, the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven cannot be experienced here on earth.
In a careful reading of the four Gospels, Jesus himself seems to confuse us about the precise meaning of the term, “kingdom of God.” Of course that is correct only if the Gospels writers always reported what Jesus said with complete accuracy, which is very doubtful. In the 25th chapter of Matthew, Jesus told his disciples two famous parables, the parable of the wise and foolish virgins and the parable of the talents. Both parables imply a future tense. The events described in the parables would occur at some point in the future, perhaps at the end of time.
The parables in Matthew which were read earlier in the service, however, do not suggest
a future tense at all. There, Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven (i.e., the kingdom of God) is like a treasure hidden in a field, like a merchant in search of fine pearls, like a net which was thrown into the sea that gathered in fish of every kind. None of those parables suggests the future, especially the eternal future.
So which is it: is the kingdom of God in heaven, or is it on earth? Is it something that is coming, or is it something that is already here?
This is what we have “here.” Here we have hurricanes by the dozens, or so it seems. Here we have one of the poorest nations in the world threatening to use the nuclear weapons it has somehow acquired to annihilate the richest nation in the world. And the leaders of those two nations seem quite capable of going over the edge and catapulting much of the earth into smoldering cinders. Here police apparently deliberately kill innocent people, apparently many of them black people, and the officers are exonerated in court, even if they are convicted in the court of public opinion. Here millions starve while millions of others live in obscene luxury. The wealthy receive “justice” in the legal system because they can afford the best lawyers while the poor end up in prison because they can’t afford any lawyer. Powerful nations overpower weak nations, and perpetually unpleasant people take advantage of perpetually gentle people.
Does “here” sound like the kingdom of God? Or must the kingdom of God be somewhere else, perhaps only “in the sweet bye-and-bye,” in a distant, antiseptic, celestial setting?
So now we turn to our text for this particular “World-Changing Saying of Jesus.” Since the text is located in a two-verse paragraph, let me quote the whole “pericope,” as the scholars say. (That Greek word will definitely not be on the final exam, I assure you.)
“Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, (Jesus) answered them, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, nor will they say, ‘Lo, here it is!’ Or ‘There!’ for behold the kingdom of God is in the midst of you” (Luke 17:20-21).
The kingdom of God is here! It is here NOW! It isn’t coming; it has already come! It is already present! There is no question that the Gospels portray the kingdom of God as both future and present, eternal and temporal. However, if the concept of God’s kingdom is to have any meaning for us on an ongoing basis, it is a necessity that in part we perceive it as Jesus expressed in the sermon text. The kingdom of God is in the midst of us. It is all around us; it even is within us. Can you believe it? --- The kingdom of God is within us.
What a literally revolutionary idea that is! If all Christians lived with that conviction written into their inner being, what a different world we would have. It could be and perhaps would be utterly transformed.
A few weeks ago one of my wife’s best friends died. Jane was born and raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She was twenty-five years older than Lois. It was in Lancaster where Lois met Jane through tennis. Jane was an outstanding tennis player her whole life, as my wife has been.
By the time she was three, both of Jane’s parents had died. She was legally adopted by her maternal grandparents, who raised her until she was sixteen, by which time both of them had died. Then, for the next several years, Jane’s aunt was her guardian and ersatz mother. All five of Jane’s “parents” did an outstanding job of raising her. She developed into an admirable, accomplished, and dedicated Christian woman. The kingdom of God surrounded Jane for her entire life, especially through her care in her formative years by those five people who were as devoted to her as she was to them. Jane exuded the kingdom of God by the way she lived, despite the many hard blows she encountered.
By now it feels as though we have been confronted for the past year by one hurricane after another, even though it is only six weeks ago that Harvey first made landfall on the northeast coast of Texas. But in quick succession we have become painfully and unforgettably aware of the existence of Harvey, Irma, Jose, Lee, and Maria. Their merciless shredding of some of the Caribbean islands has been truly terrible. I will be addressing the subject of hurricanes in much greater detail in next Sunday’s sermon.
There have been many stories in the newspapers and news magazines about extraordinary assistance given to people whose lives have been devastated by the huge storms. Ultimately, those stories depict ordinary people taking amazing action on behalf of neighbors or complete strangers. Many of those helpers have come hundreds or thousands of miles to assist people in dire need. The kingdom of God is evident in all of that outstanding volunteer and professional activity. These are big things, which at the same time are also little things. The kingdom of God is observable in all kinds of things, big and small, astonishing and very ordinary. The kingdom is coming, but it is already here. The kingdom of God is an enormous, tiny, brilliant, obtuse, marvelous, mysterious, extremely evident and silently subtle reality. In everything Jesus said about the kingdom of God, he verbalized all those contradictory notions.
In one of the books under the overall title, Children’s Letters to God, a boy named Elliott said this: “Dear God, I think about you sometimes even when I’m not even praying.” Elliott, you’re my kind of person! People who think about God, especially when they’re not praying, are giving substance to the kingdom of God just by thinking about God. They are laying a foundation and are constructing walls, brick by brick, in an edifice not even the most powerful hurricane could ever destroy.
If all of us thought more about God and His kingdom and less about ourselves or own little fiefdoms, the kingdom of God would be far more evident than it is. As Jesus said, the kingdom is in the midst of us, but we see it too infrequently, because we do not contemplate it or activate it into existence nearly enough. We are too devoted to us and too little devoted to God. Jesus told us that from the first day he began his ministry in the region of the Galilee until he took his last breath on the cross in Jerusalem.
A few days ago I was talking to a friend here on the island. He is involved in a program in a South Carolina prison ministry many miles from Hilton Head Island. Every Tuesday he leaves the island at 7:00 AM and returns home at about 7:00 PM.
As you may know, there are two kinds of prisoners in prisons all over the world. “Lifers” either have life sentences without the possibility of parole or they are likely to remain in prison as long as they live, because they unlikely ever to be paroled because of a variety of factors.
Most sentences of 30- or 40-years-to-life shall probably never end with a parole.
The unique ministry in which my friend is involved is called Jump Start. It was founded by a lifer who realized while in prison that he was going nowhere with his life unless there was a major transformation in how he thought and acted. One day he was so distraught at how his life had turned out that he knelt in the shower and implored God to give him a chance to be redeemed, thereby also to redeem himself.
The Jump Start founder was a murderer. My friend told me that the majority of lifers are murderers, although not all of them are. Not long after he somehow came to believe that God had promised him a chance to reform himself, this man had a parole hearing. Most murderers are prevented from being paroled because relatives of the murder victim are always there, and they plead with the parole board not to release the man (or much less likely, woman) who killed their loved one. That is very understandable, but perhaps sometimes regrettable. On this particular day the family of the person who had been murdered had written the wrong date of the parole hearing on their calendar, and so they were not present. The parole board believed that the murderer truly had been rehabilitated. Therefore, without the inevitable social and political family pressure, they issued him a parole. To the prisoner it was sign that God had divinely initiated the process whereby he could begin a new and resurrected life.
He was like Red, the Morgan Freeman character in The Shawshank Redemption. Many times Red had appeared before the parole board, and every time they stamped “Denied” on his appeal. The last time Red summoned up the courage before the hearing had barely begun to tell the deciders of his fate that they could take their parole and thrust it into a dark place where it might never again be seen in the light of day. With that they gave him his parole, and he went to meet the Tim Robbins movie character in Mexico, there presumably to live happily ever after.
My friend’s friend, who started Jump Start, eventually had Jump Start seminars in prisons throughout South Carolina for prisoners who were to come up for parole within a year. An outside volunteer is the facilitator of the program, but there are twelve volunteer prisoners who lead seventy other prisoners in the self-help therapy groups for behavioral overhaul which enables many of them to achieve parole when the year is up. Buildings have been donated to Jump Start which become half-way houses for released prisoners who live in these facilities until they can sustain themselves financially. It is an amazing Christian enterprise. It is nothing less than the kingdom of God in action.
Early in the sermon I briefly mentioned the parable of the wise and foolish virgins and the parable of the talents. They are both found in the 25th chapter of Matthew. Following those two parables, Jesus gave another extended parable-like saying about the Son of man coming in his glory. Chronologically, Jesus made these observations just three days before he was crucified. “Son of man” is another of those mysterious terms Jesus often used. Sometimes he clearly indicated that he himself was the Son of man, and other times one might deduce on the basis of what he said that the Son of man was someone else.
In this strange and frequently quoted lengthy statement of Jesus, Jesus said that the Son of man would eventually separate everybody into one of two categories. The groupings Jesus described were “the sheep and the goats.” The King (the Son of man) would observe the actions of the sheep when the King came to them. He would announce to them, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.” Without directly saying it, Jesus indicated that the kingdom of God happens when those kinds of things happen. It doesn’t when they don’t. It is as plain, and as obscure, as that.
The kingdom of God is coming when the Son of man comes in his glory. It is coming at the end of time. It also is coming at the end of our time, when we die.
But the kingdom is also in the midst of us. It is here, it is here now. When we assist the victims of natural disasters, when we help anyone in need, especially the hungry, the thirsty, the immigrants, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned, we do it on behalf of the Son of man, of Jesus, of God.
Don’t spend the rest of your life thinking of the kingdom of God solely as life after death or as the end of time (the eschaton) or as eternity in heaven, wherever and whatever that may be. Think of the kingdom of God also as being present everywhere we are or where anyone else is. Furthermore, live with the conviction that YOU an indispensible agent in the kingdom of God, because you are. All of us are indispensible to the kingdom. Let us begin to display our indispensability. Thus shall the kingdom of God become ever more visible in our midst.