Hilton Head Island, SC – September 22, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 13:24-30; Matthew 13:44-52
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” – Matthew 6:9 (RSV)
Jesus talked more about the kingdom of God than about any single subject, with the possible exception of money and wealth. He devoted more time to describing God’s kingdom than he took in referring to any other one topic in all of his teachings. No doubt he perceived himself as the primary proclaimer of God’s kingdom.
In the Gospels of Mark and Luke, there are literally dozens of references to the three-word term, the “kingdom of God.” Only twice in John’s Gospel did Jesus use those particular words, and he did so only in conjunction with Nicodemus, the mysterious Pharisee who came to Jesus “by night.” According to Matthew, on the other hand, Jesus never once talked about “the kingdom of God.” Instead, says Matthew, he always talked about “the kingdom of heaven.”
I am convinced Matthew was incorrect in his reporting of that phrase. The reason I’m sure Jesus didn’t ever talk about “the kingdom of heaven” and instead always talked about “the kingdom of God” is because of our sermon text, which is the second full statement in the Lord’s Prayer. “The kingdom of heaven” inevitably implies a future reality, because by definition, we can experience heaven only in the future, specifically in eternity. Furthermore, our entry into heaven is made possible only by our death. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know; everyone understands this. Not everyone believes it, but at least everyone understands that heaven represents only eternal life, and it cannot be a description of temporal life.
However, it is also evident when one reads the Gospel narratives, especially in Mark and Luke, that the kingdom of God as it was projected by Jesus has both a present and a future meaning. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” There may be pie in the sky by and by (whatever that might connote), but God’s kingdom is unfurled in the world like lightning bolts hurled (whatever that also might connote. With minimal thought, anyone can create theological doggerel with the best of them). We can discover the kingdom here and now, in this world, if we open our eyes to see its evidence all around us.
Before we talk further about that, however, let us all come to an admission: The very concept of a kingdom, any kingdom, has less meaning to anyone who lives in a 21st century democracy than it would have had to people in Jesus’ day. Virtually every nation in the world in the 1st century of the Common Era was a monarchy of some variety. There were no democracies then, nor dictatorships as they emerged in the 20th century. Monarchies were the universal name of the game in 1st century statecraft. The Roman Empire was an enormous kingdom, except that it was ruled by an emperor, not a king. However, an emperor was simply a king, writ very large.
From the standpoint of both Jesus and those who heard him, the idea of “the kingdom of God” had more immediate meaning to them than it does to us. That was because the Jews had had kings for centuries, and the entire Mediterranean world was held together by an imperial figure in the imperial city of Rome. Kingdoms were very real in those days, as were kings.
To be sure, Jesus was not the first person to imply that God was a king or that He is The King. That notion is suggested numerous times in the Hebrew Bible, especially in the Psalms. Our responsive reading from Isaiah proclaims the kingdom of God in Isaiah’s unique and poetic fashion. But when Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God, he was proclaiming an all-encompassing entity, something that shall exist in the future but which already exists in the present. And when the kingdom comes (as shall happen in eternity but also happens in temporality), it is God, and God alone, who is the sovereign. Every human being must step aside and even step down if we want the kingdom to come, because only God may rule in His kingdom. None of us need apply.
There’s something else very important to know about God’s kingdom. It is NOT a political reality. When Jesus talked about the kingdom, as he did so often, he didn’t want anybody to conceptualize it as we conceptualize nations or states or geographical territories. The kingdom isn’t like that at all. God’s kingdom isn’t like the United Kingdom or Morocco or Saudi Arabia; it is supra-national, extra-political, and essentially spiritual. In other words, God’s kingdom must first take root in our own hearts before it can ever be observed outside ourselves. When people are transformed, then the world can be transformed. And when that happens, then God’s kingdom shall come and His will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven. As the old song says, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.” To actualize that hope, to make it real, is to see the kingdom manifested all around us.
In this section of the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus is telling us that we must implore God to change us from what we have been into what we can be. This is both a huge request and a huge gamble. It’s no small task to give a personal overhaul to folks like us. Even the Holy One of Israel has a challenge to accomplish such a feat. Besides, what if God managed to give us what we asked of Him? No longer shall we able to put ourselves first! The kingdom doesn’t allow that! No longer can our normal concerns remain our first concerns! “Seek first God’s kingdom and His righteousness, and all these other things shall be yours as well.” Things don’t matter much in the kingdom; actions matter much more. The right stuff isn’t the right stuff in the kingdom; it’s the right deeds that truly count. Be doers of God’s Word, and not hearers only.
Were the kingdom of God to come, here, and now, what would it look like? Neighbors would bring a casserole to the meanest man on the block after his long-suffering wife finally escaped her captivity through the blessed act of dying. That old coot would be the kind from whose resisting shoulders you would gladly twist his resisting head, but you wouldn’t do it, because you were helping to do God’s will and to assist in the coming of His kingdom on earth. People who object to illegal immigrants would volunteer to teach English to the children of illegal immigrants and maybe even to such immigrants themselves. The subjects of God’s kingdom would go out of their way to try to be kind to people whose behavior would appear to preclude being shown any kindness. Spouses would not nip and snip and clip one another simply because they can get away with it, since nobody else would put up with such crass behavior. Instead they would attempt to be particularly humane and thoughtful to one another. Once upon a time they took vows before God, they made promises, they established a covenant between one another and the Unseen One Whose Will It Is to Bless All Marriages. When the kingdom comes, we would express a desire for national stewardship ahead of national defense, for seeking ventures which offer great opportunities as well as great risks rather than narrowly defined security which sounds great, costs limitless billions, and can provide only a false sense of safety.
Richard Rorty was one of America’s best-known contemporary philosophers. He was the grandson of Walter Rauschenbusch, the father of what was called the Social Gospel. Rorty was a deep thinker, a man who was committed to truth who nonetheless believed there is no absolute truth. He also was an atheist. Shortly before he died, he was asked about the notion of “the holy,” as in “hallowed be Thy name.” He responded, “My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.” That sounds a lot like the kingdom of God to me, and I believe that Richard Rorty is now totally immersed in it, much to his amazement and, I also trust, his delight.
Stephen Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University. He wrote a book called Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – and Doesn’t. He points out how most Americans now living are woefully ignorant of the contents of the Bible. That has innumerable negative results, says he. I agree with him. Too many people are too uninformed about what scripture tells us. How many of us really know the Bible, or read it regularly, or meditate on its deep and abiding truths? If more of us knew what the Bible really says, if we incorporated its teachings into our minds and hearts, the kingdom of God would be far more evident among us than it is. How can God’s kingdom come on earth if we don’t even know what the kingdom means in heaven? Professor Prothero says that most Americans can’t name any of the four Gospels. Shocking. He says that many high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife. Appalling. And it isn’t only middle-of-the-roaders and theological liberals who are biblically illiterate. He declares that most evangelical high school students don’t know that “Blessed are the poor in spirit” is a statement of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount.
When people understand and live by the teachings of the Bible, God’s kingdom can be observed everywhere. When we know what it means to seek first God’s kingdom and His righteousness, His kingdom and righteousness shall be seen in and through and around us. The kingdom is poised and ready to flower. If we ask God to make it happen, it will happen. But it will happen only through us, through people. We have it in our power both to create and to crush the kingdom. God is always ready to assist us in the construction of His kingdom, but we are the only ones who can actually build it, who can actualize it. God is not a general contractor; rather He is a universal inspirer. But until His inspiration becomes flesh and blood in people of flesh and blood, the kingdom of God is all potentiality and no actuality whatsoever.
The kingdom, you see, is not a place, but a process. It isn’t a reality that is, but instead is something that is always becoming. That’s why Jesus always indicated the kingdom was not an “either/or”, but was of necessity a “both/and.” It isn’t either on earth or in heaven or future or present. It is both future and present, both invisible and visible, both there and then and here and now. It’s here, but it’s getting here more and more, if we are doing more and more to make it so.
If we are serious when we pray, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” we’d better be very careful about what we ask for. If the kingdom comes on earth, it means a lot of the earthly will have to be jettisoned for that which is more heavenly. Don’t pray the Lord’s Prayer carelessly or as a harmless liturgical routine. The Lord’s Prayer is a Hazmat issue; there is very hazardous material here. It is explosive. Used improperly, it is highly dangerous. God’s kingdom is more revolutionary than any other realm the world has ever known.
The kingdom of God doesn’t take hold in particularly pedestrian people. It gets its grip in the hearts of poets and artists and dreamers, in people who choose to look beyond the obvious to the elusive but effervescent possibilities which lie beyond the range of ordinary human sight. The kingdom doesn’t become visible in a series of a few Really Big Things; it appears mainly through a myriad sequence of Rather Small Things. Major treaties don’t illustrate the kingdom’s reality; obscure small human compromises and agreements are much more likely to point a spotlight onto how the kingdom operates. Thus did Jesus say that the kingdom was like a grain of mustard seed or like a woman who put yeast in three measures of flour or like wheat and tares in a field or like a treasure hidden in a field or like a merchant searching for the pearl of great price or like a fishnet, or, or, or. The parables of the kingdom are about very mundane things. But it is in the very mundane world, in the earthly and earthy mundus, where the kingdom finds its ordinary environment and its primary existence.
Let me ask you a question. Do you expect the kingdom to come? Do you look for it, now, as well as in the future? Or have you concluded that you’ve seen as much of God’s kingdom as you’re going to see, which isn’t very much? What do all of us expect? Whatever it is, that is what we are very likely to encounter until the day we die. Faith ignites the kingdom, and apathy extinguishes it. Its success depends on us. Do we depend on it?
Several years ago Ruth Graham died. She was better know as Billy Graham’s wife, but Ruth Graham was a major personality in her own right. She was born in China to American Presbyterian missionary parents, and she was a Presbyterian to her dying day. That will tell you something about Ruth, considering that her husband was the world’s best known Baptist since John The.
The Grahams’ son William Franklin was a hellion as a boy. Franklin is not necessarily the mellowest chap ever to draw breath now, even though his father named him head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association before he died. One time when Ruth Graham was driving her young children from Montreat, North Carolina to nearby Ashville, North Carolina, Franklin got into a fierce squabble with his sisters. Ruth stopped the car, thrust the startled Franklin into the trunk, and locked it shut. No messing around with that lady.
When Ruth Graham was told that some supporters were touting Billy as a candidate for President of the United States, she said she would sooner divorce him than see him President. And she wasn’t kidding. You could always expect truth from Ruth.
Not long before she died, Ruth Graham said to her daughter Anne, “Make the most of all that comes, and the least of all that goes.” What outstanding advice that is! Make the most of all that comes, and the least of all that goes.
The past is past. Everything that happened, happenED. It is over. If you didn’t see the kingdom in whatever has gone, then start looking for it in all that is coming. Write the poem; paint the picture; dream the dream. “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Then, when heaven comes, you’ll be ready for it too.