Hilton Head Island, SC - June 2, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 20:1-16
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." - Matthew 6:10
In the Lord's Prayer, Jesus instructed His followers to petition God that His kingdom might come and His will be done on earth as it is in heaven. If you have closely inspected the part of the world that is immediately around you, perhaps you may have noticed that seems not to have happened yet. The world is not the way we suppose heaven to be. Or if heaven is like the world, then heaven help us. Come to think of it, heaven would seem incapable of helping anyone if the earth is currently a mirror image of heaven.
Let me give you an example of some issues which exist in the earthly kingdom. I like statistics about almost anything. You give me a list of statistics, and I will gladly pour over them, trying to imbibe every trifling tidbit of trivia they contain. It takes all kinds to make a world, and a few of us are statistaholics; that's just the way it is.
Nearly everyone in this congregation belongs to the flower children generation. I read some fascinating numbers about the children of the flower children. The Higher Education Research Bureau of UCLA reported that in 1967 when students were asked if they were going to college to develop a meaningful philosophy of life, 92.9% answered Yes. In 1987 that figure had dropped to 39.4%. In 1970 when students were asked if they were going to college to become well off financially, 39.1% were sufficiently forthright to say Yes, but in 1987 75.6% brazenly admitted Yes. In 1969 53.9% of college students wanted the death penalty abolished, and in 1990 it had fallen to 21.5%.
Geezers of the 2020s: statistically we produced quite a different generation from our generation. And our children produced quite a different generation from their generation. That is to say that our grandchildren are less mercenary than our children, because they know a college education does not guarantee them what it used to guarantee. Major in computer science or engineering technology and you can go to Silicon Valley, get a job that starts out at $125,000 a year, pay off all your college loans by thirty-five, and retire at fifty, living happily ever after (if that’s what makes you happy.) But now lots of high school graduates are not going to college at all. They go into trades or sales. And those who do graduate from college might find themselves managers of a McDonalds at $65,000 per annum, if they majored in French literature, philosophy, or political science. However, lest we conclude our children consist entirely of acquisitive misanthropes, in 1986 57.2% of the college students polled said they were interested in helping others, but only four years later, in 1990, that figure had risen to 62%. Furthermore, young adults now are even more inclined to want to help the down-and-out to get up-and-in. So there is hope yet that the self-absorption of the young may be dissipating into a greater concern for the larger world.
As Christians who are attempting to contemplate the meaning of the Lord's Prayer, what may we deduce from these numbers? I deduce that God's kingdom has not yet come on earth nor is His will being done in the way in which presumably it prevails in heaven, even though there are hopeful signs. The Sixties were years of polyphonic semi-anarchy, the Eighties were years of government-encouraged greed, and the decade of the 2020s is not turning out to be all that much to write home about either. Commitment to the purposes of God seems distinctly underwhelming in our time.
Nevertheless, God's kingdom also seems to have become visible during the last few months in the surprising numbers of student demonstrations against the treatment of innocent Palestinians in Gaza. Nearly everyone outside the Middle East declared that Hamas caused the War in Gaza by its vicious attack on the Israeli settlements last October 7. But the ultra-conservative Israeli government led by Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has grossly overreacted against the beleaguered Palestinians in the over-crowded Gaza Strip, and the students have primarily peacefully and rightfully protested the violence of the Israeli heavily-armed response.
The kingdom of God is often a very sneaky business. We expect it to light up in sunbursts and ubiquitous rainbows, but sometimes it is muted and soft and unobtrusive. More often than not, when it manifests itself, it does so in a manner which would never elicit headlines, but quietly, with elegant reserve, in minuscule sights and minimal sounds and only the faintest of Spirit-induced rustlings.
God's kingdom comes and His will is done in utterly unpredictable transfusions of grace. But each of us is very capable of stemming the flow of the Gospel. Ramon Arango once observed, "For the Spaniard it is not enough to have heaven guaranteed for himself; he must also have hell guaranteed for his neighbor." Is that a profound statement, or what? We can try to patent the kingdom, to get an exclusive on it, but God is too cosmopolitan and non-ideological to allow that to happen. He is perfectly able to thwart our attempts to get Him into our little cages, and He refuses to be solely a Catholic or Presbyterian or Methodist or even a Christian or Jewish God. He is God for everyone, and His kingdom is everywhere, if we look around to see it.
If we pray for God's kingdom to come and for His will to be done on earth, whom do we imagine will make it happen - - - God? His hands are tied without our hands! His feet are shackled without our feet! If Christian soldiers are to go marching onward, it is we who will do the marching, not God! God moves through and above and around and within us, but it is God working through us that constitutes the kingdom's construction crew. To pray for the kingdom is to pray to become its agents. To ask for God's will necessitates volunteering to become instruments of that will.
If we want the kingdom to come, we need to be watching for ways to effect it right where we live. If it doesn't begin with us where we are, it may not begin anywhere else, or at least we won't see it happen there if we are unwilling or unable to see it happen here.
Sam Garofola of Mt. Holly, New Jersey was stopped by a police officer on the New Jersey Turnpike. The policeman told him that he had left his wife in a service station restroom nearly 100 miles behind him. "Thank God!" said the startled Mr. Garofola, who wondered why he had been stopped. "I thought I was going deaf."
The kingdom of God begins at the beginning of the New Jersey Turnpike, not at its end, and that is true no matter whether you are going north or south. To pray for God's kingdom and His will means that we must be listening for the sounds of His voice, and that voice may be most clearly heard through the voice of a nattering spouse, even if it seems utterly ludicrous to us that it could be so.
"Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Do we really mean that? If so, it means we must be willing to shoulder a great responsibility. It means we must become the keepers of the kingdom, its custodians, the ones who make it work as it should.
When the kingdom comes, the hungry are fed. Street people and the homeless are given shelter. Workers who cannot afford decent housing anywhere need affluent citizens and local, state, and national governments to subsidize housing for these people if the economy is to be equitable for everyone. Swords are beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. Defense budgets are readministered and possibly slashed, even when the need for defense is greatly increased. Instead of providing funds to foreign nations for military purposes, more foreign assistance needs to be directed toward economic development, because that, and not weapons, is what truly creates a stable world. The sick are made well, those who cannot afford health as well as those who can.
When the kingdom comes, everybody is treated equally, whether they are rich or poor, black or white, Hispanic or Asian. When the kingdom comes, black and white children are praised for doing well rather than being ignored for doing it; excellence is rewarded rather than overlooked. When the kingdom comes, people who have had a very hard time with somebody, a parent or spouse or child or lover or friend, do everything they can to repair the estrangement which has occurred. If it doesn't or can't happen, they make the best of it and go on, instead of wallowing in self-pity or guilt outside the kingdom's gates. When the kingdom comes, life starts anew, because everybody needs a fresh start; nobody is excluded from that most pressing need.
When the kingdom comes we do the best we can with what we have, because there's no more that we can do. What you see is what you get, when the kingdom comes and we have given it, as we are wont to say in these days of hackneyed Americanese, our best shot.
The kingdom doesn't necessarily look a whole lot different when it is operative than when it isn't. Maybe the best we can hope for is that the world becomes just a little kinder and gentler. God isn't asking the impossible of us; He's only asking for improvement, and when we pray for that to happen, which is what we do when we pray the Lord's Prayer, we should be prepared to help make it happen. The kingdom doesn't come from above us; it comes from within us.
A few weeks before Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, he told the parable of the workers in the vineyard. A landowner needed the grapes picked in his vineyard. They were ripe, and if he didn't get them all in, and soon, the crop would spoil. So he hired some daily-pay workers at 6:00 in the morning. Then, because it was evident the first workers weren't going to be able to get the job done he hired some more at 9:00 AM, some more at noon, more at 3:00 PM, and yet more at 5:00. (You may deduce from this that they had a twelve-hour work day back then. Back then life was much tougher than it is now.) When it came time to pay the workers, the landowner gave all of them the fair wage for one day of work. The first workers naturally objected, thinking they should get more, but the landowner told them, "Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to the last workers what I gave you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you angry because I am generous?"
Jesus began that parable by saying, "The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard." This is a parable of the kingdom. When the kingdom comes, everybody is going to be granted the same thing: salvation through grace. And salvation for the most able or the most industrious is no greater than salvation for the least able or the least motivated. There is no Salvation First Class or Salvation Second Class or Salvation Ninth Class; salvation is salvation, and it the best thing God can give any of us, whether we are gifted but cynical workers with great potential or an abandoned child in Kolkata with only the dimmest of prospects.
That about says it all, doesn't it? The kingdom has come, God's will is being done, whether or not we are part of the divine program. So why not assist God in the firmer establishment of His kingdom? After all, isn't that why we're here?