“…Preach, saying, `the kingdom of heaven is at hand’” (10.7)
Like John the Baptist, Jesus also announces the kingdom of heaven. But, unlike his cousin, Our Lord also brings it; as the theologian Karl Barth states, “Jesus Christ is himself the established kingdom of God” (Church Dogmatics, II/2, Edinburgh-Naperville, Illinois, 1957, p. 177).
I want to talk this morning about this kingdom-from-above-come-amongst-us, understood also as the end-time of God’s rule and sovereignty over the power and glory of this world; an act of redemption and deliverance central to our belief as Christians that should make a difference in the way we live, move, and have our being; a gift, grace hidden in baptism, wherein we share in the life, death, and resurrection of the Christ; and, a gateway to eternal life, the kingdom of heaven which Christ brings and is, prepared for by repentance and faith – that time and place of one’s surrender in daily life to the care and will of the Almighty; the kingdom of God being our Passover/our Easter.
Thus, the coming and presence of the kingdom of God are not a judgment of vengeance but a saving event, an unveiling or bringing to light of God’s mercy, not Divine anger or wrath; salvation of this sort, being something that should both comfort and disturb us; revelation of the Truth, surpassing all our understanding and expectation, of the God of Love; exemplified in the life and death of the Crucified Lord, whose self-offering upon the Cross tells of the transforming power of mercy, forgiveness, and peace as the basis for a new way of being in the world; repentance, therefore, understood as one’s willingness to return to the faithfulness of God’s love, a power of new life one discovers in the leaving behind or the letting-go of dependence on the fear, violence, and death that hold all people, places, things, and events captive in the kingdom of this world.
Therefore, the kingdom of God, or call it love, or call it Christ, you choose, is something that makes of repentance and faith no easy measure of commitment; yet, borrowing from the martyr and theologian, Bonhoeffer, it is “…the great venture” that “must be dared” (A Testament to Freedom: the Essential Writings of DB, Harper Collins, SF, pp. 228-29). In other words, its importance, in part, being, it is where we truly and fully live as never before, as well as, the time and place, as Bonhoeffer would say, we are “able to do those deeds, and in the simplicity of discipleship, to live life in the likeness of Christ” (DB Works English Edition, vol. 4, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, p. 287).
This kingdom of heaven is also the witness and proclamation of the Church; the Good News of the Word made Flesh and the Cross of Jesus, both set before us as a pilgrim people of God caught between belief and unbelief in a Church and world where we are never certain as to whether we are hospice workers or midwives. Herein, amidst history’s cycle of death and birth, that curious mix signaling life’s mutability that perplexes, consumes, and undoes us, is also found the mysterious substance, the grace and power of God, of which saints and heroes are made!
For example, think upon Andre and Magda Trocme, whose work in the French resistance during World War II saved many individuals, particularly children, from the Nazi death camps. According to Magda, these rescue efforts were undertaken because they were morally the right thing to do. “Remember…” she says “that in your life, there will be lots of circumstances that will need a kind of courage, a kind of decision of your own, not about other people but about yourself. I would say no more” (as taken from the documentary, The Courage to Care).
Or, for example, remember Rosa Parks, the black seamstress, who fifty years ago, refused to yield a seat on a city bus to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, thereby helping spark the civil rights movement.
Or, recall Thomas Merton, the modern day Trappist monk, uncomfortable in his habit throughout much of his vocation, who taught us that life in search of God is true life, life worth living, and who found in Manhattan a rebel’s paradise, a place of sin and temptation against which he would further rebel by becoming religious.
The list of such men and women, most of whom are quite flawed in their humanity, and, therefore, unlikely candidates for the high honors of sainthood or heroism, goes on; each and all, however, and remarkably, a witness to the presence of the power of the kingdom of heaven; God’s mercy, forgiveness, and peace; eternity present with us now to do in and through us what we cannot do or accomplish on our own.
I said earlier, that the kingdom of heaven, Christ, is our Passover; our Easter pilgrimage with God and Our Risen Lord: in other words, it is like that epic and fateful journey of the ancient Israelites who set forth upon Divine command into the unknown toward a promised land, fleeing Egypt with all its idolatries and before the threat of mighty Pharaoh. Thus, the reign of God in which our salvation and redemption have come, has much to do with questions of belief, of how to live, and to whom we ultimately belong; questions whose answers change and perhaps save our lives, as well as the lives of others. The kingdom of God is, I am saying, life viewed and lived in a new and different light, the light of the Incarnate Word and the Resurrection of the Crucified One of God, which promises to make of us who we are not.
Remember, for example, if you will, Miranda in Shakespeare’s Tempest, toward the end of the play and after Caliban’s transformation, in those lines in which she exclaims the beauty of the world, “Oh wonder!/How many goodly creatures are there here!/How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world/That has such people in it” (V, I, lns 181-183). This is creation viewed in Resurrection light; the brightness and clarity of gratitude and re-beginning, the heart awakening glimpse of an eternal kingdom whose purpose it is to transform the kingdom of this world; a metamorphosis wherein the chains of fear, violence, and death are forever broken and “…darkness…[is] vanquished by our Eternal King” (Exsultet); the victory of God’s goodness.
Walt Whitman, that visionary American vates (L., poet-priest) of the 19th century, once described the poet saying, “He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.” God, the kingdom of heaven, Christ, are, I think, each like that: like the penetrating rays of the sun, whose light falls upon all that is, revealing the true nature of people, places, things, and events; exposing, in other words, the creatureliness of human powerlessness and life’s unmanageability; a light, also, in whose eternal dazzling and mystery, we are called to hope, that we have in and through God the power to chose to become our true and fullest selves; which is to say, men and women of mercy, forgiveness, and peace; saints and heroes, disciples of the God who put Divine love in human flesh; believers in the God-man, who suffered and died for the whole world, not just some small, or special part of it.
Rejoice! That’s our message here in this holy place. Good news, a great venture in and through a brave new world invites one and all to renewed repentance and faith. The kingdom of heaven is at hand! “I will always give thanks unto thee for that thou has done…” [says the Psalmist]; “and I will hope in thy Name, for thy saints like it well” (52.10). That mystery come amongst us is our help. It bears the Name of our Lord. Thanks be to God!
