PENTECOST LAST B 2009

Text: Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” John 18:36 ( NRSV )

When I get reflective, and ponder this thing we call life for a few moments, I am always astounded by the incredible mystery of it all. While I try and talk in sermons about the mysteries of God, I think it is important for us to realize that we are immersed in incredible mystery every moment of our existence. I am no scientist, but I think these types tell us that we are composed of millions upon millions of little things called cells, and somehow, they all work together and this thing we call a body functions with incredible strength and accuracy – most of the time, until you get older like me.. or some of you. And then if you ponder what goes on inside these bodies – the thoughts and emotions and desires and struggles, that can get so intense that can want to love others or kill them.. to get up in the morning or just end it all. And then multiply what is going on in our individual lives and put that together in communities and nations life itself is really an astounding and incredible and wonderful, yet crazy and mysterious reality.

And then in the midst of this mystery of life we face such contradiction. On the one hand, life can be so beautiful and noble. We can see the beauty of the ocean or the sky and clouds or flowers and tress and rivers and animals. We see beauty in music and art and literature.. And then we hear about suicide bombers indiscriminately killing people, or parents abusing their children, or people stealing from the poor and needy. Life is a mixture of often opposing forces.

I started thinking about this when I pondered our gospel for today. In this incredible encounter between the Lord, or King, or Caesar of Heaven and the representative of Caesar on earth, Pilate. To most of you the story is pretty familiar. In this encounter, Pilate is not really concerned with the reasons that Jewish leaders brought Jesus to him. He is trying to discern whether Jesus is going to be any type of threat to the Rome. This is the reason for the question:

Are you the King of the Jews?

Pilate is trying to figure out if Jesus is part of the radical group of zealots, or a new group, who are fighting against Rome. The leaders had told Pilate that this Jesus was making himself a king, and this would arouse Pilates concern. The fact was that Jesus never understood kingship in this sense of being a military rival to Rome. We see this clearly when Jesus tells Pilate:

John 18:36 ( NRSV ) 36Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”

In this saying I began to ponder two words – world and kingdom. So I am going to reflect on these for a few minutes.

The Evangelist John uses the word world over 50 plus times, and the writer of 1 John, which we are not too sure is the same writer as the gospel, picks up on this theme of the world. Probably the most famous verse in the gospel of John is John 3:16:

John 3:16 ( NRSV ) 16“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

In this usage of the world, we see that God loves it, and in the coming of Jesus wants to restore and redeem it. But then in other places we read how the world hates Jesus and his followers. So we read passages like this:

14I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.

In 1 John we read verses like this:

15Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world; 16for all that is in the world—the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches—comes not from the Father but from the world. 17And the world and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God live forever.

So here we face a seeming contradiction. God loves the world but we aren’t supposed to love the world. We are in the world, but we aren’t of the world, or belong to the world.

Now lets think for moment about the other concept of kingdom. Jesus says that his kingdom is not of this world. He acknowledges that he is a king, but it is of a different nature. In the kingdom of men, we fight for our King. In this kingdom, we don’t take up arms.

Every Sunday we pray what we call the Lord’s prayer, and we say:

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

When Jesus walked on this earth, he said things like the kingdom of God has come, it is in your midst, it is in you. New Testament scholars spend a lot of time writing and studying this concept of the kingdom of God. In my mind, while it is very interesting when you study it as a scholar, it is also pretty simple when you think about this phrase in the Lords prayer. At its most basic level, the kingdom exists, is present, when King Jesus is reigning, when the will of God is being done. When the will of God is not being done, then neither the King or the Kingdom is present.

In the gospel story, somehow, or in someway, humanity in many ways, but not all, fell away from doing the will of God. In that initial wonderful story of Adam and Eve, it was when humanity decided to stop doing the will of God and chose their own way that sin and evil and death entered the world. But this did not mean that everything was evil and corrupt and bad. The Bible story is one of God, through Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and the people of Israel, reaching out to humanity to call them back to a kingdom in which the will and truth of God would reign. This calling culminates in the coming of Jesus, and Jesus’ coming is motivated by the love of God. Thus we have all of those passages which speak of God loving the world. But of course it was not a love for the evil and the sin and the suffering and the killing and the lusting of the world. It is a love which desired to save us from all of this.

So John writes:

John 3:17 ( NRSV ) 17“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

And so we have this image of Jesus invading the world, a world which is both wonderful and beautiful, and yet has been horribly damaged by sin, to save it and lead humanity to live by the standards of heaven and not the standards of the world which have been corrupted by sin. In our collect this morning we prayed this

Almighty and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in your well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords: Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule…”

Christians are those who freely desire to make Jesus their King, and who want to live in the world in such a way that they are following the most gracious rule, or will, of Jesus. You can know if you are a Christian if this is the desire of your life. Is Jesus the King of your life?

Once this decision is made, then the challenge is how to discern the will of God in our day to day life. This is not always easy. Some Christian traditions, taking the exhortation to not love the world,, try and live in such a way that they aren’t infected by the world. People like the Amish strive to live very simply lives so that they don’t pollute their Spirits with the sinful spirits around them. Some of you might have grown up in traditions in which you did not go to movies or watch TV or play cards or dance or smoke or drink. These behaviors were seen as “worldly’ and might lead you on to greater sin. When I joined the Jesus people commune we were taught not to listen to worldly music, so I gave away my very loved blues and country and soul records to a friend. Traditions like these, however, often miss the beauty and wonder of life.

Our Episcopal, or Anglican tradition, and others like it have usually seen the world in a different light. One of the key things that drew me back to the faith of my youth was our traditions openness to the good and beautiful in the world. Thus movies and art and drama and music and education, etc, are not bad and worldly in and of themselves. As a matter of fact, when these are done right, or well, they can reflect the creativity and will of God. The great Protestant theologian used to say that Mozart was the greatest theologian that ever lived. He began every day by listening to Mozart.

But since we live in world that both beauty and evil, love and hate, giving and selfishness, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Men, reign, it often takes effort and awareness on our part to discern the difference. In the clearly evil things of life we can see the difference, but there are other areas of life that are not so easy.

This is why we have to make the effort to put ourselves in the presence of the King on a regular basis and seek to learn how it is we should live and act in this world. So often our natural tendencies, infected by sin, lead us away from the King and his will. Our cultural around us often has no concern for the rule or the ways of our King, and if this is all we listen to, then we find ourselves living in the kingdom of this world, controlled and governed by its rule, rather than the rule of Jesus.

When the Puritans came to this country, their desire was to establish a place where Jesus was King and people lived according to the will of God. In a real sense, they were trying to establish the kingdom of God on earth. In many ways there is something very noble about their efforts, and in spite of their many human failings, this desire to live by heavenly standards -- this hope to be a city set on a hill for the world to see -- has been a part of the DNA of this country. Of course it has been secularized to now be a city set on a hill that represents freedom and democracy, but the fact is, those first settlers established, for good and for ill, some core values for this country.

As we gather to celebrate Thanksgiving this week, I pray that some of this zeal of the early founders of this country would be in our hearts, not to establish the kingdom by force or rule, but that the will of God might reign in our lives. As we see the fruits of the earth pile up on the table, let us also pray that the fruits of the Spirit.. love, joy, peace patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control will also be present in the table of our hearts… AMEN.