Kingdom...Come Near!

A sermon based upon Matthew 4:12-23

Preached by Charles J. Tomlin,  DMin.

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership,

January, 3^rd, 2021.  1/14

 

Happy New Year, everyone!   I really mean that. 

 

I certainly hope that this year, 2021, will be much better than last year.   I hope we have a vaccine for the Coronavirus.  I hope we can get on with our lives in a more normal fashion.  I hope we all get to do something we’ve wanted to do but couldn’t.  And I hope we get some of it together.

 

But what should we do?  

 

Isn’t that the real question?  It’s not just what can we do to have a happy new year, but it’s also what we need to do and what we must we do so that we live in a way that God can work his will and purpose through our lives?

 

PROCLAIM...THE KINGDOM

Think about this:  Compared to time and eternity, our lives are brief and very short.  And when you think about the expanse of the universe, the whole earth, is just a speck, and we are all so very, very, small.   

 

To be able to live wisely and fully, we must learn what it means, as God’s people and as the church of Jesus Christ, to connect with and live for God’s eternal purposes in His world.   As Paul’s wrote in his most introspective letter, the letter to the Colossians:  “We’ve not ceased asking and praying that you may be filled with the knowledge of God's will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding,  so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God.”   (Col. 1:9-10 NRS)

 

Now certainly, that’s a lot to pray and think about, isn’t it?  How can we, in this new year gain the spiritual wisdom we need to ‘lead lives worthy of the Lord’…bearing fruit in every good work, and growing in the knowledge of God’?   

 

Last summer and fall, I shared 18 messages on ‘growing in the grace and knowledge of God’, based upon Paul’s writing and others.   But now, I want to take us back to the original source---the gospels and to Jesus himself.  I want us to look at the wisdom, will and purposes of God as it is revealed to us in Jesus Christ, who is, as the book of Colossians says,  ‘the image of God’ (1:15), and ‘the fullness’ of God in human form (1: 19, 2:9), who is ‘before all things and who holds all things together’ (1:17.  In Jesus, we can still learn what it means to discover God’s will and and purpose for our own lives---in this year, 2021, and beyond.

 

But of course, as we consider the will and purposes of God, no one can give you any specifics.  Anyone who says that there is an exact blueprint for your life, might mean well, but they are misleading you.   You may be able to look back and see how God has been guiding and leading you, but looking forward to know what God’s will and purpose is for your life, doesn’t work that way; except of course, for fortune tellers.  

 

And yes, sometimes ‘fortune tellers’ get it right, and it can make big news like Nostradamus did in 1555.  I even read recently how he appears to have predicted Hitler (Hister), 911, and now, it looks like he also predicted the Coronavirus.  And do you know what he predicts 7 years after the ‘plague and great captivity?   He says it will be the time for ‘games of slaughter’ as  ‘people will come out of their graves’.   A Zombie Apocalypse?  

 

Yes, Fortune Tellers, especially smart, French, and very vague ones, like Nostradamus, can sometimes get it right, but do we really remember him, except for fun and intrigue?  No, not really.   What’s so great about predicting the future, especially after its past.   But we do remember Jesus, don’t we?   And we are still captivated at what he taught.  And why is that?    

 

Well, what Jesus gives us, is not all predictions, not all the specifics, and not the small, detailed stuff, but Jesus gives us the ‘big picture’.  And this is really how any of us should try to figure out God’s will for our lives.  We can’t discover the exact steps we should take, because every we haven’t taken these steps yet, and we are all different.   We live with different genetics, in different times, in a different culture, and we also get to decide most of what we should do, for ourselves.  And to decide wisely what God’s purpose and perfect will means, we make ‘giant steps’ in the right direction, as we follow Jesus, and learn what it means to follow in the footsteps of Jesus each and every day.

 

The gospels of Mark, Luke, and John, primarily show us what Jesus came to do and be.   As we learned during my Advent series, Mark wants us to know most basically and briefly, that Jesus came to die on the cross for us.   

 

Beyond this most basic understanding, and like a good missionary doctor Luke wants us to know who Jesus came to help and heal: Jesus came for those who are oppressed by sin and evil; and he came to set us free.  

 

John goes deep into the mind and purpose of God, and he sees Jesus as the one who expresses the heart and mind of God in in human form and flesh, through very personal, soul-saving relationships.  It is in John’s gospel that we have these great relational stories about Nicodemus, the Woman and the Well, the Man Born Blind, and the Raising of Lazarus, and others. 

 

But it is with Matthew’s gospel, that we have the most focused attention on the wisdom Jesus lived and taught.   We find this wisdom put together very concisely in a brief collection of sayings called the Sermon on the Mount.   Then, after giving us a brief look into Jesus ministry, more completely than any other gospel, Matthew then tells us how Jesus began to preach in stories, or parables.  

 

What connects Jesus’ teaching, Jesus’ ministry, and Jesus’ parables that Jesus’ focus on ‘the kingdom’.    Although all of the gospels begin with Jesus preaching about the ‘nearness’ of the kingdom as his most central message, it is Matthew’s gospel which gives us of clearest examples and mysteries about what this ‘kingdom’ means.   It is the kingdom, which is even more central to what Jesus taught, lived and died for, than Jesus’ message about faith, personal salvation, or the establishment of the church.   While faith, salvation and the church all relate to the kingdom, they are to be considered keys to the kingdom, which is greater than any of them.  It is the kingdom that helps us understand best what God is up to in this world and what God wills for our lives.  

 

KINGDOM...COME NEAR

So, now, let’s start to unpack what Jesus’ teaching about the ‘kingdom’ means for us today. 

 

Again, Jesus had more to say about the kingdom than he said about anything else.   He even said, as it is translated in the well-known King James phrasing, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness...’  (Matt. 6:33). 

 

Only Matthew has Jesus telling us this.   ‘Put the kingdom first...’   This is what Jesus says, but what does this mean?   Seeking a kingdom might have been important then, but what does it mean in a world like ours, for people like us, who live in a culture where the idea of kings and kingdoms is not only archaic and outdated, but it goes against the grain of all the popular, anti-establishment discussion in our times.   What did Jesus mean then, and what does it mean now that Jesus preached that ‘the kingdom...was near’?

 

We don’t have time, nor do most of us have the patience, nor do I want to make this first sermon about the ‘kingdom’ to become a history lesson.   But there is something about Jesus’ preaching and announcing the nearness of the kingdom that connected with his people, then and that I think can still connect with us.

 

First, let’ just briefly consider, what did the preaching about the kingdom mean then?    Well, in a nutshell, the idea of God’s people as a kingdom goes all the back to when God freed his people from Egypt, made his Covenant with them through Moses, and then, Moses explained God’s great purpose for his people, who were called to be, out of all the peoples of the earth,  ‘a priestly kingdom and a holy nation. Exod. 19: 6 NRS).  But then, as the story of Israel’s history develops, we see how this whole idea of being ‘a priestly kingdom and holy nation’ takes a back seat to Israel wanting to become a political, earthly kingdom with ‘a king to govern (them), like other nations, so that God says to Samuel, the final Judge of Israel: ‘the people have rejected me’  (1 Sam. 8:7).   

 

As we see, through the entire Biblical history of Israel and it’s kings, this doesn’t work out well, with only a couple of kingly exceptions, King David, the most beloved King of the people who ‘was a man after God’s own heart’ ( 1 Sam. 13:14), and King Josiah, the great reformer King, who like no other king is said to have ‘love the Lord with all his heart, soul, and might (2 Kings 23:25). 

 

After it became clear to the great prophets, that Israel’s earthly kingdom was falling apart, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others prophets dreamed and hoped for a day in the future when God would restore Israel as the promised, eternal kingdom, which they preferred to call the holy city of ‘Zion’ (Isa. 60:14), which would become a hub of light and righteous for all the nations. 

 

But it was the book Daniel, one of the last books written in the Old Testament, where this idea God’s people as a ‘kingdom’ resurfaces again.   As a story purported to have taken place during Israel’s Babylonian exile,  the prophetic sounding Daniel, uses the word ‘kingdom’ more than just about any other OT book, and he dreams, even more graphically, about a day when God’s eternal kingdom will appear, after all the human earthly kingdoms have practically devoured themselves.    

 

It is Daniel’s prophetic picture of ‘the holy ones’ ‘receiving and possessing this eternal kingdom ‘forever and ever’ (7:18), and of one like ‘the Son of Man’ or a ‘human being’ ‘coming with clouds of heaven (7:13), being given an ‘everlasting kingdom that shall not pass away’ (7:14), which is the very vision of ‘the kingdom’ that Jesus came preaching.   This is the kingdom of God that is also the kingdom from Heaven.  It was this connection to that kind of hope God’s eternal kingdom was ‘near’, that immediately connected with the Jewish people who heard had heard John the Baptist preaching about in the Wilderness, and who were now hearing Jesus preach about, immediately after John was arrested and put in prison. 

 

It was the hope of this everlasting ‘kingdom’ of light that Matthew means when he quotes Isaiah chapter 9, introducing this kingdom coming to people ‘who sat in darkness’ and in ‘the shadow of death’ long enough.   Now, in both John and now in Jesus, Matthew implies, they are living in the time of the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy:  ‘they have seen a great light’.  And this great light in the ‘dawn’ and ‘nearness’ of the kingdom.

 

REPENT, FOR THE KINGDOM...

But that was what the hope of the kingdom meant, then.  What does Jesus’ most important teaching mean for us now, and I mean right now?  

 

I know there are a lot of prophecy preachers who will tell you that we live in the time of the church, and that the kingdom is still coming in the future.   Besides, didn’t Jesus tell us to pray for God’s kingdom ‘to come’?    And some of these prophecy preacher are right about one thing:  the fulness of God’s kingdom isn’t yet fully ‘on earth, as it is in heaven’.   And the Bible, especially the book of Revelation, does clearly point us to a hope for the future, when ‘the kingdoms of this world’ will one day become, the Kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ, and he will reign forever... (Rev. 11:15). 

 

But while God has certainly plans for the future, the kingdom of God, Jesus told his own disciples is ‘among you’ now.  In Luke, Jesus was once asked by some religious leaders:  ‘When is the kingdom of God coming’?  To this Jesus answered quite surprisingly: "The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed;  nor will they say, 'Look, here it is!' or 'There it is!' For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you." (Lk. 17:20-21 NRS).  Now, that really through those religious leaders for a loop, just like it still throws a lot of prophecy preachers for a loop still today.

 

 

So, now, let’s conclude with summarizing what Jesus’ preaching about the kingdom, might mean to us, right now.

 

More than anything else, by preaching the kingdom, Jesus was putting a new possibility of hope and purpose before God’s people.   By preaching that the kingdom was ‘near’, Jesus was implying that if people will allow God truth and God’s spiritual presence to rule in our hearts and over our lives, we have the best chance to live these new possibilities into reality.   

 

Back in the 1990’s, when we were living in Germany, I was scanning through the German Newspaper, practicing my German, and I came upon an interesting headline saying, that 60 percent of Germans would like to live under a King again. 

 

The writer of the article discovered that most Germans were not happy with their democratic system.  They felt it caused too much political corruption and having a king again would create a more civil atmosphere which held greater political promise.

 

Now, such an political suggestion, of returning something like a feudal system, with most of the wealth and all of the power in the control of just a few, sounds more like the dark ages, than a way of hope, possibility and promise, doesn’t it?  

 

Last year, I came across and interesting article.  It was a review of social and a book, by Joel Kotkin, entitled, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism.  Now that probably doesn’t get your attention, but I bet the subtitle might: ‘A Warning to the Global Middle Class’. 

 

In that book, Kotkin describes how he believes that our society is being rapidly reduced to a feudal state, and that this process has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.   As millions of small businesses are near extinction, millions more losing their jobs and many others stuck in the status of property-less serfs. The big winners have been the “expert” class...and, most of all, the small group of high-tech entrepreneurs,  who have benefited the most, as people rely more on algorithms than human relationships.

 

Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism.

 

If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical, ruling-class society is emerging... The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times.”

 

So, how can a ‘kingdom’, even a kingdom from heaven, or kingdom of God, which sounds even more ancient and Medieval, than it does modern or hopeful---how can this kind of teaching hold ‘good news’ or ‘gospel’ for us?

 

Well, the one thing different about God’s kingdom, than any human, or earthly kingdom, is that it is a kingdom that depends upon ‘our’ own participation in making it a reality.   This is the very ‘wisdom’ of God, and the most ‘clever’ way that God works, and brings hope in the world;  he brings it through us.  

 

This is exactly what Jesus was doing when he preached the kingdom, then called upon the people to ‘receive’ the kingdom through ‘repentance’ and through ‘faith’.   And this is what Jesus meant, when he explained that the ‘kingdom of God is among you’,  or when he taught his disciples to ‘strive for’ or to seek the kingdom, or when he taught them to ‘pray’ for the kingdom.  

 

While God’s truth already rules in heaven, where things are as they should be,  we, the people who are made in God’s image, are the key to God’s truth coming into reality ‘on earth, as it is in heaven’.   And a lot of people miss this part.  Too many people give up, in despair, saying that ‘the end of the world is coming’ when it hasn’t, or saying that they can’t do anything different or better, but perhaps they can, they must, and we should.

 

Maybe this is the most important thing to learn about the kingdom.   While the kingdom of God is a reality that only God can bring into fulness and completion,  it is also a reality that means nothing, and gets nowhere, unless, we participate in God’s coming reality, right now.   For only when we take hold of God’s promise now, can we also fully participate in its fulfillment when the future comes.

 

One story that came out of the tragedy of World War II is a good, lasting example, of how Jesus calls us to participate in what God can still do through us.   Some of you will remember this story, which was story told by Ernest Gordon and made into a great motion picture, ‘Miracle on the River Kwai’.

 

Ernest Gordon had been a dashing young Scottish officer in one of the elite units of the British army.  But he was captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore and sent to a prison camp in the jungles of Thailand.

 

The camp commander was so cruel that he was actually tried by his own government for war crimes after the war was over. It was the Japanese commander's goal to break the spirits of the proud British prisoners through backbreaking labor building the notorious railroad through the valley of the River Kwai.

 

He also subjected his prisoners to near starvation and to every imaginable kind of physical and emotional abuse. The first time Gordon saw some of his fellow prisoners fighting over swill (or dish water) that had been thrown to them while their captors laughed, he resolved he would never let himself be reduced to that.

 

But the mistreatment took its toll. Bit by bit, the prisoners were reduced to struggling for survival. There was no community life, no trust, no self-respect.

 

Eventually, Ernest Gordon found himself in a crowded hospital shack, broken in body and spirit.  He was exhausted from long days of hard labor in the jungle heat and from malnutrition. His legs were covered with cuts and bruises and topical ulcers. He suffered from amoebic dysentery and diphtheria. He had given up and was ready to die.

 

Then one day, two men came to the hospital shack to care for him. One was a Roman Catholic named Denny Moore. The other was a Methodist, the son of an English gardener. His name was Dusty Miller. They rubbed his legs to restore circulation. They talked to him about things intended to restore his hope.

 

Ernest Gordon didn't know it at the time, but the two men were part of a little group of prisoners who decided to "have another go at the Christian faith" not as a way of trying to bribe God to rescue them, but simply in an effort to recover their own human dignity. As faith revived, so did love. Dusty explained to Gordon that he came to care for him because he had always been taught that Christians are supposed to love others.

 

The movement grew among the prisoners as acts of sacrificial love occurred. One day, a guard in charge of a labor detail thought one of the shovels had gone missing. The guard screamed at his detail that if the person who had stolen the shovel did not confess, he would shoot them one by one until someone confessed.

 

He aimed his rifle at the first prisoner in the line but before he could fire it, another prisoner confessed to stealing the shovel. The guard beat that prisoner to death with his rifle butt while the others watched. Later it was found that the shovel had not been stolen at all. The tools had just been miscounted. A person had given his life to save his friends.

 

The news of that loving act spread throughout the camp and inspired others to sacrificial commitment. Eventually Gordon learned that his friend, Denny Moore, had sold the gold Rolex watch with which he had hoped to eventually buy his own freedom and used the money to buy medicine on the black market to save Gordon's life.

 

Eventually Denny and Dusty talked to Gordon about the Christian faith. At first he wanted none of it. He had long since rejected Christianity for rationalism. But in time, faith was renewed in him. He recovered his strength. Since he was well-educated and had studied philosophy and religion, he was asked to teach a class in religion for prisoners who were interested. He became a part of the movement.

 

Bit by bit, even under the constant abuse of their captors, faith revived among the prisoners. They recovered a sense of their own worth. Structures of community life developed among them. The prisoners began to minister to one another in love.  At one time some of those who had recovered their faith actually ministered to a group of sick Japanese soldiers, because those soldiers were human beings even more pitiful than they had been.

 

The oppression never stopped. Gordon eventually learned that his friend Dusty Miller was killed just a few days before the war ended. The camp commander was so frustrated by Dusty's unconquerable goodness that he ordered him crucified.

 

If the promise of the kingdom of heaven could bring a new possibility to the prisoners in the prison camp on the River Kwai, what kind of a possibility might it bring to you?

 

The word "repent" means to change.  What kind of changes might you need to make to enter into God's new possibility? What kind of new possibility might God's promise offer to the world we live in? What might we be called to do to help our world move into that new possibility?  What can bring God’s kingdom closer to us, even today?   Amen.