Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 5, 2006

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Last week I told you that God’s call to us in the story of Christ’s Transfiguration to listen to Jesus, the beloved Son of God, means that we are to listen to what he has to say about the Kingdom of God and then respond in lives committed to the peace and justice that are the hallmarks of the Kingdom. There was in that sermon, I think, an unspoken assumption about the Kingdom of God, namely that it is not here, that it is something that we are called to work to bring about precisely because it is not a reality in our world today. And indeed when we look at the world around us, that certainly appears to be the case. I’ve heard the Kingdom of God characterized as God’s dream of how the world should be. If that’s true, the world as it is must in many ways be God’s nightmare. God’s dream is of a world at peace, but so much of the world is at war so much of the time. Today there are so many wars going that it’s hard to keep track of them all. We all know about Iraq and Afghanistan, but tragically those aren’t the only wars going on today. There are many others that we’ve never even heard of. What must make it even worse for God is that so many of those doing the fighting and killing claim to be doing so in the name of God or even at God’s command. A divine nightmare indeed. God’s dream is of a world of justice for all, yet in the world today a tiny fraction of the world’s people control the lion’s share of the wealth, and something like half of God’s children live on two dollars a day or less. God’s dream is of a huge banquet table where all are invited and all are welcome; yet in the world today we all have our lists of who’s in and who’s out, who’s welcome and who’s not. Worst of all, we ground many of those lists in what we think is the will of God, excluding some because of ancient ignorance and prejudice preserved in what we call God’s word or because we think our way to God is the only way to God. The Kingdom of God seems very far from us indeed.

So it may have come as something of a shock to you, as it did to me. to be reminded in this morning’s Gospel lesson that Jesus’ very first public proclamation included the seemingly outrageous claim that the Kingdom of God has come near. What could he possibly have meant by that? Was he delusional? We he completely unaware of the world around him? After all, in his day his people lived under brutal Roman military oppression, the imbalance of wealth between the very few rich and the great many poor was even worse than it is today, and war was simply how life was most of the time. Could Jesus have been unaware of all that? Was he just plain wrong? Well, I don’t think he was wrong, which I suppose comes as no great shock to you. Yet to understand how he was not wrong in the face of all that evidence to the contrary in both his day and ours we have, I think, to rethink what we understand him to have meant by his claim that the Kingdom of God has come near.

Clearly he did not mean, he could not have meant, that peace and justice were about to break out all over the world. That didn’t happen, and I can’t believe that Jesus was so naïve that he thought it was going to happen. Some scholars say he meant that God was about to break into history and put an end to the world as we know it, ushering in the Kingdom of God by force and destroying all of God’s enemies. I can’t believe that Jesus meant that either. It didn’t happen, and that’s not how the God Jesus called Abba Father operated or operates. So clearly he had to mean something else. To understand what the something else is, let’s look at what actually had come near in this passage from Mark.

What had come near wasn’t a thing, and it wasn’t a radical reordering of human affairs. It was Jesus himself. The setting for our passage this morning is the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry. The very first thing Jesus says as he begins his public ministry is: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near." Well, what time is fulfilled? The time, I think, for the appearance of Jesus. That after all is what’s happening here. Jesus is appearing. Jesus here emerges onto the stage of world history. He has come near, and it is in him that we see the Kingdom of God.

And that’s not something that happened only once a long time ago in a place far away. Jesus is still near. True, he isn’t among us as a physical human being the way he was with his contemporaries in first century Judea. He is near to us nonetheless. He can be near to us like he was near to people so long ago because, as we heard in our passage from 1 Peter, after his death Jesus was "made alive in the spirit." He is still with us in spirit. His spirit is as near to us as his physical body was to those who knew him during his physical life. Indeed, he is even nearer. As a living human being Jesus couldn’t dwell in people’s hearts. Even then his spirit could and did, but the important thing for us is that that is still true for us. Jesus alive in the spirit dwells in our spirits, in our hearts. That’s how and why the Kingdom of God has come near to us. The Kingdom is at hand because the spirit of Christ is at hand. And we can live in the Kingdom of God because we live in the spirit of Christ and the spirit of Christ lives in us.

What, you may well be asking, does that have to do with how we actually live? How does it make the Kingdom near? Well, because we live in Christ and Christ lives in us, we can live in the Kingdom even though the world doesn’t. The world may be a place of war and injustice, but we can live lives of peace and justice. The world may whore after the false idols of wealth, prestige, and power; but we can live the divine values of the Kingdom, the values of love, mercy, peace, and compassion. We can live in peace ourselves, because we know God’s peace in and through Jesus. Maybe we can’t change the world, although we can’t give up trying. We can change ourselves. We can give up our fears and our anxieties. We can give up our hatreds and our prejudices. We can let God soften our hardened hearts and open our closed minds. We can say to God, with Jesus, not my will but thine be done. We can do all of these things because the Kingdom of God has indeed come near. It has come near to us in Christ Jesus. It is near to us because Jesus lives in spirit and is, as the Koran says of God, closer to us than our carotid artery, or as Brian Wren says in the great hymn "Bring Many Names" "closer yet than breathing." When we live in the spirit of Christ, we live in the Kingdom of God.

So this Lent, as we prepare to walk with Christ in triumph into Jerusalem, to walk with him in tears to Calvary, and to walk with the women to find the empty tomb, let us rejoice that indeed the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God has come near. Let us realize that we can indeed live in the Kingdom of God. All we have to do is open our hearts to Jesus Christ, listen to him, and follow him. The Kingdom of God has come near, and that my friends is very, very good news indeed. Amen.