Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 3, 2011

Scripture:
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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.

So today we come to the final sermon in my series on the temptations of Jesus. The theme of the series is that the story of the devil’s temptations of Jesus in the wilderness in Matthew is about what it means for Jesus to be the Son of God. We can think of those stories as being, on the one hand, about Jesus struggling himself with his identity and his mission. On the other hand we can think of them as a being about what Jesus being the Son of God means for us. In the first, introductory sermon in this series I said that the third temptation, the temptation in which the devil offers Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” introduced the question of rule into the question of what it means for Jesus to be the Son of God. I said that the third temptation tells us that Jesus being the Son of God is about ruling, about some kind of reign, but it isn’t about ruling the way we see it done on earth. It is about the reign of God, what the Gospels call the Kingdom of God, or sometimes in Matthew, the Kingdom of Heaven, which means the same thing.

OK, so far so good; but as is true of the first two temptations which don’t at all flesh out the theme that they introduce, this third temptation doesn’t really tell us anything about what the reign the Jesus is all about, that is, what the Kingdom of God is all about. We have seen, however, that these temptations act as a kind of prologue to the Gospels. They set a theme, then point us to the rest of the Gospel to fill out what those themes have to say to us in more detail. With the first two temptations, the one about bread and the one about salvation, it was pretty easy to find specific Bible passages that address those themes. With this one, about the Kingdom of God, it’s a bit different. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God all the time, but he never gives a direct, complete statement of what the Kingdom of God is. I included the Beatitudes in our scripture readings this morning because I think they give us a pretty good introduction to what the Kingdom of God is about and how it is so different from the way of the world, but what really struck me as I considered this question for this sermon was that where we see most clearly what the Kingdom of God is about isn’t in any Bible passage. It is in the life of Jesus as a whole. Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God, but more importantly he lives the Kingdom of God. So what I want to do this morning is take a look at what we learn about the Kingdom of God from Jesus’ life—and, of course, from his death and resurrection. Obviously in one short sermon I can only give a brief overview of what we learn about the Kingdom of God from Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. We will talk a lot more about his death and resurrection during Holy Week and Easter, so today I want to focus this morning on his life.

In the way Jesus lived his life we see a radical alternative to those kingdoms of the earth and their splendor that the devil had offered Jesus. The kingdoms of the earth, that is, the earthly way of ruling that applies to all earthly forms of government, not merely to actual kingdoms, is about several things. It is about amassing wealth, at least for those elements of the nation upon which the rulers’ power rests. It is about protecting the privilege of the privileged. It is about control. The rulers must control the ruled in order to perpetuate their rule. Earthly kingdoms, both historically and in our own time, are about military conquest. As Crossan says, they are grounded in a worldly ideology or an idolatrous theology that seeks peace through violence, that seeks security through war. They seek peace and security by inflicting death on others, and their internal policies produce death for the poor and the vulnerable. They even see killing as a legitimate form of punishment. Earthly kingdoms can produce a reasonably comfortable life for at least some of their citizens, sometimes for many of their citizens; but they do it at the price of worshipping the devil—metaphorically of course but for that none the less really. That’s why when Jesus rejects the devil’s offer of the kingdoms of the world and their splendor he does it by saying we are to worship only God.

Jesus could have chosen the earthly kind of kingdom by accepting the devil’s offer. Jesus, however, chose a different kind of kingdom. He lived a different kind of kingdom. He lived God’s kingdom, a kingdom characterized pretty much by the exact opposite of the kingdoms of the world in every conceivable way. He lived God’s kingdom of peace, both internal spiritual peace through an intimate relationship with God and an external peace characterized by a radical commitment to nonviolence. Even when faced with certain torture and death he would not let his followers use violence to defend him. He lived God’s kingdom of compassion, forgiveness, and mercy. He reached out to the excluded and brought them into God’s kingdom. He rejected worldly wealth and saw it as a barrier to living the Kingdom of God. He lived God’s kingdom of love for all people. He called those with privilege to repent and lifted up those the world had trodden down. Most of all he lived God’s kingdom of life. The Gospel of John quotes him as saying “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly,” and in that saying he once again sets himself at loggerheads with the kingdoms of the world and their ethic of death.

In the third temptation Jesus had a choice between those two kinds of kingdoms, the worldly kind and God’s kind. He chose God’s kind; and here’s the thing: We are faced with exactly the same choice every single day. We live in the dominant worldly kingdom of our time. It provides a comfortable living for most of us, but when we understand what the story of the third temptation of Jesus is all about we have to ask ourselves: At what price? At the price, for one thing, of creating, supporting, and using the greatest instrument of violence the world has ever seen, the United States military. At the price, for another, of a sinfully inadequate social services system for the most needy and most vulnerable among us, a social security net that we are now dismantling even further so that we don’t have to raise taxes on rich people or reduce our spending on the military. We live in one of those earthly kingdoms that the devil offered Jesus. It has a lot of splendor no doubt. But who does it really worship?

We have the choice that Jesus had. We can choose to live the life of the Kingdom of God. We can choose a commitment to nonviolence. We can choose an ethic of life, an ethic of love, compassion, mercy, and forgiveness. We can choose to reach out to the excluded. It’s not easy. It’s not easy because we live in an earthly kingdom. As it did in Jesus’ time the Kingdom of God exists within and alongside the earthly kingdoms. Choosing the life of the Kingdom of God isn’t safe. After all, it cost Jesus his life, and it has cost many other faithful people their lives. Earthly kingdoms generally don’t much like being shown up by the much better way that is the Kingdom of God, and they always fight back.

So here’s the question before us in this season of Lent? Do we have the courage to choose the life of the Kingdom of God as Jesus did? Do we have enough faith, enough trust in God, to reject the world’s ways of violence, privilege, and material wealth and embrace God’s way of nonviolence, radical equality, and spiritual wealth? Perhaps through prayer and discernment together we can, in this season of Lent, begin to answer those questions. Amen.