The Kingdom of God is Near

The Kingdom of God is Near
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
December 3, 2006 (Advent I)
Jeremiah 33:14-16; 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13; Luke 21:25-36

Jeremiah 33:14-16 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: "The Lord is our righteousness."

1 Thessalonians 3:9-13 How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you? Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith.
Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you. And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.

Luke 21:25-36 "There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in a cloud' with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near."
Then he told them a parable: "Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. "Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man."

I. BEGINNING

I am a New Yorker. Allow me to tell you a little bit about my people.

We prefer our pizza thin crusted. We like our Buffalo wings to taste like the ones they make in Buffalo. Many of us stand on line, not in line. We pride ourselves on coming from a state that can boast Manhattan, Niagara Falls, the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Finger Lakes, Coney Island, the Adirondacks, and the Hudson River Valley among its attractions. We pass on the left--and on the right. We like our politicians tough and a little bit rough--which is why they never get elected to national office. We're loud. We like to argue. We don't allow a lot of room between cars on the highway.

And we hate to wait.

When I was moving to DC a friend came with me to help me scout apartments. He was from Brooklyn. At one point we were waiting to get something to eat at the concession stand that used to be outside the Lincoln Memorial. The line was only about 20 feel long and we waited 10-15 minutes on line. After a few minutes, we looked at each other and said, "This place would be out of business back home." And it would have. Patience is not a virtue in New York. Waiting is not something we enjoy.

I daresay that there are a good deal many of us, especially in this country, in this day and age, who are likewise terrible at waiting. When I first made my foray onto the information superhighway, it was with a 1200 baud modem. I remember being contented with that. Now, I'd sooner walk down the road to the library than wait for information over a modem that slow.

In the old days, lawyers had to wait for responses to letters they'd sent through the mail. The turnaround time could be as long as a week or more. Now, people have e-mailed the documents as a PDF and want a response right away. More and more retailers are doing away with lay-away--an option that allows you to save up money and pay off the purchase before you buy it--in favor of store credit cards, that often place the consumer into debt, and attach finance charges, but allow the consumer to take the product home with them now .

Instant gratification is the watchword of our society. We as a people--New Yorkers or no--are not very good at waiting.

II. NEARNESS

And there are some things we've been waiting for for a long time. At least 2000 years. In some cases longer.

Jeremiah writes:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: "The Lord is our righteousness."

The days a surely coming ... Jeremiah wrote those words in the early 6 th Century BC, just after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and the deportation of the Jews into captivity in Babylon. Have those days come yet? Even those of us who identify Jesus as the "righteous branch" to "spring up for David" would be hard pressed to point to the time when Judah was finally saved and Jerusalem would live in safety. And that was 2,600 years ago.

And then we have Jesus saying:

So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place.

You will know that the Kingdom of God is near ... The word that is translated "near" has both a physical and a temporal meaning. Physically it means close by. In terms of time it mean "imminent and soon to come to pass." Imminent and soon to come to pass.

Jesus has a strange definition of near or soon if he said that that Kingdom of God was coming soon . That was at least 1,976 years ago when he said that. We might be able to talk about "God's time" and how a day in the first chapter of Genesis isn't one of our days, but one of God's. Fine. But then he goes on to say, "Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place." Even using the generous Biblical interpretation of a generation as '40 years', that still 49 generations that have come and gone and these things have not taken place.

Perhaps, even St. Luke realized that things weren't happening as quickly as they'd expected. The version of this story as it appears in Matthew and Mark (Mark being the source that Matthew and Luke both use) reads "Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place." Luke changes "all these things" to "all things"--perhaps out of a recognition that all these things --the signs in the sun and the moon, the roar of the oceans, and the coming of the Son of Man--have not taken place within a generation. "All things" is a little more open to interpretation.

Was Jesus wrong?

III. SPIRITUALIZING THE PROMISE AWAY

But Luke would not be the only one to do some fancy interpretive footwork on this issue. In fact, the church has over the centuries increasingly spiritualized this passage away.

The Kingdom is already present, we say, in the church or in our midst. It's a spiritual reality that Jesus was talking about. We need to stop looking forward to some long-postponed day of deliverance and start focusing on how salvation is attained in the here and now.

And so the Church begins to focus on salvation as an individual thing--it's a spiritual reality so people come to it one by one. It becomes less and less about a radically transformed reality and more about where your spirit goes after you die. The kingdom of God is something each of us can attain, each of us can get to with enough faith.

I don't find that satisfying.

There are a lot of things wrong with the world, and we were promised that they'd be taken care of. There are a lot of people suffering. There are a lot of people dying from violence, or famine, or disease. This past Friday was World AIDS Day, a day on which we show our solidarity with all who have suffered from the scourge of AIDS. There are 39.5 million people living with AIDS right now, 2.3 million of whom are children, and 24 million of whom live in Africa, where the disease has decimated populations. [1]. Since 1981, 25 million people have died of AIDS. Three million in the past year--two million of whom were in Africa. Two million. As the Detroit Free Press noted in its coverage of World AIDS day, the "disease [is] still winning." [2]

I don't know about you, but I don't want any Kingdom of God that doesn't include in it a cure for AIDS and the end to suffering. Any kingdom of God that doesn't have that is unworthy of the terms "kingdom" and "God".

Any kingdom that doesn't include a realization of all our hopes for justice and for peace. If Christians are to be true to our faith, we cannot spiritualize away the promises of God. We cannot reduce to mere metaphor the vindication of our hopes for a redeemed and renewed world. The kingdom of God has not come just yet.

But, as I said, I'm a New Yorker--and my people don't like waiting. So, where exactly is the Kingdom?

IV. ADVENT

We are in the time of Advent--advent, a word that means "arrival". We often think of the arrival that we're expecting as the arrival of Jesus in the manger. And certainly, that is a big part of it. But as the apocalyptic texts we read throughout Advent make it clear, it is not the Baby Jesus that we're awaiting, but the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Where is the kingdom? It's coming.

Jesus was not wrong. He tells us that "about that day or hour, no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." (Mark 13:32) The date of the arrival of the kingdom is not known, even to Jesus. But its arrival is certain.

For we have seen in Jesus' own resurrection on Easter morning the beginnings of that Kingdom's coming. It is a kingdom in its coming. It's nature is in its arriving. As on theologian notes, "Every situation is confronting a world that is passing away and a world that is not apparent that is coming to pass, and faith is relying on the latter." [3] Our faith is not in relying on the world that is, but on the world that is coming to pass, the world that is coming into being. It is that world, whose first glimpses we see on Easter, that defines us, that gives us hope.

V. END

Though we await the coming of the kingdom in its fullness, we can glimpse something of its present reality in the resurrection of Jesus and in the response to that grace in our community.

When we gather together for worship, and praise a God who is over and against the powers of this world, we get a glimpse of the coming Kingdom of God.

When we gather together in fellowship, building community with one another, loving one another, taking care of one another and growing as a fellowship of caring and love, we get a foretaste of the coming Kingdom of God.

When we help one another to grow in wisdom and knowledge, supporting one another in growth in Christian discipleship, we see something of the coming Kingdom of God.

When we work for justice, speaking out for those who have no voice, challenging systems of oppression and violence, seeking liberation for those who are bound, we testify to the power of the coming Kingdom of God.

And when we share with others the power of the Kingdom of God, we help others to perceive something of the coming Kingdom of God.

Advent is a time of waiting. And waiting is something we're not very good at. But we have been waiting for a long time and might be waiting for a long time to come.

It is in what we're waiting for that we have hope. For we await not some ordinary event in our lives, but the culmination of history, the vindication of our hopes, the turning of the world upside-down.

God enables us to live into this Kingdom, to be "on hand" for what is "at hand" but not yet "in hand". God gives us the grace, in the midst of a world that is passing away, to testify to the reality of a world that is yet come to pass. [3] So that, in spite of the realities of this world, in spite of the violence that runs unabated, the poverty, the sorrow, we can yet testify to the reality of the Kingdom with our words and our actions.

We are no longer impatient New Yorkers, or East Coasters, or Americans. We are citizens of the Kingdom of God--people who can wait with faithful and joyful hope. We, as a people of faith, can rely on the promises of the reality that is coming to pass, and can testify with conviction: "The Kingdom of God is near."

Notes
[1] http://www.avert.org/worldstats.htm
[2] http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061201/OPINION01/612010329/1068/OPINION
[3] Dr. Christopher Morse, Union Theological Seminary

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*The Kingdom of God is Near* Rev. Mark Schaefer Kay Spiritual Life Center December 3, 2006 (Advent I) Jeremiah 33:14-16; 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13; Luke 21:25-36 Jeremiah 33:14-16 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: "The Lord is our righteousness." 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13 How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you? Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith. Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you. And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints. Luke 21:25-36 "There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in a cloud' with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near." Then he told them a parable: "Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. "Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man." I. BEGINNING I am a New Yorker. Allow me to tell you a little bit about my people. We prefer our pizza thin crusted. We like our Buffalo wings to taste like the ones they make in Buffalo. Many of us stand on line, not in line. We pride ourselves on coming from a state that can boast Manhattan, Niagara Falls, the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Finger Lakes, Coney Island, the Adirondacks, and the Hudson River Valley among its attractions. We pass on the left--and on the right. We like our politicians tough and a little bit rough--which is why they never get elected to national office. We're loud. We like to argue. We don't allow a lot of room between cars on the highway. And we hate to wait. When I was moving to DC a friend came with me to help me scout apartments. He was from Brooklyn. At one point we were waiting to get something to eat at the concession stand that used to be outside the Lincoln Memorial. The line was only about 20 feel long and we waited 10-15 minutes on line. After a few minutes, we looked at each other and said, "This place would be out of business back home." And it would have. Patience is not a virtue in New York. Waiting is not something we enjoy. I daresay that there are a good deal many of us, especially in this country, in this day and age, who are likewise terrible at waiting. When I first made my foray onto the information superhighway, it was with a 1200 baud modem. I remember being contented with that. Now, I'd sooner walk down the road to the library than wait for information over a modem that slow. In the old days, lawyers had to wait for responses to letters they'd sent through the mail. The turnaround time could be as long as a week or more. Now, people have e-mailed the documents as a PDF and want a response right away. More and more retailers are doing away with lay-away--an option that allows you to save up money and pay off the purchase before you buy it--in favor of store credit cards, that often place the consumer into debt, and attach finance charges, but allow the consumer to take the product home with them now . Instant gratification is the watchword of our society. We as a people--New Yorkers or no--are not very good at waiting. II. NEARNESS And there are some things we've been waiting for for a long time. At least 2000 years. In some cases longer. Jeremiah writes: The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: "The Lord is our righteousness." The days a surely coming ... Jeremiah wrote those words in the early 6 th Century BC, just after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and the deportation of the Jews into captivity in Babylon. Have those days come yet? Even those of us who identify Jesus as the "righteous branch" to "spring up for David" would be hard pressed to point to the time when Judah was finally saved and Jerusalem would live in safety. And that was 2,600 years ago. And then we have Jesus saying: So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. You will know that the Kingdom of God is near ... The word that is translated "near" has both a physical and a temporal meaning. Physically it means close by. In terms of time it mean "imminent and soon to come to pass." Imminent and soon to come to pass. Jesus has a strange definition of near or soon if he said that that Kingdom of God was coming soon . That was at least 1,976 years ago when he said that. We might be able to talk about "God's time" and how a day in the first chapter of Genesis isn't one of our days, but one of God's. Fine. But then he goes on to say, "Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place." Even using the generous Biblical interpretation of a generation as '40 years', that still 49 generations that have come and gone and these things have not taken place. Perhaps, even St. Luke realized that things weren't happening as quickly as they'd expected. The version of this story as it appears in Matthew and Mark (Mark being the source that Matthew and Luke both use) reads "Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place." Luke changes "all these things" to "all things"--perhaps out of a recognition that all these things --the signs in the sun and the moon, the roar of the oceans, and the coming of the Son of Man--have not taken place within a generation. "All things" is a little more open to interpretation. Was Jesus wrong? III. SPIRITUALIZING THE PROMISE AWAY But Luke would not be the only one to do some fancy interpretive footwork on this issue. In fact, the church has over the centuries increasingly spiritualized this passage away. The Kingdom is already present, we say, in the church or in our midst. It's a spiritual reality that Jesus was talking about. We need to stop looking forward to some long-postponed day of deliverance and start focusing on how salvation is attained in the here and now. And so the Church begins to focus on salvation as an individual thing--it's a spiritual reality so people come to it one by one. It becomes less and less about a radically transformed reality and more about where your spirit goes after you die. The kingdom of God is something each of us can attain, each of us can get to with enough faith. I don't find that satisfying. There are a lot of things wrong with the world, and we were promised that they'd be taken care of. There are a lot of people suffering. There are a lot of people dying from violence, or famine, or disease. This past Friday was World AIDS Day, a day on which we show our solidarity with all who have suffered from the scourge of AIDS. There are 39.5 million people living with AIDS right now, 2.3 million of whom are children, and 24 million of whom live in Africa, where the disease has decimated populations. [1]. Since 1981, 25 million people have died of AIDS. Three million in the past year--two million of whom were in Africa. Two million. As the Detroit Free Press noted in its coverage of World AIDS day, the "disease [is] still winning." [2] I don't know about you, but I don't want any Kingdom of God that doesn't include in it a cure for AIDS and the end to suffering. Any kingdom of God that doesn't have that is unworthy of the terms "kingdom" and "God". Any kingdom that doesn't include a realization of all our hopes for justice and for peace. If Christians are to be true to our faith, we cannot spiritualize away the promises of God. We cannot reduce to mere metaphor the vindication of our hopes for a redeemed and renewed world. The kingdom of God has not come just yet. But, as I said, I'm a New Yorker--and my people don't like waiting. So, where exactly is the Kingdom? IV. ADVENT We are in the time of Advent--advent, a word that means "arrival". We often think of the arrival that we're expecting as the arrival of Jesus in the manger. And certainly, that is a big part of it. But as the apocalyptic texts we read throughout Advent make it clear, it is not the Baby Jesus that we're awaiting, but the coming of the Kingdom of God. Where is the kingdom? It's coming. Jesus was not wrong. He tells us that "about that day or hour, no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." (Mark 13:32) The date of the arrival of the kingdom is not known, even to Jesus. But its arrival is certain. For we have seen in Jesus' own resurrection on Easter morning the beginnings of that Kingdom's coming. It is a kingdom in its coming. It's nature is in its arriving. As on theologian notes, "Every situation is confronting a world that is passing away and a world that is not apparent that is coming to pass, and faith is relying on the latter." [3] Our faith is not in relying on the world that is, but on the world that is coming to pass, the world that is coming into being. It is that world, whose first glimpses we see on Easter, that defines us, that gives us hope. V. END Though we await the coming of the kingdom in its fullness, we can glimpse something of its present reality in the resurrection of Jesus and in the response to that grace in our community. When we gather together for worship, and praise a God who is over and against the powers of this world, we get a glimpse of the coming Kingdom of God. When we gather together in fellowship, building community with one another, loving one another, taking care of one another and growing as a fellowship of caring and love, we get a foretaste of the coming Kingdom of God. When we help one another to grow in wisdom and knowledge, supporting one another in growth in Christian discipleship, we see something of the coming Kingdom of God. When we work for justice, speaking out for those who have no voice, challenging systems of oppression and violence, seeking liberation for those who are bound, we testify to the power of the coming Kingdom of God. And when we share with others the power of the Kingdom of God, we help others to perceive something of the coming Kingdom of God. Advent is a time of waiting. And waiting is something we're not very good at. But we have been waiting for a long time and might be waiting for a long time to come. It is in what we're waiting for that we have hope. For we await not some ordinary event in our lives, but the culmination of history, the vindication of our hopes, the turning of the world upside-down. God enables us to live into this Kingdom, to be "on hand" for what is "at hand" but not yet "in hand". God gives us the grace, in the midst of a world that is passing away, to testify to the reality of a world that is yet come to pass. [3] So that, in spite of the realities of this world, in spite of the violence that runs unabated, the poverty, the sorrow, we can yet testify to the reality of the Kingdom with our words and our actions. We are no longer impatient New Yorkers, or East Coasters, or Americans. We are citizens of the Kingdom of God--people who can wait with faithful and joyful hope. We, as a people of faith, can rely on the promises of the reality that is coming to pass, and can testify with conviction: "The Kingdom of God is near." Notes [1] http://www.avert.org/worldstats.htm [2] http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061201/OPINION01/612010329/1068/OPINION [3] Dr. Christopher Morse, Union Theological Seminary Back to Sermons page Back to AU UMC Home Copyright © 2006. Mark A. Schaefer. No part of this text may be reproduced or otherwise disseminated without the express written consent of the author.

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