AU United Methodist Community

Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
December 5, 2010—Advent II
Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12

Isaiah 11:1-10 • A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. His delight shall be in the fear of the LORD.
He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins.
The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.
On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.

Matthew 3:1-12 • In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
“I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

I. BEGINNING

I have a friend CherylNames have been changed to protect the innocent, and tardy. for whom the flow of time operates on a completely different level from the rest of the observable universe.  That is, if Cheryl says she’ll be ready in 10 minutes, you can bet that it actually means 20.  So prevalent was this that we got to joking: “Is that in real time or Cheryl-time?”  I suspect we’ve all known people like that.  I suspect that we’ve often been people like that.  Our time estimates are just a little bit… off. It can be frustrating for our friends when we wind up making them wait longer than they were expecting to.

Now, I understand the reason for that—perhaps you are a bad estimator of the time that it takes to do something.  Perhaps you—like me—always forget to factor in things like waiting on the Metro platform for a train.  Perhaps you just simply want to give your friends a sense of hope that what you’ve promised will come sooner rather than later.

II. THE TEXT

Now, which one, I wonder, was John the Baptist?  He proclaimed “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven has come near” or as it’s usually translated “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”  Because, um, that was 2,000 years ago.  Two thousand.  Either John the Baptist was a poor estimator of time or we’ve all missed something.

Because it’s hard to imagine that we weren’t clear about what John was talking about.  His preaching is full of apocalyptic language and a sense of urgency and imminence.  “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees…” and “His winnowing fork is in his hand…”  Lots of present tense.  Lots of immediacy.

John is proclaiming the long hoped for Kingdom of God (or as Matthew is wont to call it, the Kingdom of Heaven).  That Kingdom that represents God’s direct reign on earth, a time at the end of history when all that is broken with the world will be made whole, all that is wrong will be set right.  It is a reign like the one in that beautiful vision of Isaiah concerning the Peaceable Kingdom:

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.

That’s what John the Baptist is referring to when he says, “The Kingdom of Heaven has come near.”  So, where is it?  What definition of ‘at hand’ or ‘nearby’ is John using here?  I don’t know about you, but if I were a friend of John the Baptist and he said he’d meet us somewhere in 30 minutes, how long do you suppose he would really take?  Are we to understand this as some sort of “John-time?”

Because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but the Kingdom of Heaven doesn’t seem to have come yet.  At least, not in any visible way.  Not in any way that the world would seem to admit.  Not so long as there are people without food, or people living on the streets, or young men and women dying in wars, or masses suffering oppression, women suffering abuse, whole classes suffering discrimination and bigotry.  No, my friends, the Kingdom of God is not here yet.  I saw as much on the 11 o’clock news.

III. THE WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART

A.   Spiritualizing the Kingdom Away

Now, it’s fair to say that we are not the first Christians to have noticed this.  No, it was as early as the late First Century that Christians began to tire of waiting.  The first generation had all expected the Kingdom of God to arrive soon.  Like, next Thursday soon.  One of the oldest Christian liturgical statements, and the only surviving one in Aramaic, is the phrase maranatha, which is Aramaic for “Come, O Lord!”  An entreaty for the speedy return of Christ to usher in the Kingdom.

Now, what’s interesting is that the sentiment can be parsed one of two ways.  Depending on where you put the space (marana tha, maran atha) It can mean either “Come, Our Lord” or “Our Lord has come.”

And there were Christians in the late First Century that began to see it that way. They began to understand the Kingdom of God as already present.  Now, of course, they could see the unredeemedness of the world as clearly as you and I can, but for them, the Kingdom was primarily a spiritual reality.  In fact, the material world began to be less and less relevant.  Concerns of the ‘world’ began to be less important.  The Kingdom of God was present already among the community of believers.  You begin to see something of this movement in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus is even quoted as saying, “The Kingdom of God is among you.”  You see it a lot in John’s Gospel, where the Second Coming and the future Kingdom of God are downplayed a lot in favor of a more present understanding of the Kingdom.

It’s a tempting theology.  We get tired of waiting.  Isn’t better to imagine that we must have had the wrong expectation?  Isn’t it easier to say, “Well we were waiting for a physical kingdom, but it seems to be running late.  Perhaps we weren’t waiting for a physical kingdom, perhaps it was a spiritual Kingdom we were waiting for and it’s been here with us the whole time in the power of the Spirit and the love of the community!”  There is certainly a lot of truth to that—there is something of the Kingdom in the power of the Spirit and in the love of the community, but does that mean that God has changed her mind about bringing the Kingdom in a physical way?  Does that mean that the poor will not be fed?  That the homeless will not be given shelter?  That the oppressed will not actually be freed?  That the dead will not actually be raised? Are we to understand all these things in a spiritual manner?  That the poor will be fed the food of the spirit, the homeless sheltered under God’s love, the oppressed freed within, and the believers receive new life here in a spiritual way?

Is the gospel like a set of political promises, big talk but meant to be understood only in some figurative sense?  Does the Gospel still have any real power—does it say anything to us in our situation now, addressing the real brokenness of the world—if it is completely spiritualized away?

B.   Hurrying the Kingdom

So, it might not surprise you to find that there are Christians who do not accept that particular view of reality.  They tend to view the world much more in line with Mark and Matthew’s Gospels, as a broken place still longing for redemption and expecting a very real physical Kingdom of Heaven.

But we kid ourselves if we imagine that Christians on that side of the theological aisle are any better at waiting than those on the other side.  In fact, if anything, they’ve decided that God must have a lot of things on his plate and so they’ll just help out a little bit and start building the Kingdom of God themselves.

But we have a pretty low bar set when it comes to what that Kingdom is. Throughout history all manner of associations have been made with the Kingdom of God. Various political movements and events have been tied to this understanding. The now practically unheard of “Liberty Party” was, at its founding, described in terms that made it equivalent to the Second Coming. Over the centuries and years, we have often looked for the Kingdom in more present, material form. And in so doing, we usually settle. We decide that the Roman Empire is the Kingdom, until it falls, and then St. Augustine has to remind us it wasn’t. Then we decide that the Church is the kingdom, until it falls into corruption and Martin Luther has to remind us it wasn’t. We decide that colonies–like the Plymouth colony–or nation states like the British Empire or the United States are the Kingdom, until we fail to live up to our values and a Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. reminds us that that wasn’t the Kingdom.

Or we identify some political philosophy or social program or movement with the Kingdom of Heaven.  We usually set the bar pretty low on that, too.  We try to imagine that the Kingdom of God is something we build.  That it’s something we do.  We become convinced that the reason the Kingdom of God has not arrived is because we haven’t built it.

And so what winds up being even worse is that we then try to construct Utopias that aim at erecting God’s Kingdom but wind up creating yet another human institution, that oppresses, that destroys, that perpetuates injustice.  Because our idea of what perfect justice looks like is so rarely just. Our idea of order is usually not God’s order.  We hurry the Kingdom and it has consequences that are often most un-heavenly.

So, if we cannot simply spiritualize the Kingdom away so that we can say it’s here already and if we can’t rush its coming, what are we supposed to do?  Just sit here and wait?

IV. BEING ON HAND

Today is the Second Sunday in Advent.  Advent means “coming toward” and is meant to remind us not only of the coming of the Christ-child at Christmas, but also of the coming Kingdom of God. But we can tire of waiting for an event that only ever seems to be in the future.

It’s true that patience is a virtue that we should be practicing more and more in our fast-paced, instant gratification world.  But the point of Christian faith is not simply to defer to the undefined future all the hopes that we have for the world.  Far too many tyrants have sought to mollify those who suffer injustice by telling them that someday they would have their reward in the world to come. But if we cannot actually build that Kingdom ourselves is our lot only to wait?  Is life one long season of Advent?

One contemporary Christian theologian—Dr. Christopher Morse—has said that our task as Christians is to “be on hand for a reality that is at hand, but not yet in hand.” To be on hand for a Kingdom that is at hand but not yet in hand.  That is, we recognize that the Kingdom of Heaven is not here yet—it is not in hand.  We do not possess it fully.  Yet, neither is it so far removed that we do not possess it altogether—it is at hand.  It has come near.  For the only reason we celebrate Christmas, and thus Advent, is because we celebrate Easter—the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the Dead, a sign that the brokenness of the world does not have the final say.  A new reality is at hand.  The Kingdom of Heaven is breaking into our world.

Our task then—being on hand—is to help others to see the Kingdom that is breaking into the world.  We do have a task in the here and now.  It is to live our lives in such a way that people will see what the Kingdom will be like.  To see that God’s purposes and God’s reality is not so far removed from ours.  That the peace and justice that we expect in fullness, can be glimpsed in the here and now.  We cannot claim that it is fully present spiritually, we cannot claim that we will build it, but we can proclaim its nearness, its advent, and we can live into that reality with our very lives.  As Dr. Morse also said, “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.”

V. END

When we live out our faith, we help others to see that still not yet apparent world that is coming into being.  When we create communities of love, we do so relying on our faith in the ultimate victory of love, and people will see a glimpse of the Kingdom of Heaven.

When we create communities of justice, we demonstrate our faith in God’s justice for all, and people will see a glimpse of the Kingdom of Heaven.

When we create communities of welcome for all people, we demonstrate our faith in God’s all inclusive love, and people will see a glimpse of the Kingdom of Heaven.

When we create communities of peace, we demonstrate a faith in that Peaceable Kingdom, and people will see a glimpse of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Kingdom of Heaven has come near.  It is breaking through even now.  When will it come in its fullness?  Perhaps today.  Perhaps tomorrow.  Perhaps a thousand years from now.

But however long it will be between now and that glorious day when “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea”, in the meantime, we are to live our lives in such a way, with such love and such commitment to faith, that when others shall see it they shall proclaim loudly: “The Kingdom of Heaven has come near!”