Henrietta United Church of Christ

Rev. David Inglis and Marcie Gass Mark 12:28-34

New Year’s Day January 1, 2006

“Heaven on Earth”

It used to be that when a new year rolled around and we hung the clean new calendars up on the wall, I’d feel a stirring of hope for what the new year might bring. Would this be the year that wars stopped and the world took a major step toward peace? Would we find a way of releasing people in the inner city from the stranglehold of poverty and futility, and see violence and self destruction give way to the building of families and neighborhoods and lives? Would the world begin to realize that we share one home, planet earth, and find meaningful ways to take care of it together?

Well, countless clean new calendars have gotten curly and old, and problems like war, poverty, and environmental destruction are still very much with us. Here we are at the beginning of another brand new, unsullied year. But I find it hard to rev up a new surge of optimism about it. A new calendar on the wall and a new digit in the date isn’t likely to make much difference in the way the world operates.

And yet, there’s something in me that wants to hope--really, that needs to hope-- because when I stop hoping, something important in me dries up and stops living. But how do we hold out for a touch of heaven on earth in a world that seems hell-bent on destruction?

Didn’t Jesus help us give voice to our longings for a better world when he taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”?

This new order that Jesus gave his life to show us won’t happen just by watching a new year roll in. This new order of heaven on earth is something that we can enter and that we can create in the world around us by our attitudes and our actions moment to moment. The kingdom of God isn’t a grandiose vision of a utopia, and it’s not pie in the sky by and by. As Jesus told us, the kingdom of God is already within us and among us. It’s like a seed growing quietly, even invisibly, yet in time it bears much fruit.

Today Marcie Gass and I are going to share some ways we find the seeds of this kingdom growing within us and in the midst of us. Our hope is that it will awaken your spirit to this dynamic, beautiful, life-giving order of the kingdom of God that we all can enter and help create this year, day by day and moment by moment.

Marcie shares:

When and how do the seeds of the Kingdom get planted? Some of those seeds got planted a few summers ago when I was picnicking with the worship committee from the Greater Rochester Community of Churches. We were at a beautiful spot – pond side – at the farm of one of the members. And after lunch Dave led us in an exercise that I believe some of you have done. We partnered up and took turns asking each other, over and over, “What Do You Want? What Do You Really Want?” What I got down to that day was that I really, REALLY, wanted to know that God loved me. Part of me knew that, part of me remembered hearing that from scripture, from sermons, but it wasn’t real to me. I couldn’t feel it deep within.

Unconsciously, I had asked myself that question all my life – we all do. What Do I Want; to pass the next test, to get a new car, for my children to be happy and healthy, for peace on earth? The list can be endless. But on that summer day I was being more deliberate. What DO I want? Looking closely at that question, over the following year, what I wanted had a way of bringing up the things I DIDN’T want or hadn’t wanted in the past. The negative always has a way of pushing to the foreground in our lives. The more I explored what I wanted the more the pain, the anger, the quilt, the fear of what I didn’t want surfaced. Perhaps the remembering of what I hadn’t gotten.

When thoughts like these arise I, like you, try to push them aside, try to run from them. But you can’t. They want your attention. They are those little, constant thoughts at the back of the mind that say, in some manner; you don’t deserve it, you aren’t worthy of it, fill in your own words. For me they were also, “If I give this to you – you owe me….”

Because I had gotten to the realization that I wasn’t feeling God’s love, and that I wasn’t loving myself either, I decided to get involved with the Heartwork Institute. Its founder, Dale Goldstein is a therapist that works in the realm of the spiritual. Here, through self-inquiry, through meditation, and with support I took a hard look at the fears, the anger, and the doubts that played in my mind. Looking at what caused these thoughts was painful work. My abusive past was rekindled, flaring up like a firestorm that would engulf and smother me. But I learned to let myself walk into the center of that fire and let it consume me. When you do that – there is nothing left to fear. How remarkable! In the midst of my greatest pain – when I let go into it, embraced it – all of the pain disappeared and I was in stillness.

It is in stillness that I find peace. For me, peace isn’t something to chase after, to long for. It is not a goal. It cannot be created. It just IS. Peace is the absence of ego trying to be more, to have more, to please more. I create the opportunity to experience the Kingdom of God, the PEACEable kingdom, by letting go of thoughts and being still. I don’t mean sitting long hours in meditation, although I do practice that, I simply mean I invite myself to focus on the energy of God that is already within me, or I focus on the God that is within you.

When I pray, “Thy Kingdom Come,” I do it with the belief that the kingdom is already here – in each of us – that what I am asking is that I be aware of it more often. I believe that we are born with the Kingdom of God in us. Life just gets in the way with all of its ego demands and we have to be still to hear and experience it again-and again-and again.

I shared with a group recently, the Metanoians, that I have always known the Holy spirit was with me. I may not have had the words for it but I was aware of the feeling. With a little more enlightenment I would also have known that God was with me and loving me. However it was as if I were living in a dense fog. Once I began practicing Silence the fog began to clear and it was as if I could see shadows moving in the mist. Life was taking on more clarity. Occasionally even the mist clears and everything comes into sharp focus. For example: A week ago or so, during the activities and celebrations of Christmas, out of the blue, I thought of my husband, and for the first time in the 22 years since he died, I missed him, really missed him, and I started crying. We had a really troubled relationship so this was not a familiar feeling. What was different for me was that in that moment I was quiet, I was totally loving and vulnerable. In that state I was able to let the negative reactions of the past go and to see the God in him, to see the pain of his own life and to have compassion for both of us. I could sense myself holding and comforting him. Such peace was present! When the Kingdom of God is acknowledged it opens life up to a deeper relationship with God and with all of God’s creation – not just that which my own/our ego is pursuing.

Marcie has found the kingdom of God emerging within her as she’s learned to open in love and trust instead of fear, insecurity, resentment, self-disparagement, judgement, and all the other futile ways our egos try to protect us and promote us.

I have found for myself too that whenever I slip out of the domain of my ego, I enter the domain of God. It should be so simple, but sometimes I find it so hard. But you know, you all are making it easier for me these days. Gratitude is one of the ways I find myself slipping out of my ego state and opening to something bigger. And this church just keeps filling me with gratitude. There is a divine spirit and energy that is bigger than all of us, but that includes and embraces and empowers each one of us. Whenever we come together to worship or learn or work or play, I feel this Spirit filling me, expanding me, opening me from the inside out. This Spirit fills me with a deep acceptance of myself and every other person just the way we are. It opens me in trust and releases my self preoccupations and anxieties. This Spirit buoys me up with as I go through the week. It empowers me to give freely and fully without being in danger of losing myself. I can work hard but not feel strained, I can be open to everyone without being used by them. I feel tapped into a flow of energy that is replenished as I share it.

I know that many of you experience something like that too. Just think of all the things that have been happening here this past year or so that have been inspired by this creative spiritual energy that is dancing in our midst: the worship band moving us with their awesome music, the kids singing right out in our children’s choir (and singing the songs over and over at home), the choir and hand bell choir singing and playing their hearts out for us, an enthusiastic cadre of welcomer/greeters, Sunday School classes that kids happily run off to that so beautifully accommodate children with special needs, vacation Bible school where the adults have as much fun as the kids, Kid’s Kamp that’s gathered so much enthusiasm, our youth’s biggest-yet Shantytown this November, an over-the-top Christmas pageant like we’ve never seen, church family fellowship events happening every month, our Sunday evening spiritual growth group that is so meaningful to people, our new Metanoians group where deep sharing is already happening, your awesome generosity for the Tsunami victims, hurricane victims, and Cameron family, and the beautiful way you have been welcoming so many new people into our church family. This to me is the kingdom of God in the midst of us. It’s a life-giving new order that didn’t come by ego-driven strategic planning or anybody pushing their agenda or anybody controlling or protecting their domain. It happens through us, but it’s bigger than all of us, yet it includes each of us. The more we give to it, the more we receive from it.

And what drives this dynamic is the power that Jesus was inviting us to experience when he told us to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love our neighbor as we love ourself. Jesus was inviting us to immerse ourselves in an all-embracing, all-emcompassing love that draws us right out of our ego’s needs to hold back, take care of number one, and pick and choose who we love and how we love them. Jesus was telling us, “Don’t lead with fear or pride or greed or blame or judgment. Lead with love, and the doors of the kingdom will swing open for you.”

In the silent meditation in our bulletin is this rather curious quote from John-Roger:

It seems easy to love God, until you realize that in loving God, you must love everything, including the neighbors. The neighbors may irritate and upset you, and that irritation closes the door to your own inner paradise. When you love both your neighbor and your irritation, the doors open once again.

The kind of love Jesus was urging us to try makes no distinctions between what’s worthy of love and what isn’t. It loves for the sake of love. Marcie got to the place of being able to miss her hard-to-love deceased husband by first deeply accepting her anger and hurt as a part of her reality and loving rather than judging the parts of her that carried those wounds. That helped her begin to release the anger and the pain, and get to the place where she could love and accept him as he was, and understand and embrace his woundedness. That’s what John-Roger means by loving both your neighbor and your irritation. Whatever is going on, turn the energy of love towards it, and it changes its nature. He says that if you’re stuck in traffic, or dealing with a hard challenge at work, say to yourself over and over, “I love this situation.” If you open yourself to your capacity to love without conditions, your resistance, judgment, blame, and frustration dissolve, and you find yourself in the flow of love, gratitude, openness, and trust, which releases your God-given creative power to meet that situation with your best.

You see, the kingdom of God isn’t just a reality that awaits us in the future, or a reality that we hope for but haven’t managed to achieve yet. The kingdom of God lies in our relationship to the reality that is right in front of us.

So we don’t have to wait and see if the events that happen in 2006 are going to keep our hope alive. We already have the power to keep hope, love and peace alive and growing in our world in this moment, and in every moment. We can slip out of our egos and tap into God’s life-giving Spirit by going into the open, all-accepting Stillness inside us that Marcie talked about, by embracing every part of ourselves and every person with deep acceptance, by opening up to life with gratitude, by offering our gifts in a spirit of joyful generosity, by loving God with our whole beings, by loving our neighbor without judgment or reservation, by loving our self with tenderness, and by leading with love and creativity in every situation, no matter how difficult. This is how we find peace and joy within ourselves. This is how we create peace and joy in our world. This is how we live in the creative power of a living hope.

Jesus said, “Behold, the kingdom of God is at hand.” What an exciting adventure it will be to build that kingdom together in the days and the year to come!