Henrietta United Church of Christ

Rev. David Inglis Mark 1:14-15

February 10, 2008

“The Church Jesus Dreams Of”

Once in awhile I get hit with a feeling of powerlessness, do you? Sometimes I feel it when I see people losing their jobs while struggling to pay for health care, while CEOs and large corporations rake in outrageous amounts of money. Sometimes I feel it when I read how global climate change is already happening even faster than the alarming projections. Sometimes I feel it when I think about the intractable conflict in the Middle East in which we’ve gotten ourselves embroiled, with no resolution in sight. Sometimes I feel it when I catch glimpses of how much of the “information” we get from the government, business and media is simply what they want us to believe. Sometimes I feel it when I realized how caught up we are in a culture that loves things and uses people, that floods us with information but has a drought of wisdom, that extols our freedoms while it promotes all kinds of addictions, that offers time saving devices while it accelerates our lives into a frantic blur, that keeps us in contact with so many people without making deep connections with anyone, that says it stands for peace while it entertains adults and children with violence.

Einstein said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” Do you think we should wait for the government or business or technology to create a sustainable world where we and our children and the children around the world can live and thrive with some kind of hope? The only way things are going to change is if we the people of this world begin to raise the level of consciousness in ourselves, in our communities, and in the government and our businesses and in the technologies we create.

Thinking about these things has gotten me taking a new look at Jesus. And the more I look, the more I see that the good news and deep truth that he shared in his day offers the same hope for our world as it did for the world he lived in.

His world stifled people’s souls at least as much as ours does today. If you had been alive in Jesus’ day, Roman soldiers would have routinely tramped past your house, and you would never know when they might collar one of your neighbors or you and rough you up, just to make sure everybody knew who was in charge.

When your local tax collector came around, he could go through all your possessions and take pretty much whatever he wanted, which would be sold to line his pockets and pay for the Roman’s occupying your land.

Even if your family had farmed a plot of land for generations, you probably would have lost your land and your home from new laws that allowed creditors to confiscate land, houses, wives, and children to pay off debts. The only thing they had to leave you was one set of clothes.

You would have been afraid of being judged, shamed or rejected for not keeping all the burdensome religious laws, for being “punished by God” for becoming blind, lame or sick–and if you were born as a female, men wouldn’t have believed that you even had a soul.

So this was the kind of world that Jesus came into–every bit as full of violence, exploitation, and dehumanization as our world is today. So let’s look again at Jesus’ central message, which he began proclaiming from the beginning of his ministry: “The kingdom of God is at hand–repent, and believe the good news.” Over time, the good news about Jesus became the content of most sermons. What has gotten lost was the good news of Jesus–the content of his own message. So let’s unpack what Jesus himself was preaching about.

The Greek word translated as “kingdom” in the phrase “kingdom of God” or reign of God is basilea. It’s the same word as “empire,” as in the Roman empire. Jesus was proclaiming an alternative way of ordering our lives, our relationships, our communities, our society, our world–not around domination, greed, fear, or judgement, but ordering them around God–the Power or Force that created all things as part of one creation, whose purpose is shalom, whose will is justice for all people, whose agency is love, whose sign is hope and joy.

Jesus didn’t just talk about this realm of God; he also embodied it and demonstrated it. His healing of the lepers and lame and blind and talking to women and eating with the tax collectors and sinners and forgiving the woman caught in adultery weren’t just acts of mercy or compassion. They were also the visible bringing back into God’s community those who had been excluded and rejected. He told the self-righteous Pharisees that these people were entering the kingdom of God before they were.

Jesus’ vision of the realm of God wasn’t just an idealistic utopian dream, and it wasn’t just an eternal realm we would go to when we die. He said that the kingdom of God was a potentiality that was already “at hand,” “within you,” “among you,” and “in your midst.”

The Bible has lots of accounts of people awakening to this kingdom. People who were bound up and defined by their illnesses felt the surge of God’s love energy through Jesus and went away healed, whole, and free in body, mind and spirit. The woman of ill repute off the street was so moved to have experienced it that she barged into a dinner party and washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. The early church that is described in the book of Acts created a community of amazing faith, hope and love. They shared all things in common, and they took in the widows and orphans that had been discarded by society and supported them. In a culture based on distinction and exclusion, they formed communities where there was no longer “male nor female, Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free.” Imagine women rising to leadership in a culture quite similar to today’s Taliban. Those early Christians were the first recorded conscientious objectors, and refused to serve in Caesar’s army, even though they often paid with their lives. When they were thrown to the lions, they would kneel and pray for the spectators, which made the spectators uncomfortable enough that that form of entertainment was stopped. They set up the first hospices to care for the sick and lame, which became the precursor to hospitals. People of said of these early Christians, “Look at how they love each other.”

These early Christians caught the spirit of the kingdom of God Jesus had talked about. God’s reign was within them, it was among them, and it began to permeate the world around them when they fully let God’s transforming love rule in their lives. Even though Christians were persecuted by being hung on crosses or set afire as torches in Caesar’s garden, this movement grew and spread to more and more souls who were hungering for this kind of love, faith and hope.

Then something happened to this movement. According to the story, Emperor Constantine saw a vision of the cross when he was leading his army into battle, and he heard a voice say, “By this sign you shall conquer.” He converted to Christianity, and forced the entire Roman Empire to convert to Christianity. It is said that the Roman Empire became Christianized. It’s more accurate to say that Christianity became Empire-ized. Those who weren’t Christians became the persecuted ones. Christianity became a tool of the kingdom of power and domination to unite people under the control of the political establishment. The empire-ized Christian leaders taught that God’s salvation was possible only through the sacraments of the Church, and people were threatened with eternal damnation if they questioned or challenged the authority of the Pope or the priests. Jews, pagans, free thinkers, and countless women were persecuted and killed during the Inquisition and witch hunts. Jesus’ gospel about the kingdom of God creating a new order in this world got replaced by a message about the unimportance of this world and how to avoid eternal damnation and go to heaven when you at last leave this fallen world behind.

So let’s go back to Jesus’ central theme: “The kingdom of God is at hand–repent, and believe the good news.” The reign of God–a new order of love, hope, freedom, and joy– is within your reach, and it can be within your experience, and it can become the reality you live in and that you help God create.

So how do we move into it? “Repent,” he said. In the Bible there are two main words that are translated as “repent.” The Hebrew word, rahne, which we find in the Hebrew Scriptures, means to be sorry for our sins and to humbly turn back towards God , so that we can become better people. It’s only by being sorrowfully aware that our old ways of doing things aren’t working, that they are causing harm to others and ourselves, that they are violating something precious, that we will have the impetus to leave the kingdom of ego and turn toward the kingdom of God.

But the scripture passage we read today, like all of the New Testament, was written in Greek. The Greek word that’s translated “repent” here in Jesus’ message is metanoia. “Meta” means “beyond;” “noia” means “mind.” If we have a metanoia–a conversion or life-changing transformation–we go beyond or transcend our past ways of thinking, our old values, assumptions, priorities, and the way we put the world together. Metanoia means to move to a higher level of consciousness, like Einstein said we need to do in order to solve the problems that threaten our world.

For Jesus, entering the reign of God meant fully opening our lives to the life-changing love, the renewing power, the healing forgiveness and the transcendent truths of God, which God freely offers us, every other person, and the world. He showed us a door into this reality when he challenged us to follow the two greatest commandments: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength;” and “love your neighbor as yourself.” And as Jesus taught, every child of God is your neighbor. So Jesus calls us to repent, to go beyond our old ways of thinking, and to believe the good news–to begin to envision it so we can live into it.

In his book Everything Must Change–Jesus, Global Crises and a Revolution of Hope, Brian McLaren says some helpful words about the power of beliefs.

If the word believing seems too soft a strategy for confronting global crises, I would reply that believing seems like a soft of weak thing only when it is a domesticated belief. Tame believing for and within the dominant system may be easy, but [courageous] believing against and beyond it turns normal people into heroes and history changers. Martin Luther, Martin Luther King Jr., Galileo, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, St. Francis...they all showed this heroic courage to believe against and beyond the dominant systems of their day. So we must realize this: the suicidal [set of beliefs] that dominates our world today has no power except the power we give it by believing it. Similarly, believing [in] an alternative and transforming [reality] may turn out to be the most [powerful] thing any of us can ever do.¹

Jesus told two short parables that give us a window into his dream for the church. The first is this: “What is the kingdom of God like? And to what should I compare it? It is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in the garden; it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches” (Luke 13:18-19). This mustard seed of the kingdom could be as small as one person opening their life to God, turning from greed to gratitude, from fear to faith, from selfishness to service, from jealousy to joy. And others are attracted to this way of living, and they open to God too, and form a community of such love, peace and hope that others come and find food in its fruit and a home in its branches. And as mustard seeds do, they spread like weeds, and more of them grow, until they’ve changed the landscape of the world around them.

And Jesus followed that parable with this one: The kingdom of God “is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures (about a bushel) of flour until all of it was leavened” (Luke 13:21). To create a world of love, peace, compassion, and justice in the midst of the old one, Jesus wouldn’t have us try to tear down the old one. He suggests that we take this vision of a new reality and knead it into the world around us, until it begins to come to life and rise–and until all of it eventually is leavened.

And so my dream for this church–us, right here–is that we become an outpost of the realm of God–a mustard tree that welcomes all the birds into its branches who want to taste this new reality of faith, hope, love and joy that we find when we center our lives in God. And we can be like that baker woman, taking this living leaven of God’s reign and kneading it into our child rearing, our relationships, our work places, our neighborhoods, our voting booths, our conversation, our lifestyle choices.

Together, as a church, we can provide a place where people’s numbed out, stressed-out burdened souls are awakened to something inside them that is God-created, beautiful, and eternal, and we can provide fertile soil for their souls to grow.

We can create a place where people can experience Christ’s welcome where they have been rejected, wholeness where they have been broken, release where they have been bound by shame, freedom where they have been bound by fear, forgiveness where they have defined themselves by their mistakes and guidance where they have lost their way.

We can create a place where each person’s gifts are recognized and encouraged, and where they find meaning and purpose for their lives.

We can create a place where children’s spirits can open and grow in gratitude, wonder, awe, faith, generosity, trust, and love–a place where they experience an alternative to over-consumption, over-stimulation, and over-indulgence.

We can create a place that equips and empowers us to create shalom where there is conflict, compassion where there is judgement, justice where there is oppression, and stewardship of God’s creation where there is exploitation.

This church that I dream of and that Jesus dreams of is already coming true. “Behold, the realm of God is in the midst of us!” But in some ways we’re just getting started. And Jesus’ parable reminds us that our work isn’t done until the whole loaf around us is all leavened. I’d say we have a way to go!

To guide us on our way to creating the church of God’s dreams, my sermons for the next couple of months are going to be drawing on Jesus’ beatitudes, which start with “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Each beatitude is a paradox, designed to take us to a place of metanoia–beyond our old ways of thinking and looking for joy and success. Each one opens a door for us to enter the realm of God.

To give us a chance to ponder and internalize these doorways into God’s realm that Jesus is offering us, I’m going to hold ½-hour spiritual growth sessions in the Lounge after coffee hour starting next Sunday. If you think you’d like to attend and need child care, let me know and we’ll set that up.

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe the good news.” Believe the good news. Live the good news. And become part of the good news of God’s reign of love--in our hearts, in our relationships, and in our world.