Proclaim the Kingdom of Heaven

June 26, 2016

The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

 

Back in 1994, as I think many of you know, I was entering my third and final year of ordination training, and Alison and I had been lucky enough to be allowed to participate in a wonderful exchange program that took us from an Oxfordshire village to Berkeley, California, for a whole exciting and bewildering academic year. At the same time, and old friend of ours was living here, in Chicago, doing a Masters degree down in Hyde Park, and, before we even left England, we arranged to visit him for a long weekend. Indeed, it was the occasion of our first ever visit to this very cathedral, but that is another story.

Life was different back then in a number of ways. While the European Union was well in existence, the Euro currency had not been invented. And we still used travel agents to book airline tickets back then. And thus it was, as I got our travel agent to book us from California to Chicago for this visit, he pointed out that the distance we would fly was pretty much the equivalent distance of a flight from London to Istanbul. "Just think," he said, "if you fly from London to Istanbul, you fly over so many different sovereign states, each with their own language, and each [as it was then] with their own currency. Leaving Britain, you head towards Belgium, Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and finally into Turkey. Fly from SFO to Chicago, you fly over one country, united in language and currency, and a dollar is a dollar in California, Illinois, and all the states in between."

It was food for thought, and made us realize some of the implications of what it might mean, genuinely, to be United States in America, notwithstanding the political, cultural and regional differences that can be found across this vast nation. Indeed, it helped us realize just how vast this land mass is! For reasons that I think are obvious, that journey, and those travel agent's remarks, have been much in my mind since Thursday evening. Because it was "for freedom that Christ has set us free," according to Paul—and, by a worryingly narrow majority, some 17 million or so of my fellow Brits, believe that they have just set the United Kingdom free. Those of them who will have turned up in church this morning will, I am sure, nod will approval when they hear St Paul exhorting people to "Stand firm... and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." Of course, there are some 16 million of us Brits who think that the motives behind this result, and the implications of this result are alarming, and are very far from rejoicing or feeling any pride in the result.

One person, however, who is very pleased with the result of the British referendum, is the presumptive nominee of the Republican party, who, with a curious sense of timing, arrived in Scotland (where every single district voted to Remain), the morning after the vote, to re-open an expensive golf course resort that he owns, and breezily told the BBC that it was a "great thing, a fantastic thing", despite the strongly differing opinion of the Scottish folk gathered around him. Mr. Trump, I think, believes in freedom as well. But if I have followed his views and opinions correctly, it will be a freedom that involves building a rather large wall across the south of this nation. There is no doubt, whatever you may think of Mr. Trump, that he's a great believer in standing firm.

The problem is that you cannot cherry-pick soundbites from a Biblical author as complex as St. Paul and get away with it. While it is true that a survey of the entire Pauline corpus of writing will show some inconsistencies here and there, you certainly cannot cherry pick the odd powerful phrase from within one or two paragraphs. Because, as we just heard, for Paul, the Christian understanding of freedom is not about self-indulgence, but about a love so powerful that it should makes us "slaves to one another". And that has big, big implications.

Writing in the British newspaper The Guardian on Friday morning, one commentator wrote: "This—perhaps the most dramatic event in Britain since the war—was, above all else, a working-class revolt. It may not have been the working-class revolt against the political establishment that many of us favored, but it is undeniable that this result was achieved off the back of furious, alienated working-class votes."  He went on to speak about Britain being an intensely divided nation and analyzed the role of various British political leaders, but went on to say: "But...far greater social forces are at play. From Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders, from Syriza in Greece to Podemos in Spain, from the Austrian far-right to the rise of the Scottish independence movement, this is an era of seething resentment against elites. That frustration is spilling out in all sorts of directions: new left movements, civic nationalism, anti-immigrant populism. Many of the nearly half of the British people who voted remain now feel scared and angry, ready to lash out at their fellow citizens...[and] many of the leavers already felt marginalized, ignored and hated."

None of this—within Britain, within Europe, and well beyond—none of this, as it affects life in the United States, in Illinois, and in this very city of Chicago—none of this speaks of what Paul calls "living by the Spirit". And while we often like to think of Paul as being a rather grumpy kill-joy, and especially when it comes to matters to do with gender and sexual expression, let's just revisit his list of things that are bad: "enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels dissensions, factions"—words which should sound all too familiar as they are becoming an increasingly familiar part of public rhetoric and debate around the western world. For, to quote the Guardian again, "It is about class, inequality, and a politics now so professionalized that is has left most people...[with] a mixture of anger and bafflement...[and] howling political failures that compound...all the clichés about people you cannot trust, answerable only to themselves."

Because there are two tightly-related things here. The first is the rise of political candidates who until very, very recently would have seemed utterly improbable. One of the constant refrains running through the American political process at the moment is the bewilderment that you end up with a presidential candidate who has no experience at all of either professional politics or military service. And at the other end of the political spectrum it is also remarkable that Mr. Sanders, whose political self-definition includes the word "socialist", made such running in the primaries, even if at the end he did not win his race.

In different ways, both Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders are protest-vote candidates—and you will find them eerily mirrored if you look at the British political scene. We are doing protest in the west, because "something is rotten in the state" (to use a Shakespearean turn of phrase). But the bigger concern, to my mind, is not just that there are political protests being made manifest in candidates and issues around the world. The big concern is the tone, language and actions of these debates. Much of Mr. Trump's primary campaign was mired with outbreaks of violence—including here in Chicago, where a scheduled meeting had to be cancelled on security grounds—and the use of extreme language. And the bigger, murderous violence we have seen, most recently in the utter horror of Orlando, and with the murder of a British MP, while clearly actions of people who were mentally ill, is, I believe, also fueled by the anger and hatred that is palpably present in much of the current rhetoric. As the writer I quoted just now said, this is an era of "seething resentment and people who are scared, angry, ready to lash out."

The United Kingdom is not united and may well become fatally disunited. Europe is falling apart. And while the union of the United States is not about to be severed, there is no shortage of political, social and economic disunity within these shores, and within this city, as we are all well aware. Which is why it is so, so important that we who are the Body of Christ in this place. That is why it is so desperately important that we remember that the "whole law is summed up in a single commandment: You shall love your neighbor as yourself". It is so important that we—we, of all people—remember that love requires and demands of us that we become "slaves to one another".

"Christ has set us free," wrote St. Paul. And his own life story shows a remarkable and unexpected freedom, embraced in remarkable, unexpected and self-sacrificial ways. That's a clue to the kind of freedom that is gospel-shaped freedom. So where does this leave us—us, here this morning, as Christ's broken body for the world? The "us" in churches across this city, across this nation, and across the world. For I have not indulged in this political commentary just because as a "Brit in exile" I'm devastated by what has happened back home—although I am deeply devastated. But that's not the point for this sermon in this act of worship.

The point, the point which screams out at me loudly and clearly, is that the world around us is divided. It is deeply divided, and I believe it is dangerously divided. And I think it will get worse before it gets better—quite possibly very much worse. I think the presidential election campaign, which is already trading deeply personal and offensive taunts between the candidates, will heighten this tension already, and, as in Britain on Friday morning, I think on Wednesday, November 9, this nation may wake up to similarly deep splits and divisions, whatever the outcome.

Which just leaves the question, what is our role as the church? Because we are the people who are called by God to be slaves one to another. We are the people commissioned by God not to use freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence but to stand firm and not submit to the yoke of slavery. We are the people commanded by God "to love our neighbour as we love ourselves."

I don't know fully what that means, but our gospel reading this morning gives us some very important clues. Jesus is setting his face to go towards Jerusalem. Luke, in particular, makes a big point about this and he does so, in part, because the over-arching message of his gospel is that we are called to walk with Jesus to Jerusalem, taking up our cross with him, day by day by day.

And going to Jerusalem is costly and painful, not just because of what will happen when we get there but also because of those we will meet on the way. The Samaritans—they'd had a referendum, I think—were probably talking of building a wall. Because since the Babylonian Exile and its consequences, they did not get on with their very close cousins, the Jews. They didn't believe in worshipping in Jerusalem—they liked to worship on their own mountain, Mt. Gerizim—and so they didn't "receive Jesus", as he walks through their region.

And what do James and John do? What do two of Jesus' closest followers do, one of them the saint in whose honor this very building is name? What do these two people who should know better do? They suggest that the Samaritans—these folk from whom they are slightly different, and with whom they disagree—they suggest that fire should be brought down on them from heaven "to consume them". Bomb them. Exclude them. Assassinate them. And Jesus rebukes them. So clue number one is a stark reminder that we are called to behave in a manner very different to how some others in the world chose to behave towards those with whom they disagree.

And a second clue comes when all those folk start making excuses to Jesus. I would follow you, but....

When you go to seminary and study the New Testament, one of the things thrown at you by your professors is the need to grapple with what is often called the Historical Jesus. In other words, you need to bring academic insights into what is, or is not, literal, historical truth in the gospel narratives. As part of that movement, some decades ago, some scholars decided to grade all the different sayings of Jesus, to indicate how likely it was that Jesus actually said any given remark attributed to him. And it was in part of that gospel reading we heard just now the remark the scholars thought was the most authentic saying of Jesus in the entire four gospels. Because the scholarly concern in their minds was the possibility that the evangelists might have elaborated or created some remarks and put them in Jesus' mouth, to underscore their belief in his divinity. But all of these scholars agreed that, in the First Century culture of the Middle East, nobody who wanted to paint a picture of someone worthy of praise and worship would ever have made up the line for them: "Leave the dead to bury their own dead."

That was a sentiment that was downright offensive in both Jewish and gentile culture, and the fact that Jesus says it is a hard wake-up call to the radical nature of discipleship. And that's the second clue we get today: we are called to find a new, different and challenging rhetoric based in the Good News of the gospel, a rhetoric that shows a stronger and better, and perhaps more shocking path, than the rhetoric of the world around us.

And the final clue is simply this: we must not be distracted. For if we are distracted and look back, we are not fit for the Kingdom of God. And what I know even more clearly this weekend than I knew before is that the world needs God's Kingdom, and the world needs a Christ-like way of doing and being and living, more and more and more. Otherwise love has no chance, our neighbor has no chance, and we have no chance. "So, as for you—and for me—we "must go and proclaim the Kingdom of God." Amen.

Back in 1994, as I think many of you know, I was entering my third and final year of ordination training, and Alison and I had been lucky enough to be allowed to participate in a wonderful exchange program that took us from an Oxfordshire village to Berkeley, California, for a whole exciting and bewildering academic year. At the same time, and old friend of ours was living here, in Chicago, doing a Masters degree down in Hyde Park, and, before we even left England, we arranged to visit him for a long weekend. Indeed, it was the occasion of our first ever visit to this very cathedral, but that is another story.

 

Life was different back then in a number of ways. While the European Union was well in existence, the Euro currency had not been invented. And we still used travel agents to book airline tickets back then. And thus it was, as I got our travel agent to book us from California to Chicago for this visit, he pointed out that the distance we would fly was pretty much the equivalent distance of a flight from London to Istanbul.

 

“Just think,” he said – “if you fly from London to Istanbul, you fly over so many different sovereign states, each with their own language, and each [as it was then] with their own currency. Leaving Britain, you head towards Belgium, Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and finally into Turkey.

 

Fly from SFO to Chicago, you fly over one country, united in language and currency, and a dollar is a dollar in California, Illinois, and all the states in between.”

 

It was food for thought, and made us realise some of the implications of what it might mean, genuinely, to be United States in America, notwithstanding the political, cultural and regional differences that can be found across this vast nation. Indeed, it helped us realise just how vast this land mass is!

 

For reasons that I think are obvious, that journey, and those travel agent’s remarks, have been much in my mind since Thursday evening. Because it was “for freedom that Christ has set us free,” according to Paul – and, by a worryingly narrow majority, some 17 million or so of my fellow Brits, believe that they have just set the United Kingdom free. Those of them who will have turned up in church this morning will, I am sure, nod will approval when they hear St Paul exhorting people to “Stand firm… and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”

 

Of course, there are some 16 million of us Brits who think that the motives behind this result, and the implications of this result are alarming, and are very far from rejoicing or feeling any pride in the result.

 

One person, however, who is very pleased with the result of the British referendum, is the presumptive nominee of the Republican party, who, with a curious sense of timing, arrived in Scotland (where every single district voted to Remain), the morning after the vote, to re-open an expensive golf course resort that he owns, and breezily told the BBC that it was a “great thing, a fantastic thing”, despite the strongly differing opinion of the Scottish folk gathered around him.

 

Mr. Trump, I think, believes in freedom as well. But if I have followed his views and opinions correctly, it will be a freedom that involves building a rather large wall across the south of this nation. There is no doubt, whatever you may think of Mr. Trump, that he’s a great believer in standing firm.

 

The problem is that you cannot cherry-pick soundbites from a Biblical author as complex as St. Paul and get away with it. While it is true that a survey of the entire Pauline corpus of writing will show some inconsistencies here and there, you certainly cannot cherry pick the odd powerful phrase from within one or two paragraphs. Because, as we just heard, for Paul, the Christian understanding of freedom is not about self-indulgence, but about a love so powerful that it should makes us “slaves to one another”. And that has big, big implications.

 

Writing in the British newspaper The Guardian on Friday morning, one commentator wrote:

 

“This – perhaps the most dramatic event in Britain since the war – was, above all else, a working-class revolt. It may not have been the working-class revolt against the political establishment that many of us favored, but it is undeniable that this result was achieved off the back of furious, alienated working-class votes.”

 

He went on to speak about Britain being anintensely divided nationand analyzed the role of various British political leaders, but went on to say:

 

“But…far greater social forces are at play. From Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders, from Syriza in Greece to Podemos in Spain, from the Austrian far-right to the rise of the Scottish independence movement, this is an era of seething resentment against elites. That frustration is spilling out in all sorts of directions: new left movements, civic nationalism, anti-immigrant populism.

Many of the nearly half of the British people who voted remain now feel scared and angry, ready to lash out at their fellow citizens…[and] many of the leavers already felt marginalized, ignored and hated.”

 

None of this—within Britain, within Europe, and well beyond—none of this, as it affects life in the United States, in Illinois, and in this very city of Chicago—none of this speaks of what Paul calls “living by the Spirit”. And while we often like to think of Paul as being a rather grumpy kill-joy, and especially when it comes to matters to do with gender and sexual expression, let’s just revisit his list of things that are bad: “enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels dissensions, factions”—words which should sound all too familiar as they are becoming an increasingly familiar part of public rhetoric and debate around the western world.

 

For, to quote the Guardian again, “It is about class, inequality, and a politics now so professionalised that is has left most people…[with] a mixture of anger and bafflement…[and] howling political failures that compound…all the clichés about people you cannot trust, answerable only to themselves.”

 

Because there are two tightly-related things here. The first is the rise of political candidates who until very, very recently would have seemed utterly improbable. One of the constant refrains running through the American political process at the moment is the bewilderment that you end up with a presidential candidate who has no experience at all of either professional politics or military service. And at the other end of the political spectrum it is also remarkable that Mr. Sanders, whose political self-definition includes the word “socialist”, made such running in the primaries, even if at the end he did not win his race.

 

In different ways, both Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders are protest-vote candidates—and you will find them eerily mirrored if you look at the British political scene. We are doing protest in the west, because “something is rotten in the state” (to use a Shakespearean turn of phrase).

 

But the bigger concern, to my mind, is not just that there are political protests being made manifest in candidates and issues around the world. The big concern is the tone, language and actions of these debates. Much of Mr. Trump’s primary campaign was mired with outbreaks of violence—including here in Chicago, where a scheduled meeting had to be cancelled on security grounds—and the use of extreme language.

 

And the bigger, murderous violence we have seen, most recently in the utter horror of Orlando, and with the murder of a British MP, while clearly actions of people who were mentally ill, is, I believe, also fuelled by the anger and hatred that is palpably present in much of the current rhetoric. As the writer I quoted just now said, this is an era of “seething resentment and people who are scared, angry, ready to lash out.”

 

The United Kingdom is not united and may well become fatally disunited. Europe is falling apart. And while the union of the United States is not about to be severed, there is no shortage of political, social and economic disunity within these shores, and within this city, as we are all well aware. Which is why it is so, so important that we who are the Body of Christ in this place. That is why it is so desperately important that we remember that the “whole law is summed up in a single commandment: You shall love your neighbour as yourself”. It is so important that we—we, of all people—remember that love requires and demands of us that we become “slaves to one another”.

 

“Christ has set us free,” wrote St. Paul. And his own life story shows a remarkable and unexpected freedom, embraced in remarkable, unexpected and self-sacrificial ways. That’s a clue to the kind of freedom that is gospel-shaped freedom.

 

So where does this leave us—us, here this morning, as Christ’s broken body for the world? The “us” in churches across this city, across this nation, and across the world. For I have not indulged in this political commentary just because as a “Brit in exile” I’m devastated by what has happened back home—although I am deeply devastated. But that’s not the point for this sermon in this act of worship.

 

The point, the point which screams out at me loudly and clearly, is that the world around us is divided. It is deeply divided, and I believe it is dangerously divided. And I think it will get worse before it gets better—quite possibly very much worse. I think the presidential election campaign, which is already trading deeply personal and offensive taunts between the candidates, will heighten this tension already, and, as in Britain on Friday morning, I think on Wednesday, November 9, this nation may wake up to similarly deep splits and divisions, whatever the outcome.

 

Which just leaves the question, what is our role as the church? Because we are the people who are called by God to be slaves one to another. We are the people commissioned by God not to use freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence but to stand firm and not submit to the yoke of slavery. We are the people commanded by God “to love our neighbour as we love ourselves.”

 

I don’t know fully what that means, but our gospel reading this morning gives us some very important clues. Jesus is setting his face to go towards Jerusalem. Luke, in particular, makes a big point about this and he does so, in part, because the over-arching message of his gospel is that we are called to walk with Jesus to Jerusalem, taking up our cross with him, day by day by day.

 

And going to Jerusalem is costly and painful, not just because of what will happen when we get there but also because of those we will meet on the way. The Samaritans—they’d had a referendum, I think—were probably talking of building a wall. Because since the Babylonian Exile and its consequences, they did not get on with their very close cousins, the Jews. They didn’t believe in worshipping in Jerusalem—they liked to worship on their own mountain, Mt. Gerizim—and so they didn’t “receive Jesus”, as he walks through their region.

 

And what do James and John do? What do two of Jesus’ closest followers do, one of them the saint in whose honor this very building is name? What do these two people who should know better do? They suggest that the Samaritans—these folk from whom they are slightly different, and with whom they disagree—they suggest that fire should be brought down on them from heaven “to consume them”. Bomb them. Exclude them. Assassinate them.

 

And Jesus rebukes them. So clue number one is a stark reminder that we are called to behave in a manner very different to how some others in the world chose to behave towards those with whom they disagree.

 

And a second clue comes when all those folk start making excuses to Jesus. I would follow you, but….

 

When you go to seminary and study the New Testament, one of the things thrown at you by your professors is the need to grapple with what is often called the Historical Jesus. In other words, you need to bring academic insights into what is, or is not, literal, historical truth in the gospel narratives.

 

As part of that movement, some decades ago, some scholars decided to grade all the different sayings of Jesus, to indicate how likely it was that Jesus actually said any given remark attributed to him. And it was in part of that gospel reading we heard just now the remark the scholars thought was the most authentic saying of Jesus in the entire four gospels. Because the scholarly concern in their minds was the possibility that the evangelists might have elaborated or created some remarks and put them in Jesus’ mouth, to underscore their belief in his divinity. But all of these scholars agreed that, in the First Century culture of the Middle East, nobody who wanted to paint a picture of someone worthy of praise and worship would ever have made up the line for them: “Leave the dead to bury their own dead.”

 

That was a sentiment that was downright offensive in both Jewish and gentile culture, and the fact that Jesus says it is a hard wake-up call to the radical nature of discipleship. And that’s the second clue we get today: we are called to find a new, different and challenging rhetoric based in the Good News of the gospel, a rhetoric that shows a stronger and better, and perhaps more shocking path, than the rhetoric of the world around us.

 

And the final clue is simply this: we must not be distracted. For if we are distracted and look back, we are not fit for the Kingdom of God. And what I know even more clearly this weekend than I knew before is that the world needs God’s Kingdom, and the world needs a Christ-like way of doing and being and living, more and more and more. Otherwise love has no chance, our neighbor has no chance, and we have no chance. “So, as for you—and for me—we “must go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.” Amen.