St.
Martin in the Fields Church, Atlanta
“Seeing the kingdom of God for Jesus means understanding that God is reclaiming a relationship with his creation that has been fractured since the time in the garden. God is calling people, all people back into a relationship that he desires to share.”
O God be in my mouth as I speak for you and fill this place with your great grace that we may leave this place less of what we use to be and more of what we ought to be through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
For God so loved the world that
he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him should not perish
but have everlasting life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn
the world, but that the world might be saved through him.
One of the great advantages or
disadvantages to being a priest is having a well-known email address.
For some reason, I seem to be on
everyone’s mailing list. I get chain letters, ads to improve my love life,
lottery winnings in the Netherlands and of course lots of jokes.
As you can imagine, if the joke
has any kind of religious connotations, it automatically gets forwarded to me.
Usually they are pretty standard
fare…you know the sort, a Baptist minister, a rabbi and a priest are stuck in a
life boat, on a desert island or in the waiting room of the afterlife.
This past week I did get one
“life after death” joke that seemed to fit in well with this morning’s gospel.
Once upon a time a woman died
after a long battle with cancer and arrived at the gates of heaven.
While she was waiting for St.
Peter to greet her, she peeked through the gates of heaven. She saw a beautiful
banquet table.
Sitting around it were her
parents and all the other people she had loved and who had died before her.
They were all enjoying sumptuous
feast, drinking wine and waving at her.
“Hello, how are you? We have
been waiting for you. Good to see you.”
When St. Peter finally came by,
the woman said to him, “This is a wonderful place. How do I get in?”
“You have to spell a word,” St.
Peter told her. The woman’s heart sank, she didn’t know heaven had pop quizzes.
“What’s the word?” The woman
asked.
“Love” replied St. Peter.
With a sigh of relief, the woman
spelled “l-o-v-e” and St. Peter welcomed her into heaven.
About a year later, St. Peter
came to the woman and asked if she minded taking on his duties for the day. He
wanted to do a little fishing with James and John.
While the woman was guarding the
pearly gates, her former husband arrived.
“I’m surprised to see you,” The
woman said. “How have you been?”
“Oh, I have been doing pretty
well since you died.” Her husband replied.
“I married the beautiful young
nurse who took care of you while you were ill. And then believe it or not I won
the lottery. I sold our little house and bought a mansion.
My wife and I traveled all over
the world. We were on vacation and I went water skiing this morning. I fell,
the ski hit my head, and here I am.”
“Boy heaven looks lovely, how do
I get into this wonderful place.” Said her husband.
“Simple, she said, all you have
to do is spell a word.”
“What word?” her husband said.
Czechoslovakia.
As my story demonstrates, there
is a natural human desire for us to want to know who will be saved at the end
of time and for us to have a say in that decision.
This is the reason Nicodemus
decides to visit Jesus in the middle of the night. He wants to make sure that
he is going to make the cut for heavenly glory.
Predictions about final judgment
have always been part of our culture from the Jehovah Witnesses of the 19th
century to Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth in the 1970’s.
Most recently the Left Behind
series of books has again popularized the idea that some of us are going to
paradise.
All the other folks, well you know
what is going to happen to them and it doesn’t matter how strong that sunscreen
happens to be.
Of course Jesus, is always
deliberately ambiguous about exactly when or how this is going to happen.
At the beginning of the Acts of
the Apostle before he leaves his followers, they ask Jesus point blank, “Are
you now going to restore the kingdom of Israel”.
Jesus replies, “It is not for
you to know the times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own
authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you;
and you shall be my witnesses…to the end of the earth.”
Jesus words from Acts remind us
this morning that we are called to be his witnesses to the world and not his
personal judges.
As the wife in my story
discovered this can be a hard role to take given our fallen natures.
We are not inclined to provide
the type of forgiveness that Jesus showed to the woman taken in adultery or the
thief on the cross.
This is because Jesus’ standard
for forgiveness costs us too much. It requires that we let go of the pride and
envy that control our human lives.
This is what I think Jesus was
trying to get across to Nicodemus in this morning’s Gospel lesson.
Nicodemus wants to know what he
must do to be saved.
Rabbi, we know that you are a
teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do, unless God is
with him.
Jesus answered him, “Very truly,
I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above”.
In prior translations this
phrase was rendered “born again or born anew.”
That is the way most of us,
particularly those who have grown up in the south are use to hearing it. Are
you born again? I have been asked that question on airplanes, and at shopping
malls.
Yet if we look carefully, Jesus
words imply that seeing the kingdom of God is not necessarily something that
comes after our death. It is not a
prediction about being a sheep or a goat at final judgment.
Instead the phrase is now
rendered from the Greek as “born from above”, for Episcopalians, this is what
our baptism prepares us to receive.
We come to the font and are
washed with the water and the spirit of God.
This journey of faith that
begins for children and some adults gives us the possibility of renewing our
lives, starting over and seeing the presence of God in this world and in each
other.
Jesus tries to get this across
to Nicodemus. He wants him to understand that his relationship with God has to
change from one that is based on keeping rules to one that uses a standard
based on God’s love and forgiveness.
Seeing the kingdom of God for
Jesus means understanding that God is reclaiming a relationship with his
creation that has been fractured since the time in the garden. God is calling
people, all people back into a relationship that he desires to share.
This kingdom is not something we
get after death when we find out whether we have been left behind.
No Jesus’ message through
Scripture is that God’s kingdom is available for us to use in the work and
ministry of the church today.
This is the message that we hear
Jesus giving to Nicodemus. God so loved the world that he came to save it, and
not to condemn it. And this is where, I think, the Left Behind folks get the
message wrong.
And frankly I don’t know about
you, but when I get to heaven someday, I would much rather spell the word love
than Czechoslovakia.