Matthew
4:12-23
I
have good news and bad news for you this morning. The good news is that the
kingdom of heaven has drawn near — very near. I’m not talking about something
that happens after we die or at the end of time, because Jesus is not talking
about that. The kingdom may reach its fulfillment in the age to come, but it
has come close to us now. It’s not a place, it’s not a destination: it’s a
state of being in which God reigns and the values God holds dear, the values
Jesus embodies — love, justice, compassion, mercy, generosity, care for all
that is broken and hurting — are all fully lived out. That kingdom is close at
hand: it is all around us and it is within us. Right now. That is amazing good
news.
The
bad news is that the one thing stopping us from experiencing it is ourselves.
God is not angry at us. God is not punishing us. God is not withholding the
kingdom from us. When we don’t experience it, when we don’t feel at least some
of the joy and peace of it, it’s because we do not choose it and we are not
living it.
Hence
the importance of that word repent, which as you should all know very well by
now does not mean “feel really crappy about yourself” but rather “change your
mind.” In the Gospel passage today, Jesus begins his public ministry, and that
ministry is all about changing people’s minds so that they can live in the
kingdom of heaven now.
I
want to talk about living in the kingdom today because it is the core of Jesus’
teaching and because this Gospel tells us some things that are crucial if we
are actually going to do that. The first is that if we want to experience the
kingdom of heaven, we need to share the kingdom of heaven. Only God can make
that kingdom happen, but God makes it happen through people. And God has
designed it so that we receive it by giving it away. This is why Jesus starts
by forming a community of people to give the kingdom away to others. Those
fishermen called today, Simon, Andrew, James, and John, will grow in love and
mercy as they learn to give love and mercy to others. And that’s not just true for the twelve
disciples. We see it throughout the Gospels. Remember Zacchaeus? He’s a tax
collector: everyone hates him and he has no friends. He climbs a tree to see
Jesus, and Jesus calls out to him and says, Zacchaeus,
hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today. And Zacchaeus is
so moved that Jesus wants to spend time with him, so happy when Jesus shows him
that kind of love. Is that when the kingdom happens to Zacchaeus? No: it’s when
he responds by paying back all those he has defrauded and giving away half his
wealth to the poor. Then, Jesus says, he is really living in the kingdom. Or
remember the Gerasene demoniac, possessed by a legion of demons and living
alone among the tombs. Jesus heals him, which is a great miracle. But is that
the end of the story? No: Jesus says to the man, Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for
you, and what mercy he has shown you. That’s when he starts to fully
experience the kingdom. It’s the same story over and over again. Let me put it
this way: there are no consumers in the kingdom of heaven. We can’t be passive
recipients of it: we can only be active participants in it. We will receive
love as we give love. Doing that, being part of the endless flow of divine
love, is what it means to live in the kingdom
The
second thing that is so striking about this Gospel is the urgency of it. Those
fishermen leave their nets immediately to follow Jesus. That may seem
incomprehensible to us, but it underlines how immediately available the kingdom
is. We don’t need years of study, we don’t need to “get holy,” we don’t need to
do anything other than change our minds and follow Jesus TODAY.
How
do we do that? Well, we can begin by accepting the fact that the kingdom of heaven
has already drawn near to us, that the Holy Spirit of God already dwells in us
and wants to move through us, and that our participation in the kingdom affects
every single thing we do. I often think of my car as my hermitage because I can be quiet in it, thinking and praying as
I drive. So when I read an article recently that referred to a book
called, My Monastery is My Minivan, it grabbed my attention. The book was written by a woman named
Denise Roy, and the excerpt I read from it goes like this: “For two decades, I
have broken bread, poured grape juice, preached, prayed, told stories, bestowed
blessings, taken care of the sick, heard confessions. I have been a parent.
These have been the sacraments of my daily life and, I suspect, yours. These are
simple, sacred acts. These are how we mediate love, as we minister to our own
little congregations — children, spouse, family, and friends.” Like this woman,
we can see ourselves as kingdom people. If need be, we can re-envision or
re-imagine our lives today. We are not isolated beings, separated from God,
trying to earn our way into heaven when we die. We are God’s beloved, enfolded
in Divine Love, redeemed by Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit seeking to flow
through us each and every moment, in all that we do. We are participants in the
kingdom. Believing that is repentance, believing that is changing our minds,
and we can do that right now, immediately, in this service.
And
everything flows from that. Generosity is a hallmark of the kingdom, and we can
be generous today. We can go online and give some of our money away to help
people in need today. There’s no reason to put it off until tomorrow. Mercy is
perhaps the greatest sign of the kingdom. God continually pours mercy upon us,
and there are people in our lives and in our world in need of mercy right now.
We can show mercy to at least one of them today. There’s no reason to put it
off until tomorrow. Acting immediately shows us in the clearest possible way
how immediately available the kingdom is to us, how immediately real it is. And
please hear me: the goal is not to be perfect: we’ll never be perfect. We don’t
need to live perfectly: we need to live purposefully, as people who say yes to
the Good News of Jesus. Because the kingdom of heaven has come near: it is
closer to us than our own breath. And to experience it, we only need to live
it. Today.
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