Scripture: Mark 1:35-39; Mark 1:9-15; John 3:1-10.
I want to begin today where I left off last week. Maybe I sort of acted like I was done with the sermon last week, but I wasn’t. I knew I wasn’t. In fact most sermons are not really done. You just find a place to stop. Because if sermons are seen as a kind of running commentary on our faith journeys, then of course you can stop them but you can’t end them; they are never complete.
Anyway, there was a scripture I didn’t quite get to last week, the one that we began this week with where Jesus had got up early in the morning and gone off by himself to pray, and then the disciples come looking for him, telling him that “everyone is searching for you”. Obviously there is a plain meaning to this statement. Jesus is already in high demand and people are literally looking for him, wondering where he is. But I chose that passage because of the spiritual meaning of that statement too. People are looking for Jesus with their hearts, wondering who he is and what he has to do with them and so forth. That’s why I chose the passage for last week, because I was talking about that sort of thing, the way I have found myself over the years searching for Jesus, and the way many people have and are searching for Jesus.
So that sentence stood out for me: everyone is looking for you. We do search for Jesus. And we don’t really ever get done with it, because there is this sort of elusive quality about Jesus. He won’t let himself be defined by creeds. He refuses to be put in boxes. When people try to pin him down, he dances away.
I also quoted Albert Schweitzer last week, about how Jesus always comes to us as one unknown, as he did to the first disciples who knew him not. That quote was from a book that Schweitzer wrote in between seeing patients as a medical missionary in West Africa. The book was called, “The Quest for the Historical Jesus”, and what Schweitzer showed was how everyone tends to imagine Jesus as being someone like them. Not only looking like them—so that Europeans tend to imagine Jesus as being blond and blue-eyed and light skinned—but thinking like them, valuing the same things as them, and so forth.
We tend to create Jesus in our own image. That’s why, or one of the reasons why, he always comes to us as one unknown. He defies our easy descriptions of him, which tend to be reflections of ourselves. Our search is always tainted or tinted by who we are and what we are wanting, hoping, needing to find.
Still the search continues. Just because we will always be somewhat partial in our search, does not mean we should give it up. It just means that we need to be self-aware and a little bit humble as we go about this task.
About fifteen years ago something called the Jesus Seminar came into being. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It has received a lot of publicity, making the cover of national news magazines from time to time. The Jesus seminar is essentially a group of scholars who have gotten together to try to come up with a picture of who Jesus really was. They assume that the gospels are not totally accurate, and they try to winnow out what is true from what is rumor, legend, hearsay, or theological propaganda.
It’s not that this has not been done before. In fact this sort of thing has been going on for a couple of hundred years, even going back to Thomas Jefferson, who didn’t believe the miracles in the Bible could have happened and so wrote his own version of the Bible, happily dispensing with those things he considered superstitious.
My problem with the Jesus seminar is not that people shouldn’t be doing this kind of thing. I’m just hoping these folks aren’t taking themselves too seriously, that they aren’t thinking they are going to come up with THE TRUTH about Jesus, where everyone else has failed, and that they don’t have the feeling that only Biblical scholars can be in touch with the real Jesus. Of course I am hoping the same thing about us, about me, in my search for Jesus—that, as I say, we will all be somewhat self-aware and not arrogant in who we find Jesus to be for ourselves. Which is again to remind ourselves that the search for Jesus is in itself a good thing. We remind ourselves that we are always still engaged in our search for Jesus. Here is one place where closure is not a good thing.
But now back to the scripture. Everyone’s searching for Jesus: Galilean farmers and fisherfolk, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Schweitzer, the Jesus Seminar, you, me, and a whole bunch of other people. Everyone’s searching for Jesus. And when Jesus is told this what does he do? He tells his disciples that it’s time to move on, that he needs to carry his message to the neighboring towns as well, because this is what he has come to do.
This is one of those occasions I referred to where Jesus dances away. Rather than letting himself be found, which is not his purpose, he re-directs the disciples’ attention away from himself and toward his mission, which is to carry a message to people. What message?
Let me read you Mark 1:14-15 again. “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God, and saying: ‘The time is fulfilled, and the reign of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.’” That is the first red letter verse in the gospel of Mark, you know…words which come from the mouth of Jesus. The first words Jesus says in Mark are, “The time is fulfilled and the reign of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.”
My guess is that when most people, or at least many people, when they hear these words of Jesus, the message they get is “Repent.” Repent is a kind of attention-getting word. REPENT! Makes you sit up straight and pay attention. What’d I do? Whatever I did I guess I better quit it. Well, I mean we all have things to repent of, so I don’t mean to say that I don’t need to repent, but okay so I’ll repent. I was going to get around to it anyway, but if it’s that important to you, Jesus, I’ll repent.
The message, “repent” plays on all those guilt feelings that sort of hang out inside us. Some of them we probably came by honestly and they belong there. Some of them are just hanging out because we let them. So if somebody, especially Jesus, says repent, we are likely to focus on that message. It seems like it’s directed at us.
The reign of God, well that’s easier to ignore, because we don’t quite know what it is and it’s not part of our everyday language and it doesn’t sound like that’s a message that’s meant for us, or that we can easily grasp ahold of. Yet as I read the gospels, as I understand Jesus that is the message that was central to who he was, central to his own faith, central to his teaching.
The reign of God is…well, different translations use different wording…the reign of God is “at hand”, “upon us”, “has come near”. In any case the reign of God is so close you can taste it, feel it in your bones, want to reach out and touch it. It’s right…here! I believe that is the message that Jesus thought of as the good news. The good news was not that we better repent. The good news was not exactly that he had arrived. The good news—he said it—is that the reign of God has come near. Jesus said that outright. His healings pointed toward it. The parables he told described it. His teaching was about it. His whole life was directed toward it. The good news is the reign of God.
Because just about everything Jesus said and did had to do with the reign of God, I am not going to be so presumptuous as to try to say what it is in a few sentences in one sermon. We’ll be returning to this down the road. For now just some thoughts as to what it’s about, and what it’s not about.
In my experience, many people seem to identify the kingdom of God (this is the way it’s translated in most Bibles) with “heaven”. This seems to fit because Jesus talks sometimes about the kingdom of God and sometimes about the kingdom of heaven as though they were the same thing. Furthermore, it would seem logical that heaven would be the place where God is the ruler. That’s God’s kingdom. On earth all sorts of strange chaotic, evil things happen that may not be God’s will. Heaven is the place where everything happens the way God wants it to happen. It’s God’s kingdom—the kingdom of God. And those who understand the term that way may tend to see that whole emphasis in the gospel as being one of preparing ourselves one day to take up residence in this kingdom where God is the ruler. In this way of seeing things, when Jesus talks about the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven, he is talking about some better place than this world, where people go after they die, and his teachings are often instructions on how to get there.
Now of course that is a very unfair description of what many people believe, unfair because it’s a caricature. It doesn’t do justice to what people actually feel. And I don’t mean in any way to disparage or dismiss the beliefs of many thoughtful people who may believe in an otherworldly heaven. We are not discussing heaven this morning. We can do that some other time. We will do that some other time.
But I do want to be clear about that, that I am not talking about heaven this morning. When I talk about the reign of God, I am not talking about heaven. When I say how the reign of God was central to everything Jesus said and did and who he was, I do not believe he was thinking of heaven.
Nor are we talking about the inner life. Some people think in these terms. We can’t control what happens out in the world, and often it doesn’t look very pretty, doesn’t look much like God is completely in charge out there, but at least if we sort of enthrone God in our spirits, and let God be in charge in our inward being, in our hearts, then there can be this little kingdom of God inside every one of us.
Here again I don’t want to disparage this way of seeing things. It’s just that it’s not what I’m talking about this morning, and I don’t believe it’s what Jesus was talking about when he talked about the reign of God.
Those are a couple of things we’re not talking about. What we are talking about, or rather what I hear Jesus talking about, has to do with turning this old world inside out, turning it into something different, renewing it, re-birthing it so that it may become not so much the way God wills it to be, in the sense of “THIS IS THE WAY I WANT IT”, but in the sense of the way God dreams it to be, from God’s heart, reflecting not the will of God but reflecting God’s most heartfelt desires, God’s love.
The reign of God is about a new world, a new earth, a new creation, a New Jerusalem, a new community, a new way of people living together. It is not a kind of consumer paradise we enter one by one as a reward for being, on balance, pretty good people in this life. It is a place we build together and a place we live in together.
What Jesus urges on us, I think, is that we set our hearts on this different way of being together. It is not something we can dismiss as utopian, or unrealistic, or irrelevant to our daily lives—not unless we are willing to dismiss what is in God’s heart in such a casual manner.
This is not, this reign of God, not just some distant, fanciful figment of the imagination, though we often tend to be so immersed in our cynicism that we see it that way. But the reign of God is not that. It may be in one sense distant, but it is also real, near at hand, tangible, upon us. And Jesus will tell us that setting our hearts on the coming of the reign of God is what will give us life in its truest, deepest, most abundant sense.
That’s why I included the reading from John this morning about being born again. Too often when people have talked about being born again, they mean it only in the sense of having a renewed, vivid, meaningful, personal, relationship with God or with Jesus. But that is not all that being born again may mean. It may mean having our hearts redirected toward a longing for the reign of God. We can explore this more at another time, but there is nothing wrong with talking about being born again. In fact it may be important for us to talk about what that might mean for us. I am suggesting that one thing it might mean is to have not only God but the reign of God become a vivid, life-giving reality for us.
As I say, I know there is much more to be said. The reign of God is not some little part of Jesus’ life and preaching that we could sort of isolate and understand. But I do need to stop, if not end. And I will do that by simply offering a very brief bit of personal testimony.
I believe that the times in my life when I have lost sight, given up any vision of the reign of God, have been those times in my life when I felt least alive, sometimes pretty close to dead. The times I have felt most alive have been those times when some part of that vision was working on me and filling me up with life that had its origin somewhere else, that was not my own.
The reign of God may seem like a faraway or abstract thing, especially when we are so often doing our best just to cope with things as they come along, day by day. But I believe Jesus offers it to us, proclaims it to us as a source of life, as good news. It has been that for me. It has been the source of new life for me, and I have always, since I first heard it, identified with the opening words of the hymn we are about to sing.
My life flows on in endless song above earth’s lamentation. I hear the real though far off hymn that hails a new creation. Through all the tumult and the strife, I hear the music ringing. It sounds an echo in my soul. How can I keep from singing?
Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 28, 2001