The promise of Heaven is not a license to exploit people on Earth, but an invitation to transform our systems and bring them into conformity with the heavenly vision.
"And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand." (Matthew 10:7 KJV)
These are the words of Jesus Christ. We all are
familiar with the various issues of justice, the different ways that people use
to try to divide humanity into different groups and turn them against each
other for their own purposes, and to keep them from uniting against oppression
of any of them.
But our inclusiveness statement for our church says, "We
invite everyone to share fully in the worship services, life, ministry, and
leadership of Briensburg United Methodist Church inclusive of age, race,
nationality, gender, LGBTQ, theology, politics, and legal status."
The Bible invites us to listen to what God has to say
about justice throughout all the scriptures, as it's one of the main themes
that flows throughout all of the Bible. The statement that Jesus made on the
kingdom of heaven being at hand is just as radical now as it was when he first
began to preach it. The kingdom of God being at hand, the kingdom of heaven
being close to us and manifesting itself in the earth is the spiritual realm
being a part of our daily lives and not just a side part, but a central,
governing, directing, organizing, ordering part of our lives as individuals and
as the faith community and extending into all the realms of society.
The promise of heaven in the next world can no longer be
used as a license to exploit people in this world. That has been a problem down
through the ages as people would oppress people and expect them to just take it
with the promise that in the next world, it'll all work out. Everything will be
rosy in the next world, but in this world, you should ... They want you to just
accept whatever they deal out to you without complaining, and then just to use
people and for their own profit and discard them as though they were without
value in this world. But the governments of this earth are expected to mirror
the kingdom of heaven. Jesus taught us to pray,
"Thy kingdom come, thy
will be done on earth as it is in heaven."
Salvation is often construed in manipulative terms and
defined in ways that make it be something that people do or receive or respond
to for someone else's profit, for someone else's goals and agenda. But the word
that is translated salvation in the scripture is also translated healing in the
scripture.
"I am the Lord that healeth thee."
Every place that Jesus went about
preaching about salvation, he also healed the sick. It was a big part of what
he did. And in this passage about where he sent the apostles out to preach the
gospel, he gave them the authority and told them to heal the problems of the
people.
And so there's not really a difference there. There's not
salvation, and then just this little side thing to prove a point as some would
say, as to demonstrate the power. But the real goal was salvation. It's all the
same goal, to save people, to heal them, to preserve us to everlasting life.
The kingdom of heaven that Jesus preached is fulfillment of the prophecy of
Isaiah,
"For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the
government shall be upon his shoulders: and his name shall be called Wonderful,
Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the
increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of
David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and
with justice from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will
perform this."
Jesus sends us, you and me and the others, to heal, to
help and to liberate the victims of oppression and injustice. In our baptismal
vow, in our United Methodist baptismal vow, we are asked,
"Do you accept
the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil and injustice and oppression
in whatever forms they present themselves?"
Our resistance is like a
spring, a steel spring, not in every respect is like a spring, but in this
respect that, when the spring is compressed, then it pushes back with an equal
force to resist and recoil against the pressure.
And in that sense, our resistance is like a spring, that
when we see injustice and oppression in whatever of these many forms it takes,
whatever the issue is, whoever the particular group of people is that's being
oppressed or that individual who's being oppressed, wherever we see this
oppression and injustice and evil, and we absorb it and then we push back, we
recoil and we push it away. We have many peaceful ways of doing that. We are a
people of peace. We don't violently respond to evil and oppression. As
followers of Jesus, we do it the way he did. You can look at all of his life
and see how peacefully he did. Even in the garden of Gethsemane, telling Peter
to put his sword away. That wasn't the way that he was going to battle. It's a
spiritual warfare.
And so for us every prayer, every message, every
contribution, every act of kindness and mercy pushes back, gently but
forcefully and with a meaningful resistance. As the hands and feet of Christ,
we continue his earthly ministry, which he declared and stated for us in Luke
4, when he quoted again, the prophet Isaiah,
"The Spirit of the Lord is
upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath
sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering
of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the
acceptable year of the Lord."
In this passage of scripture, Jesus was going around. He
had made that declaration and he was getting resistance for it, but he was
going around and healing everybody anyway. He was getting pushback for his
mission that he declared of healing and ministry and healing the brokenhearted
and all of this preaching of deliverance and all that he was standing for. But
his response was compassion. He looked out across the people, and it says that
when he saw that ... This is in the English Standard Version, "When he saw the
crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless like
sheep without a shepherd."
We're like sheep, not in every respect, but in this
respect, in the respect that we're like sheep in that like of being frightened
and scattered by both religious and secular politicians acting like wolves to
divide and conquer us. In the King James Version, it says they fainted. And
here in the English Standard, it said there were harassed and helpless. The
people that Jesus was looking out across and feeling compassion for were not
unlike us in many ways. Consider the situation for them and how similar it is
to our situation right today.
- One way was that they, like many of us today are in our
world during this pandemic, they were victims of dreaded diseases for which
there was no cure or immunity.
- Another way, they were victims of racial
injustice and institutional injustices that were instituted by the Roman
government, and that were perpetuated, these injustices, by many in the
religious community.
- Another way is they were victims of economic disparities, highlighted in the New Testament by the system of taxation personified in repentant
participants like Matthew and Zacchaeus.
Jesus' empathetic response to their
unbelief and pushback against his ministry was to have compassion on them.
Unlike a lot of times when we have people that don't like
what we're doing, the response sometimes is different than of Christ, but we're
expected to respond as Christ responded to their pushback when he stood up for
these people, when he stood up for healing and wholeness and for the liberation
of those who were in prison and stood up for the oppressed. And he said that
people would treat us in the same way they treated him. Of course, it hasn't
been as bad for us yet for many anyway, as it was for him anywhere near,
there's hardly any comparison at all.
People didn't like it when he stood up for justice, when
he stood up for people, when he stood up for and stood against their
oppressors. But yet his response was to have compassion on them and to teach
them and to heal them. His response was to have compassion and to teach and to
heal and to preach the gospel of the kingdom to them. Jesus told us to pray.
Tells us to pray in a lot of different situations. But in this situation, he
said, "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few, therefore pray
earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his
harvest." That's in Matthew 9:37-38 in the English Standard Version.
It's not enough just to say, we're going to pray about it.
We're expected to actually pray. Another part of that is that people know that
a lot of times someone will say, they'll pray for you, or they'll think about
it in lieu of actually doing something that's in their power to do. When we
pray, part of our prayer is the work we do to accomplish it while we're praying
for it. So part of our prayer is that God will show us what our part is in the
answering of that prayer, not just to say we'll pray and then go off and not
even give it another thought, or just to say a prayer, but not be paying
attention to what God is instructing us in that prayer.
Remember that James said,
"The heartfelt prayer of a
righteous person availeth much."
So the prayer itself helps. Somehow in
ways that we can't know, God uses our prayers as a part of the work that He is
doing, the work of creation and the work of sustaining and redeeming the world.
We're a part of that in our prayers. God also uses our prayers as an
opportunity to communicate with us and to share with us of the changes that we
need to make in our personal lives. And also God uses that opportunity to help
us understand what we need to do ourselves to shape and transform the world and
to bring the kingdom of God to bear in the various situations that we are a
part of, and that we have voice in, that we have a vote in, or that we have
opportunity and influence.
So God uses prayer to shape us. And of course, there's a
lot of teaching about prayer in the Bible. There's an invitation through Isaiah
where God says, "Come now, and let us reason together, saith the
Lord," to come and just spend some time with the Lord. And through that,
our sins get clarified and washed away. And their guidance is opened up for us,
and our relationship with God is built, and we are strengthened and given our
guidance and direction.
Jesus also suggested that when we pray, we should go in a
private area and really pour our hearts out to the Lord, where nobody else was
around. We could just be free to talk however we wanted, and really good things
worked out with God. Hear Him and speak to Him and share our thoughts together.
So he says for us to go and pray, pray about these things. Not just say you'll
pray about it, and not just say it to make other people feel good, but actually
pray. Pray that the Lord of the harvest will send laborers.
Now, the harvest is
the people who are ready to make changes in their lives.
When he looked out across, there were all these people,
they were like sheep without a shepherd, they were helpless. They were hurting
and they needed someone to help pull them together and guide them, and to do
the work of unity and love and of resistance to oppression and the work of
justice. There were people there that were ready to make a change. That's the
harvest. When we look out and we see people, we see the people of our world
rising up, it's because they're ready. They're ready. They're ready to make
changes in their lives and in the life of the community. And we see many of
those changes already going on. Sometimes at a pace that's hard to even
believe, because people are ready and the people that are ready are the
harvest. The Bible speaks of them in this passage, that's who Jesus is talking
about.
Look at all the people that are ready right now for
change, ready for transformation and reshaping of our society and of our world,
and of their own personal lives and attitudes. They're ready to be a part of
something new, something better, a more just, and an equitable system. They're
ready to do the work that is necessary to bring that about, the work of
justice. And so we pray for those in the harvest, and we pray for those that
God sends out to do this work, to organizing and the preparation on the study
and the actual making of the rules, changing of the laws, changing of the
system and procedures and the policies.
The laborers are those who work for reform and justice and
the implementation of God's peace and justice throughout society. Those are the
laborers that we probably are sent. Jesus sends us as laborers into the field.
And in Matthew 10:1, this is the way it's said in the Message, "He gave
them power to kick out the evil spirits and to tenderly care for the bruised
and hurt lives." Power is authority, but we're not just the authority of
being told we can do something or certified with a piece of paper, but the
authority along with the capability, along with in our way of looking at it in
the body of Christ authority with the spiritual gifts that are necessary to
actually carry out while we're authorized to do. We have that.
The Holy Spirit working within us and among us provides us
with the spiritual gifts that are necessary to carry out whatever it is God is
calling us to do in whatever circumstances we may find ourselves. With our
authority comes the resources under the providence of God and the methods that
are needed to exercise that authority. Our instructions are the same as he gave
these apostles when he sent them out. The instructions are to stand against the
demonic influences of injustice and oppression in whatever forms they may
present themselves, racism, discrimination, exploitation, and violence, just to
get started with the list, all of these ways that people find to divide people
and to oppress them and to crush them, to put their knee on their neck, all the
ways that people discover new ways all the time too, but yet they're the same
old things, the old wine in new skins in a way.
They're the old ways just finding new ways to put people
in their place and then make people feel that they're second class citizens of
this world. All those ways that there are, that's what these people were
encountering there. People that were sick and had no hope of health care,
people that were tormented by the demons, which we often like to think of as
those spiritual entities beyond our understanding or someplace in the spirit
realm, but just think about how much of that demonic torment is by people who
enjoy causing trouble, starting up trouble or pitting people against each other
for their own gain. Dividing people in order to further their own agenda,
rather than standing up for what's right and for standing against oppression or
being that spring that resists and recoils against discrimination and
oppression and all these various other things in whatever forms they take.
We're sent to heal, and that healing includes body, mind,
spirit, and soul, includes our relationships, includes the relationships of
those around us. It includes all the struggles and difficulties that people go
through, that's what salvation and healing is all about, is to make the world a
better place for everybody and to make each person's life and situation better
in some way. Most of us don't really have a lot of ways that we can do that,
but we do have some. One of them is a sacramental way by prayer and laying on
of hands and anointing with oil as described in the Bible and in the liturgies
and history of the church.
This is like an outward invisible sign though, of what is
happening and empowering how the spirit is empowering us with the grace and the
gifts to heal in more practical day by day ways. We have the outward sign. We
have the things that the laying on of hands for example, is an outward sign,
but it's a sign of something inward and powerful and real that is happening, to
bring the answer to the prayer is the wholeness and the healing of individuals,
but also of communities and societies.
So we're called and sent to do whatever we can do. First
of all, to prevent harm. First do no harm. The first way to heal is to not make it
worse, "do no harm," to prevent the spread of diseases or prejudices or
brokenness and heartache. And then to support those who are working to bring
healing. Everyone involved in providing humanitarian relief services, we
support them in our prayers and by contributions that we can make wherever we
can make them, whatever is practical for us in our personal situation. And
support everybody and all the service industries and on the mission fields and
those in Christian vocations and other religious vocations that work to bring
relief and wholeness and justice and peace and harmony. And to restore where
there has been disasters and to stand against oppression.
All the ways that we can support each other in preventing
the spread of anything that hurts other people and where we can support each
other in the building up of doing good, and building people up and making life
better for people. In our heritage, we have a saying that was attributed to
John Wesley about doing good and being kind to everyone whose paths we cross.
Do all the good you can,
by all the means you can,
in all the ways you can,
in all the places you can,
at all the times you can,
to all the people you can,
as long as ever you can.
Another way might be the way that Isaiah put again,
"Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God."
Jesus sent with
authority to heal and cast out the demons, and we take that in the broadest
sense of the authority that God has given us in its broadest definition of
healing and casting out evil. He also sent them to preach and to liberate, tell
them ... This is how it says in the Message,
"Tell them that the kingdom
is here. Bring health to the sick. Raise the dead. Touch the untouchables. Kick
out the demons."
The kingdom of heaven is among you and within you was one
of the things that Jesus used to say. And through the scriptures and through
our conversations, he still says it, the kingdom of God is within you. The
kingdom of God is among you. The kingdom of God, as he says, here has come unto
you.
What a radical statement, because the kingdom of God is a
form of government, kingdom, government, reign of Christ. We say the reign of
Christ in our lives. The kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven is God's law
governing us. There are many types of government where we usually associate
first off the geographical boundaries of different countries of the world or
different states, or even our counties or whatever cities and everything. But
in geographical terms, we think of our government.
But within that is also the political realm, and
oftentimes that crosses all these boundaries. So we have the political
government and that changes back and forth regardless of what the boundaries
are. It kind of goes with the politics of the day and who's leading, and who's
in charge. In our country who got elected, in some countries who took over, but
we think of that government like that, or groups like that that rule either by election
or by force. But government also includes our social groups, the different
organizations we belong to that they have bylaws and they have rules and they
have procedures as to how things are done.
Our churches, our families, all of the different ways we
associate with each other and make rules to govern our behavior and our work
and whatever it is that we're doing, line out the scope of what that group is
doing. In many cases, the rules aren't ever even written down, we just know
what they are. Or we kind of learned through experience like in our families or
with our friends and everything. Thinking about it, you have some rules that
guide, you know what you can do and what you can't do, you know what's expected
of you. That is a form of government.
The children of Israel when they left Egypt, before they
went to the promised land, there was a 40 year period there where they received
the Torah through Moses, and that became their organizing document, their
constitution, their law. And for those people and for that society, they were a
nation. They were considered a nation, but they didn't have any geographic
property. They were on the move. They were wandering in the wilderness,
according to our scriptures and tradition of the Judaic tradition that they had
to be in a land, but they were slaves in that land.
And so they left and they had land that was promised to
live in the future, but the generation that left Egypt and was promised this
land in the future, they didn't make it to that land. They just saw that and
moved around. And it was their succeeding generations that entered the promised
land and occupied that physical, geographical territory. But the people who
were wandering in the desert were still considered a nation and they still had
a law. They still had these rules and that was their government. So, however,
that we're organized, that is our governing principle. That's the way we
operate. That's the way we're governed.
The kingdom of heaven is a spiritual government. Jesus
told Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world." We don't have a
military that rises up to protect it or replace another government or anything
like that. This is a spiritual kingdom. The law of this government is love.
This government has as its task to work to transform this world into a
reflection of the very best that heaven has to offer. I love to think about
heaven. It's my favorite thing to think about. My favorite songs of the faith
are songs about heaven. Now, when we all get to heaven, what a day, a glorious
day that will be, and on and on. I better not start in on that because when we
think about heaven, our minds go to the sweet by and by, and what is offered in
the future, like the promised land that was offered to the children of Israel
as they wandered in the desert.
As we wander in this life, we are comforted by the hope of
heaven in the future. We're often manipulated by that, by people like I brought
up in the beginning by people saying, just put up with injustice in this world,
not complaining about all the ways you can get ripped off and just go ahead and
take it, and then just look forward to what you're going to have in heaven. We
should look forward to what we're going to have in heaven. It's a beautiful
thing to think about all the beauty, all the joy that is prepared for us, and
all the very best of this earth and of our relationships and of our life, all
brought to its fulfillment.
All of our friendships and kinship, all of our family and
friends that have gone before us for generations before, how we'll be united
with them, most of them, we have never met yet. Many people that we have, and
that we've loved here in the earth and they've gone on to be with the Lord and
now we're going on and soon we'll be with them. And those that follow us will
eventually join us there too. And we have everlasting life and we have all of
these things that God promises. I love in the book of Revelation at the end of
the Bible, where John saw the city and that represents so much of the beauty
and glory of God, just in that small little picture there of the city of new
Jerusalem.
He said that the tabernacle of God is with people and God
Himself shall wipe away every tear from their eye. There shall be no more
tears, no more crying, no more pain, no more suffering, no more sickness, no
more sin, no more death. All of those things are themselves passed away. The
Lord Himself would do this, he said. And then it has all that imagery that
speaks to us so eloquently. All through the Bible, another one of the great
threads of the Bible is the heaven and the perfection of love and fellowship
and kinship and friendship and all that we seek for. It just makes us feel so
good in our hearts when we think about the glory that awaits us in the life of
the world to come.
"They sing the lamb in hymns above, and we in hymns below." (Charles Wesley)
It's all so close. It's all part of this spiritual life that God brings us
into. But it's not just over yonder. It's not just some day yonder. We are
expected and called and invited and encouraged and sent to make everything that
we can do here as reflective of everything we dream of there as absolutely
possible each day. We are invited and sent to love today, as perfectly as we
can in the same ways that we envision we will love in heaven. The justice that
we certainly expect there to be in heaven, we're supposed to be working on that
here as well. Maybe we can't get it all done today, or even each of any one of
us in our lifetime, but together we can work on making it a little closer, a
little better, a little more like heaven.
And so the radical thing about Jesus preaching that the
kingdom of God is present, is at hand, is that expectation that whatever
governments we're a part of here are supposed to be reformed to be like the
expectation and the joy and the anticipation that we have of heaven in the
world to come. That didn't sit well with people back then, and it doesn't sit
well with people now. People often use the Bible and religion, not the way that
Jesus described here in sending people out and not the way he described in the
Sermon on the Mount. But they use them as an excuse and a license to
manipulate and to oppress, which is completely antithetical to everything that
the Bible is about and everything Jesus and his teachings are about.
The kingdom of God is present in our hearts and minds. We
speak it into new degrees of existence in our own lives when we pray, as Jesus
taught us, thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. And
then the lectionary passage for this second Sunday after a Pentecost concludes
with a verse that in the King James, it says, "Freely you have received,
freely give." I like how Peterson translated that in the Message,
"You have been treated generously, so live generously." Don't get
sidetracked from your mission, the mission of Christ by greed or what James
referred to as partiality toward those who have other agendas. Trust God for
the resources. Don't let the cost of ministry hinder the work of the kingdom.
You've been treated generously, be generous. In the way
that you minister freely, freely and generously pray and work for the up
building of the kingdom of God in this life and in the life of the world to
come. Generously and freely work for justice, and for the fair treatment of
everybody everywhere, for equality, for good to be for everybody without any
kind of limitations or without putting people in categories and then dividing
them against each other. Freely work for unity and stand against evil and
injustice and oppression and whatever forms they may take.
So go, we're always
... He's always saying, "Go." Go.
"And as you go, preach, saying, the kingdom of
heaven is at hand."
In the all powerful name of Jesus. Amen.
