O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
We live in a world without kingdoms, except in abstraction or in faraway places. (Sorry if you are English or Dutch.) In America since 1776 or so we have learned to live without a personal sovereign. The people are sovereign. That is abstract. And we are sorting out what it means.
This affects us not only as citizens, not just as consumers, but as people of faith. As Christians we hold that there is a king indeed, just one not of this world. And we are sorting out what that means. Since about the year 30.
We have some help with that one. Human beings have been puzzling out their relation with the divine being since time began to pierce our consciousness.
What does it mean to be under God, and not under an earthly sovereign? How then do we further the coming of a kingdom not like earthly kingdoms? “On earth as it is in heaven” - what does that mean, and how do we play a part in its coming to be?
Bishop Michael Curry refers to the ‘realization of the beloved community’ - this is part of it, and a pressing part of it for Americans. The beloved community as envisioned by thinkers from Josiah Royce to Howard Thurman and by activists from A. J. Must to Martin Luther King, is a community where all belong, together.
Where the lion lies down with the lamb, so to speak. Where we learn to live with each other in harmony, delighting in our differences and celebrating our commonality. Where intolerance is not tolerated, and love is an active verb.
Specifically right now the Episcopal Church, like so many other church bodies and institutions, is aching through a process of reconciliation, restoration, and perhaps restitution, as it takes upon itself the historical necessity of confronting the past.
Sins of the fathers, yours or mine or not ours at all, are still affecting us. We may say we were not there, we did not come into this church or this society or this world until long after those sins were past, over, long forgiven.
Or, as it turns out, not so much.
People are saying, my children will have less freedom than I have had. Not just less money, less of a material future, but less in terms of rights. Freedom, liberty, and justice for all.
We may have had it. Or felt we never did. As individuals or as a part of society that has never felt free.
But now we have that in our face. And how can anyone be free if not all of us are?
It is getting harder to say.
***
Part of how it is hard to imagine kingdom come is that we no longer live surrounded by people who believe it is “in heaven” as we long it to be “on earth”.
Heaven–what is that? Will it pay the rent–yours? It is possible to live now in a way that takes no account of the presence of God, of the imminence and transcendence of his kingdom. At least for a while.
You can live not as if you have stopped believing but as if you do not know what that is.
Do we? Do we also, as much as we see ourselves as believers, act as if we do?
Functionally are we in our personal and social lives “living into the kingdom”, that is, living as if Jesus is real, and his kingdom is here at the stretch of our hands?
As it is in heaven - so let it be on earth.
****
Keeping the Faith: Kingdom in its Fullness
Jesus’ disciple asked, “Teach us to pray.” He responded with the Lord’s Prayer. (Luke 11:2-4)
What does Jesus tell us to ask for first? What are we to ask for? “Thy kingdom come.” Ask with boldness and persistence for the arrival of the reign of God. This comes first. Then request what we need ourselves, personally and as God’s people. “Everything comes from you” David prays. (1 Chronicles 29:14) For us to take our part in establishing God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven, we need: daily sustenance, for which we are dependent on God; reconciliation, for which we are dependent on God; and to be saved from “the time of trial”, for which we are dependent on God.
Only then can we be built into the eternal temple of praise which is the kingdom of God. When David said, “of thine own have we given thee” (1 Chronicles 29:14) he was offering the first fruits of the harvest, as the people would in the Temple. So his prayer was one of thanksgiving, and one of celebration.
Of course the “Temple not built with hands” – that is the eternal place of offering – is what Jesus is bringing into daily life. Incarnate in him is the word of God, and making real in the world the kingdom he proclaims is the duty and the invitation he gives his followers: us.
When we pray “thy kingdom come” we are participating in the coming of his kingdom. When we ask for what we need from the one on whom we are dependent for everything, we are saying he is Lord. And when we ask to be forgiven and freed from temptation, we are saying he is Savior.
And we are saying make us instruments of thy peace, thy salvation, thy shalom, thy reign of peace.
In a recent essay on the website of the Episcopal diocese of Arizona, Canon Pam Hyde invites us to rethink dominion - particularly our sense of “dominion over” the rest of creation. Of course this is part of our rethinking what “kingdom come” might look like. Maybe it really is like the “peaceable kingdom” depicted in 19th Century American art, where lion and lamb lie down together and human beings, explorers and indigenous people, alike, are able to find a place for all beings. (Isaiah 11:6-9)
Don’t hold your breath, I hear you say. “What about–?” What about the travesty of settler lifestyles that tear apart the very fabric of the natural world, through mineral extraction and agricultural industrialization? What about the continuing and historic exploitation of one species by another, not to mention one set of people by another?
How are we to live without exerting our dominion, our “power over” others, as if it were by divine right, even divine mandate? Is not this our “manifest destiny” as Americans, indeed, as the human race?
What does it mean to have “dominion over” anything if God is really in charge? Ask Elizabeth II, queen of England: she has had 70 years to think this one over. She may be sovereign, in her realm, but it is only under God, under the blessing, under the mercy, and under obedience.
How do we play faithful to that mercy, how do we conform to that obedience, how do we share that blessing? The blessing that is the coming and immanent kingdom of God, the ‘dominion’ if you will, that is without end as it is indeed without beginning? The truth is, God reigns now.
If we could only see it. Sometimes it is hard to see. A traffic accident on the freeway, a senseless act of destruction, an unkindness where a helping hand is called for. Cruelty, gratuitous and severe. Capricious catastrophe.
So we ask for the kingdom to come, to become real. In the meantime, the between-time, between the asking and the fulfillment of the prayer, we are the ones who begin to make it real.
We do this in us-sized ways. We do it in small kindnesses, large life choices, common acts in common life, and unseen acts of small mercies.
We ask for the kingdom to come, and then we pray for what we need to live into its reality.
In Paul’s letter to the church in Colossus, we get a picture of a cosmic Christ, one “in whom the fullness of God is pleased to dwell” and one from whom we receive our own “fullness” as his creatures and his people. “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority.” (1:19, 2:9-10)
“Fullness” in Christ means a completion of being, a perfection in direction and in action. We sense moments of fullness already; in him our joy will be made complete.
So dominion and fullness meet in the presence of the Lord. God is the source of all being, therefore the one in whom all authority finally resides; our ‘dominion’ is partial and contingent. And yet our completion, the fulfillment of our calling and our gift as creatures, is already at work through Christ in us.
We have the challenge of living into that in-coming and already-here state of being.
How can we possibly do this by ourselves? As individuals, as a church, as a society, as the human race?
We don’t have to do it alone: for the one who creates us is the one who redeems us is the one who inspires and empowers us. By our side, along with us, God is present in the Spirit, and in each other.
We are not there yet, not yet in the kingdom to come, but we work to make it so, and we long for its arrival. In the grace of God and under the mercy. Amen.
The Rev. Dr. John Leech studied history and religion at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He serves as a priest associate at the Episcopal Church of Saint Matthew in Tucson. This sermon was given at St Michael's Church, Coolidge, Ariz. http://stmichaelscoolidge.com/
Genesis 18:20-32
Psalm 138
Colossians 2:6-15, (16-19)
Luke 11:1-13
Hosea 1:2-10
Psalm 85
Colossians 2:6-15, (16-19)
Luke 11:1-13
https://azdiocese.org/2022/06/rethinking-dominion/
https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.59908.html
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.
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