In God’s Reign

Sermon preached Sunday, November 19, 2023, Reign of Christ Sunday, at Lutheran Church of Our Saviour in North Chesterfield, VA. 

It’s the last Sunday of the church year. A new cycle of Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter begins next week. And, as always, that means today is Christ the King Sunday, or, as it is also known, Reign of Christ Sunday.

We don’t have nearly as many kings or autocratic rulers in the world as there used to be. In the world of the Bible, though, nations were almost exclusively ruled in this way.

Do you know how the Kings of Israel came to be?

When the Israelites finally entered the Promised Land after decades of wandering in the desert, they only wanted one thing: a king. They believed a king would lead them to victory in battle and set them on the same level as the nations around them. In a way, it was kind of a status symbol for the fledgling Israelites. For a long time, God resisted. God appointed judges like Deborah and Gideon to lead the people. The judges kept the people together, oversaw legal, political, and military proceedings…but it wasn’t enough. The people still asked for a king.

God warned the Israelites. God told them a king would take their children and put them into service, take their harvest, take pretty much anything he wanted from them and not serve in their best interest. It took hardly any time at all for God’s predictions to come true. By the time the prophet Ezekiel was writing, the Israelites had endured terrible king after terrible king. God saw this and decided to step back in.

In the Old Testament, the Shepherd is always a kingly image. In poetry, in the Psalms, shepherding is a metaphor for ruling, for caring for one’s people the way one might care for their sheep. Ezekiel speaks the word of the Lord and says that God will once again be the Shepherd of the people.

God says, “I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out…  I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness… and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the watercourses, and in all the inhabited parts of the land.  ¹⁵I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God. ¹⁶I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.” (Ezekiel 34:11-19)

God is ready to take over. There may be a human shepherd set to watch over them, but God will have a hand in it all. God will be the primary ruler.

Christ the King Sunday is when we explore what it means to have God as our sovereign. If God is our ruler, the leader of our hearts, what does that mean for us?

Maybe that’s where today’s parable comes in—it gives us an idea of what the kingship of Christ looks like, what the reign of Christ looks like.

When the sheep and goats are called to account, what does the Son of Man focus on? Is it the number of Sundays they went to church? Is it a quiz on how well they know their scripture? Is it a tally of how many prayers we’ve said over the years? No, it is their actions to the most vulnerable that matter. It is how they’ve cared for the hungry, stranger, the naked, the sick and the imprisoned. It’s how they’ve lived out their faith in service to one another.

In the reign of Christ, our call is not to micromanage religiosity, but to care for our neighbor. Our neighbor, who just might be Jesus in our midst.

The Gospel of Matthew is all about Jesus’ incarnation and Jesus’ presence with us in the world. Matthew begins with Jesus being called “Emmanuel,” which means “God is with us,” and it ends with Jesus saying, “Remember, I am with you until the end of the age.” Jesus was with us, Jesus is with us, and Jesus will be with us. We know this to be true and we know that we might encounter Jesus in surprising and unsuspecting ways. One of the ways we experience this is in the idea that we are all “little Christs” in the world. When we care for each other, we are expressing the Christ within us. When we are cared for, Christ is coming to meet us.

Jesus doesn’t ever leave us. This is the part we tend to forget.

The parable Jesus tells is frightening.

It is the day when the Son of Man comes in all his glory and all the nations are gathered before him. They are separated into two categories, although none of them know why. Both groups are mystified. No one was able to determine their grouping prior to Jesus doing it. Two groups: the sheep and the goats. The sheep, who took care of Christ and welcomed him; who unwittingly encountered God because they chose to care for their neighbor. The goats, who did nothing; who never had the chance to encounter God because they chose to ignore their neighbor. One, invited to inherit the kingdom, the other, sent away to eternal punishment.

It has a terrible ending…but even at the end, even when the Son of Man tells the goats to depart, we know that this can’t be the final word. They are sent away to eternal punishment…but they are not there alone. There is no place so far that Christ is not there, including whatever version of hell we might be talking about.

Remember that image from the Chora Church I shared on All Saints Sunday? If you weren’t here, or if you don’t remember, it’s a beautiful image. Jesus, flanked by saints, is reaching down into hell and pulling out sarcophagi there. The figures he grabs are Adam and Eve, representing all of humanity. At the very bottom, in the shadows, is the figure of Satan bound in chains just below broken pieces of a gate and lock. Humanity is lifted up from the depths of hell by Christ. Jesus goes to the lost, to the forgotten, to the cast out, and gathers them up and takes them home. They are reconciled to God.

This is what it means to have God as our sovereign. We cannot be forgotten. We cannot be left behind. We cannot be lost. Christ, our king, God, our shepherd, is watching over us.

Here again the words of Psalm 95: “For the Lord is our God,
and we are the people of God’s pasture and the sheep of God’s hand.” (v.7a)

The Shepherd does not abandon the flock. God does not abandon us. Amen.

The Reign of God

Sermon preached Sunday, July 17th, 2018, the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, at St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Littlestown, PA. Audio can be found here.

What do you imagine when you think of the “Kingdom of God”?

I’d imagine that something slightly different comes to mind for all of us…but it’s something I think anyone who’s read the Bible thinks about. After all, it comes up with some regularity in the New Testament. Jesus frequently refers to it, especially in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew.

Chances are, I’ve mentioned this in the past, but I actually don’t prefer “kingdom” as the best translation from the Greek. “Kingdom” usually makes us think of a physical place, a defined location. The word basileia, however, can also be translated as “reign.”

Think about what changes if you hear “reign of God” versus “kingdom of God.” [Beat] “Reign” is more of a way of living, a way of being, a way of organizing the world.

Today, we hear Jesus tell parables about the reign of God. Want to hear it again?

³⁰He also said, “With what can we compare the reign of God, or what parable will we use for it? ³¹It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; ³²yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” (Mark 4:30-32)

How many of you have heard this parable before? How many of you have heard it more times than you can count? How many of you tend to retell it by talking about having “faith the size of a mustard seed?”

If you’re thinking, “I have,” you’re not alone. This parable is most often cited when someone is experiencing a crisis of faith, or if resources are limited in a faith community. “You know what the Bible says, all you need is a small amount of faith, a mustard seed.” Sound familiar?

But does Jesus say anything about faith? No, he asks, “With what can we compare the reign of God?” The reign of God is like a mustard seed, not a person’s faith.

To be honest, I’m not even sure I fully realized the implications of this distinction until relatively recently.

What does it mean that the reign of God is like a mustard seed, “which, when sown upon the ground is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs…?”

I think it means that we might not always realize it when the reign of God is at work, or when the reign of God might be breaking in, sowing a seed that’s just waiting to sprout and grow.

Like many of you, this week I was inundated with pictures and reports of children being housed in reprehensible conditions and being separated from their parents. This is not the reign of God, even if a verse of scripture taken out of context is used to justify it. In fact, if one continues reading in that very same chapter of Romans, one finds this passage:

“Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. ⁹The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet’; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ ¹⁰Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” (Romans 13:8-10)

“Love your neighbor as yourself.” “Love does not wrong to a neighbor.”

To be honest, I’m not sure I can come up with a much better description of the what the reign of God looks like, except that it is an environment and a culture and a community in which everyone loves and everyone is loved—a setting in which all come together to build one another up.

I don’t know much for certain, but I know that, I know it deep within my soul. And, as fate would have it, I caught a few glimpses of it this week.

As most of you know, I spent the past week at Camp Nawakwa with eighty middle- and early-high schoolers for our area’s All Saint’s Confirmation Camp. It was an excellent week with an excellent group of kids and, as always, I was amazed at the seeds God is sowing in our midst—mustard seeds, you might say.

I glimpsed the reign of God at the low ropes course. Smaller groups of campers would have to find ways to work together to complete tasks and overcome obstacles. They learned to talk to each other and, more importantly, they learned to listen to each other. The drew upon each other’s strengthens and supported each other in their weaknesses. They realized that they only succeeded if they all succeeded.

I glimpsed the reign of God when I took our older campers on a field trip to a local farm. The owner and his family displayed remarkable hospitality as they showed us around their orchard and vegetable patch. The owner reminded us of the intricacies and wonder of God’s creation as he explained the process of planting and caring for this tender produce. He told us about the joy he feels being able to feed the people in his community. We were embraced and even fed by these people, as they pulled last year’s apples out of cold storage and let us feast on the still delicious fruit.

And, perhaps most vividly, I glimpsed the reign of God on Friday morning when we held our all-camp activity. Our theme this year was hunger, so we decided to involve the kids in a large food packing event. After breakfast on Friday, a couple showed up from a local organization in a van loaded with supplies. While the campers waited outside, the pastors, youth leaders and camp staff quickly set up seven tables as assembly lines to put together macaroni and cheese meals for hungry people.

One by one, the campers filed in with hairnets on their heads, aprons on, and hands freshly sanitized. As they took their spots at the tables, we explained the process of how to build the meal kits. One person for each stage. Everyone had a role, and everyone needed everyone else.

Within minutes, the music kicked on and the room was buzzing with activity. These kids dove in, working quickly and yet very conscientiously. The organizers of this event had let us know earlier that the meals we were currently putting together would be going to Puerto Rico, a place still reeling from last year’s hurricane and a place where 11,000 people are still without power, seven months later. It was this news that spurred all of us into action. It was the knowledge that our siblings, that fellow children of God were suffering, and we could do something to maybe make life a tiny bit better, to possibly keep even one person from going hungry.

We chatted and laughed. We danced and sang along to Queen, Abba, and Disney songs. And we worked. Bag after bag was filled and sealed. Box after box was taped up. And we cheered loudly with every announcement of a bench mark: “One thousand meals done!” “Two thousand meals done!” “Three thousand!” “Four thousand!”

Anyone want to guess how many meals we packed? Eighteen thousand. In a little over an hour!

After lunch, we had a chance to split up into our congregation groups and talk about our highs and lows for the week. When we leaders talked about it later, we discovered that almost all of our kids listed the meal packing event as a major high.

It wasn’t just the process: scooping macaroni through a funnel isn’t all that exciting. It wasn’t just the music, although I’ll never forget singing songs from Moana with a table full of twelve-year-old boys. It was the knowledge that they were making a difference, that they were helping people—that they were able to be the hands and feet of God in service to other people.

The reign of God is like a field trip to a farm. The reign of God is like a low ropes course. The reign of God is like a meal packing event.

The reign of God is like anything that builds relationships and expands understandings and, most of all, expresses love to one another.

The reign of God is love.

Amen.