Reign of Christ
Central United Church—25 November 2012—Michael Kooiman
John 18
Jesus answered Pilate, saying: ‘My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the the religious leaders. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.’ Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world: to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’
I seems you can have too much of a good thing.
When my loving partner and I enjoyed our honeymoon, I thought to would be helpful to record the event with my camera. I took 3,000 pictures. No one told me that taking 3,000 photos on your honeymoon is excessive: no one, except Carmen, of course.
So yes, you can have too much of a good thing. This summer I had a brief but lovely week in the Cotswolds (1,600 photos), and managed a side trip to Tewksbury Abbey. The Abbey, it seems, is the second largest parish church in the UK and may have the largest Romanesque crossing tower in Europe. In a land of abbeys and cathedrals, I guess it helps to stand out.
So I’m taking photos, mostly upward toward the fine vaulted ceiling, and chatting with one of the Abbey volunteers. As he was telling me, in some detail, about the death of some long-ago Prince of Wales in the field next to the abbey, I notice a small metal box labelled 50p. “50p,” I’m thinking, still listening and trying to be polite, “what could be 50p?”
I asked, and it turns out that for a mere 50p you can illuminate the ceiling of the Abbey for about ten minutes. I pay, of course, and then happily proceed to retake all the photos I just took (did I say 1,600 for the trip?). Now I’m trying to retake my pictures, listen politely, and digest the implications of 50p. ‘This is brilliant,’ I think while snapping and listening politely, “everything at the church becomes 50p.’
You want light? 50p! You want this microphone to continue to work? 50p! You want the heat on, or better, you want the heat off? 50p. Bathrooms? 50p. Coffee? 50p. Choir anthem? 50p. Sermon longer or shorter? 50p. There is no end to the possibilities in the land of 50p. Church may never be the same.
And I would have learned none of this, if Henry VIII had his way. You see, Tewksbury Abbey was founded by the Benedictines, actually made of French stone floated across the channel starting in 1102. It was wealthy, and on the list of monastic communities to be dissolved in Henry’s Reformation. The church would have been destroyed, except for the townsfolk who complained to Henry that destroying the Abbey would deny them their parish church.
Ever practical, Henry said, ‘pay me for the lead I was going to salvage from the bells and the roof, and you can have your Abbey, for £453.’ Seems like a deal, really, £453 for one of the finest churches in England, but consider that Tewksbury was tiny, the monastery was gone (the main source of income for the town) and £453 is £200,000 in today’s pounds.
But they paid. They found the money and they bought themselves a church that still stands 900 years later, looking lovely and bright, 50p at a time. They paid because it obviously seemed foolish and short-sighted not to, but also because the idea of paying would have made sense to everyone in the town and surrounding area: This after all, was the time we call Christendom.
Christendom, is a term most often given to historically Christian societies, societies where the vast majority of the population participated in the Christian church or at least respected its place at the centre or society. If you are a sociologist or a Marxist or both, you might describe Christendom as a form of cultural hegemony, where an elite favours and propagates a cultural norm, in this case Christian practice and belief.
Christendom is not the Kingdom of God, they are two completely different things. But the Kingdom is a little harder to define:
Jesus answered Pilate, saying: ‘My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the the religious leaders. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.’ Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world: to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’
Before I begin to try to unpack this exchange, a note. John has this troubling habit of describing the mob and the religious leaders that they follow as Jews. And this is true. But what is also true is that John is trying to create distance between a very Jewish Jesus and the crowd that wants him dead. It is part of John’s unfortunate project to begin to shift the blame for Jesus’ death away from the Romans and onto the Jewish community that he wants to imagine is separate from Jesus and the twelve. But they are not. Jesus had trouble with the religious leaders of his own religion, much in the way that Jesus would likely trouble with the Pope, the Moderator, the Archbishop of Canterbury and everyone else who imagines they have a lock on the truth.
So, Jesus says “My Kingdom is not of this world.” But he also says “the kingdom is near” (Matthew 3, Mark 1, Luke 10) and to those healed of a demon, he says “the Kingdom is upon you” (Luke 11). And to really muddy the waters he says to the Pharisees “The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you.” So let me get this straight, Jesus: It’s near, it’s here, it’s not of this world, and it’s inside me. No wonder every parable in the Bible is another attempt to explain the Kingdom, and no wonder that he said “I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world.” Still seems pretty hidden to me.
And that, I would argue, is precisely the point. The Kingdom of God is not a movement, or a program, or a set of steps, but rather the very mystery hidden at the heart of God. Just as God cannot be reduced to either ‘out there’ or ‘in here,’ God’s Kingdom cannot be reduced to a set of principles we ought to follow or the latest expression of the church that claims to be purer or nearer somehow to God.
And it is certainly never to be confused with Christendom. In Christendom, councils met and declarations were made, and earthly kings trembled at the thought of disobedience to God’s law, freshly interpreted. But Jesus said, “My Kingdom is not of this world.” In Christendom, people clamoured to the church at the correct moments to see what their salvation might look like, but Jesus said “the coming of the Kingdom of God is not something that can be observed.” In Christendom you try to be mature in your faith, and take the whole thing very seriously, but then Jesus says, “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of God.”
As we struggle to understand all of this, I want to share a recent story, one that may shed light on the difference between Christendom and the Kingdom we seek to comprehend. I also want to share it because frankly, it’s been bothering me.
I’m a member of our presbytery’s property committee, and as such we meet with congregations that want to renovate or alter or even sell their building. We met with a delegation from church near the lake, a delegation who have a redevelopment dream: to gut their church and transform it into a smaller congregational space and add seniors housing. It’s a good scheme, and it may be beyond the energy and skill of the forty or so members of the congregation, but they have been supplemented by at least three members of the community who understand community housing and such things.
They have become good friends, the three community folks and the members of the church that are working on this project together. Months of effort, achieving consensus, and deepening their bond has paid off in the quality of the plan they presented to our committee.
But only one of the three has joined the church. So here we have three well-meaning, left-leaning, well-educated, and middle-class people drawn into relationship with the church, but only one chooses to worship God. Do you see the source of the concern here? We, in the church, live with the illusion that if we could only meet the people who live around us, if we could only have a chance to tell our story, if we could only show them how friendly we are, and if we could show them how newly photogenic we are, then they would join the church.
But they won’t. And they don’t. Across the church, we are challenged by the disconnect between the excellent thing we offer and the relative indifference of the neighbours that surround us. We are challenged by being the very model of Christian community that feels like ‘thy kingdom come,’ yet the United Church of Canada still stubbornly refuses to grow. And we don’t even need growth, we just want it to hold our own.
I’m going to argue--and you can disagree--that the idea of church growth belongs to Christendom and does not belong to the Kingdom. Yes, we would love more fellow travelers on the road; yes it would be nice if the ushers struggled to carry the plates under the great weight of offering received. But these would seem to be more about the success of a church rather than the degree of faithfulness shown.
And in some ways it is not even about faithfulness shown, because this can quickly become a contest too: are we doing something more meaningful then the church over there, or the one over there? Rather, the Kingdom is a mysterious place where some hearts are turned to prayer, where some fall to their knees to express joy or regret, where some name Jesus Christ the Lord of their life, and others simply do not.
In Christendom, it was easy to identify and judge these people. Never darken the door, and you were not ‘good, church-going folk.’ Drop your kids off at Sunday School and race home for some alone time and you were better, but not good enough. Christmas and Easter only, we had their number. You see, whenever you set up a model and judge the people who fall short, you are engaged in ‘cultural hegemony’ (the needs of the dominant group) and not the Kingdom.
So we don’t want to go back, and we’re not sure there is a way forward. The Kingdom is not of this world but we want to help build it here, in some form. The Kingdom near or here or coming and all we know is that some will see it and some will not. And God knows why this happens. Literally, only God knows why this happens.
So it’s 50p to keep the lights on, and work hard not the judge 99% of the town who are not here this morning, and don’t judge ourselves for not attracting the 99% of the town who are not here this morning, and ponder the Kingdom, that is clearly not of this world, but speaks to our hearts, now and always, Amen.
Proper 26
Ruth 1
11 But Naomi said, “Return home, my daughters. Why would you come with me? Am I going to have any more sons, who could become your husbands? 12 Return home, my daughters; I am too old to have another husband. Even if I thought there was still hope for me—even if I had a husband tonight and then gave birth to sons— 13 would you wait until they grew up? Would you remain unmarried for them? No, my daughters. It is more bitter for me than for you, because the Lord’s hand has turned against me!”
14 At this they wept aloud again. Then Orpah kissed her mother-in-law goodbye, but Ruth clung to her.
15 “Look,” said Naomi, “your sister-in-law is going back to her people and her gods. Go back with her.”
16 But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. 17 Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.” 18 When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her.
48 hours to go and there are surrogates in the spin room.
CNN and FOX News viewers know what I’m talking about: each party in the election has surrogates (partisans, spokespeople) who make themselves available in the spin room (place to put the best face on whatever just happened). And each party has hundreds: they fan out (meaning they leave the spin room) and go to swing states that the candidate cannot reach, owing to the strict rule of physics that only allow you to be in one place at a time.
Investment tip: Jet fuel.
Pity that preachers don’t have surrogates or spin rooms. You know, after the service we could retreat to coffee and a surrogate can say, ‘what I think Michael meant to say...’ Other surrogates could offer a counter-argument: ‘Meant to say? You mean you can’t tell for sure?’ I think you see the picture.
So if I was going take my place as a Mount Dennis surrogate, and spin the vote to come to Central, I might begin with the seamless transition from neighbours to brief co-habitors to companions and now friends. I might highlight the leaders who have joined our administrative life and the renewed sense of purpose this brings, and I would certainly mention the Mount Dennis Neighbourhood Centre, steps from becoming a reality and something that is certain to bring great benefit to the Weston-Mount Dennis community.
I see smiles and nods (I’m so confident that I have written here ‘I see smiles and nods’) and so you might say this surrogate has it right. There is great satisfaction when a seeming disaster leads instead to a positive outcome for the benefit of everyone. And I’m not just talking about the Book of Ruth.
But I could be talking about the Book of Ruth. It is a story about a seeming disaster that leads instead to a positive outcome for the benefit of everyone. And it has given us one of the Bible’s most loved quotes, but that would be jumping ahead.
Ruth is a little book, just four chapters, and hard to find unless you know the mnemonic, the handy memory aid that will allow you to find it every time. It helps to remember that it’s Old Testament, then recall the sequence of books: Joshua Judges Ruth. Of course, Joshua is not literally judging Ruth, just providing a handy memory aid.
Think of Ruth as Job’s twin, separated at birth. Like Job, all the misfortune is over before you turn the first page: Naomi is widowed, her daughter-in-laws are widowed, and everyone is in a difficult spot. Whenever Old Testament writers want to give you shorthand for peril or misfortune, they usually start with ‘widows, orphans and aliens.’ Who are the most vulnerable? Widows, orphans and aliens. Who must the faithful protect? Widows, orphans and aliens. Says who? Psalm 10; Exodus 22; Leviticus 19 and 25; Deuteronomy 10,14,24,26,27, and 31; Proverbs 15, 23. And don’t even get me started on the New Testament.
So we have three widows and a difficult choice: Remain together in Moab and face an uncertain future, or return to Judah and face an uncertain future. Judah offered the possibility of kin, but not for all three. Naomi’s best option was to separate from her two daughters-in-law and go back to Bethlehem alone. Ruth and Orpah might best return to their kin and look for support.
All of this, it seems, is based in the idea of something called Levirate marriage, the principle whereby a widow is to marry her late-husband’s brother in an effort to maintain his bloodline. We see it in John 4, with the unlucky woman who has had five husbands, and we see it in other cultures throughout history. (I will mention it on Thursday, when poor Henry must marry Catherine of Aragon, his brother’s widow, and who can forget Mary of Teck, who marries her fiancee’s younger brother, George V)
So everything old is new again. Either way, splitting up seems the best option and so Orpah remains in Moab. But Ruth has other plans, and gives us some of the most moving words in scripture:
“Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. 17 Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.
And like Job, there is a happy ending, when Ruth meets Boaz, and something happens on the threshing room floor, and everyone lives happily ever after and the boodline becomes the bloodline of King David, the greatest king of all. But that would be jumping ahead. And it would cheat us of our parallel to Job, the real heart of the story. Listen to verses 19 and 20:
19 So the two women went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they arrived in Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them, and the women exclaimed, “Can this be Naomi?”
20 “Don’t call me Naomi,[b]” she told them. “Call me Mara,[c] because the Almighty[d] has made my life very bitter. 21 I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The Lord has afflicted[e] me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.”
In some ways, Naomi is her own ‘comforter,’ much in the way Job has so-called comforters to provide him with the rationale for all his suffering. Leaving full, and returning empty, Naomi can only conclude that she is being punished by God. She wants to be called bitter, because God has made her bitter, and all the good feeling that Ruth has generated with her stirring words is quickly gone. Oddly, verses 19 and 20 don’t appear in the lectionary of readings, maybe because the people who framed the lectionany felt that one Job was more than enough.
But I would argue the opposite, and for two reasons: The first is that by seeing the depth of her despair, by understanding that the ‘greats’ of the Bible experience moments of doubt and despair, we too can have our moments. Voicing discontent, blaming God for our misfortune, letting God know that we are blaming God for our misfortune: all of these have a place in a life of faith. Remember God is big and we are small: God can take it, so blame away. I can make a spirited argument that God cannot be the author of our misfortune, but that denies the cathatic experience that Job needed and Naomi needed and we sometimes need too.
The second reason we need to look at Ruth’s despair is its place in the overall arc of the story. She goes from despair (famine) to hope (family) to despair (death) to hope (Ruth and Boaz). Like all stories worth repeating, it has twists and turns and misfortune and fortune and underneath it all is a picture of a life of faith. Like Job, we learn that being faithful is not guarantee of ongoing happiness, and that looking up we are most often confronted with mystery. The biblical scholar John Collins put it this way:
The author [of Ruth] wants us to see ourselves here: we cannot see the outcome of our situations, nor can we see God’s guiding hand on them--but we are to “walk by faith and not by sight,” to use a New Testament phrase.
In other words, the road is long, the outcome is less than certain, and we always need companions in the journey. And isn’t that the story of the church? There are moments in our life together when we cannot see where we are headed, and we can’t always feel that God is guiding us, until we find ourselves in a place that feels like the place where we are meant to be. Add some fellow-travellers, people willing to take risks and journey together, and you get the very best of church and the best model for a life of faith.
And so we look about, at friends old and new, and we say “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.” Thanks be to God, amen.
Edith Rankin Memorial UC Covenanting
Philippians 2
If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, 2make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. 3Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. 4Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. 5Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 6who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, 7but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, 8he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.
I greet you this afternoon as friends, but also as neighbours.
For you see, we have the good fortune sharing a cottage, not more than seven or eight miles south of here, on Simcoe Island. You might say that Simcoe is the poor man’s Wolfe Island, sort of an after-thought, although we can claim with some pride to be “number one” of the Thousand Islands, unless you count from the other direction.
So we look north and west, to watch the sunset, to play a game we call “spot the prisons,” and, if it were not for that pesky airport, to see this fine church. Based on current hydrological trends, we may soon be able to walk to this church, but that is another matter. So we are neighbours.
I assume that it is no accident that this church was located on the shore. We tend to seek out places beside rivers and lakes, for the feeling that water evokes, a sense of connection, a sense of something bigger, some sense of primeval longing we can’t quite put our finger on. I know we feel it seven or eight miles over there, and I’m certain you feel it here too.
So we are in a unique place, at a unique moment in your life together, so we mark it. We celebrate with Jean, and Beth, and Wayne, we offer our support, and we worship together the God of Sea and Sky. It is God who gives us the grace to make living-in-covenant possible, it is God who gives us the strength to keep the vows we make, and it is God who will speak through us to offer the support that every ministry team needs.
Being in a unique place, you have something unique to share. Even congregations without a Great Lake in their backyard have something unique to share: Christian community. And St. Paul does his best to help the church at Philippi see it, expressing it this way:
If there is any encouragement in Christ, if there is any consolation from love, if there is any sharing in the Spirit, if there is any compassion and sympathy (and it’s a big if), 2make my joy complete by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.
Before I move on, and look at those important ‘ifs,’ I want to note the repetition in the second verse. If Paul was using a word processor, we might attribute the repetition to a ‘cut and paste’ problem, that modern mystery in writing where things appear twice or not at all. But this is old, even older than MS-DOS, and we can only conclude that Paul means it when he says ‘be of one mind.‘ I’m thinking maybe it’s a coded message for Jean, Beth and Wayne, so we will leave it to them to decode.
Failing that theory, I would suggest that if Paul troubled himself to say it twice, we better pay attention. What if being ‘of one mind’ was pushed to the top of the list of Christian virtues? How would we fare? I’ll just leave that hanging in air and pick it up in a moment.
The other word that leaps off the page is ‘accord.’ In this case it means ‘harmony.’ If your mind took you to the Meech Lake Accord, I would say you are living in the past. Maybe when you hear the world accord you think of being here ‘of your own accord,’ meaning voluntarily, something that we will assume for everyone with the possible exception of presbyters, who are having a really long day.
So Paul’s wish for the gathered community is unity, and harmony, and the same love extended to others. Back to my not-so-coded message to the team, it seems an ideal set of goals, something to strive for, but also something for everyone.
Perhaps just now you are thinking to yourself, ‘steady on, preacher, these are difficult goals, and we are but tiny craft on the shore of a great sea.’ Okay, I see what you mean. Life is hard enough without heaping on seemingly impossible goals. But before we despair, we need to look again at Paul’s fine rhetoric, the good kind of rhetoric, and see the foundation of the goals we hope to achieve together.
Looking again at the ‘big ifs,’ another pattern comes into view. “If there is encouragement in Christ, if there is consolation from love, if there is sharing in the Spirit, if there is compassion and sympathy,” then the unity and harmony and kindness will follow. And the big ifs, the encouragement and the consolation and the sharing and the compassion and the sympathy are all God’s. We can do these things too, but they belong to God, and do not happen apart from God. Tiny craft, vast sea, Great Pilot.
Now, I want to tell you about a small and non-scientific survey I witnessed this week, because it seems to have some bearing on our life as a church and frankly it’s been bothering me.
I am a member of our presbytery’s property committee, and as such we meet with congregations that want to renovate or alter or even sell their building. We met with a delegation who have a redevelopment dream, to gut their church and transform it into a smaller congregational space and add seniors housing. It’s a good scheme, and it may be beyond the energy and skill of the forty or so members of the congregation, but they have been supplemented by at least three members of the community who understand community housing and such things.
They have become good friends, the three community folks and the members of the church that are working on this project together. Months of effort, achieving consensus, and deepening their bond has paid off in the quality of the plan they presented to our committee.
But only one of the three has joined the church. So here we have three well-meaning, left-leaning, well-educated, and middle-class people drawn into relationship with the church, but only one chooses to worship God. Do you see the source of the concern here? We, in the church, live with the illusion that if we could only meet the people who live around us, if we could only have a chance to tell our story, if we could only show them how friendly we are, and if we could show them our lakeside view (and it’s a big view), then they would join the church.
But they won’t. And they don’t. Across the church, we are challenged by the disconnect between the excellent thing we offer and the relative indifference of the neighbours that surround us. We are challenged by being the very model of Christian community that St. Paul commends to us, yet our denomination still stubbornly refuses to grow. And we don’t even need growth, we just want it to remain the same.
So again, we turn to Paul. Paul, in his very best rhetoric (the good kind) has set up for us an IF-THEN paradigm. If this happens, then this will follow. IF-THEN. Now, notice in his letter to the church at Philippi, and I’m going to suggest in most other places for Paul, the IF always belongs to God: If God encourages us, consoles us, inspires us, and has mercy on us, then we will be united, and harmonious, and ever-loving. The IF belongs to God, and the result is ours.
Back to my non-scientific look at church growth, we tend to give ourselves the IF’s and expect the result we want. If we paint the washrooms, if we have a website, if we practice the ideal handshake, then people will come and worship with us. But these are big if’s, and the wrong ones. Yes, it’s important to paint and promote and shake (firm, but not too firm), but the IF’s belong to God, and not to us, as well-meaning as we might be.
If someone feels the urge to lift their thoughts to God, if someone reflects on all that serves as a barrier between creature and Creator, if someone falls to their knees and names Jesus Christ the Lord of their life, this will be God’s doing, and God’s alone. Our job is praise.
Our job is praise, and not erect barriers to all the IF’s that God is constantly opening in people’s lives. In other word’s we belong to a unique community of believers that is not of our making. And this is something we should try to agree on. God is the author of the growth, and the life, and the love, and the compassion, and we are the pages on which this story is written. We don’t write the church’s story, we don’t turn a heart to praise, we don’t define a carefully articulated mission, God does all of these things.
So we try to be of one mind, focused on the God who made us, the Christ who makes us one, and the Spirit who leads us every day. Amen.
