Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, January 26, 2003
Alan Jones is an Episcopal priest and a writer I admire, and although my theological lens is considerably different from his, I always find his work both thought-provoking and a pleasure to read. It was a phrase of his, taken from a book called The Desert Fathers, that gave me the idea for this sermon because I found his words so resonant. He wrote, "The Kingdom of God is concerned with the restoration of lost harmonies, with the healing of fractured integrities, with the creation of new spaces within the soul. One way of understanding the Kingdom of God is to think of it as a code word for 'mending the creation' and for enlarging the space in which it can flourish."
Now, I realize that Unitarian Universalists rarely, if ever, use language like "the Kingdom of God" to express either our theologies or our utopias. It's language that sounds more congruent with fundamentalist Christianity or with apocalyptic thinking, and the monarchist implications can give us even more of an allergic reaction than we normally have to language that evokes an anthropomorphic God.
In fact two centuries ago, Unitarians and Universalists wholeheartedly rejected the two concepts most commonly associated with this term. The first of these is the Kingdom of God as heaven or an afterlife, implying that what was wrong or unjust in this life would be made right in the next one. The second notion is the apocalyptic one that points to the second coming of Jesus as the Christ, when those with the proper religious credentials will be brought back from the dead to enjoy the new earth that will be created for them.
But there are other ways to look at the Kingdom of God, as our reading and the Alan Jones quote make clear. These are more reflective of the beliefs of a very different segment of the Christian world, radicals like the Catholic Workers who align themselves unequivocally with the poor and marginalized in our societies. For a number of years now there have been radical Christians in my life, some of whom I've worked alongside of in soup kitchens in this country and in rebuilding war-ravaged homes in Nicaragua. Some of them have become close friends and companions on my own spiritual path, which is to say that our theological and language differences became irrelevant. The Kingdom of God is a notion and a language that belongs to these Christians also, and it's from them that I've learned to reconsider it and to claim some of its meaning for myself, whether or not I use the language.
Jesus was the instigator of the notion of the Kingdom of God as the radical Christians I know think of it. But he wasn't the one who invented the term, and it's probably because of the way the language was commonly used in his day that even now, all these centuries later, there are still many who take it to mean something apocalyptic.
In Jesus' time, a belief in the imminent end of the world was rampant, and the idea of the coming reign of God pervaded much of the thinking and many of the religious movements afoot when he began his teaching. The Kingdom of God was seen in fairly literal terms, at least as far as can be pieced together from the writings that survived. There would be a new heaven and a new earth, brought about by sudden and shattering change; the lion would lie down with the lamb, those who were oppressed and downtrodden would be lifted up, and so on. The Kingdom was in God's hands and flowed according to his time-frame; the only role available to humans was to wait and watch.
How incredibly confounding it therefore must have been for those listening to Jesus teach, when he spoke about the Kingdom of God. No angels wielding avenging swords, no brilliant flashes of lightning to destroy the wicked, no streets paved with gold when it was all over. What he said was much more baffling.
The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, which is smaller than any other seed; but when it is sown, it grows up and becomes the largest of shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the sky are able to make their nests in its shade.
The Kingdom of God is like yeast, which a woman took and mixed in with fifty pounds of dough, until all of it was leavened. The Kingdom of God is like this: there was a man looking for fine pearls, who suddenly found one pearl of great price; and in his joy he went and sold all he had and bought it. "Once, the disciples asked Jesus, 'Who is the greatest in the Kingdom?' And he called a child over, and put him in front of them; and taking him in his arms, he said, 'Truly I tell you, unless you return and become like children, you can't enter the Kingdom of God.'"
And perhaps most confounding of all: Someone asked him, 'When will the Kingdom of God come?' And he said, 'The Kingdom of God will not come if you watch for it. Nor will anyone be able to say, 'It is here', or 'It is there.' For the Kingdom of God is within you.' In the Gospel of Thomas, one of the many gospels that did not make it into the canon we now call the bible, Jesus says, "If your teachers say to you, 'Look, the Kingdom is in Heaven', then the birds will get there before you!...The Kingdom of God is spread out upon the earth, and yet you do not see it."
None of these analogies for the Kingdom of God were anything like what Jesus' listeners had heard before or expected to hear from him. None of them support the notion, still around today, that the Kingdom of God is something apocalyptic that will descend upon us, signaling the end of the world as we know it. Instead, he talked about the most common, unnoticed things that we suddenly notice, and realize are pivotal. He spoke of small things like yeast or mustard seed affecting great change; or hidden things suddenly discovered right before us, like a pearl of great price. His analogies involve immediacy, accessibility, and great joy.
What could be more simple, and yet more profoundly difficult? No wonder it was apocalyptic thinking that won out, despite Jesus' words. Because after all this time it is still hard to believe that the key to the most profound and far-reaching change, in us and in our world, could be something simple, something quiet and near at hand in the way Jesus implied.
How could a Kingdom be like a tiny seed? How could it be like something so mundane and homely as yeast? And most baffling of all, how could it be within us, or spread out and somehow invisible before us?
There is an old story, I think from the Hebrew tradition, that tells about the angels gathering around when God had finished creating the first human beings. The angels were given the task of deciding where to hide the secret to salvation, because if it were too easy to find, the people would not value it enough nor would they grow enough in seeking it. So the angels considered all the places they could hide the secret, from the highest mountain to the depths of the ocean, but all the places seemed to them too easy and too accessible. And then finally one of them hit on an idea, and said, "I know! Let's hide the secret within the human heart! That will be the last place they'll ever think to look." And so it came to pass.
But there are those in all the world's religions who have come to realize where the secret is hidden. In his book The Gospel in Solentiname, Ernesto Cardenal documents some of the house churches that developed in revolutionary Nicaragua, when peasant people would gather to reflect on scriptural passages in the light of their own lives. Cardenal recalled a house church meeting on the day they were considering the bible passage about the mustard seed. A campesino named Marcelino said, "It doesn't seem there's any connection between a thing [like a tiny seed] and that great big tree. It doesn't seem either that there's any connection between some poor campesinos and a just and [good] society, where there is abundance and everything is shared....[but] we are the seed of that society. When the tree will develop we don't know. But we know that we are a seed."
This is what it means, I think, to be able to envision the Kingdom of God: to see in ourselves the seeds of transformation, understanding that even the most radical and complete change has to begin in its small and invisible ways within us. Therefore the Kingdom of God is ultimately concerned with us: with shaping each flawed one of us into something better. In Christian language it's the process of helping us to become saints, but if we have too much trouble with that word we can substitute another. The Kingdom of God is concerned with each of us realizing our Buddha-nature; it is concerned with shifting the way we act and live to bring us into line with our ideals; it is concerned with showing us a greater depth and purpose in being human than we have so far realized.
In Graham Greene's novel, The Power and the Glory, one of the main characters is a seedy, alcoholic Catholic priest who after months as a fugitive is finally caught by the revolutionary Mexican government and condemned to be shot. On the evening before his execution, he sits in his cell with a flask of brandy to keep his courage up, and thinks back over what seems to him the dingy failure of his life. Greene writes, "Tears poured down his face. he was not at the moment afraid of damnation -- even the fear of pain was in the background. He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him at that moment that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint, and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted -- to be a saint."
What is the underlying purpose in our lives? To become saints, says the old priest in the novel; to become Buddha's, a Buddhist might say; to live fully into the best and most whole-hearted notion of what it is to be a human being, the humanist might say. Or to recognize and begin to manifest the Kingdom of God that is within us, as some Christians might say.
Another Christian theologian, Frederick Beuchner, writes: "To be a saint is… to work and weep for the broken and suffering of the world, but it is also…to know joy. Not happiness that comes and goes with the moments that occasion it, but joy that is always there like an underground spring no matter how dark and terrible the night. To be a saint is to be a little out of one's mind, which is a very good thing to be a little out of from time to time. It is to live a life that is always giving itself away and yet is always full....I believe that...beneath all our yearning for whatever glitters brightest in this world lies our yearning for this kind of life: ...to be a saint, to be fully human, to enter the Kingdom of [God], as Jesus calls it."
This is how the Kingdom of God has ended up meaning something for me, in the way I've come to hear it from radical Christians: Just like us, their hard-nosed and practical UU brethren, they are continually involved in trying to change the world for the better. At the same time they realize that the work that is most accessible to us is also the most difficult: and that's the work of making ourselves into the mustard seeds, into manifestations of the Kingdom of God, or into saints.
We ourselves may never choose to use this language: the Kingdom of God, or the work of becoming more saintly, when we're thinking about the work we feel called to do on ourselves and on our world. But even holding the notions loosely and gently at the back of our minds might be useful to us, however we translate them.
Or we might hold in mind a translation that works for us, like the poetry of Alan Jones: "The Kingdom of God is concerned with the restoration of lost harmonies, with the healing of fractured integrities, with the creation of new spaces within the soul. One way of understanding the Kingdom of God is to think of it as a code word for 'mending the creation' and for enlarging the space in which it can flourish."
In holding such a notion in our minds, we can then weigh our choices in its light, asking, In choosing this direction, am I serving that which seems most whole and holy to me? Am I deepening the way I live, or deadening it? Am I manifesting something true and light and joyful in the world? Am I restoring lost harmonies? At the very least, maybe the next time we find ourselves working side by side with those who are still more deeply within the Christian language than are we, we'll recognize a commonality below the different words and terms we use.
But I think something more than that is also possible, because whether or not we use the language, we need the dual vision implied by the Kingdom of God. We need this notion, on the one hand, that it is buried within us, because that reminds us that when we make ourselves more true, more authentic, more wise and compassionate, this has an essential impact on the world. And on the other hand, we need the hope and faith contained in the statement that the Kingdom of God is already between or among us, spread out on the earth before us though we do not see. This reminds us to open our eyes to one another and to see that the fruits of our own changes and growth in solitude can only be made manifest in community.
The dual vision is especially important in a world that tries to make us choose between what is personal and what is political, or between what is the private realm and what is the public, or between what is me and what is not-me. Within the language of the Kingdom of God, these lines do not get drawn. Instead, we have to learn to operate on two levels at the same time, seeing them as two currents within a single stream.
Alan Jones writes, "We have to keep both [currents] going -- the problem-solving, which seems to be the mental genius of our species, and the fearless contemplation of gigantic things, which is the spiritual genius of our species. Souls come into being when they are willing to contemplate gigantic things, when they are willing to allow the wildness of the wild card to enter their systems..."
I don't think there is anything more gigantic, or more of a wild card, than what Jesus spoke of as the Kingdom of God. It is a tiny seed that grows into something enormous; it is the yeast that leavens all it touches; it is the pearl of great price, worth everything else we own; it is within us; it is spread out before us; it is ours. AMEN.