[Sermon delivered at St. Mary the Virgin Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona (https://stmarysphoenix.org) for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, July 18, 2021]
✠In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen
If you have not noticed, we talk a lot about the Kingdom of God, but what do we know about the Kingdom of God? Well, we hear about it a lot, but while it has become familiar, I fear too often it becomes background noise. We hear the messages of the Kingdom, we try to work them into the fabric of our everyday lives, but they get mixed in along with the other messages and patterns we hear and see, and the true radical nature of God’s will in our world tends to become muted.
Really, though, the Kingdom of God is a topsy-turvy place, a state where business as usual is set on its ear. Consider what we frequently pray: hallowed be Thy Name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Our Lord enjoins us to pray that because on earth quite the opposite happens…a lot. God’s name is not treated as holy and set apart from the mundane and the profane. His Kingdom is anything but evident in human interaction. God’s Will…oh good grief, do you for one moment think all this garbage around us is the Will of God?
In the world the adage “might make right” holds sway regardless of how one feels. The rich squander their money on senseless projects that in effect help no one to bring empty glory on themselves. The politically powerful spend considerable time, effort, and money tearing down their enemies and opponents for the sole purpose of bolstering their careers. Influencers sell us on products, fads, and lifestyles that turn those influenced into pale, pathetic shadows of the influencers for the sole purpose of padding already over-inflated egos. At a more visceral level, the criminal element resorts to violence to coerce people to cater to their wants and whims, or the powerful use violence to keep an oppressed populace under their thumb. It is also a matter of degree…the greater the power, the greater the force applied. It has no need for God, no desire for God, no place for God.
God knows this. God knows the emptiness, the despair, and the ultimate misery of such an existence, and He would deliver us from that. To that end, God has dropped into the middle of all this sin a place, as it were, where those rules do not apply. This place is a temple, if you will, a sacred enclosure where God dwells among us where oppression and deceit and death have no place, where the weak are esteemed, the poor are glorified, the disabled and the broken are cared for and rehabilitated, and everyone has value.
Now, take note of what I had stated earlier. The current, default condition of humanity is one in opposition to God’s holiness, to God’s Kingdom, and to God’s will. In fact, the common “wisdom” of our kind considers the touchstones of the Kingdom to be weakness and foolishness. We are, and frankly always have been, driven to look out for our personal survival, our personal fulfilment, our personal self-realization. We are that crowd that Jesus looked on in today’s Gospel, for “…he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd”[1] Our Lord saw a rudderless, lost, sick, and ignorant group of people. Bereft of God’s peace and fellowship, they were basically dead. These people are us. If we do not identify with them, both personally and as humanity as a whole, we miss the point. The point is that we are like sheep without a shepherd, needing reconciliation with God if we are to have any hope of true Life. Jesus selflessly gave of Himself to rectify this. He taught and healed those around Him, but that was only the beginning of His great work. To truly effect reconciliation between God and Humanity, he had to make it universal, as St. Paul had reminded us, “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” [2] Our Lord went head-to-head with the powers of the age not only in addressing the needs of others but by offering His very life. In his commentary on this section, St. Ambrose tells us,
The Lord of Hosts was not signaling weakness as He gave sight to the blind, made the crooked to stand upright, raised the dead to life, anticipated the effects of medicine at our prayers, and cured those who sought after Him. Those who merely touched the fringe of His robe were healed. Surely you did not think it was some divine weakness, you speculators, when you saw Him wounded? Indeed there are wounds that pierced His body, but they did not demonstrate weakness but strength. For from these wounds flowed life to all, from the One who was the Life of all.[3]
In offering Himself for us, Our Lord has made possible a Temple, a sacred enclosure, where the Holiness, Kingdom, and Will of God is made manifest to the World. In reconciling us to God, in our participating in fellowship with God, Our Lord has created a place where God dwells, where everything that is wrong with the World has no place, where its darkness is banished by the light of God’s presence. Early Israel foreshadowed this visually and geographically with first the Tabernacle, then the Temple, where sacrifices specifically for the reconciliation of God and His people were offered.
When we read the exchange between Nathan the Prophet and David the King in 2 Samuel, we not only see the groundwork laid for the Temple in Jerusalem, but we see a prophecy of this Temple that is the Kingdom of God. Nathan tells David, “When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever.”[4] At first glance, it would seem he refers to Solomon who would build the Temple, but Nathan also looked forward to another of David’s line, Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, who by His sacrifice established the greatest Temple of all, the hearts of God’s children, where God would dwell forever more and where the Kingdom, as small as a mustard seed, would take root and grow and crowd out the disaster that is the current age and replace it forever. As St. Paul writes, “In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling-place for God.”[5]
But there is still much to do, and we have not fully realized the Temple of God in our hearts. Every time we turn from Our Lord’s example and let the values of this world take centre stage then God does not dwell in us. When we exalt ourselves over others, oppress the disadvantaged, silence the voice of the poor, denigrate, or deny the truth of others, when we do not offer healing, shelter, or nourishment, then we shut out the presence of God and no longer is the Temple of God with us. When we embrace our own selfish desires, we make no place for the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit will not dwell where He is not welcome. The Church’s work has been hampered grievously by this, where the Temple appears to be in ruins, a paving stone here, an arch there, part of the wall knocked over and lying as scattered, unconnected stones. The enemies of God see this, and God is brought into disrepute by us, as the prophet Isaiah[6] and the apostle Paul[7] both remind us, “The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.” But it does not have to be this way. God in His mercy can clear the brambles and rebuild the walls, all because the foundation, Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, is intact, and the Gates of Hell cannot prevail against it. What we must do is turn again to God, to offer our hearts, souls, and bodies in His service, and allow this Temple to rise, to become complete, and at the end push out the undergrowth of the World and present this Temple, the New Jerusalem, complete and whole to God, and instead of God being mocked by the nations, God will instead be praised.
✠Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Saviour save us. Amen.
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