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Making Heaven Reign
By Administrator | January 27, 2008
January 27, 2008 at Palm Bay, FL
by Rev. Scott Elliott
My childhood and the early years of adolescence were dark and storming. One of my parents was an alcoholic and abusive, and not surprisingly, we always seemed to be on the brink of some sort of financial trouble or other crisis.
I am sure it was scary for all four of us children, but, for me it seemed particularly hopeless– the early years of adolescence can sort of have a gloomy feel to them anyway, but, mix in trouble at home and, well, I think disaster was brewing for me.
While this dark mix was steeping – through what I can only describe in hindsight as the Grace of God– I somehow found my way to a church youth group. It changed my life. It brought me out the gloom. It gave me hope.
The storms of my childhood brought me to God. Often that is when people reach out and find God. Down and out. Dark and stormy God’s hand is there for the grabbing. God is a great light for those who sit in darkness. Which at one time or another is all of us.
I have mentioned a lot of this before. I was welcomed and loved at that church that I found. And I heard about this God who was Love. I really glommed on to that.
If God was love and God was everywhere then that meant to me that I was loved. Sounds kind of simple, and I suppose it is, but, it had a profound and powerful influence on me. That Love centered me. It gave me courage to do things– to feel I had worth. It also affected how I saw others. And eventually if affected how I saw the church.
I know I look really young up here, but, it’s the lighting and this really cool robe I am wearing. I am actually fifty. And here’s the thing, it’s been quite awhile since I spent my youth immersed in the church.
Although the years have long past I can still remember rather well that the church that I found the God of Love in as a teenager I have also come to remember as a church that understood and experienced a God who excluded others. A church that preached about hell and damnation for anyone who did not believe as it did, who did not profess Jesus to be their personal Lord and Savior.
“Sorry,” I heard them say, “But those who do not repent of their personal sins and seek salvation through Jesus cannot get to heaven.” Atheists. Agnostics. Jews. Muslims. Buddhists. Hindus. Mormons. Native Americans. Catholics. All were seen as bound for eternal torment, no matter how good they might be.
It was not that God did not love them, it was not even that they did not love God, it was that they had not repented and accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior in the eyes of that church.
Heaven, they tried to teach me was, you see, only for those who leapt through that hoop. It was only for Christians. And only their type of Christians at that.
I had trouble with that. A lot of trouble. I am not the only one. I hear quite often from people who have left the church that this is one of the most troubling aspects of Christianity. How could Love send anyone to hell? How could Love bar good people from heaven?
As a young adult I questioned that such a God existed and then I eventually became what I can only describe as an atheist to such a God of limited love.
The God I knew and experienced loved me and held on to me with all my imperfections. And I felt certain that God loved and held everyone else as well – regardless of who they were or what they believed.
So I left the church. I spent my later teen years and most of my twenties and thirties away from organized religion.
Then one day I walked into a United Church of Christ. At first I did not believe it, but, over time I came to understand that not all of Christianity insists on understanding and experiencing God as limited in love and requiring repentance of personal sins and acceptance of Jesus as personal Lord and Savior in order to get into heaven in the afterlife.
There was, and is, a huge difference in how the United Church of Christ and the church of my youth allow understandings of God. The words that Jesus says in today’s scripture epitomize the difference. . .well, how we hear the words epitomizes it.
Jesus’ words in the New Revised Standard Version are “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven has come near.”
Those words are loaded.
Indeed they give a number of folks I know the heebee-
geebees.
Most folks tend to hear those words as a threat, meaning something along the lines of “You’d better renounce your sinful ways before it is too late to get into heaven!” The implication being that you are going to hell if you don’t.
Of course what “sinful” means– that is what was to be repented– tends to be whatever the person or church pushing that idea decides to emphasize.
It seemed to me when I was a teenager that the sins we were supposed to repent and stay away from most often related to intimate relationships, intoxication, dishonesty and swearing.
If you stopped having sex, lying, drinking beer and cursing you were pretty much on the path to repentance and would be safe when the Kingdom of Heaven arrived.
As a teenager I pretty much didn’t do any of those things anyway. But I just did not get why if someone did them or wanted to do them God would not let them in heaven; worse, God would send them elsewhere to burn forever in hell.
If you think about it, the gospels don’t have Jesus telling us so much what not to do, as it has him telling us what to do. Jesus ministry was action oriented. The word repent in today’s verse is an action word, in Matthew’s Greek it literally means “change one’s mind.” 1
But it also connotes the Hebrew meaning that Alicia has often taught us, that is, “to turn” or “change direction.” Both the Old Testament and New Testament use the word “repent” to urge “a change in the direction of one’s life.” 2
Or as the New Interpreter’s Bible commentary puts it “get yourself a new orientation for the way you live then act on it.”3
Matthew’s phrase “The Kingdom of Heaven” is in reference to the kingdom of God. Like many Jews of his day and up into the present out of respect and piety the author of Matthew preferred to not write the word “God” and used the word “heaven” instead.
What Jesus is saying then in today’s verse is repent, change your ways God’s reign is near, it is close at hand.
In fact in Luke 17 (20-21) when Jesus was
asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God was coming he answered “The Kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed ; nor will they say ‘Look here it is’ or ‘There it is’ for in fact the Kingdom of God is among you.”
Since joining the United Church of Christ and going to seminary and being ordained I have learned to hear “Repent for Kingdom of Heaven has come near,” not just as a call for us to turn away from personal sin to save ourselves, but also as a call for humanity to get a new orientation for the way we live to help bring the Kingdom of Heaven about in the here and now. Heaven is possible on earth in life.
That is what Jesus was preaching and teaching.
If you think about it this is not a new concept in church. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer (which is based on Matthew 6) we ask that God’s kingdom come, that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
But how is it that we are to repent, that is re-orient ourselves, to help God’s Reign, to make Heaven’s Reign, break in on earth?
Micah 6 tells us that all God requires of us is “to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with our God.” Jesus basically tells us to do the same thing. To repent – to orient ourselves in a new direction– we need to love God, love ourselves, love our neighbors, love our enemies. More specifically as we heard last week in our lesson from Matthew 25: that when we feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, welcome the stranger, tend to the sick and visit the imprisoned we are tending to Christ. It is this type of action, these acts of love that Jesus calls us to orient our lives to.
When we love and feed and tend to all equally in a sense it’s like a “rain dance” those ceremonial rituals performed to invoke rain. Only it’s about Heaven’s Reign, God’s Kingdom on earth.
You see if Jesus is right then the Kingdom of Heaven is near. And our repentance, our doing a dance in life that showers love on everyone, that does justice, loves kindness and walks humbly with God can and will bring about the Reign of God, we can bring about Heaven’s Reign in the here and now.
That’s a far cry from only repenting of your personal sins only to personally get into heaven in the afterlife to avoid hell. It’s about changing our ways to make it possible for heaven to reign on earth for all of us, for all our friends, for those we don’t know, for even our foes, for everyone.
If we act as Jesus did, and as he taught us to do, we can bring heaven to earth for the living and our living will then be in heaven.
May we all hear and respond to Jesus’s call to “repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Let it begin with each of us.
May our reign-dance of love . . . make Heaven Reign.
AMEN.
– END NOTES–
1. New Interpreters Bible, Vol. VIII, 167.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
Scott Elliott Copyright © 2008
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