{"id":1613,"date":"2017-07-16T11:00:45","date_gmt":"2017-07-16T15:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=1613"},"modified":"2019-09-24T13:16:37","modified_gmt":"2019-09-24T17:16:37","slug":"among-you-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2017\/07\/16\/among-you-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Among You (Us)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here to listen to the full service<\/a><\/p>\n

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7<\/a><\/p>\n

Romans 7:15-25a<\/a><\/p>\n

Luke 17:20-21<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to listen to the meditation only<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/strong>The kingdom of God is among us.<\/p>\n

Many years ago, there was a man who worked in a pottery factory\u2014a large man, a quiet man\u2026 Let\u2019s call him Joe.[1]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Like so many of us, every day, Joe came to work, kept his head down, did his job to the best of his ability and then went home.<\/p>\n

Now, as happens in most factories, there was always something extraneous to the process that was left over at the end of the day; nothing much: a piece of glass, a bit of ribbon, a shard of broken pottery\u2014you know, trash\u2014the result of human error along the production line.<\/p>\n

Most of those items would be discarded, thrown away, sent to a landfill somewhere never to be seen again, but not all of them.<\/p>\n

You see, before he left for the day, much to the bemusement of his coworkers, Joe went around silently sifting through those extraneous pieces, those scraps of the industrial process, the things that everyone else had thrown away. He would search until he found at least a couple of items to add to what most considered a pile of junk now occupying a rather comical portion of his locker.<\/p>\n

But the snickers from his coworkers didn\u2019t stop Joe.<\/p>\n

No, every day, either staying late or coming in early, Joe found some time to do something with that junk. Every day Joe\u00a0E worked with those scraps to make something new, not always large or complex or artful, but new so that he always had something colorful or unique to bring home.<\/p>\n

You see, Joe had a son at home whom he knew from his birth would never leave his bed.\u00a0 His \u201cwee lad,\u201d as he called him, spent each day in his small bed in his small room in a small house.\u00a0 And large Joe, though he couldn\u2019t always find ways to express it with words, loved his \u201cwee lad\u201d more than anything in this broken world.\u00a0 And though it meant a little extra time at work, he brought something home every day that he knew, if only for a moment, would make his son\u2019s face light up.<\/p>\n

Every day he pulled together scraps that others had discarded in the name of love.<\/p>\n

The kingdom of God is among us.<\/p>\n

Once, according to Luke, some Pharisees asked Jesus when the Kingdom of God was coming. We don\u2019t have much context for the question in Luke\u2019s Gospel, we\u2019re just told that once\u2014that is, at some point\u2014they asked it.<\/p>\n

And if we\u2019re honest, we get it.\u00a0 After all, it\u2019s a question we\u2019ve asked from time to time as well.\u00a0 If not always in those words.<\/p>\n

Perhaps some of us have done so this week. As we look around at the political mess we find ourselves in, as we get increasingly terrifying news alerts on our phones, as we witness the saber rattling our leaders, as we learn of the ice caps breaking apart, of meetings with Russian lawyers, of health care without the care, of nobel peace prize winning dissidents dying in prison, it might be only natural to pause and ask ourselves\u2026is this the end? Is the kingdom of God finally upon us?<\/p>\n

The Pharisees had similar question.\u00a0 They were concerned with timing.\u00a0 Who knows? Maybe they wanted to get invitations out in time for the party.\u00a0 More likely, they wanted to prepare themselves for the end; for that time when God would come in final victory and their hard work would be rewarded.<\/p>\n

Now to be fair, Luke, like Matthew and Mark, also seemed to believe that the Kingdom of God was imminent; as each of those gospel writers said in their own way, they believed that not a generation would pass before the Kingdom would be upon them; hopeful words for those first century Christians to whom they writing.<\/p>\n

Those early Christians must have heard these gospels and taken comfort that the kingdom of God was right around the corner, that the uncertainty and alienation and exclusion of their present age would soon pass\u2026that they needed only to bide their time.<\/p>\n

But, as we know, Luke, like Matthew and Mark, was wrong.\u00a0\u00a0 John, writing at least a generation later, had to deal with their misunderstanding in his gospel, but friends, no matter how we dice it, the kingdom of God didn\u2019t come about within a generation. Nor, as it turns out, in the hundreds of generations since.\u00a0 The truth is, we\u2019re still waiting for that uncertainty and alienation and exclusion to pass.<\/p>\n

In other words, the gospel writers were wrong.<\/p>\n

Now, on the one hand, it\u2019s comforting to know that even the gospel writers could be wrong every once in a while\u2026after all, we know the feeling.\u00a0 On the other, though, it\u2019s a little disconcerting.<\/p>\n

Here, they had been waiting for something to happen, longing for something to happen, promised that something would happen, and then, it didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

And now we, nearly 2000 years later, are left to ask, \u201cWhy?\u201d\u00a0 Another question with which we have more than a passing familiarity. Why?<\/p>\n

Fortunately, we get by with a little help from our friends.<\/p>\n

In our case today, we receive some help from the Gospel of Luke itself; from a quirky little passage that speaks about the Kingdom of God in such a different way than the rest of the gospel that its authenticity to Luke has been questioned.<\/p>\n

You see in our passage today, when the Pharisees ask Jesus when the kingdom of God is coming he surprises them by saying, \u201cThe kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, \u201clook, here it is,\u201d or \u201cthere is it!\u201d for, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Do you hear? Jesus says, \u201cThe kingdom of God is among you,\u201d or as might better be translated, \u201cwithin you.\u201d\u00a0 The Kingdom of God is among us.<\/p>\n

That changes some things, doesn\u2019t it? \u00a0At the very least, it shifts our attention from the sky to the mirror. \u00a0Not that that makes it easier, it doesn\u2019t, but it does make sense.\u00a0 It makes sense to us that the Kingdom of God is not something that happens to us, but rather something that we take part in. \u00a0It\u2019s not passive, but active.<\/p>\n

Friends, the Kingdom of God is not some apocalyptic vision about the end of the world, but rather a hope for a world in which we all finally and fully live as God commands.<\/p>\n

And fortunately, we know the gospel writers didn\u2019t get that part wrong. \u00a0We have the rest of Scripture and our own experience to affirm it: in the end, we know how we are called to live.\u00a0 We know that as a people of faith we are really only called to do two things: to love God and to love our neighbor.\u00a0 Or said more succinctly we are called to love. Full stop.<\/p>\n

\u201cI give you a new command, that you love one another.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

For some of us, that means staying a little late at the factory.<\/p>\n

For some of us, it means letting go of a broken relationship, or workplace, or heart.<\/p>\n

For some of us, it means changing the way we spend our time or money or life.<\/p>\n

The truth is, we don\u2019t love in the abstract, we love in the concrete.\u00a0 Human to human, person to person, heart to heart.<\/p>\n

Friends, the kingdom of God is among us and is revealed one relationship at a time.<\/p>\n

The good news is that we don\u2019t have to figure it out on our own.\u00a0 That\u2019s why we\u2019re here, that\u2019s why we\u2019ve tuned in this morning, isn\u2019t it? \u00a0\u00a0To get a little help from our friends?<\/p>\n

The purpose of the church universal is to help one another find better and fuller ways to love.\u00a0 And though we\u2019ve made it more complicated and at times missed the point entirely, that\u2019s really the only purpose we have.<\/p>\n

Friends, we are called to keep reminding each other that each person we encounter is someone of worth, a child of the same God.<\/p>\n

All of us, young and old, black and white, gay and straight, male and female, rich and poor, broken and whole.\u00a0 All of us are God\u2019s children, which among other things means that we have an awfully big family to care for.<\/p>\n

It means we have an awfully strange family to care for.<\/p>\n

It means that we collect the scraps that everyone else thinks of as trash.<\/p>\n

But we don\u2019t do it alone.\u00a0 And as we know from hard experience, we can do an awful lot if we know we don\u2019t have to do it alone.<\/p>\n

As Howard Thurman said, we have each, by the grace of God, been given a crown to grow into\u2026a crown which we did nothing to earn and, thank God, can do nothing to take away. A crown of grace which means that whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, whether we believe it or not, the kingdom of God is within us.<\/p>\n

Friends, Luke believed that the Kingdom of God was coming soon. He believed that it would not be long before the barriers that we use to divide ourselves, the walls that we build would finally and fully be taken down.\u00a0 After all, it\u2019s hard to love your neighbor through a wall.<\/p>\n

Perhaps he was more optimistic than he should have been, but the good news, friends, is that the Kingdom of God is just as close today as it was when Luke was writing.<\/p>\n

The kingdom of God is not a place.\u00a0 It\u2019s our hope for a world in which we each recognize the crown we have been given and then help others to do the same.<\/p>\n

Do you hear? The kingdom of God is among us.<\/p>\n

And sometimes it only takes one act of love to change this broken world.<\/p>\n

Nobody quite knows how Joe\u2019s co-workers found out about his \u201cwee lad,\u201d\u2014no one ever spoke about it.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, one by one, the other pottery workers began to collect scraps of their own.\u00a0 And soon, a couple times a week, Joe would return to his locker to find a little cup with wheels or a painted piece of scrap, or an engraving in wood, and he understood.<\/p>\n

Over the next few months, the culture of the factory began to change.\u00a0 The workers were said to grow quiet, becoming gentle and kind, swearing less frequently, even if not altogether.\u00a0 Then, at some point they noticed the increasingly weary look on Joe\u2019s face and knew that the inevitable shadow was drawing nearer.<\/p>\n

They began to do a piece for him every day and put it on a sanded plank to dry so that he could come in later or go home earlier.<\/p>\n

And so it was that when the funeral bell tolled and that small boy finally left that small house in a small procession, there stood a hundred stalwart workers from the pottery with clean clothes on, having taken the day off for the privilege of walking alongside Joe and the \u201cwee lad\u201d that not one had ever seen in life.<\/p>\n

Do you see? They couldn\u2019t take away Joe\u2019s pain\u2014that\u2019s a part of love.\u00a0 But in the end, they could remind him that he was not alone.<\/p>\n

Friends, neither are we.<\/p>\n

The kingdom of God is among us\u2026let\u2019s not leave each other waiting.<\/p>\n

-The Rev. Dr.\u00a0Stephen M. Cady II, Senior Minister from Asbury First United Methodist Church in Rochester, New York.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\n

[1]<\/span><\/a> This is my adaptation of a story found in Howard Thurman\u2019s The Growing Edge<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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