“Striving for the Kingdom”
Luke 12:22-34
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
10/2/16
Today’s
passage often gets cited by people who want to connect with the beloved Hippie
Jesus – the Jesus who sits in the middle of a Monet painting smelling flowers,
watching birds, and saying, “Dude! It’s all good! Just chill!
Jesus does say
not to worry about physical things,
but we’re human beings. Unlike ravens, lilies, and alfalfa whose consciousness
happens almost entirely on instinctive and cellular levels, you and I must deliberately toil and spin. So it’s a
matter of how we approach our lives. Do we live humbly and gratefully,
creatively and generously, faithfully and hopefully? Or do we let selfish and prideful
fear drive us? In this case, fear refers not to the fear of not having enough,
but the fear of not having the excess which first-world denizens like us have
learned to consider necessity.
I think fear
is the great wound of humankind. It always has been, perhaps, and the
relentless spotlighting of violent realties from Tulsa to Charlotte to Paris to
Aleppo to South Sudan to whatever hides in our closets and lurks under our beds
– all of these things can make us terrified of living, terrified of those with
whom we live.
It’s hard to say what poses the
greatest terror threat – fundamentalism (whether religious, political, or otherwise),
selfishness, or simple ignorance. Worldly kingdoms trust intimidation. They love
coercion, manipulation, and every other Machiavellian means of the
self-perpetuating currency of fear.
When living in fear, human beings
concentrate on one thing – ourselves. We worry about what to eat, what to wear,
who threatens our privilege, and when the next iPhone comes out. We strive not
for gratitude or contentment, but for certainty and excess. We stockpile it,
guard it, even kill for it, and all the while thanking God for “our many
blessings.” Excess represents some fictitious storehouse that I expect will feed and clothe me forever, as if somehow I will last forever.
In one episode of the PBS series “Downton
Abbey,” the Dowager Countess, played to exquisite perfection by Maggie Smith, stands
before a splendid dinner table in the waning years of the old British
aristocracy. The table is set to try to persuade a rich American to bail out the
foundering estate. The ancient aristocrat looks at the table and says with
gusto, “Nothing succeeds like excess!”
A spoiled and fearful Anglican, she
has completely missed – or dismissed
– Jesus’ point: In their time, ravens, lilies, and the grass of the field receive
and thrive on God’s gracious provision. And in the fullness of their time, they
go to seed and die - as did the Dowager Countess’ hopes.
“Strive for
[God’s] kingdom,” says Jesus. Strive to live differently here and now. Strive
to live in the realm of grace, receiving that which you cannot hoard, because
you cannot fully receive it except
through sharing it.
In Luke 17, some Pharisees hound
Jesus about the arrival of the kingdom. “The kingdom of God
is not coming with things that can be observed,” says Jesus, “nor will they
say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is
among you.” (Luke 17:20b-21) “Among you” can
also be translated “within you.”
Striving for God’s kingdom entails
infinitely more than trying to secure a spot in some post-mortem paradise.
Striving for God’s kingdom means living the new life that Jesus reveals here
and now. This kingdom cannot be measured in the ways we measure scarcity,
adequacy, and excess. It’s not about gifts given to us for our individual benefit, but gifts given through us for the benefit of all. That
means that it’s about relationship – Jesus-style relationship, face-to-face,
concrete relationship that transcends the flighty, nebulous, Just Love Everybody philosophy, which,
ironically, tends to distance us from real Justice, agape Love, and pretty much Everybody.
When Jesus says,
“where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” he challenges us to treasure
ourselves and the particular person or persons before us in a particular
moment. He challenges us to open our hearts to them, to be present to them
humbly, gratefully, and generously.
We
are thriving now, and just like the old British aristocracy, just like last
summer’s crops, we are going to die. Will our lives have been worth living? Will
we have received and shared with faith, hope, and Love? Or will we have striven
in fear, judging our quality of our lives by the quantity of our consumption?
In a poem entitled
“When Death Comes,” Mary Oliver writes:
When it's over, I want
to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my
life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find
myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up
simply having visited this world.1
We
are more than visitors. We are treasured co-creators with God, ones in and
through whom God’s kingdom dwells.
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