Acts 16.16-34, John 17.20-end
The Seventh Sunday of Easter / Sunday after Ascension
2 June 2019: Eldroth, Keasden
In this period now between Ascension and Pentecost the worldwide church is being urged to pray ‘Thy Kingdom Come’. It’s a bold prayer to make when you think about it. ‘Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ In other words, may the rule of God which is usually quite hidden, be revealed in the world; may the way of God, which is most of the time neglected, become the way of the world.
The world doesn’t really want God’s rule because we’d rather do things our way; but we followers of Christ pray in the way he taught us because we’re sure that God’s ways are the true ways towards goodness and the flourishing of the earth and its people.
‘Thy Kingdom come’ is a bold prayer to make also because when we pray it God involves us in answering it. I wonder if you’ve ever had the experience of praying, let’s say for a person you’re aware of in some sort of trouble or need, asking God to help them; and following your request, where there’s a silence you’ve felt God replying to you - saying, ‘You help them. You go for me.’ When you pray ‘Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,’ you’re likely to find that God gets you involved in the answer. How wonderful.
When we pray we become united with God - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - we know that because John’s gospel records Jesus asking his Father in prayer, that ‘… those who believe me … may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.’ United in love; united in fellowship; united in the ways of God’s kingdom - that’s the intention and that’s the experience of prayer. [1]
Now, we live in a world divided, whose leaders speak of unity but build their empires on creating divisions - in 2016 Donald Trump, in a campaign speech, said, ‘The only important thing is the unification of the people, because the other people don’t mean anything.’ [2] And we know that Jesus’ social, religious and political world was just as fractured and fractious as our own. It was a fragmenting society riven with divisions and splits in the population.
Jews were pitted against Gentiles over issues of purity and identity; Zealot warred against Roman occupier; Pharisees and Sadducees were at each other’s throats; the scribes and the lawyers were at loggerheads; the Essenes opposed and defied the Temple authorities.
People were kept apart by a sense of hierarchy which honoured patriarchal families and to the well-to-do, who in turn regarded as shameful those at the opposite end of the spectrum - obvious social outcasts like prostitutes and tax-collectors (Roman collaborators), but also children and women. In this painfully polarised society the sick and maimed were excluded from the Temple and those who did not ‘fit’ were mercilessly marginalised. The Hebrew Scriptures taught of a God who was distant and of enemies to be slaughtered. The people had divorced tithing and religious observance from issues of justice and mercy, sinners were stoned not welcomed, and the chosen people saw themselves as superior to Gentiles. [3]
So, yes, a world very much like ours. But the good news is that
It is precisely in this world of people divided, that Jesus develops his radical unifying and inclusive vision of the kingdom of God. With all his heart he longs to bring all people together as one in their dignity as beloved and cherished children of God. In the holy city Jesus cried out his heart’s longing ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem… how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings and you were not willing!’. Jesus’ desire is for the unity of the world: ‘Then people will come from east and west from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God,’ he said.
Notice how many of Jesus’ sayings are about overcoming separation, loss and division. He sees the potential for things once separated coming together:
• The woman is reunited with her lost coin.
• The shepherd once again embraces his sheep.
• The yeast is mixed with the flour.
• The vine is joined to the branches.
• The birds come to roost in the branches.
• Things old and new are to be treasured.
• The enemy is to be loved.
• The prodigal is restored to his father.
• The wounded Jewish traveller finds himself in the arms of a hated Samaritan.
• God’s will is to be done on earth as it is in heaven.
• Love of God and love of neighbour are inseparable.
• The kingdom is both now and not yet, here and still to come.
Where did these ideas come from? They came from a place of prayer and contemplation. Prayer and contemplation were at the heart of Jesus’ life and practice. He removed himself to pray in the self-same hills above Galilee, where he also taught. When he gave the Sermon on the Mount, that hillside was precisely the same place where Jesus went to pray. His teachings and his healings flowed from his practice of prayer. [4]
So, the good news for us, in these broken times is that, if we find a place of prayer and contemplation, and pray the way that Jesus taught us, then we too can go back into the world empowered to reach towards healing and reconciliation.
Paul and Silas were in a place of prayer in prison on that night where by a miracle of God an earthquake flung the prison doors open. The prayerful prisoners might have united together acting against the jailer to make their escape but instead they united with the jailer, saving him from taking his own life and instead opening to him a new life of faith in Christ.
The good news is that, if if we make our prayers fully awake to God being within us and inside the life of this messy world, that if we say ‘Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’, then we are taking real, positive, steps towards healing divisions, bringing things together, and making peace.
The good news is that, if if we begin to accept ourselves as ones who God loves, completely, unconditionally, then we learn what it means to be forgiven - and from that, how to forgive others.
Notes
This sermon borrows substantially from I know this is the way the world is, because Donald Trump told me / Lord, teach me how to pray preached in Somerset in 2016. In turn it quotes heavily from the excellent chapter Jesus the mystic in Andrew D. Mayes’ excellent book ‘Another Christ, Re-envisioning ministry’ (SPCK 2014). So this sermon is thus substantially Andrew’s, to whom I am extremely grateful. Thy Kingdom Come global prayer initiative.
[1] “ As Jesus taught us, prayer helps us enter into a different way of knowing, an alternative way of perceiving reality. A way which removes all boundaries, barriers, divisions between ourselves, God and others. It is very simple, the way he puts it. The prayer which Jesus taught us begins with a sense of God being beyond us: ‘Our Father who art in heaven.’ But it immediately then dares to pray ‘thy kingdom come’, and moves to an awareness of the God within us and inside the life of this messy world: ‘Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’. When he teaches us to pray Jesus brings heaven and earth together.” Andrew D. Mayes, Another Christ, Re-envisioning ministry, p.45-46, referencing John MacQuarrie, Two Worlds Are Ours: An Introduction to Christian Mysticism.
[2] Trump quoted in Jan-Werner Muller, Populism and the People. London Review of Books, 23 May 2019.
[3] Mayes, Another Christ, p.44, altered.
[4] Mayes, Another Christ, p.46-48, altered.
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