Homily for Sunday, September
28, 2014 Graves Chapel
Your
Kingdom come. Once again, in today's
lesson from Matthew, Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of God--and of those who will
easily enter it. I feel called to
revisit this topic of my July sermon.
Twenty-five
years ago (or more), I was driving my car on Georgetown Road in
Charlottesville, stopping at the red light at Hydraulic Road and waiting to
turn left. Right then, an idea
entered my head: "At any given moment, I make my life either a heaven or a
hell by the way I think about it."
Now I understand, all these years later, that I had caught a glimpse of
the pathway to God's kingdom. At
that moment, I realized that I hold the key to the kingdom, and it is my choice
to use it or not.
This
is the kind of realization, the kind of epiphany that you think ought to happen
in a spectacular setting--on a mountaintop or by the sea. But no, there I was
in my car, probably on the way to Albemarle High School, where I was teaching
at the time. And it's a pretty good assumption that, within a few minutes of my
having that revelation, I would turn into AHS and begin to prove the truth of
it--by allowing my thoughts to determine the color of my day at what was
usually a stressful job.
Now
I know that the setting and the timing were perfect, of course. The whole point
of this kingdom that Jesus often says is "at hand" is just that--the
kingdom of God is wherever we are. We are within God's kingdom just as a fish
is in the sea. Or, as Paul wrote in his letter to the Colossians, "We are
hidden with Christ in God."
In
today's lesson from Matthew, Jesus is having one of his many disputes with some
chief priests and elders, the sort of people who believe God's kingdom is
reserved for them. These are the people who believe they are more righteous,
more worthy than most of their neighbors to enjoy the rewards of heaven. Can
you imagine how angry they must have felt when Jesus said, "Truly I tell
you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God
ahead of you"?
If
we, like the chief priests and elders, doubt that such obvious sinners deserve
to enter the kingdom after they die, we would be missing Jesus's point. Jesus is not saying that his friends
and followers, those tax collectors and prostitutes, have to wait to inherit
the kingdom. No, Jesus is saying that because his followers have believed in
him and in his message of love and mercy, they are already enjoying the
benefits of the kingdom. They are hidden with Christ in God.
You
know, I need to say that my so-called epiphany is really an ordinary one. Most of us, at some point in our lives,
must have realized that we were "getting ourselves worked up" over
something, as my parents used to say. Simply by thinking (maybe obsessing)
about something we fear--or something that aggravates us--we remove ourselves
from God's kingdom of peace. We
can see this tendency "to get worked up" in others, and I think this
is the sort of thing Jesus may have meant when he said we are more likely to
see the speck in someone else's eye rather than the log in our own. We may have
even had the thought [I admit that I have], "Boy, she's getting herself
upset over nothing."
When
we observe that happening in someone else, or we are fortunate enough to catch
ourselves in that state, what we are really seeing is someone moving out of the
kingdom. When I think negative or fearful thoughts, I lose touch with the Holy
Spirit whose peace is always present within us--when I choose to turn my gaze
in the Spirit's direction.
Some
words of William Shakespeare prove that this idea of thinking ourselves into
trouble has been understood for centuries. "Nothing is either good or bad
but thinking makes it so."
Or,
as Jesus has assured us through the words of Paul, nothing (not even the thing
we most fear) can separate us from the love of God.
AMEN.
