Saturday, January 21, 2017

“The Kingdom of Heaven Has Come Near” - January 22, 2017


Matthew 4:12-23

            There’s a pretty well-known cartoon that was in The New Yorker a few years ago.  It had a man leaning down and staring his cat right in the eye and saying, “Never, ever, ever think outside the box.”

            Cats aside, thinking outside the box is something that we generally applaud and admire – when it works.  When it doesn’t work, it’s just craziness or stupidity.  When something is obvious, you just go with it.

            The ancestor of the tuba was an instrument designed specifically for church back in the day when Gregorian chant was the major type of singing in worship.  The bass line in that kind of singing is sometimes called a “drone”, and for good reason.  There are times when a bass feels like he’s singing a dial tone moved down two octaves.  Basses need instrumental support because you can only go so long singing one, very low note before your voice starts to give out.  To get the really low notes, though, you need a very long tube (in Latin that’s tuba) and you end up with one of those horns that you see in pictures of the Austrian Alps, where it takes one person to blow the horn while someone else stabilizes it.  If you want to play more than one or two notes, though, you need a third person covering the holes.  It just isn’t practical.  Then around 1590 a Frenchman named Edme Guillaume came up with the idea of twisting the tube around like a snake so that one person could handle it.  He called the instrument a “serpent”.  Later developments came along, like valves and keys, and twisting it differently to go around someone in a marching band, but it was that one big leap that made it possible, a leap that now seems obvious.

            So I want to talk about repentance.  Repentance and tubas kind of go together in my head.  When I hear tuba music I often feel like I’ve mde a mistake.  It’s not what you think, either.  It has nothing to do with how much really bad music there is out there that relies on an oompah beat.

            When I was in about seventh grade, I played violin in the school orchestra.  We had a lot of violinists – some of them very good.  There was a shortage of tuba players, though.  The orchestra director, who was more than a little bit of a tyrant and who really had no business teaching kids, decided for me and a couple of other string players that we were going to switch instruments.  Now picture someone about 4’6” trying to carry a tuba on a school bus, then getting it home and trying to prop it up on a chair to climb inside the thing to practice.  If you want to know what repentance is, one version of it is the feeling you get when you find yourself tipping over sideways while trying to find C# and grabbing at the music stand at the same time.

            You know that feeling.  You know that how-did-I-get-myself-into-this-and-how-do-I-get-out feeling.  You know that sinking sensation that tells you it might be worse than you thought, and it’s your own fault for going along with some hare-brained scheme just because you were in a position where you knew it was not a good idea to say, “No.”

            That’s not really repentance.  That’s remorse.

            Repentance is what Edme Guillaume did when he rethought the way things were done and invented the prototype of this thing that would one day threaten to engulf many, many middle schoolers.  Remorse is feeling bad about something.  Repentance is thinking about how to do things a whole new way.

            Jesus didn’t come to make us feel remorse.  That was already going on.  People have consciences and have known from the beginning that when you’ve made a mess of things, there will be trouble.  Adam ate the apple and then heard God calling his name and decided he needed to go and hide.  That was remorse.  Moses killed an Egyptian soldier in a fit of righteous rage, but then realized what he had done, hurriedly buried the body in a shallow grave, and ran for the desert where he could hide from the consequences.  That was remorse.  David fell for the beautiful wife of one of his generals, got her pregnant while her husband was away at the front, and realized that his sin would soon go public.  That was remorse, and more followed when his horrible efforts to cover things up went wrong and resulted in the general’s death.  There was no need for God to send his Son to make anyone sense their guilt.

            Jesus came for something else.  Matthew says, as do the other gospels, that his message began with the news that God was doing something new and that we can, too.

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” [Matthew 4:17]

Rethink things.  Rethink the things that lead you to feel remorse.  Rethink your assumptions.  Think outside the box.  God was already doing that, reaching out beyond the usual suspects to the people who were on the edge of things.  Jesus would start his preaching ministry telling the people who were farthest away from Jerusalem and the center of religious life that if they felt too far away from God, God would come to them.

“Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,
            on the road by the sea,
            across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles –
The people who sat in darkness
            have seen a great light,
            and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death
                        light has dawned.” [Matthew 4:15-16]

We don’t have to find the kingdom of heaven.  Jesus brings it to us. 

            Rethink how you understand God.  Is God way out there or way up there?  Or is God right here?  Is God always upset and angry because of our sins (which are real and a real problem), or is God more hurt at our rejection?  Does God want to reject his people in return, or does he want to restore humankind to a right relationship with himself and with one another?  Repent.  Rethink.  Reimagine.  Recalibrate.  Readjust.  Re-whatever it takes.  Re-new.  Maybe sometimes re-know.

“The kingdom of heaven has come near.”

            You can see how things begin when Jesus calls the first disciples.  Business as usual is left behind. 

“As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea – for they were fishermen.  And he said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.’  Immediately they left their nets and followed him.  As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them.  Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.”  [Matthew 4:18-23]
These are people to whom the kingdom of heaven very suddenly and unexpectedly became a present reality.  A switch was flipped on.  The people who walked in darkness saw a great light.

            In the dark, you walk carefully and only walk paths you know well.  Even then, you stub your toe from time to time.  In the light, you can move in all kinds of ways, and move with confidence.  You see the obstacles and can go around them.  You aren’t as limited or as tentative.  You could even, if you are so inclined, run or jump or dance or spin around.

            Frederick Buechner wrote,

“The Kingdom of God is so close we can almost reach out our hands and touch it.  It is so close that sometimes it almost reaches out and takes us by the hand.  The Kingdom of God, that is.  Not man’s kingdom.  Not Saddam Hussein’s kingdom, not Bush’s kingdom, not Gorbachev’s kingdom.”
Interesting, isn’t it, how these people are all out of the picture, but Jesus isn’t?  Let me continue, though.

“Not any of the kingdoms that still have nuclear missiles aimed at each other’s heads, that worry like us about counting calories while hundreds of thousands starve to death.  But God’s Kingdom.  Jesus says it is the Kingdom of God that is at hand.  If anybody else said it, we would hoot him off the stage.  But it is Jesus who says it.  Even people who don’t believe in him can’t quite hoot him off the stage.  Even people who have long since written him off can’t help listening to him.
…the Kingdom of God is the time, or a time beyond time, when it will no longer be humans in their lunacy who are in charge of the world but God in his mercy who will be in charge of the world.  It’s the time above all else for wild rejoicing – like getting out of jail, like being cured of cancer, like finally, at long last, coming home.  And it is at hand, Jesus says.”[1]
Yes.  He does.  Because it is.
               



[1] Frederick Buechner, “The Kingdom of God” in The Clown in the Belfry (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 164-165.

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