This sermon was given by Bishop Margaret G. Payne at the Festive Eucharist Friday, June 3, at Wesley United Methodist Church, Worcester, during the 2005 Annual Assembly of the New England Synod, ELCA.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God the Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Imagine that one day a letter came in the mail for you.

Maybe it came on a day that was like the ones we had last week  chilly and rainy and windy and glum when you were grumpy because May isn’t supposed to be that way but then this letter came  with an offer that brought the sunshine right back into your world. The letter (not from Publishers’ Clearing House, but from a much more reliable source) … the letter announced to you the free gift of a much better home than the one you have now  one that would be well constructed, roomy, beautifully decorated, located in a fabulous neighborhood with fresh water and clean air, good neighbors, no mortgage and with the added gift of the promise of good health and peace and food for the rest of your life.

Your first response would be: What’s the catch? No catch – it’s a free gift – well ... one little catch. You’re in charge of the construction and the move.

Now listen carefully – because we all got that letter – the Word of God offers to us the gift of a home better than any place we have ever lived, and describes this home for us in detail throughout the Old and New Testaments – though Jesus is the one who gives us the clearest vision, and the tools for building it, and tips about how to move in.

He asks us to move  and to help with the construction of this new home for ourselves as well as others  a better place to live for all of us, and this home is called the Kingdom of God. But then again – you know what a move is like. You’ve got to get rid of your old house, go through all your stuff, keep some, throw some out, give some away, clean, pack, say good-byes, make a journey, work hard to build a new place, and then endure the ups and downs of settling in and making it your true home.

It’s hard work to move. A friend of mine, facing her 12^th move in 25 years confided to me: “I think this time I’ll just burn down the house.” Any kind of move asks a lot of us, and especially this one  a move into the Kingdom of God.

Remember all the times that I have reminded you over the last five years that the only thing that Jesus talked about more than money and greed was the Kingdom of God?

Well, I have finally figured out why those things were #1 and #2 on his agenda – his invitation to build and live in this kingdom was the most important thing of all that he told us about. And he talked so much about money, not because money is evil, but because it is the thing that is most likely to stand in the way of our move into our new home  our home in God’s vision of life the way it should be for all people.

Now, let me take just a moment here to tell you that I spent a considerable amount of time this week trying to come up with a different way to say: Kingdom of God. I looked in my thesaurus and I saw reign, realm, country, sphere of influence, I thought of a recent effort – “kin-dom” and I pondered how I felt about the maleness of the words king and kingdom.

But when I remembered the Lord’s Prayer, the festival of Christ the King, and the word “kingdom” is all over the Bible, in both of the testaments, you will be either relieved or displeased to learn that I decided to retain the phrase “Kingdom of God” for the purposes of this sermon. The dictionary defines a kingdom as “an organized community headed by a king” and I realized that that definition helps us to get a better understanding of the real meaning of the Kingdom of God.

God’s Kingdom is organized – it is not a vague, spiritualized world of high self-esteem and warm fuzzies. It is based on the value system that Jesus taught us – one that is different from the value systems of the world  in fact, OPPOSITE and upside down from the value systems of the world. It is organized around work and witness for justice and peace, self-giving instead of seeking profit and accumulation, and it is organized around compassion as a higher value than judgment and condemnation.

The Kingdom of God is a community – not a private religious experience  you get help building it, you get help moving in, and you live in it with all sorts of people that didn’t live in the neighborhood you left behind.

This Kingdom takes its shape from its head  it’s not a democracy  we don’t vote on the values, we learn them from Jesus  because which one of us would have ever voted to love our enemies, or share our wealth with the poor, or put in more time visiting prisoners than watching baseball or going to the mall?

The kingdom of God is like …

that’s the way Jesus almost always started the sentence when he was trying to help us to understand this Kingdom that is a great gift and a hard job. The Kingdom of God is mysterious. It is already near us, and within us, and sometimes we just catch glimpses of it in the world. It is now and later, established before all time but being built through us now. Its presence critiques the world simply by existing in it, and those people who work to build it and move and live in it … are often regarded by the world as misfits.

And so instead of working on the move to this strange place, sometimes we try to make do with a renovation of our current home  trying to save some time, trying to save some money, trying to massage the status quo so that we can keep our comforts while we spend some spare time constructing shacks of justice that barely can stand against the wind and the rain.

Jesus taught us to pray: “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven”. But lately I have been wondering if that is a true prayer and commitment of our hearts, or a meaningless mantra that we have learned how to recite in comfortable churches. If the Kingdom of God is such a precious gift that God is longing to give to us, how come it’s so hard to loosen our grip on our old homes and move toward it?

… The Kingdom of God is like … one of the descriptions that Isaiah gives us. It is new things, nurtured by the Spirit of God, that appear unexpectedly out of things that had been dead. In this Kingdom, the poor and the meek have the upper hand all the children are safe natural enemies that are usually at one another’s throats share food and bed and the place is so filled with the goodness of God that hatred and evil are left gasping and dying  like fish out of water.

How can we move toward that kind of world? One way to begin is to create one small place that gives the world a glimpse of the difference between a kingdom of life and a kingdom of death.

Last week, my daughter sat me down in front of the movie “Hotel Rwanda.” I hadn’t gone to see it, and didn’t really want to see it because it’s a lot easier to cocoon myself in the comfort and safety of our farm and family and pretend that things like genocide don’t happen. Hotel Rwanda is the true story of a man who was the manager of a luxury hotel in Migali, Rwanda when the tribal warfare between the Tutsis and the Hutus escalated into mass murder.

At first, no one wants to believe that such a thing is taking place  foreign correspondents quibble over the meaning of the word ‘genocide,’ trying to work out whether all those deaths actually qualify as genocide, or if that term is not quite fitting for the situation  maybe just ‘massacre’ would be a sufficient description. More and more people are slaughtered; the UN peacekeeping team is too small to make a difference, and no foreign power makes a move to intervene. Finally there is an evacuation plan from the hotel, but only the white people are taken away.

Paul, the manager, who is African, asks an American journalist who is leaving the country to go and tell the story of what is happening in Rwanda because surely, he believes, people will respond if they know about the many deaths. The journalist says to him: “It won’t matter to them. They will see my pictures on their TVs and they will say to each other: ‘Isn’t that terrible?’ And then they will turn back to their dinners.”

When I heard that, and realized how true it is, it made me wonder if our American obsession with eating is a sinfulness more than simple animal greed, and is a way of filling up our bodies and satisfaction of our appetites as one more way to avoid paying attention to the suffering and death in the world around us. (Although, ironically, our eating is leading us to obesity that causes our own death.) What would be powerful enough to keep us from turning back to our dinners?

The kingdom of death was all around them in a violent way in Rwanda, and so Paul had to create the Kingdom of God right there in that hotel, and he did. He welcomed everyone who needed safety, regardless of their tribe, and he found food for them. Natural tribal enemies lay down together in the hallways. And, at least in that place – children were safe enough to dance around a fountain of freely flowing water. In this little kingdom that he created, the rich were no more privileged than the poor, it was clear to all of them that they were equally at risk of death, and everyone realized their dependence on their leader, who was willing to sacrifice his own life for theirs.

The Kingdom of God is like … a little hotel in Rwanda where fear and bread were shared, where every person’s life is valued equally  regardless of class or color, and everyone’s needs are met.

Second lesson  Colossians describes the Kingdom of God in a different way  as a place where all you can see is Jesus.

He is all around us, he is God, he is always, he is before and after, he is the head of the community whose words and love shape every thing we do - we have no real life apart from him, and nothing that we do escapes his notice.

When I was growing up, we had a wooden plaque in our breakfast-room, and it read: “Christ is the head of this household, the unseen guest at every meal, the unseen listener to every conversation.” Whenever I got a bit out of hand at the table, all my mother had to do was glance up at the plaque. That simple roll of her eyeball was enough to conjure up for me the image of Jesus being startled by my rudeness or gossiping or little white lies. Image if Mother Wisdom could remind all of us as easily and regularly that Jesus is the unseen witness to our American habits of consumption every day and the unseen listener to the hateful ways that we demonize one another, and endlessly dissect all of our differences, instead of rejoicing in them.

Jesus is not here to judge, but to invite us to move to a better kingdom, and one of the primary signs of the kingdom is a longing for reconciliation. I think we have lost the kingdom-understanding of reconciliation these days  reconciliation seems to be represented as weakness and failure of true faith. But reconciliation is costly, not a cop-out, if God is willing to offer the death of a beloved son as a way to reconcile heaven and earth, is it too much to ask that we offer the death of our certainties as a way to reconcile all those who together seek to create the Kingdom of God?

In Anne Tyler’s novel Saint Maybe, you can read about a character named Ian Bedloe who discovered the deepest meaning of reconciliation. I don’t want to give away the story, because it’s a really good read, but I can tell you that he learned that reconciliation to God and one another is not cheap. He learned this lesson with the help of a congregation called “The Church of the Second Chance”  not a bad name for a congregation  maybe we should put it on our list of possible names  The Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth Chances  because I’ve learned over the years that sometimes two is not enough. What Ian learned over many years is that reconciliation comes from specific, concrete, costly acts of commitment  we move into a place of reconciliation by loving and sacrificial attention to the creation of Kingdom of God wherever we are  often setting aside our own agenda, caring more about humility than power and serving Christ by serving others.

There is one other lesson that this book teaches, and that is that reconciliation and redemption are possible only through a faith community that holds us accountable to values that are beyond our own appetites and opinions. It’s hard to pull up stakes in our old home of self-righteousness and begin the move into the kingdom  it’s hard work and it feels like loss but it becomes the God-given power that brings life from death.

The last time I went through the trauma of a move, I moved to New England, and it was hard work and it felt like loss. Now, I’m not exactly trying to correlate New England with the Kingdom of God, but there are some similarities  promising soil (once you get the rocks out of the way), a high priority for freedom and justice, and respect for all people, and there are systems of justice and mercy, most notably through our churches.

And some of my deepest learnings have come from the farm that became my home. The 15th chapter of the Gospel of John has always been one of my favorites, but more and more, as I live in an agricultural community, the idea of connectedness being essential not only for growth, but for fruitfulness seems not only wise, but seems to be a sign of the Kingdom.

We are connected to one another in Christ  apart from him and from one another we can do nothing, at least nothing of value in the sight of God. We are parts of the Body, branches of the vine, and it is that organic, growing mystery that brings in the Kingdom, and not our individual efforts or good works.

William Willimon has said: “Personal convictions, privately held, are no match for principalities and powers.” We need community, we need prayer, we need to be partners in the Body of Christ to build the Kingdom.

In this synod, our work in the process of Healing the Wounds of Racism is an example of the work of the Kingdom. We understand this task not as a social reform effort, but as a battle against the evil one. We need prayer, we need armor … we need one another. We need one another to help us live beyond our congregational families with its pride and comfort and insulation from the world. We need one another to hear different stories, to tell each other the truth, and to strengthen in that way the whole body of Christ.

It is so easy to fool ourselves into thinking that our busy days are all that we can manage. But God gives us the tools of faith, health and holy partners to transform days that are too busy and too self-centered into moving days  days that find us moving toward the Kingdom.

Together we are the synod, and we are the ELCA and we are the hands in Africa that are caring for the millions of people affected by AIDS and hunger. It is all these connections that keep us securely attached to the Christ of the world not just the Christ of our own neighborhood or congregation.

Once, when I was walking near the farm, I saw a huge pumpkin in the middle of an empty field. It was the biggest pumpkin that I had ever seen, even in a part of the country where contests to grow the biggest pumpkin are fiercely fought. It was beautifully shaped, as gorgeously orange as the leaves on the tree above it, set against a bright blue sky, and obviously capable of giving birth to multiple pumpkin pies. I wondered why someone would have set it there  out in the middle of that field, and so I went closer to have a look. When I got there, there were no other pumpkins around it, it was not in a pumpkin patch, but it was connected to a branch, a branch that was still busy with the work of making it into an even bigger pumpkin. At first I thought that the branch went directly into the ground, but instead, it disappeared under some leaves and brush nearby, and so I decided to follow it to see where it went. I walked along and followed it, pushing aside bushes and going around trees, and finally I ended up in a little pumpkin patch that was out of sight of the big mother pumpkin. It was a modest, unremarkable gathering of little pumpkins, as small as a congregation in New England, but it had reached far beyond itself and created an amazing pumpkin, that continued to be sustained by its connection to its source.

Staying connected is what makes remarkable growth possible. Jesus said: “I am the Vine and you are the branches  abide in my love.” We stay connected to this vine so that we can have life, and our primary ritual of connection is the eating and drinking at God’s table that nourishes us for all of our holy moves. The Eucharist is purposely a social sacrament  we call it communion  we do not do it alone  it connects us more deeply to one another at this table at the same time that it connects us to every other part of the Body  in Massachusetts and Maine and Palestine and Africa and in Episcopal and Presbyterian and UCC churches, with people of all different styles of life, all connected by this powerful spiritual mystery that we cannot explain but only take hungrily as a way to grow the Kingdom while, at the same time, we receive forgiveness, freedom and eternal life.

Bread and wine is the food of the Kingdom, strength for the move, connection to the source of God’s love, and partnership with all those other precious brothers and sisters who share our journey. Amen.