kingdom | hughdbryant

Sermon for Parish Eucharist on the 8th Sunday after Trinity, 30th July 2023 at All Saints, Penarth

1 Kings 3:5-12

Romans 8:26-39

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=557551823

‘Can I have a second-class single off-peak with a Senior Railcard to the kingdom of heaven?’ A second-class single off-peak with a Senior Railcard to the kingdom of heaven. That’s what I said to the man in the booking office here in Penarth.

‘I beg your pardon?’ he said.

Now the fact that he was a bit stumped is, I should hasten to add, not a reflection on how useful it is to have a booking office at the station, as I am sure you will know very well from listening to Mick Lynch. But if we’re on this journey to the kingdom of heaven, where is it? What sort of a place is it?

The first thing to say is that it’s a kingdom. We’re in the United Kingdom here in Wales. I think that I am risking having some of you shoot me on the way out if I add to my Mick Lynch reference with any ‘Yes Cymru’ allusions, so I won’t.

But is the set-up in the kingdom of heaven like that of the United Kingdom? We can look at the story of the beginning of King Solomon’s reign over the people of Israel; it may not exactly be the kingdom of heaven, but surely it might give us some pointers. Solomon chose wisdom rather than long life or riches. No big increases in the civil list for King Solomon!

But in one important respect he was similar to our king, and that is that actually, King Solomon wasn’t the top man. King Solomon got his authority and his power from God; our king, our Monarch, gets his power from the people. He is a constitutional monarch. In these senses, neither he nor King Solomon are absolute monarchs. In both cases they look to a higher authority. But in the kingdom of heaven, the king is the king. The king is God.

Remember that originally, in the story of Israel, the prophet Samuel was pestered by the leaders of Israel to appoint for them a king. Initially he was very reluctant to do so because he thought that a king would exploit his people in all sorts of ways.

So Solomon was a pleasant surprise, as he chose wisdom over riches, although as you will no doubt remember he wasn’t perfect; he was what used to be called a ‘ladies’ man’, having at the last count 700 wives. They are supposed to have distracted him a bit from the duties of government, somewhat unsurprisingly.

So I think we can infer that the place we are going to is run by a good king, somebody who has all the wisdom of Solomon, without his bad side. That makes sense, because we understand God to be all-powerful and all-knowing.

But have we got the right ticket? Are we going to be on the right train? Will we get to this marvellous place? It looks from Saint Paul’s letter that perhaps the train to the kingdom of heaven is something like the Orient Express, very exclusive – although of course, if it starts from Cardiff Central, it will run on the GWR, God’s Wonderful Railway.

But look what St Paul says. ‘For those whom he foreknew he also predestined… [T]hose whom he predestined he also called’. You need to be ‘predestined’. So it looks a bit as though not everybody can ride on this train. It isn’t really up to you whether you can book that kind of ticket. So is that really the case, that unless you are somehow given a golden ticket, you can’t get on the train? Is that what it means to be predestined, to be called?

No. I don’t think it is. St Paul says, ‘We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.’ God’s covenant, God’s agreement with his people the Israelites, is based on their love for him; to love God and love your neighbour. If you love God and follow his commandments, then, St Paul says, God will choose you; you can get on the train. And it will indeed be a very special ticket. ‘If God is for us, who is against us?’

And who is going to decide whether God is for us and whether we will get a ticket? That is what Jesus does. St Paul says that Jesus intercedes for us, that He speaks up for us. ‘And who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword?’

Then we will have this wonderful, blessed assurance that we are on the train. ‘I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’.

I may have tried to buy a second-class ticket with a senior Railcard, but it looks as though actually I am in an all-first-class Pullman, on the up main line to heaven. And what’s the station for the heavenly destination like? Is it one of Brunel’s temples of steam, Paddington or Bristol Temple Meads perhaps? Or Santa Maria Novella in Florence or Zürich Hauptbahnhof or the Gare du Nord in Paris? Perhaps I’m not on a Pullman, in fact, but on the Train Bleu, headed by Pacific 231, speeding towards the Côte D’Azur. Whatever – but for sure, we are approaching a divine destination.

But you have to realise that God’s Wonderful Railway came a little bit later than Jesus; and during the time of Jesus, He wasn’t into locomotion in the way that some of us like me are today.

When Jesus was describing what your destination would be, He offered other sorts of images, comparing it with a market garden with a mighty mustard seed, or yeast in a loaf of bread or a trader on the Silk Route dealing in pearls, or on a deep sea trawler, with a hint that in the Kingdom of Heaven only the best fish would get on to the overnight train to Billingsgate.

Now it is just about possible that one or two of you might not immediately picture this wonderful railway, and it is possible that you might see heaven without steam locomotives or even Trains à Grand Vitesse; and I think that you will all have rumbled the fact that, just like the man in the booking office, I can’t say exactly where the kingdom of heaven is to be found, at least in the sense of pinpointing it on Google Maps or finding it in Bradshaw.

That’s true: but Graham Kendrick, the great hymn writer today, has written a hymn, or perhaps it’s more properly called a worship song, which could give you another clue. It’s called ‘Heaven is in my Heart’. One thing is for sure.

That is that when you do get there, nothing will separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Sermon for the Sunday next before Advent, Christ the King: 22nd November 2015

Daniel 5

Today in the Christian year we celebrate, we talk about, the idea of Christ the King. The expression ‘King’ comes up when he is on trial in front of Pontius Pilate, which seems to have been the most extraordinary scenario. ‘Are you a king?’ Pilate asks.

Pilate seems to me to have been a rather normal bloke, in a difficult position, having to deal with a bunch of fanatics who were zealots who caused a lot of trouble: possibly we might say they were in the line of ancestors of the people who are Zionists today, contributing to dissent and and unrest in the Holy Land.

Well, perhaps that’s not a legitimate thing to say, but we can say that the Jews presenting Jesus for judgement by the ruler, by Pontius Pilate, were certainly not thinking about how to promote peace and harmony in the long run; they just wanted to rub out Jesus. He was asking awkward questions, which they did not find easy to answer. It was said that he was King of the Jews.

The idea of the kingdom of God in Jewish theology is a mixture of the idea of the Promised Land and the theology of God’s Holy Mountain. ‘They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain’ (Isaiah 11:9) – the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and so on. We all know to some extent about Jesus’ rather upside-down concept of kingship. The first shall be last, washing people’s feet, giving up all that you own and giving it to the poor, when dealing with somebody described as a “rich young ruler”, a sort of prince.

But I’m afraid that I will rehearse all these stories, and then add a couple of pious sentences, saying that somehow you should follow them – and then you will forget this sermon and the ideas that it contains, probably before the end of the service, if not a few moments later.

I’d be very doubtful if a sermon, which concentrates on telling you, just in an academic way, what the meaning of kingship was in relation to Jesus Christ, would influence your life in any meaningful way, because you would find the way of life then so different, so alien from what we do now.

We have to build a bridge. What would Jesus do if he were here today? If we go back to the trial before Pontius Pilate, there’s an awful lot of irony in it. Pilate clearly is the representative of the ruling establishment, of the empire of Rome. So the idea that somebody else should come forward and present themselves as a king looks rather counter-intuitive, when it was so obvious that the ruler was a Roman.

Maybe Jesus’ kingship was a bit like all those grandly-named sort-of kings that survived in India after independence – I think largely for the purpose of owning classic vintage Rolls-Royces. The Maharajah of Jaipur, or the Nawab of Pataudi, for instance. Possibly Pontius Pilate had something similar in mind when he was tackling Jesus. ‘Are you a king?’ Meaning, ‘Are you one of those symbolic kings?’

I’m pretty sure that that’s not what the earliest Christians, what the contemporary readers of the Gospel, would have had in mind. The idea of some kind of symbolic king without any power just doesn’t chime with the whole of Jewish history. It’s more likely that they thought of a king as being like King Belshazzar the King of Babylon, the King from Ur of the Chaldees, portrayed in the wonderful fifth chapter of the Book of Daniel.

That King’s father, Nebuchadnezzar, was so confident in his own legitimacy and strength that he had invaded the kingdom of Judah, overrun the Temple, and nicked all the treasures, the gold goblets, plates and things used in the Temple rituals; he turned them over for use at parties, at his court banquet. It was pretty insulting to the Jews, but he had the power.

Was their God so weak, so inferior to Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar’s god? The Jews didn’t believe this. What that King did, what Belshazzar did, was sacrilege to the Jews. Even today, in theological debates, now between Moslems and Christians, the heart of the matter is precisely that both sides think they have the correct understanding of the most important question ever, namely, what the nature of God is.

But then, despite all his power, Belshazzar encountered the writing on the wall. What did it mean? And Daniel, the Jew, explained. Despite all his power as a king, Belshazzar was finished.

What would happen today, if the confrontation between Jesus and Pontius Pilate was re-run in a contemporary environment? Was Jesus a king? And if so, what sort of king? Well, in St John’s Gospel, Jesus very clearly reserves his position, and points out that the kingdom that he rules as a king is not of this world. So we can’t judge him by how big a country he rules or how big an empire: or whether he has given up his power and become a constitutional monarch like the Queen; or whether he is still an absolute monarch, like the Saudi King, for example.

There’s a faint colour of artificiality about the move which I’m trying to make, between Jesus the king in the Bible and some kind of contemporary interpretation. But never mind; let’s pursue it. I’m confident that it will illustrate what needs to be said here.

What would the kingdom of God look like? Is it like Belshazzar’s banquet, or is it ‘the year of the Lord’s favour’ as Jesus proclaimed in St Luke chapter 4 [4:19], fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah [Is. 61:1,2]? Is it ‘They shall not hurt or destroy on God’s holy mountain’? Or is it, ‘The last shall be first, and the first shall be last’, in the Gospel story itself? [Matt. 20:16]
What does it mean to be a king? I think that the idea of kingship can be taken in more than one way.

You can of course look historically at who has actually been a king, and identify the qualities these historic kings actually had. But equally, another way of looking at it is to see kingship as a kind of metaphor for the whole business of government, of leadership of people. What would a really Christian government look like – a government where Christ was really in charge?
Would he be democratic, for example? Surely yes. We believe that God loves every single one of us: indeed that he has called us all by name [Isaiah 43:1], and that therefore we are all worth knowing. That would imply that we should each have a vote; it would imply a need for democracy.

But would Jesus approve of our particular version of democracy? So many people didn’t vote in the last general election. So, although the government claims a majority, in fact I believe that only 24% of the electorate as a whole actually voted for them. Many more, 36%, didn’t vote for anyone. It’s at least arguable that our current arrangements are not as democratic as one feels they might be, if we were trying to create heaven on earth. It’s something to think about.

Again, after Bishop John Robinson’s ‘Honest to God’, we now understand that the Kingdom of God isn’t in a particular place, where Jesus, the Lamb or God Himself is, up there somewhere on their thrones. In a spiritual sense, the Kingdom is with us here and now. We are God’s workers – ‘Take my hands and let them move | At the impulse of thy love’, as the hymn says [Common Praise no 581]. It’s up to us to work to bring about the year of the Lord’s favour. Jesus is our King – not in a temporal, earthly sense, as he says when Pilate questions him – but he does rule; he rules in our hearts.

I worry a bit, when I say that. I worry because I think that it might be the same type of reasoning which IS, Daesh, uses in support of its ‘Caliphate’. They talk about their Islamic State having a king, a ‘caliph’. But the difference is that, whereas their caliph is to be a sheikh, an Arab king, who is defined as the successor to, or deputy for, Mohammed, in Islam, and is king, caliph, by virtue of that divine authority, in Christianity, as Jesus says, the king is not a secular ruler. ‘My kingdom is not from this world’, he said, in John 18:36.

And definitely, on our God’s holy mountain there will be peace: ‘They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain’ (Isaiah 11:9). It’s so tragic that people who support Daesh believe that God supports violence. We understand that Moslems as well as Jews all worship the same God as we do – but the IS people don’t recognise that if their Islamic State were a real Caliphate, governed by God, then God ‘will dwell with them, they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them’:

that we agree on; but we believe that

‘he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.’

That’s in our Bible, in the Book of Revelation, 21:3-4. To be fair, I think that most Moslems do not support the idea of a a militant ‘caliphate’, based on terror. They wouldn’t recognise a Daesh Caliph as a real ruler, whoever he might be.

So, even if there’s no kingly pomp, let us give our allegiance, let us indeed sing hymns and praises, sing the National Anthem of the Kingdom of Heaven, even, to our King, to Jesus.

GWR

The National Anthem of the Kingdom of Heaven