Finding the Kingdom of God

Sermon for Oct. 31, 2021

Mark 12:28-34

In late August, I preached about being “doers of the Word,” as the Letter of James puts it, and the importance of our words and our actions aligning.  As an example, I noted that St. Andrew’s had offered a table at Kansas City’s Pridefest, and I talked about the effect of that act of welcome on a man who’d been hurt by his experience of churches.

A couple of weeks after that sermon, one of the members of our Thursday-morning men’s Bible study asked me if I would come visit with the group about what he described as “LGBTQ, Pridefest, and St. Andrew’s.”  I said yes, absolutely, and we got together a couple of weeks ago. 

Now, I really didn’t know what to expect.  I didn’t know who would be there or whether to expect a confrontational conversation.  By the same token, of course, the group didn’t know what approach I would take either.  These days, there’s a lot of concern about being “cancelled” by those who disagree with you.  So, we got our cups of coffee, passed the donuts, and started talking.

Keep that setting in mind as we look at today’s Gospel reading.  It comes after several stories of public disagreement between Jesus and the religious authorities about issues of their day – like whether good Jews should pay taxes to the Roman emperor, and whether resurrection is real, by whose authority Jesus is teaching … and, of course, the real conflict, which was that Jesus had entered Jerusalem surrounded by adoring crowds and then threw the merchants and money changers out of the Temple.  So, amid all this conflict, one of the scribes has had about as much arguing as he can take.  So, he comes up to Jesus with a direct question:  “Which commandment is the first of all?” (Mark 12:28).  Come on, Jesus.  What are you really about?  Give me your bottom line.

I wonder what the two of them were thinking in that moment.  Was the scribe thinking Jesus would rant at him?  Was Jesus thinking the scribe would try to show him up, like all the other self-righteous religious leaders?  Were they each expecting conflict?  Probably so, given the previous 60 verses of Mark’s story.

So, what happened?  Well, the scribe asks Jesus for his elevator speech.  What’s your agenda, anyway?  What’s the mark of true faithfulness, from your perspective?  And Jesus answers him directly, even though he probably expects self-righteousness or one-upmanship back from the scribe.  Jesus says, I’ll tell you which commandment is first:  “The first commandment is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’  The second is this,” Jesus continues: “‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  There is no other commandment greater than these.” (12:29-31)  Ha!  Take that, scribe.

Then it’s the scribe’s turn, and I think his response kind of blows Jesus away.  The scribe says, basically, “Yeah.  You’re right.”  In fact, the scribe says, taking Jesus’ own point one step further, loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself “is much more important than all … burnt offerings and sacrifices” (12:33) – in other words, much more important than the activities and regulations the scribe’s work was all about.  And Jesus smiles and says, Hmmm.  “You are not far from the kingdom of God” after all (12:34).  Turns out, once they got down to what mattered most, Jesus and the scribe were basically on the same page.

 Now, what do you suppose would have happened if they’d started off discussing a particular point of law instead: divorce, or sabbath keeping, or giving to the Temple treasury, or paying taxes to the empire?  The scribe and Jesus might well have had very different opinions on any of those questions, and their differences would have been the focus of, you guessed it, another argument.  But they didn’t start there.  They started at core principles.  And instead of another argument, they found the kingdom of God.

So, what happened back in that conversation I had with the men’s Bible study?  Well, there were certainly points of disagreement – especially whether it’s right for the Church to be represented at Pridefest.  The guys in the group didn’t all agree with each other on that question.  They asked what I thought, and I said the Church has a call to show up especially among people who’ve felt themselves hurt by churches or excluded from churches in the past.  Some of the guys focused on how they heard Scripture condemning homosexual practice.  I said why I interpret it differently, and we left it that way.  Our minds weren’t changed, which is OK.  But we found that, when you get down to first principles, there’s a lot we agree on, rooted in the calls we heard today: to love God with everything we’ve got; and to love others the same way as we love ourselves. 

And, most important, that call to love was fleshed out by what was happening right then, around that table.  One of the guys noted that, in our current culture, we seem unable to disagree without things getting ugly.  As he said, “We’ve got to be able to have a fair fight.”  It seems to me that’s exactly what was happening over coffee and donuts that morning, though I might not have characterized it as a fight.  It was also what we learned about in our civil-discourse class this spring and in the discussion series on “What Should Be the Role of the Church In” a variety of hot-button issues.  Over coffee and donuts, we were loving God and loving one another as we love ourselves.

It may be that one of God’s most important calls to the Church right now is to be a place where we learn to live the way we yearn for our society to live – to be a place where we can come together standing on the first principle, which is love.  As people who follow the way of Jesus, we commit ourselves to practice love toward all three objects of that verb in today’s reading – to love God, to love neighbor, and to love ourselves.  I would say those relationships of love are the first and most important things God asks us to steward.  And if those relationships of love are balanced the way God intends, then they reinforce and empower each other.  First, give yourself to God fully – in heart, in mind, in every part of your life.  Then, see your neighbor and yourself in the light of the divinity God shares with each one of us.  We are made in God’s image and likeness, after all; so, every person – people with whom we disagree, people we don’t know at all, even that person you see in the mirror – every person merits the regard we would show to Jesus himself if he were sitting at the table, having coffee and donuts with us.  Which, of course, he is.

If you see Jesus in the faces of the people around you, you don’t look for difference nearly as much as you look for common ground.  If you see Jesus in the faces of the people around you, you don’t ascribe selfish motive nearly as much as you try to see the other’s heart.  In fact, if you see Jesus in the faces of the people around you, you don’t so much want to win the argument as you want to pass the peace.  And in the process, you find that “you are not far from the kingdom of God.”

Well, like I said a couple of weeks ago, don’t just take it from me.  Here's another story of finding Jesus in unexpected people and places, and, in the process, finding the kingdom coming among us – this week, from parishioner Tom Murray.