Epiphany 5 - Joining Jesus in His Kingdom

Sometimes the sermon that was written is nothing like the sermon that was preached. That was the case this week!

When I was young, I remember learning to pray the Lord's Prayer, especially that part that says, "Thy kingdom come." And when I was a kid, I often thought about that idea of “Thy kingdom come” being, going to heaven as in the last day when Jesus comes again in glory. And I think part of the reason for that is that when we think about kingdoms as human beings, we think about a kingdom as a place. You know? A kingdom in our world is like a country with its own boundaries, towns, and geography.

But biblically speaking, a kingdom is more than a place. It's what God does as king. The kingdom of heaven isn't about a place. It's about His role as a ruler or as a king. So for us to be in the kingdom of heaven, it's not about being in a particular place, like coming to church puts you in the kingdom of heaven. And it's not like a kingdom like Spain or Luxembourg, where royalty still holds power. God is king everywhere. Jesus is king through the whole universe. So, to be in the kingdom of heaven is really about being within a relationship with Jesus, where he reigns, and he rules in your life. So welcome to the kingdom of heaven.

Easy peasy. Right? You just decide that Jesus is your king, and you start doing Jesus-y stuff. Right? Well, not quite.

Did you notice that in our gospel reading, there was this part where Jesus talks about the kingdom of heaven? He says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, unless heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law until it is accomplished.” What Jesus is saying is that this message of the law and the prophets is not going to go away until He finishes all His work – His death, resurrection, and His return in glory when He sets all things right.

So, what is the message of the law? Well, the message of the law is about how people are to live, particularly God’s people, but also all people. Once you've been saved and live in a right relationship with him, God says, “This is how people are to live.” And the laws in the Old Testament are very detailed, and they cover all kinds of circumstances – some applying only to Israel’s political and religious life, and other parts about morality and how people are to live in relationship with God and one another. And probably the easiest way for us to access God's law is through the Ten Commandments.

The Commandments serve as a really good summary of how people are to live rightly as created beings. And when you look at the Ten Commandments, it's pretty easy to say, on a surface level, "I've kept all these," the same way that the rich young ruler did. You know, I've never murdered anybody. I've never stolen anything. I always speak God’s name respectfully. We set the expectations really, really low, and we say, "Yeah, I’ve kept the commandments. I've done all the things that God says.” But when Jesus comes along, and He starts preaching in the Sermon on the Mount, which our gospel lesson is part of, he amplifies all of these commandments. He says, “Well, if you've gotten angry with your brother, you've committed murder. If you've had lustful thoughts in your heart, you've committed adultery.”

Jesus amplifies the message of the law, and he also clarifies it. He wants us to know it's not just about the surface meaning and outward actions; His concern is what's going on in our hearts. Jesus is pointing out that none of us is righteous.

Now, are there other parts of the Bible that flat out say no one is righteous on their own? Yeah. Obviously. But Jesus is making it really clear by going through these commandments and saying, “These are the things that you're meant to do, and you haven't done them.” So, in terms of keeping the Commandments, He is telling us that none of us have done them.

And then there's this part about the prophets in what Jesus said. One part of what the prophets did was to confront God's people with the message that they were not living according to God's will. So a major part of the work of the prophets throughout the scriptures was to call people to repent, to turn away from sin, and to turn back to God.

I think for a lot of us, we tend to think about people as though our default setting were toward the kingdom of heaven. We think that people are born with an inclination to do good and Godly things, but that's not true. The default setting of humanity is not toward the kingdom of heaven. The default setting of our hearts is actually towards sin.

There are a few ways we could talk about this inclination of our hearts. We often call it original sin, but we could just talk about it as the desire to live in the “kingdom of me.” We tend to prefer a kingdom of ourselves in which we are the gods of our own lives, that we want to rule and reign and say, this is how things ought to be, and I will decide what is true and what is good and what is right. And so in that way, we are putting ourselves on God's throne. Sometimes we like to talk about people having free will, but the reality is that the way we use our will, this “free” will, is always towards sin, at least that is where our hearts want to go, apart from the work of the Holy Spirit within us. Without the intervention of God and the Holy Spirit, that's our inclination. That's our default.

And when we, as Christians, relax God's command, Jesus says that we are least in the kingdom of heaven. We are least in the kingdom of heaven when we excuse some sins while condemning others. We are least in the kingdom of heaven when we relax what God says and say, “These things don't apply anymore,” when we say we don't have to keep, believe in, or teach God's law.

So when you look at your own life, what are the sins that you look at in the world that you personally find reprehensible, that you personally are willing to condemn? And then what sins do you sin in the world that you acknowledge as sin, but then you make excuses as if to say they’re not so bad? What sins do you excuse for yourself? Look out at your own life as you look at the world. Are there sins that you just flat out ignore? And you say, these things don’t matter anymore.

You see, when it comes to God's law, as it interacts with sin, it doesn't matter what that sin is. God's law condemns all of it. All sin is damnable in God's sight. And Jesus says that when we relax those standards, we will be least in the kingdom. But he says, whoever does the law and the message of the prophets and teaches these things will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. So catch that.

God wants us to do His will. He wants us to do what he teaches us in His Word, in His law, and he wants us to teach that to others. So, who is out here in our crowd today that is doing and teaching the law and the prophets perfectly? No one.

During Jesus’ ministry, there were two important religious groups: the scribes and the Pharisees. And these were people who tried very hard to keep God's law perfectly, to live according to the word of the prophets perfectly. They lived to exacting standards, but they fell far short of God’s law. In fact, they fell so far short that they actually conspired to murder Jesus. (You know, I think there's a commandment that says, “don't murder,” don't kill people. Yeah.) These people presented themselves as being the ones who did and taught what God commands, but they themselves didn’t do it.

And this is a danger for us, too: we might think we are the ones keeping God's law, but we don't realize we're actually falling short. We need to be mindful of our own sin and not play the “holier than thou” game, which we are often accused of playing.

Now here's where things get really interesting and where something really important happens. You see, I said one part of what the prophets did was to confront and to condemn the sin of God's people, and actually the sins of the whole world. But the prophets had another part to their work. They were also sent to proclaim a message of grace and salvation, a message of forgiveness and reconciliation, and restoration.

In other words, they were sent to preach a message of a new righteousness. It's a righteousness that comes by faith, a righteousness that is not rooted in the things that we do. In fact, it's Christ's righteousness that we've received by faith. That's the work of baptism – God washes us, and we are connected to Jesus in His death, and we receive His righteousness. We receive His holiness in our lives.

So when God looks upon us, he doesn't see our sins. He sees Jesus' righteousness. This is why we come to the Lord's Supper. When we eat and drink Jesus' body and blood, it's for the forgiveness of our sins, and we become righteous in God's sight.

It's not our righteousness. It's Jesus' righteousness that stands between God and us so that he looks on us and sees that holiness and perfection. And friends, this is a real righteousness that surpasses what the scribes and the Pharisees did in their own lives. When we interact with God, we know that we have a real righteousness, not a righteousness that's rooted in the things that we do, but it's rooted in what God has done for us. So when we pray for God's kingdom to come, what we're really asking for is for that faith to come to us. And for us then by faith to receive Jesus' righteousness and live in faith, believing God's word and doing what it says.

By grace, we would believe God's holy word and lead godly lives here in time, and then, yes, there in heaven in eternity. We are called to be people who believe, who receive, and who also do. In this way – believing, receiving, and doing – we are joining Jesus in His righteousness and in His kingdom. This is really all about a reorientation that goes on within us as Christ brings us to life, as the Holy Spirit gives us faith. It's a reorientation away from the kingdom of our self, the kingdom of sin, the kingdom of death, toward the kingdom of heaven.

And in that kingdom of heaven, we look and we see that this isn't a place per se, not a geographical place, but it's wherever the king does His work of saving sinners. The kingdom of heaven is where Jesus is seeking and saving the lost.

And friends, once upon a time, that was you. You were the lost person that Jesus sought out and found. And for many of us, that happened when we were still babies. Our parents proclaimed His word to us, and they brought us to the baptismal font, and we were washed of our sins, cleansed, and given this faith. And so now now you are people of the kingdom. The call for you and for me is to repent, to turn our hearts toward God by the power of the Holy Spirit. And when that happens, you turn your heart toward God's law, and you begin to love God's law, and you seek to obey it.

You love God. That's the first part of the commandment. You could sum it up by saying that we should love God with all of our heart, soul, strength, and mind. And then, as we love God, we love the behaviors that he loves. We begin to love things like holiness and mercy and goodness. And as we begin to love God, we also begin to love the people that God loves, also known as our neighbors.

And when we love our neighbors, we seek to do good for them. We seek to bring the good news of the kingdom to them. Those things are wrapped together: doing good and sharing the good news. Because in this world, sometimes, the entry point for the good news to come into a person's life is by loving them and by doing good to them. You see, God doesn't need our good works, but our neighbors do.

And so we seek to love them in such a way that it reflects what God is doing in us, how His work of bringing salvation has brought forgiveness into our lives. And we've received this love, which we then pour forth into the lives of others. This is what it means to join Jesus in His kingdom. Because the kingdom of heaven has come. Jesus has come and brought new righteousness; brought salvation and life.

And when the kingdom of heaven comes, yeah, it comes condemning sin. The kingdom of heaven calls for your holiness. It calls for me to live a godly life. And when we fall short, we remember that the kingdom of heaven also comes proclaiming forgiveness for Christ's sake. The love of God is seen nowhere more clearly than at the cross of Jesus, where Jesus himself takes our sins into His body, and he dies for us that we might live in His righteousness.

And what are we called to do? We're called to believe that word. We're called to believe the word that condemns us for our sin, but also that tells us of this love and this forgiveness. And we're called to share that word, to teach it, where God gives us the opportunity. And we're called to do what the law demands of us, to love our neighbors, to love God above all.

And in loving our neighbors and in loving God and living in His righteousness, we join Jesus in His kingdom and its work. Amen.