Joel D. Kline
January 23, 2005
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
The Third Sunday after Epiphany
Jim Forest, long active in the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, several years ago wrote a book about the beatitudes of Jesus. Near the beginning of the book he asserts that the pivotal question of the New Testament is this: To whom are we listening? And the clear urging of the New Testament writers, of course, is that we listen to Jesus, a task which the Gospel writers realize was no easy thing for the first disciples, any more than listening to Jesus is easy in our day. For Jesus urges us to consider new ways of thinking and acting in the world around us, ways that go against the grain of our most familiar and often comfortable patterns.
This morning’s Gospel lesson is set at the beginnings of Jesus’ active ministry, as Jesus proclaims, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matthew 4:17). A more familiar translation puts it, “for the kingdom is at hand.” It’s a message that bears listening to, a message that carries urgency, for it does not let us rest satisfied with routine ways of thinking and relating. Clarence Jordan in his Cotton Patch Version of Matthew’s Gospel translates the call of Jesus this way: “Reshape your lives, for God’s new order of the Spirit is confronting you.” In other words, something new is afoot, and now is the time for change, the time to put on a new way of living.
Matthew alone speaks of this new order of the Spirit as the kingdom of heaven, while the other Gospel writers use the phrase kingdom of God. In Jewish tradition the word God was generally avoided out of reverence and respect, and no doubt it is that practice that stands behind Matthew’s use of the alternative phrase kingdom of heaven. But for us, talk of heaven evokes images of the future, of that place of promise for life after death, while Jesus is urging his hearers to embrace a new quality of living here and now. When the people of Jesus’ day heard him talking of the kingdom as arriving now, as something in their midst, they would have understood that he was talking of a coming revolution—not a pie-in-the-sky future, but a markedly new way to experience life, beginning here and beginning now.
The people of Jesus’ day grew up in the shadow of kingdom-movements, each hoping beyond hope to end the oppressive Roman rule and to restore Israel to a position of glory and prominence. But when Jesus announces that God’s kingdom is at hand, he is suggesting a new understanding of the coming revolution; the old ways, asserts Jesus, will longer be adequate. We cannot fight darkness with more darkness.
That’s why Matthew links the beginning of Jesus’ ministry with a text from the prophet Isaiah: “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.” In his commentary Matthew for Everyone Tom Wright puts it this way:
Jesus could see that the standard kind of revolution, fighting and killing in order to put an end to…fighting and killing, was nonsense. Doing it in God’s name was a blasphemous nonsense.
But the trouble was that many of his contemporaries were ready to get on with the fight. [Jesus’] message of repentance was not, therefore, that they should feel sorry for personal and private sins (though he would of course want that as well), but that as a people they should stop rushing towards the cliff edge of a violent revolution, and instead go the other way, towards God’s kingdom of light and peace and healing and forgiveness, for themselves and for the world.
It is this new kind of revolution that Jesus has in mind when beginning his public ministry with a call to repentance. In our day we are likely to reduce that call to repentance to a matter of feeling badly about ourselves and our shortcomings, but Jesus has something far greater in mind. Jesus is urging us to envision an entirely new world, one in which injustice and oppression and warfare are no more, one in which we learn to live together in peace, viewing one another with compassion and respect.
In his book The Call to Conversion Jim Wallis speaks of the repentance to which Jesus call us as a turning away from sin, selfishness, and darkness. It is a turning from “all that binds and oppresses us and others, from all the violence and evil in which we are so complicit, from all the false worship that has controlled and corrupted us. Ultimately, repentance is turning from the powers of death.” At the same time, it is turning towards life and faith. And faith, asserts Wallis,
is turning to belief, hope, and trust…Faith opens us to the future by restoring our sight, softening our hearts, bringing light into our darkness. We are converted to compassion, justice and peace as we take our stand as citizens of Christ’s new order. We see, hear, and feel now as never before….
Heart, mind, and soul, being, thinking, and doing—all are remade in the grace of God’s redeeming love.
Is that not the power of Clarence Jordan’s paraphrase of the call to repentance: “Reshape your lives.” This is not a message for the shallow, the thin-skinned, the weak-hearted. Nor does it appeal to the wishy-washy or the namby-pamby. For Jesus is not simply talking about a matter of fine-tuning our lives, of making some minor adjustments; Jesus is talking of an experience so profound that our lives shall never again the same. In the book of Acts, you may remember, those who are opposed to the fledgling Christian movement complain that “these people who have been turning the world upside down have come here also” (Acts 17:6). And how is it that we turn the world upside down, but by embracing light in the midst of darkness, by turning from violence and choosing the path of forgiveness, healing, and peace, going the extra mile in relationships, reaching out to the broken and the forgotten, serving “the least of these” in the name and spirit of Christ Jesus.
Jim Forest tells the story of Mother Maria Skobtsova, a Latvian woman born into an aristocratic family in 1891 in Russia. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and civil war, she and her family joined the throngs of uprooted refugees making their way to France. Soon after arriving in Paris, Maria’s second child died of meningitis, a tragedy that initiated a profound conversion in Maria’s life. She determined, in her own words, to lead “a more authentic and purified life,” and she wrote during that time that she saw a new road before her, a new meaning in life, to be a servant for all “who need maternal care, assistance, or protection.”
As a result, Maria immersed herself in efforts to assist fellow Russian refugees, whether they were in prisons, hospitals, mental asylums, or on the streets. Eventually Maria became a nun in the Orthodox Church, but only after seeking assurance that she need not withdraw from the world, but could continue her active ministry to refugees. Leasing a house with enough space for a chapel, a soup kitchen, and a shelter for destitute refugees, Mother Maria’s ministry spawned a new movement, called Orthodox Action, committed to serving the poor and the broken.
With the German occupation of Paris in 1940, Mother Maria’s dedication, her revering of each person as a worthy part of God’s creation, caught the attention of the Nazis, and she was labeled subversive. Even though she knew she was under Nazi surveillance, Mother Maria did all in her power to assist Jews and others being sought by Nazi officials. She wrote in her diary these words during that time: “There is one moment when you start burning with love and you have the inner desire to throw yourself at the feet of some other human being. This one moment is enough. Immediately you know that instead of losing your life, it is being given back to you twofold.”
Eventually Mother Maria was arrested and sent to the notorious Ravensbruck concentration camp, where she managed to survive almost to the war’s end. But on Good Friday, March 31, 1945, she willingly took the place of a Jewish prisoner being sent to the gas chamber. Mother Maria died in her fellow prisoner’s place. Earlier in her life she had asserted, “At the Last Judgment I shall not be asked whether I was successful in my ascetic experiences, nor how many bows and prostrations I had made. Instead I shall be asked, Did I feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and the pisoner? That is all I shall be asked.”
Conventional rabbis of Jesus’ day, I have read, did not seek out disciples, did not call persons to sit at their feet and follow in their footsteps. In fact, it was considered bad form for a rabbi to go out and beat the bushes, asking persons to be his disciples. But the New Testament portrays Jesus as ever in the business of reaching out, actively seeking, relentlessly searching for those who would join with him in the revolutionary task of proclaiming the kingdom of God. And Jesus continues, through the centuries, to invite the Mother Marias, the Saint Francises, the Henri Nouwens, to walk in paths of discipleship. In our own tradition, we know those “saints” among us who have responded to the call of Jesus to deny self, take up the cross, and follow—the Anna and Alexander Macks, the John Klines, the Anna Mows, the Ted Studebakers, the Jim Renzes.
Just so, Jesus pursues you and me, reaching out to each one of us, inviting, prodding, challenging, guiding, enticing, encouraging, summoning us to embrace a new way of living, to take hold of a revolutionary way of thinking and acting. Jesus calls you and me to consider the ways of repentance, to let go of the darkness and embrace the light, to take hold of the ways of peace and justice, of feeding the hungry and caring for the hurting. To be a Christian, writes William Willimon, is not simply a matter of believing a half dozen impossible things before breakfast. Much more, it is to be “open to the possibility that something’s afoot, that the life you live may not be your own, that God really does mean to have God’s way with the world through you. It is to believe that God really is determined to have you, come what may, that God has plans for you.”
The first disciples, we are told, upon hearing the call, “immediately left their nets and followed.” What about us? Shall we not also allow our hearts and lives to be reshaped by the one whose love knows no limits? With Mother Maria, we shall discover along the way that our lives are not lost, but rather that life is given back to us twofold and much more!
Creator God, you who are the source of peace in our hearts, we come confessing that our living is often restless. We act as if we will find meaning in life as we strive for more and more possessions, as we yearn for power over others, as we seek to be in control—but still our hearts are restless.
Draw near to us, O God. Calm our unwise confusion; bid the inner clamor cease. O holy Comforter, in moments of quietness remind us that life is found not in the hoarding and the stockpiling but in sharing and living for others. Remind us, gracious God, of the call to do justice, to love tenderly, and to walk humbly in your presence. Take away our anxious striving, O God, that we might hear your voice and respond to the needs of our fellow human beings.
God of peace, fill us with a passion for peace in the world. Form us into a body of peacemakers and reconcilers—those who live and proclaim the promise of life lived in relationship with you and in harmony with one another. O God, hear now our prayers for the people of Iraq, for an end to the continuing strife and division and violence and fear. Remind us, loving God, that our trust is not in weapons but in you, our Creator, our Redeemer, our Strength, our Sustainer.
God of healing, we hold before you now those in special need of your healing grace. Hear our prayers for…
Thanks be to you, O God, for our church family, for this community of blessing, support, encouragement and challenge.
Hear us now, O God, as together we pray as Christ taught the disciples…
Amen.