Garrett Vickrey 2.18.15 The Prayer Jesus Taught Us to Pray, Part 2 Pentecost 13+ Among You The Lord s Prayer, Luke 17:20-21 Woodland Baptist Church San Antonio, TX I. If you want to know what a person believes watch them pray. If we want to know more about Jesus faith we should look at his prayers. If we want to know what it means to be a follower of Jesus then we should be praying like him. Today we go another step into the Lord s Prayer. This step is perhaps the most mysterious and the most demanding. Your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Here is the risk and the reward of the prayer. It is the risk and the promise of Jesus gospel itself. The kingdom of God is more than life after death. It is the central message of Jesus preaching. It s what he prayed for. It s what he healed people for. It s what he was constantly inviting people to imagine. I m a few years behind on movies. A few weeks ago I finally watched the movie Lincoln. There s a great scene in that movie where President Lincoln and the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton are going over strategies as the Civil War is raging on. As they are debating strategy Lincoln starts into a story about his days as a lawyer in Illinois. Stanton shouts just before storming out of the room, You re going to tell one your stories! I can t stand another of your stories. Lincoln was a great storyteller, and he would often launch into stories in the middle of meetings on policy or war or anything. Sometimes the meaning of his story would be obvious. Sometimes no one would know what he was talking about. I wonder if the disciples felt that way about Jesus and all his parables of the Kingdom. The great baptist pastor and professor Walter Rauschenbusch wrote that nowhere does Jesus define the phrase the Kingdom of God. Rather, he took an understanding of it for granted with his hearers, who were schooled in the Hebrew prophets. The vision of the Kingdom coming from the prophets pictured God s reign on earth in earthy terms. Swords were beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, captives would be set free, debts forgiven, justice would roll down like waters and righteousness like an overflowing 1
stream. When Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God we have to assume he means something like that. The Kingdom of God is mysterious. It s not just a spiritual realm off somewhere in the great by and by (with angels and harps). It s also not just the church. The Kingdom of God is God s dream for everything God created. It s God s dream for earth for you and for me. The Kingdom of God is God s will done on earth as it is in heaven. And the salvation Jesus announces is not just that we should believe in him, but that we should stake everything we have on the kingdom because when we do that the kingdom is already here. The kingdom he describes is an event. It comes suddenly. It surprises. It cannot be controlled. II. Jesus wasn t killed for preaching a message about a heavenly kingdom where we go when we die. He was killed for presuming that he might just be the foretaste of a kingdom that is at hand a kingdom which is uniting heaven and earth right here (right now). This is where Jesus went from praying to meddling. His kingdom cannot be controlled. It cannot even be fully grasped. This is the problem. It s surprising how little attention has often been given to the place of preaching the Kingdom of God. For instance, you who grew up in other traditions Catholic or even mainline protestant churches you probably recited the ancient creeds in worship. Perhaps, every Sunday you said the Apostle s Creed or the Nicene Creed. The creeds don t mention the Kingdom. Which is strange, because that was just about the only thing Jesus ever talked about in the Gospels. Evangelicals may not use the ancient creeds. We may claim to be non-creedal. But, we do have things like the 4 spiritual laws; that aren t functionally all that different from creeds. The 4 spiritual laws are a method of evangelism that tell us, first that God loves us and has a plan for us. Next, that we are sinful. Third, Jesus died in our place. Finally, we must receive Christ through faith to experience salvation after we die. The scriptures that typically go along with these laws come from John 3:16 and the letters of Paul. No mention of the kingdom of God. No mention of the prophetic justice which was the driving force and 2
major content behind Jesus ministry. The first council to put together the Nicene Creed in 325 A.D. was called together by the Emperor of Rome, Constantine. Consider the irony here, the Roman guard that crucified Jesus now guards the Emperor with shields emblazoned with the cross. The Roman Empire once saw Jesus and his proclamation of the Kingdom of God as a threat. Now they see in the religion bearing his name an opportunity. There s a lesson here for us. God s purposes are not one with our own. The powerful often claim the cross for themselves, but empty it of its content. They empty the cross of it s content to leverage it for themselves. No longer do we need to hear of the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed. Focus on the spiritual aspects and look away from where that spirit touches the material. Look away from Jesus preaching that the kingdom is among us. The kingdom is an event. It s a little yeast in a vat of flour. It s a mustard seed that turns into an unwieldy tree large enough to house birds. It is a mystery we lean into in faith. The kingdom cannot be controlled. Creeds then and now are meant to unify and organize. Creedal faith turns Christianity into intellectual assent to propositions and doctrine. It preaches believing this or that. It s watered down faith. You can believe something without trusting your life on it. Faith is about trust. It s about staking your life on what you can t live without. When we place our faith in the Kingdom Jesus preached we find renewed hope in God s new community that shows up here and there. My friend Kevin likes to say, Any moment where you choose the needs of another over your own is a kingdom moment. III. God s kingdom is here, yet not here. Martha Perusek is the development director at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. She was with our staff this week and told us a story about a man name Rodney. Rodney is an inmate at a federal prison in Missouri. Martha knows Rodney because she gets an envelope each week from Rodney with $3 in it for CBF missionaries in the Slovakia who work with the Roma people. He read about their work in a Fellowship! Magazine given to him by the prison chaplain. Rodney is serving a life sentence. 3
He was convicted of a murder he committed when he was 17 years old. He will never leave that prison. He will never go on a mission trip to work with the Roma people. He will never be able to leave those walls to advocate on behalf of the poor and disinherited people in society. But, every week $3 of the $15 he earns will go in an envelope to go to missionaries in Slovakia. He even started writing letters to them. Rodney even developed a friendship with a Roma woman in Slovakia who he now calls mom. He had lost his birth parents, and she had lost a son. Somehow, by God s grace they connected. In the kingdom of God there is hope for prisoners and even grieving mothers. The Kingdom of God is here. Yet, the Kingdom of God is not here yet. Rodney is still in jail. Roma are still marginalized. And dead sons don t come back. But, there s healing and wholeness yet. Somehow in all this brokenness, God s new community is found. The kingdom is within us now. It surprises us sometimes how it shows up. It s an event; it s a pursuit; it s among you. IV. Presbyterian pastor Victor Pentz was the first child in his family to leave home. At 23 he moved from San Diego to New Jersey to go to Princeton Seminary. After his first year he was heading back home to San Diego for the summer. His parents were elated. Their eldest son was driving back home cross country with his new bride. They had traveled 2,700 miles of that 3,000-mile journey, and one night as they were passing through the tiny town of Oasis, Nevada--one of those tiny microscopic dots where the entering and leaving are the opposite sides of the same sign. You know what I mean. Fifteen miles outside Elko and there in the middle of the night, Victor s 1963 Plymouth Valiant blew its engine, and he and his new wife were stranded at a gas station in a town with no motels and no food except one coin-operated machine where you put in some quarters and a Frito bag drops. But Victor knew all he had to do was place one phone call to one person. All he had to do was call his dad. And so he did. It was like calling in a massive military response. Every tool in the garage he threw in his trunk. Somehow he borrowed a towbar from a friend in the middle of the night. He got all 4
kinds of running lights for his car. Victor s mom was up making sandwiches, and the two of them charged 250 miles into the Nevada desert drinking coffee to stay awake. It may actually be the most fun they ever had. 1 When we pray your kingdom come your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We are praying that we would be opened to this kind of sacrifice; this kind of generosity; this kind of love. We act like the kingdom is not within our reach to free us of the responsibility the kingdom demands of us now. But, sometimes we are called to get up, make sandwiches, load the car with all the tools we have and go pick up our sons and daughters. Because they are stranded. Because they are ours. And we are the means by which God s new day arrives for them. The funny things is, when we are that means we find that new day dawns on us too. Jesus message to us is this, The kingdom is at hand. It is near. It is even within you. That s good news. That kingdom is coming here. Every time we pray it; it s here. 5
1 Victor Pentz, Tugging at God's Heart, sermon from July 21, 2002 day1.org, http://day1.org/560-tugging_at_gods_heart 6