The Unexpected Kingdom
Or, Expecting the Unexpected

Sunday, August 8th, 2004
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
Luke 12:32-40

32 "Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. 33 Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. 34 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. "Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; 36 be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks. 37 Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. 38 If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves. 39 "But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. 40 You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour."

The first call came in shortly after 11:30. Nancy was over at Loretta’s trying to get her into her car so she could take her down to the hospital in Kilmarnock. Loretta had fallen for the second time that day, and for the 5th time in 3 days. I walked over and helped get Loretta down the steps, out of the house, and into the car.

Part of being in ministry, part of being a part of a family of faith like Jerusalem Baptist Church, means that, inasmuch as possible, you make yourself available for emergencies.

We’ve only been faced with a few such calls in our time here, and they’ve not all been late at night. The first was the call to let me know of Fox School’s death, just over a year ago. The second was to let me know of Charlotte Lewis’ passing a few months later. Both of those calls came in the middle of the day.
Most recently, Angelica’s call at 6 in the morning was a similar call, asking one of us to help take her to the hospital to welcome her baby, Cristal Esmeralda, into the world.

There is something different in a late- or middle-of-the-night phone call. Sometimes they’re expected, but generally, they are not. There is a jarring, an unsettling of the routine, when the night, which is usually reserved for relatively quiet sleep, is interrupted by either an unexpected knock on the door, the ring of the doorbell, or the ringing of the telephone.

There was something different about the way Jesus presented the kingdom to the people he spoke to. It caught them just as off-guard as a late-night phone call or knock on the door. Why would Jesus tell his listeners to not be afraid of the coming of the kingdom? It occurs to me that he was presenting them with a kingdom they weren’t looking for. They were looking for an earthly kingdom where they would, after centuries of being the vanquished, be the victors, in very specific physical and literal ways. That was what caused so much consternation among the leaders of the day. Jesus’ redefinition of what the TRUE kingdom of heaven was like went completely against the grain of what they’d been led to believe would be the reality of the kingdom by human standards. Jesus presented them with what is called a paradigm shift. That is when the very basic elements of what you have founded yourself in are flipped on end, and you have to learn to look at the world from an entirely different perspective. It comes out in Christ’s telling the disciples ‘the first shall be last and the last shall be first.” It comes through in Jesus’ telling the Pharisees ‘give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”

A couple of weeks ago, we went over the parable of the Good Samaritan. In telling the parable, Jesus was not ONLY identifying who one’s neighbor REALLY is, but he was also painting a picture for his listeners of what the kingdom will be like. “The kingdom of God will be like having your sworn enemy be your best friend.” Have you noticed that when Jesus speaks of the Kingdom, he speaks in terms of relationships and values, not streets of Gold or wings and harps?

That may be why I find myself shying away from speaking of Heaven – in the way John speaks of Heaven in the book of Revelation. Heaven is the Kingdom of God fully realized. “Fully realized” means that everyone and everything is as God intended it to be. We will be fully human – the ‘whole people’ God wants us to be - in the Kingdom. We will live in a place where there is no more war, illness, sorrow, no more drug abuse, child abuse, and injustice, a world where we won’t open the paper to the obituaries to find out who’s lost whom. That by definition excludes it from being completed in our present reality.

That DOES NOT mean that IN our present reality, we won’t see parts of it. Jesus said ‘the Kingdom of God is within you”. We catch glimpses of the kingdom – Friday night at the game, we got whupped. however you look at it, by the 5th inning, we were just playing to be out on the field, it stopped being about trying to beat the other team. there was some grumbling and gloomy faces, but then something really cool happened.

Farnham (the other team) started to relax, laugh and smile, and so did we. The grandson of one of the players, who was decked out in his uniform, came out to swing his bat ... RJ, our pitcher, came up to within a few feet of home plate, and gently tossed the ball to the little boy. He was a little overwhelmed by the attention, and would have rather buried his face in his pappy's leg than swing again, but he did give it a try. With his grandfather's help, he did swing about 3 or 4 times. Then an older boy, probably 9 or 10, came up to bat. He got a base hit.
When it was our turn to come up to bat again, Leslie, who'd been cheering the team on, got a chance to bat and ALSO made a base hit. It turned into a relaxing evening. There were still some bruises and pulled muscles, and even, I’m afraid, one broken thumb. (Sorry Jay!)

The cool thing was this –

EVERYONE WAS CHEERING.

It wasn't about us and them anymore.

You could probably make a plausible argument for the fact that it stopped being about us and them when them's were the ones who had too many points for us to catch up, but looking at it another way, we could have stopped the game once we'd reached the point of no return - and emptied the field, made room for the other teams, and gone about our business. But somewhere around the 5th inning it started being about just being together.

It stopped being about the competition. About who’s going to get there first. It stopped being about base hits, tagging the runners, and catching fly balls, RBI’s and strategy, or knowing who to throw the ball to if and when it came to you. It started being about what Jesus was talking about. It started being about what we have in common, what we find joy in, what we have to share. It started being about treasuring each other as the wonderful, precious gifts of God that we are, about respecting and honoring each other even though we are on different sides of the field, about looking the other people on the field in the face and seeing the laughter of Jesus Christ himself reflected there.

"Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; 36 be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks. 37 Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.

Can you imagine yourself being found by God in the middle of performing an unthinking act of … selfishness? A small thing … a cutting remark, a cold retort, a closing of the door to a person in need … God’s love for you is no different.

Now, can you picture it, being found by God in the middle of an act born from God’s own heart - a welcoming openness, an extravagant gesture of kindness, an irrepressibly warm and loving hug, a church with an average attendance of around 55 people serving meals to 80 or more people in the community on a routine basis, or delivering clothes, or much needed furniture? Again, God’s love does not change. It is now about how we respond to the kingdom.

Where would you rather be found?

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

The kingdom of God is like …

The second call, came shortly before 2 AM. It woke me out of a dead sleep. I keep 2 phones beside the bed at night – the cell phone and the home line. I was asleep enough that it took me a couple of rings to wake up, and by the time I picked up the cell phone and saw that IT wasn’t ringing, the landline had stopped ringing. We have caller ID, and I was able to view the number from which the call had come, but didn’t recognize it. I tried to call it back, but the line was busy. After a few minutes, I heard Buster barking, and sat up and looked out the front bedroom window. There was a trooper’s car pulled in over at Loretta’s, so I jumped up, threw some clothes on, and walked over. When I got there, Nancy and the trooper were trying to get Loretta up the steps and into the house. The call that I’d missed was Nancy calling me to ask for help – in trying to get Loretta from the car into the house, they’d both fallen, and Loretta’s back was soaked from having lain down in the wet grass. We got her inside the house, and we helped as best we could while Nancy helped Loretta out of the wet clothes and into a dry gown.

May we here, as part of this family of faith, be found ready. ALWAYS ready. May that be our character, our mind, and our heart.

Let’s pray.