Time's Up!

A Sermon offered for the 1st Sunday of Lent, at Church of the Holy Spirit in Bellmawr, and St. Luke's Church in Westville, NJ

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.” This is the essential message that our Lord came to bring to humanity. This is the Gospel message! Unfortunately, sadly, this message, even to this day, is often misunderstood. But rest assured, my friends, it is my calling to make sure that all of us here in this parish eventually understand its true meaning and impact.

In 1935, the Rural Electrification Administration was created to bring electricity to rural America. This energy promised to provide a vastly improved quality of life for farmers. When the lines were installed into new areas and electric power was made available, the people had to make a decision. Very few of them had any personal experience with this electricity. They had heard of it, to be sure, and they heard of all the ways their life would be different because of it. But in order to receive these benefits, they had to believe the message, they had to understand how this worked, and they had to take the necessary steps to become connected to this source of energy. These farmers had to turn away from the life that they had known for so long: a life with kerosene lamps and iceboxes and washboards and pedal-powered sewing machines. A totally new life was right there waiting for them, but they had to connect to it and begin to rely upon it for their everyday existence. It’s hard to imagine now, but some couldn’t make the change, and chose to stay outside of the world of electricity.

In essence, the message delivered by the government to these farmers was this: “The time has come, and the kingdom of electricity is at hand; repent, change your ways and accept this new improved life.”

In our day and time, I like to think about the kingdom of God in the same way as the world of the wireless internet. All around us, at every moment, is a source of information and communication that would have been impossible for our ancestors to have imagined. We can’t see it, but it’s there - all around us. We can choose not to connect, to stay with our old familiar ways. Or we can receive this new power and begin to have our lives transformed.

The analogies may be rough, but they speak truth, I believe, about our Lord’s message to us. “It’s time,” he declared to the people and he says to us today. “It’s time! God’s kingdom is here. Change directions, and trust in this message.”

It’s so easy for us to get mixed up about this, because our western churches have focused so heavily upon the question of eternal judgment and the forgiveness of sins. But this is clearly not the focus of the Gospel!

At the 225th Convention of the Diocese of NJ this past Friday and Saturday, we sang a number of old revival hymns. I learned these while I was in Virginia and my wife Erin knows them all from her Southern Baptist upbringing. One thing they all have in common is this singular focus upon our status after death:

“When the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there.” They’re fun to sing. But I’m sorry to say that they generally miss the point entirely about the Gospel!

The Holy One of Israel is a God of forgiving love and mercy. All of the Hebrew prophets knew that! Just look at the Psalms which were written hundreds of years before Christ. Today’s Psalm speaks of the “steadfast love and faithfulness” of God. “His mercy endures forever” is the refrain of many of the psalms.

David, and Solomon and Isaiah and the others knew that God is “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love”. (It would be foolish to think that Jesus came to teach us about the love of God.) The problem was that, although the people of Israel knew and heard about the love of God, it made no practical change in their homes and in their communities. Anger, greed, violence, and injustice were just as common in Bethlehem as they were in Rome.

And the sad truth is that they continue to be very common in our world today and even among Christians.

As we read along in The Illumined Heart, we will hear more about the spiritual disciplines of the early Christians. For me, I find the image of the athlete in training as very helpful here. The committed athlete works with the trainer to develop a specific plan to strengthen weak areas in his performance. If the shoulders need to be strengthened for better performance, then military presses and other exercises are planned out and the results are tallied and charted.

If we are committed to growing closer to God and living a fuller, healthier, abundant life, then we follow the same kind of pattern. With assistance from someone who is experienced, we identify our weak areas and then plan out exercises to strengthen that part of our life. If my weakness is that I tend to speak before I think, and often cut people down with negative and hurtful comments, then I take on an intentional practice of saying a brief prayer before speaking, and saying one positive thing before I ever say something negative!

If I really do covet what my neighbor has and greed is a problem in my soul, then I develop a specific plan to change this, perhaps by volunteering once a week to help those less fortunate than me, and perhaps concretely giving something tangible away on a regular basis.

Do you get the idea of how this works? You see, it’s so tempting for us to externalize the Gospel. “The kingdom of God is here, so we need to change that bad government! We need to change those bad laws! We need to build more schools to teach the children!”

But, tell me, what good is it to build schools to teach children if we still go home at night and abuse our children in private?! What good is it to pass civil rights laws if we are still going to cultivate hatred in our households for those who are different?

No, no, no. The struggle is not our there. It’s right here. The dividing line between good and evil runs through every human heart. This (pointing to my heart) is where the true fight for the kingdom of God is taking place, every single day!

Leave behind your old self with its bad habits, and connect now to a source of energy and wisdom that is endless. Learn to live a new life now intimately connected to God.
That’s the message that our Lord brings. And though the task may seem overwhelming, unending grace – divine energy – is made available to us in the Holy Spirit.

It seems that Thomas Cranmer and the English reformers understood this. One of the last requests that we made in the Great Litany this morning is right on target here and we would do well to chew on these words:

“That it may please thee to give us true repentance; to forgive us all our sins, negligences, and ignorances; and to endue us with the grace of thy Holy Spirit to amend our lives according to thy holy Word.” We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord. So may it be. Amen.