THE PROMISED KINGDOM
Rev. Alfred Williams
Ladera Community Church
June 8, 2008
Genesis 15:1, 1-12; Matthew 10:1-7
Prayer: Our ears are attentive. Our hearts are open. May your Word abide in us, O God, for your Love’s sake. Amen.
According to the Book of Genesis, Yahweh, the God of Israel, made a promise to Abraham and his descendents. It was the promise of land – land that stretched from the Nile to the Euphrates. It was the promise of offspring who would multiply and prosper. It was the promise that Abraham and his descendants would be blessed. It was the promise that Abraham’s descendents would possess a land, that as a people they would multiply and prosper, that eventually they would become a mighty kingdom, a blessing to the nations.
For more than two and a half millennia that promise has been repeated and remembered and treasured. In Israel’s good times, that promise is a reason for celebration and thanksgiving. During painful years of exile and century after century of forced dispersion, that promise was the fountainhead of Israel’s hope. I am the Lord who brought you up from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.
There is a consensus among biblical scholars today that the Book of Genesis and the other four books of the Torah were compiled during and following Israel’s exile in Babylonia. By the time of the Exile, Israel had been a nation for more than 400 years. In 587 BCE the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, sacked Solomon’s Temple, murdered the royal family, and carted off the elite of Israel’s people to Babylon.
For seven decades the despondent Israelites told and retold the great stories of Israel’s patriarchs – Abraham first of all. The Abraham stories, preserved in the mythical tales of Israel’s past, spoke a message of hope: “Do not despair. Remember Yahweh’s promise. You are a blessed people. One day you will again possess the land Yahweh promised to you. Jerusalem and the Temple will be restored and the Kingdom of Israel will once again prosper and flourish.”
And so too after 70 CE when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, again laying waste the Temple, taking thousands of Jews to Rome as slaves, and forcing the rest into a dispersion that lasted until the new state of Israel was founded by the United Nations in 1947.
Elie Wiesel1, the Jewish author, captures the meaning of Yahweh’s “promised kingdom” for Jews today: “A name, a prayer, a promise. Seventeen times destroyed yet never erased. The symbol of survival.” At the same time, that same name, that same prayer, that same promise over two millennia and a half has wrought tragedy for multitudes of people. In the early years, when the tribes of Israel invaded the land promised to them, there was mass killing and the subjugation of the people who already lived there. Down through centuries of time, there were incursions by the conquering armies of Egypt and Assyria and Babylonia and Greece and Rome. More recently, with the establishment of the State of Israel and the resident Palestinians forced from their homes and turned into refugees, there has been unending violence resulting in a seemingly unstoppable firestorm of destruction and death. How do you explain it?
Well, what happens when you treat glycerol with a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids? An explosion! Though it is an oversimplification, I believe it can be argued that you get the same result when you mix land and nation/tribes and religion. When tribes or nations, fired by deeply held beliefs and inflamed by religious zealots, lay claim by divine right to land already populated by another people there will be a conflagration.
The formula is right there in Genesis: “Yahweh, the God of Israel,” (Religion) “says to Abraham and to his descendants,” (Tribe/Nation) “I give you and your descendants this to possess.” (Land). The ingredients for a firestorm that has raged almost non-stop for more than two thousand five hundred years! All of which causes me to wonder: Is Yahweh’s promised kingdom as attested by Genesis a blessing or a curse?
The New Testament lesson from the Gospel of Matthew also promises a kingdom - but of a very different sort. The text begins with Jesus calling and then commissioning the twelve disciples. They are sent out by Jesus to exorcize unclean spirits and to cure disease and sickness. As Matthew tells it, the twelve are forbidden to go to the Gentiles and the Samaritans. Their mission is restricted to the Jews. Along the way they are to proclaim the good news: The kingdom of heaven has come near.
The disciples were to follow in the way and the style of Jesus. They were to embark on a mission shaped by the good news of God’s grace. They were sent to people most in need. They were to incarnate God’s compassion. They were to “feel-with” people in the depths of their being. They were sent out, not to call attention to themselves, but as emissaries of the kingdom of God. Their message: God’s kingdom has come near.
But don’t miss the crucial point. By way of what the disciples were instructed to say and to do, the meaning of “the promised kingdom” was redefined. The kingdom promised was not that of land possessed, or power enhanced, or affluence increased, or prestige multiplied. The kingdom promised by Jesus doesn’t have to do with land and empire but with a community of caring. Rex Hunt2 calls Jesus’ promised kingdom: “social space” within which the reality of God is experienced as compassion.
Two millennia of history testify that neither Judaism nor its offspring – Islam and Christianity - have accepted Jesus’ message. Exhibit A in present-day Islam is Osama bin Laden.
William O. Beeman3, professor of Anthropology at Brown University and specialist on Middle East Culture, is convinced that bin Laden’s anger with the United States has to do with our presence in the Gulf region, more particularly in Saudi Arabia and in Jerusalem, locations of the most sacred Islamic religious sites. In the name of Allah, bin Laden wants the defilers punished and removed. Motivated by a variant of Islam, bin Laden believes that his mission is sacred. And his followers are as fervent and intense in their beliefs as he is. The role of religion is decisive. A distorted version of Islam generates the spiritual energy, provides the rationale and purpose, and blesses behavior nothing short of barbaric.
Turn the page to Christianity. In November 1095 Pope Urban II preached a stirring sermon at a synod in Clermont, France that launched the first crusade. He called on the Christians of Western Europe to free the holy places from the hands of infidels. He promised eternal life to those who lost their lives in the enterprise. Those who responded wore the symbol of the Cross. The first wave to set forth attacked Jews and pillaged fellow Christians, but most perished after crossing into Asia. The second wave fought its way through Asia Minor, captured Antioch with great slaughter and then took Jerusalem, putting many of its inhabitants to the sword. All to the glory of God and in the name of Christ Jesus!
Of course, we Protestants have our own sins to confess. There is the irony of Congregational Massachusetts, which for the sake of establishing the “second Eden,” expunged Native Americans, hung Quakers, banished Baptists, and propounded the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Is there anyone who would challenge the premise that our nation from its beginning has shaped itself in the mold of the Genesis definition of the promised kingdom?
Only on the fringe of American life, and even then ever so briefly, has Jesus’ definition of the promised kingdom - as social space within which the reality of God is experienced as compassion – been evident. Why?
Because those who profess Jesus’ definition of the promised kingdom are ridiculed and dismissed as wooly headed idealists living in a spiritual never-never land.
It was in the summer of 1961 when I attended a conference at Purdue University to introduce the newly published United Church of Christ Church School Curriculum. The person I most vividly remember from that experience was Dr. James H. Robinson4, who in 1958 established a cross-cultural exchange program, Operation Crossroads Africa. Crossroads Africa is a program in which young North Americans work at the grassroots level with young Africans. It is young people “building bridges of friendship to Africa.” President John Kennedy called Crossroads Africa the progenitor of the Peace Corps. In the last 49 summers it has sent over 11,000 persons to more than 40 African countries, 12 Caribbean countries, and Brazil.
On one of those summer evenings in 1961 James Robinson made a prophetic statement that is etched in my memory. He said something like this: “This very night in Southeast Asia a land is crying out to America’s young people to come with the instruments of peace and hands of friendship. But mark my word. If they do not come now with the instruments of peace they will come later with the weapons of war.” The land to which Robinson referred was Vietnam.
You tell me, was James Robinson a wooly headed idealist living in a spiritual never-never land or a man awake to the times with his feet on the ground, living out Jesus’ promise that the kingdom of heaven has come near? Is it too much to hope, that after two millennia, those of us who call ourselves Jesus’ followers, will one day finally get the message? Who knows? After all, as a friend reminds me: “God is still speaking!”
1 Elie Wiesel, "It Was Here" as found in www.babagan.com, Eyewitnesses to History.
2 Rex Hunt, A sermon preached on June 8, 2008: Keeping Alive the Compassionate Dream of God. Found on web: www.rexaehuntprogressive.com.
3 William O Beeman, Understanding Osama bin Laden, Pacific News Service; September 12, 2001.
4 James H. Robinson, Quotation taken from memory. Information regarding Operation Crossroads Africa found on web: www.operationcrossroadsafrica.org.
