COME, FOLLOW ME
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

January 25, 2009

Jonah 3: 1-5, 10 and Mark 1:14-20

This is supposed to be a short sermon so that those folks going to the IU Basketball game have time to hear a word from God before leaving to sit in the crucible of Hoosier Hysteria. I am not critical of those of you going to the game. I appreciate your dedication and support of the team as it is transitioning through tough times.

We all are in luck because this is a morning of short sermons. In Jonah's story his sermon is all of eight words and as a result a whole huge city repents and is saved from being destroyed by the wrath of God. Jesus preaches his first sermon and tries to beat Jonah's record in our story from Mark's gospel, but fails. Jesus' sermon is nearly twice as long, fifteen words long, saying, “The time has come. The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news.”

Nineveh was a large Assyrian city much like Jerusalem . Back then most places were city states. If you could defend the city, you could say that you were defending the whole land. The Assyrians were threatening Jerusalem .

The Assyrians were into dramatic conquests. They believed in getting your attention. They would come into an area militarily with their shock and awe techniques. First, they would capture the highest ranking government official they could and they would skin the person alive in front of the gates to the city that they wanted to conquer. Then they would send this message: Your king has a choice. He can come out of his own free will and we will quickly behead him or when we capture him we will do to him what we have just done to this other person.

God called Jonah to travel to Nineveh so he could go tell the Assyrians to repent of their evil ways. When Jonah went that morning to check his email and he saw this message from God, he said, “No way will it work and I'm a dead man if I go.” You know the rest of the story of Jonah seeking to hide from God and avoid the hard task that he was called to accomplish. Eight words of invitation and the people repented.

Jesus preaches fifteen and we remain challenged to this day to discover what it means to embrace a relationship with God, to live forth the reign of God not only in our souls, but in what we buy and how we talk, what we talk about and what we teach and what we drink and eat and drive. Jesus says the Kingdom of God is near.

Now I am not Jonah and I certainly am not Jesus and I want you to know that Jack cannot do this sermon even in fifteen paragraphs. I want us to look and remember that the Reign of God is as near today as it was when Jesus first uttered those words.

Despite all appearances to the contrary, no matter how much disarray and disappointment and disorder surround our lives, the reign of God remains near. One might argue that when Jesus was present in body, God's salvation was dawning; in Christ, new life and salvation has broken into the dark violence of our live and world with radiant power, shattering the chains of sin and evil and freeing us from the clutches of death and despair. We have been brought into God's family and we have been gathered into God's arms and united with God forever. This is the reality of what the gospels proclaim when they announce, “the reign of God is near!”

The reality of God's kingdom present was not a temporary event, an offer available for a short time only. It did not expire when Jesus did on the cross. There are many who think the reign of God will not be present until that event of eschatological conclusion when Jesus comes again and brings the reign of God to the earth a second and final time. To believe such a thing is to miss, to close off the possibility of experiencing the transforming power of Jesus Christ that is pulsing in the midst of our daily lives right now.

God's spirit and reign continues to be present to us, sometimes, perhaps in the most unlikely of places, in the most unusual situations—even, and perhaps especially, in those situations of despair, destruction and deprivation. The promise that the Reign of God is near means that God is not impotent, impassive, or indifferent to what is going on in the life of each of us, in our nation, in our world, in all of creation. Rather, whoever you are, wherever you are, God is already present, working to bring to fruition the fullness of new life and salvation that God has always hoped could be the result of our lives. As people of faith, we are to believe it, trust in it, and work for it, empowered by the nearness of this spectacular new reality.

All of this leads me to a second point which is that the nearness of God means that we are to live differently. This is simply another way of describing what is meant by following Jesus Christ, but with the added oomph of urgency that the in-breaking kingdom of God injects into our lives right now.

If the Kingdom, the Reign of God were simply a past reality, then what we would be called to do is remember it. Conversely, if the Kingdom of God were simply a future reality, then what we would be called to do is to hope for it. But, God's reign is both these things and more, it is an ever-present reality that is simultaneously past, present and future. We are called not just to reflect upon it, but live into it with a passionate intensity.

Following in the way of Jesus is not a spectator sport; rather, it is a declaration of trust, a signaling of the intent to radically reorient one's life, and a commitment to being a different kind of person, a kingdom person, if you will.

There is significant challenge in being a kingdom person. It calls us to radical change of life priorities. It was as much to the chagrin and vexation of the earliest disciples as it is to us. If we want to continue to live by the purity laws that strictly separate the insiders from the outsiders, the good from the bad, the Christian from the Muslim, democracies from other political systems, the holy from the profane…, well, that's going to be tough, because in God's kingdom, those laws, those divisions of us against them don't exist and we have to live not against others, but for them, with them, together. Are we looking for greatness and prestige? Sorry, in God's kingdom we are all equal children and grandeur in the kingdom is found in service and sacrifice and love. Do we need our Hoosiers to win; do we need to win, to be right, and to be superior? Do you need to be on the winning team, the side that will topple the Roman Empire , the evil doers with power and strength? Sorry, but the hallmark of God's reign is peace, so we have to lay down our swords, our tanks, our missiles and how was it said the other day, we have to beat our tanks into tractors that help the hungry till the earth. Discipleship was a tough, tall order in Jesus' day and it remains a path of steep growth and development, a road not often traveled, for us today.

The nearness of the kingdom of God demands that we live a radically new kind of life, a life that is still, in many ways, at odds with the world. We are called to reject a capitalist lifestyle that values money above people, power rather than humility. I could not have disagreed with Obama any more than when he said to the world we will not apologize for our lifestyles. We have a lot of lifestyle issues to repent of in God's kingdom. We are called by God's kingdom to reject torture as a necessary act of violence. We are called to reject the labeling of our brothers and sisters as unsaved and lost sinners without hope of salvation because they are of another faith system, and we are called to see them as equal and full participants in the life and the salvation that God has inspired into being; fellow citizens are all God's people.

It would be easier if we could just look back on the kingdom of God with a fond nostalgia that doesn't demand anything from us other than a splash of baptismal water. It would be easier if we could just look forward to the kingdom of God coming down out of the clouds and all evil resolved by some miraculous act of God. It would be easier if we could just anticipate everything being okay whether we do anything significant or not.

However, neither of these responses is faithful to the truth of the proclamation that in Jesus Christ, the kingdom of God has drawn near to us, and remains among us, calling us out of both reminiscence and apathy, enticing us to be the new people God has created us to be, showing forth the reality of God's kingdom both in word and in deed.

Amen.