Exhibit the Kingdom

Exhibit the Kingdom (October 23, 2005)

The Great Ends of the Church - Part 6 - The Exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the World

We come now to the final “great end” of the Great Ends of the Church. These great ends are the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind; the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the people of God, the maintenance of divine worship, the preservation of the truth, the promotion of social righteousness, and the exhibition of the kingdom of heaven to the world.

What is clear is that if the church is doing the first five the sixth will be done almost automatically. But if the church is not doing the first five with all its heart then for sure there is no chance for showing forth the kingdom of heaven to the world. The church which has forgotten what the gospel is about and has no message of God’s saving love in Jesus Christ, or which is filled with bickering instead of nurture, gossip instead of shelter, cliques instead of spiritual fellowship, or takes Sabbath worship cavalierly, or which believes that all truth is relative and there is no solid rock on which to stand, or which forgets society and the world and just concentrates on itself, that church will have absolutely no chance of exhibiting anything remotely like the kingdom of heaven to the world.

Whether it likes it or not, the church sends messages to the world.

In the mid sixties, when the civil rights battles were being fought, a photograph appeared one day in front pages across the country. It showed ten burly white men all with arms folded across their chests in front of a church in Americus, Georgia. No blacks were going to be allowed in that church, period. That was the message.

In those days Dr. King famously said that the most segregated hour of the week was 11 o’clock Sunday morning. That was a message the church sent once a week.

Prior to the civil war more than 50% of all the tracts and books supporting slavery were written by Protestant ministers. These tracts showed conclusively, with carefully selected proof texts from the Bible, that God willed the institution of slavery. One of the leading proponents of this view was a professor at Presbyterian Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, named Robert Dabney. He supported slavery with extensive Bible quotes and lengthy theological arguments. During one of my summers at Union in the 80s out of curiosity I read from two or three of Dabney’s books in the seminary’s old library. And I wept.

That was a message and the world understood it very well.

The message that was sent showed how easy it is for the church to stray from the teachings of Jesus and adopt the views of the surrounding culture. In our New Testament reading today Jesus says clearly that the first duty we have as Christians is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength, and with all our mind. And the second duty is to love our neighbor as ourselves.

How well do you suppose those men who stood outside the church in Americus, Georgia, or how well did Dr. Dabney and his fellow pro-slavery ministers fulfill that clear injunction of Jesus?

I have several times joined other ministers here in Forest Hills to take youth to Washington, D.C. to visit the Holocaust museum and other sites. On one of the floors in that museum there is a large black and white photograph of a Nazi parade. The soldiers are marching by a church. On the church steps, dressed in his full clerical robes with collar and clerical tabs, is a well known Lutheran bishop of the day. He is giving the Nazi “Heil Hitler” salute.

How well did that salute exhibit the kingdom of heaven to the world?

Last week we talked about the fifth of the great ends: the promotion of social righteousness. Joseph D. Small has written: “Before any society will pay attention to the church’s efforts to promote social righteousness, it must be able to see some evidence that the church lives out God’s own way in the world. If the church’s own life displays the shape of human community lived within God’s reign, the church will then possess the capacity and authority to promote righteousness within the larger society. Society may be forgiven for ignoring the church if all it hears is a faint ecclesial echo of its own voice.”

One of the gifts of this final “great end” is that it clearly reminds us that whether the world pays attention or not, the church has a duty to do all it can to reflect the kingdom of heaven on earth. It should be what the apostle Paul called a “foretaste”, an earnest, an “arrabon” in the Greek, of what is to come. The old hymn goes “I love thy kingdom Lord, the house of thine abode….its sweet communion, solemn vows, her hymns of love and praise…..Sure as Thy truth shall last, to Zion shall be given The brightest glories earth can yield and brighter bliss of heaven.” It can do this only, of course, if its sole foundation and cornerstone is Jesus Christ and its sole power and dynamic is the Holy Spirit.

The church should be a place where service, and not personal glory or power, is emphasized.

It should be a place where all are welcomed, period, regardless of outward circumstance, race, gender, physical limitations, or sexual orientation.

It should be a place where the focus is constantly on Christ, and not, say, on the minister. Everything in its life – the fellowship, the prayers, the services of worship, the music, the organization, while grateful for individual talents, should point to the glory of God.

It should be a place where Jesus’ parable of the Last Judgment is never forgotten and doing unto “the least of these” is remembered. It should be a place which never forgets its obligations to the world. The church, it has been said, is the only membership organization on earth whose purpose is to serve non-members.

It should be a place where all children are treasured and nurtured in love, and youth are encouraged to take their rightful place and hear their calling from God.

It should be a place which treasures its older folks who have borne the burden and heat of the day and bring the wisdom of their years to its life.

It should be a place which practices forgiveness in its life together, especially as it gathers around the table of forgiveness. It can never speak too much about the power of forgiving love for individuals and families. If it does that within its community, it will have authority to speak on that to the world.

It should be a place where people talk not so much about the individuals in it but about its life together, to use Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s descriptive phrase. Not simply individuals all going their own way, or getting just what they want for their individual lives, but rather people who ask first not what they can get but what they can give.

Over the years many who have been a part of our life together and then moved out of the city say this is what they have missed most about this church. The life together. Some of you remember when the Reeses left for New Hampshire and we gave George an old fashioned subway strap. George said he wouldn’t really miss the city, but he would the church. What he would miss was the life together around Our Lord, and empowered by the Holy Spirit working among us, bringing forth new leaders, nurturing people in love, helping one another, living to the glory of God.

In July the Presbyterian Church held a national conference here in the city at Columbia University on transforming churches and building multi-cultural congregations. Our church was one of the presenters at the conference and Ian Amritt and Ebun Sanu gave a terrific presentation to several hundred folks, using photos taken by Steve Chen, and taking so many questions the presentation ran way over the allotted time. So many wanted to know how we did it. Friends in the presbytery later told me it was an outstanding presentation, showing clearly that Christ calls people from east and west and north and south to live together in one fellowship of love.

Not perfectly, by any means, and not without the basic difficulties of carrying on church life in the city, with all its pressures and claims for our time. We should never become complacent. That is death. Nor should we wallow in defeatism. That, too, is death.

God is always doing a new thing.