The Kingdom of God has come near

The Kingdom of God has come near The Dover Church
July 4, 2010 – 6th Sunday after Pentecost Scripture: Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

The last few weeks have been very un-spiritual for me. I have not noticed the holiness of life and wonder of Creation all that much. I haven’t paused to see where God is in all of it, my life, my work, my family, my community. My days have felt like a long list of tasks to work my way through with far too little time to give anything the respect and attention it deserves. From my rising in the morning to my lying down at night, it has been a blur. Life has seemed very circumstantial, rather than full of meaning, so much so that I lost perspective. In short, I have not seen God or felt God’s presence all that much and that has drained my spirit.
The funny thing about this is that as I was actually writing these words on Friday at 11, in yet another serious rush to get something important done that I had had to put off for all the more most immediates earlier in the week, my wife sent me a text message: “would you like to go for a walk with me?”
“Right now?” I immediately started spirally into more intense anxiety about the still unfinished sermon and the sound of the copy machine running bulletins in the office which would need to be folded and the knowledge that Leo’s camp would get out at 2, which only left me three hours to finish everything.
But then it dawned on me, “Don’t sit here in your office writing a sermon about it, Max. Live it. Right now. Peace be with you. The Kingdom of God has come near.”
Our lives tend to be crazy from sun up to sundown with a million things to do, rushing here and rushing there, balancing competing agendas, trying to love our families, work, take care of our homes, respect ourselves, and maybe fit God in here or there. That’s just how life is these days for most people. So what’s the big deal?
The big deal is that living this way erodes the human spirit and ultimately makes life in communion with God improbable if not impossible. Any of us might be able to pull it off for a while, maybe even for years, but in the end our lives go by and we miss so much, miss the most important thing, which is God’s presence in us, with us, and for us.
In our lesson this morning, Jesus sends out the disciples and tells them to go into the word proclaiming, “Peace be with you. The Kingdom of God has come near.” Perhaps you never thought about being a Christian in this way, but this is what it is really all about. As disciples of Jesus, we are called to go into the world and proclaim “peace be with you. The Kingdom of God has come near.” I do not mean just mindlessly walking about yelling out the words. Sure, you might say the words themselves from time to time, but talk is cheap. Anyone and everyone will see right through the words if the substance of peace and nearness of the holy is not tangibly evident in your demeanor, your interaction with others, the details of your life, and the choices you make. I mean first living it ourselves. Once we are living it so fully that it is just bubbling over, others around us can’t miss it. As ne member of our church put when describing being in the presence of a holy person, “what drug is she on? I want some of that!”
Jesus himself would have used the Hebrew words “Shalom Aleychem,” which is still the Jewish Sabbath greeting. “Peace be with you.” In the Koran, the holy book of Islam, we find the following commandment: “...when you enter a house, greet one another with a greeting from Allâh (i.e. say: As-Salâmu 'Alaikum - peace be on you).” But this peace which Jesus and our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters greet each other with is much more than what we think of when we think of “peace.” Correct me if I am wrong, but when we say the word “peace” we probably are thinking of either the absence of conflict or things just being nice. The Hebrew word shalom means so much more, “may you be “complete, whole, no longer split in pieces, may you be who you could be, the ideal which God hopes for you.” You see what I meant when I described my life over last few weeks? I was none of those things. I was all over the place. I was living out on the periphery. I was not living out of my center which is God in Jesus Christ. I lacked shalom.
Just to let you know what I did about my wife’s invitation to go for a walk in the middle of a busy Friday, I went. Thomas Merton, one of the great teachers of the spiritual life in the 20th century once wrote that “efficiency is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life in our time.” I’m not trying to make excuses for ducking out of work for an hour, but all I can say to Merton is “Amen!”
Which leads me to what I learned from this moment of realization and what I hope you will bring away from this sermon. Once I knew what was wrong with my life, I knew how to go about putting it right. Everyone of us are unique individuals with our own spirituality, practices and ways of being that work for our personality type. One kind of prayer does not fit all. Far too many people these days throw around this word “spirituality” and what they are really talking about is some sort of psychological self-help strategy. It’s hard to see the difference between a handbook on aerobics and one on meditation sometimes, except one gets you sweaty and the other doesn’t.
One of the people I turn to for guidance on the spiritual life is a woman named Joan Chittister. I have never actually met Joan, but she has written a number of very good books which I have read. In one, she writes, “Spirituality is about coming to consciousness of the sacred. It is in that consciousness that perspective comes, that peace comes. It is in that consciousness that a person comes to wholeness.” Ah! There’s that wholeness, that shalom Jesus wishes for us. Consciousness of the sacred is what Jesus was on and that’s what I want a lot of!
For me, the path of coming to that consciousness of the sacred is the practice of silence and contemplation. By silence, I do not mean coming home from work and going out to lie in the hammock with a cold beer and the paper while my wife keeps the kids inside. No. I mean the disciplined practice of silence, of intentionally sitting in silence until all the noise inside my head goes away, until all the voices of ego which tell me what I ought to do, who I ought to be, and what I ought to have, just stop catching my attention and I am alone…with God. In case you are thinking this sounds like a piece of cake, I can tell you that I have been in a monastery in total silence for two whole days and nights before all the noise quieted down, and those two days felt like a serious wrestling match.
As I said, silence may not be your path. You should never try to force things of the spirit. Force is a thing of the ego. But for millennia people who seek consciousness of the sacred have known that silence is the surest way to find God. Last week, when I talked about sharing with you paths towards spiritual maturity, or growing up as I called it, well…this is one of the biggies. You would think that being silent would come naturally, that it wouldn’t be something one would have to be taught or learn, let alone practice. But it is. I am still learning and being taught and practicing, practicing, practicing. Now I would like to start sharing with you.
Why? Because this is who we are supposed to be as the church: people not just conscious of the sacred, but living it. This is who Jesus has sent us out to be in the world. We are here to demonstrate peace and the nearness of the kingdom of God in our individual lives and in our communal life as the church. We, the people of the Dover Church, are really a mission outpost in our community, an outpost of peace, an outpost where the nearness of the Kingdom of God is tangible to our community full of people whose lives are normally like mine was these past weeks, stressed out, fragmented, rushed and a little rough. Do the hundreds of people who pass by our church everyday see it? Feel it? Is here somehow different from out there? How do we proclaim and live peace? Are we consistent and believable agents of peace and the kingdom? In our homes and neighborhoods? At work? Wherever we are in our lives? Can others see it, feel it, sense it in our presence? Do they receive peace? Do they recognize the presence of the kingdom of God?
“The harvest is indeed plentiful, but the laborers are few. Let us pray to the Lord of the harvest that he might send laborers out into the harvest, that we might be those laborers.” I am talking about a whole different way of being church, in-soul, in-between, in-house, and in-the-world. Margaret Meade once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” That's us, or who Christ calls us to become. This is not just rhetoric or homiletics.
Just to finish my story about taking a break to walk with Marie-Laure, she came by to get me and we took off. Well…not quite. As I locked the door, I remembered that I had to leave Kraft Hall open for a group of students. So I went back to unlock that door. Then I thought I ought to bring my phone, just in case the students couldn’t figure out which door was open while we were walking. So I went back to my office to get my cell phone, which started to frustrate Marie-Laure. Finally we were power walking down Springdale towards Main Street, planning to walk around the block, Springdale to Main to Haven to Dedham and back to the church. And then, my phone rang. “Hello?” “Hi, Mr. Olmstead?” “Yes.” “This is the Dover Rec Department calling. We have Leo here. Camp ended at 12 because of the holiday weekend.” “Oh my God! I’ll be right there to get him. Sorry.” And so we went back to the church to get the car and went to pick-up our son. Was I angry or frustrated? No! I was laughing. God was telling me to not take myself too seriously, not to get on my high horse with this sermon. Laughing at oneself is also good spirituality! And for the first time in a few weeks, I was returning to a consciousness of the sacred and I was able to write this sermon. Oh, by the way, it turned out that I had the date wrong for the students. They aren’t coming until tomorrow. I didn’t need the phone for their call. It was my son’s call I needed it for. “Peace be with you. The Kingdom of God had come near.”