Legos and Kingdom Living

“Legos and Kingdom Living" The Dover Church
September 25, 2010 – 15th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: Psalm 25, Matthew 21: 23-32

When I was a little boy, I loved Legos. I had a big box of them in my closet, in all different shapes, sizes, and colors. I spent hours building houses and cars and planes and rocket ships and castles. Looking back, my houses and cars and planes and rocket ships and castles weren’t always obviously houses or cars or planes or rocket ships or castles. They were more what you might call reasonable facsimiles. When my mother or father would smile at me and ask, “what do you have there, Max?” they were genuinely curios. “It’s a plane,” I’d hold it up, smiling. “Oh yes! What a lovely plane you’ve made.”
Have any of you played with Legos recently? As a father of two small boys, I have and let me tell you, things have changed. Nowadays you don’t buy a box of 100 Legos. Now you buy “The Death Star,” “the Eiffel Tower,” “The Medieval Castle” or some other truly extravagant kit that is not intended to be a reasonable facsimile but rather an exact replica of the picture on the box. Inside every box is a detailed book of instructions, because this is about exact construction and many of the pieces only go in one place. After Leo’s birthday I look with despair at the boxes that say for age 7+, knowing that I am in for a long engineering afternoon with an impatient birthday boy asking me when we’re going to be finished or why I'm not doing anything as I root around in the piles of pieces which we unwisely dumped out of their individual plastic bags. Legos these days are beautiful and marvelous toys for learning patience, sequential thinking, and spatial association, but I wonder whether they are really meant to be played with by real little boys. Real little boys drop and break things. Once the space ship has gone to pieces, the instructions are not all that helpful. Putting it back together again feels a lot more like complex reconstructive surgery than play to me.
Jesus’ parable of the Two Sons and the Vineyard got me to thinking about Legos this week. According to this parable, being a kingdom person living a kingdom life is like a father who tells his two sons to go into the vineyard to work for him. One son says yes, but doesn’t go. The other says no, but goes. The reluctant one who goes is living the kingdom. Jesus is clearly telling us that being a kingdom person living a kingdom life is, at its most fundamental level, about obedience, about doing the will of God. In Christian lingo we call it following Jesus, living how Jesus lived.
It occurs to me that modern Americans like us have three problems at least with this model of being a kingdom person living a kingdom life. First, we like to think of ourselves as independent, autonomous individuals, which is another way of saying that “obedience” sticks in our throats. The idea of blind obedience is not attractive to us. There's something unAmerican about it. That's not even good for kids these days I'm told.
Which leads to our second problem, emulation, copying Jesus. We like to think of ourselves as freethinking, creative people who find our own ways in life according to our individual intelligence, ingenuity and hard work. To just do as Jesus did seems somehow an abandonment of our adulthood, our maturity, our intelligence, our hard won autonomy and independence.
And last but not least, obedience and emulation imply action, doing something. Most people think that Christianity is something you think about, something that makes you feel a certain way, a from the neck up experience. We are supposed to actually do something? Something, or a number of things, the way Jesus did them? Oh, that is a problem. Some might see me.
And yet, you are all here this morning so I am assuming that you have felt at least some allure to Jesus, something about him attracts you, something has made you want to find out more about being a kingdom person living a kingdom life. A lot of people meet Jesus in the Bible and like what they see, so they decide to give the whole thing a go. The more we learn about Jesus, the we you discover there is to find out about him. Some is quite attractive, love, dinner parties with friends, being nice, hanging out with God, and some is a little off putting because it doesn’t mesh all that well with how we lived our lives before this Jesus guy popped up on our radar screens, forgiveness of enemies, suffering, welcoming strangers, giving away our money to the poor. Which leads me back to the Legos. Some folks, let’s call them the Legos from my youth folks, take a piece here and a piece there, picking and choosing what they find attractive, easy to do, easy to incorporate into their life style and world view, and they build a kingdom life. Believe me, I know, because I have done this. What I ended up with, however, was a reasonable facsimile that was fun to play with, but it was completely idiosyncratic to what I wanted to do, what I would have done anyways on my own, rather than what Jesus is inviting me to do. In my experience, important pieces tended to be left out, the ones that didn’t fit in easily, which were usually exactly the ones I really needed.
Then there are what I will call the Leo’s Lego folks who see the picture on the box, take the entire kit with all its hundreds and thousands of intricate pieces, each of which go in in only place, and set about piecing the whole thing together according to the instructions. I’ve never done this myself, so I can’t say for certain, but I would bet that the analogy with Legos still holds. If these folks actually get the whole thing together, it’s beautiful. It’s remarkable, but they can’t actually play with it. If one piece gets lost, they can’t put the whole thing back together again. It’s something of a museum piece to put on their shelf and look at. And I'm convinced that God meant life to be fun.
So what are we to do? I prefer a third way that is both true to Jesus, that is actually obedient to God’s will for us, and that is practical, as in conceptually simple, with a very few pieces involved. The difficult part is actually wanting to put them into our lives in the first place and being willing to keeping putting them back together as they continually get dropped on the floor of our lives. It's sort of a hybrid of my Legos and Leo's.
Just in case you were thinking I am a light weight so far this morning, far from the world of Legos is Walter Brueggemann, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible whom I admire immensely for the breadth of his wisdom, the scope of his scholarship, and the rambunctiousness of his personality. He is also a member of the United Church of Christ like us, so he speaks our language. In the context of a larger debate about what liberal and conservative Christians ought to be able to agree upon, Brueggemann once said that there are three primary marks of the church, three primary and essential components, three Lego pieces if you will, to being a kingdom person living a kingdom life. Those primary marks are: Practicing Hospitality, Practicing Generosity, and not Practicing Vengeance. He went on to add Sabbath Keeping and No Coveting as two other essential non-negotiables. I am a small fry compared with old Walt, but I would also add Practicing the Awareness of the Holy. Do these six things, build your life on them, let them seep into every pore of your daily life, stick with them, evolve with them as they continually pull you out of where you are into where God would have you, and you will be true to Jesus, doing the will of God. You will be the son who goes.
Jesus’ parable is more accurate than we care to admit. When we look at the pieces, we know that all of them are going to take us places we are pretty sure we don’t want to go. Our first response will be that of the second son who says no. Practice hospitality? Like Jesus did? There are some pretty seedy characters in some of those Bible stories. Practice Generosity? How much? Towards whom? No vengeance? Never? Like Jesus and all that forgiveness stuff? Can I still privately resent others? No coveting? My coveting has made me successful. It keeps me getting up in the morning and going to work every day. Keep the Sabbath? During the hockey season too? Ah, practice an awareness of the holy. Now that sounds nice. Does he mean praying? Slowing down and seeing God in your life? Well, I can do that on summer vacation and when things slow down at work.
“So why bother?” you might ask. “What’s in it for me?” We are living the good life here in Dover after all. Why mess that up? The priests and elders, people living a very Dover sort of top of the pyramid life in Jesus' day, asked the same question in our lesson this morning: by what authority did he do what he did? Eknath Easwaran, a Hindu teacher of meditation once said, "Lasting change happens when people see for themselves that a different way of life is more fulfilling than their present one." If we truly believe that Jesus was of God, or even if we only want to try to find out, well that is what Jesus offers us: a way to authentic, whole, healthy, happy, creative, unconfused life. Live a life of hospitality, generosity, non-vengeance, sabbath keeping, no coveting and awareness of the Holy. Jesus himself once said: “I have told you these things so that my joy may in you and your joy may be complete.” Imagine the joy of God in me! You don't have to imagine. You can live it and see for yourself. That’s what keeps me getting out of bed in the morning and giving it another try every day. This is the Good News.