Kingdom of Heaven Part 2

On here. But

I am... And if you come in the

fall,

you might not know at all because I'm

gonna go on sa bad, so We're getting

ready for me to be somewhere else, but

anyway,

it's not a here there. I'm just killing

time when we all find our seats.

Let's pray.

Father, we thank you for your word.

We thank you for the life that you

lived.

And for the kingdom that you have ina.

And we asked Lord that as

as we think on these things this morning

as we meditate on who you are and

what you've done,

that you would move us and shake us

deep within that you would wake us up,

that you put a fire in her hearts

lord

for the things that bother you,

that they would bother us.

For the things that

fill you with joy would fill us with

joy.

That we might know your peace

and be your church.

We ask this in Jesus name,

amen,

Well, this morning is the second part of

probably like a 12 part sermon series. It

just keeps getting bigger and bigger. I thought

it was just gonna be a 2 part

service series, but man, I could just keep

b on this thing. It's like my favorite

jam. It's like, playing fun or something. I

don't know. I can't can't quite, you know,

how it is. Drummer and fun gets kind

of that way.

I I love this thing. It we're talking

about the Kingdom of God. We've been talking

about it for a couple of weeks now.

This will be week 2 of that. And,

I guess Tim was talking about the Kingdom

of God too. So It's not the last

you'll hear of it, but it's the primary

theme

throughout the bible. And the last week, we

talked a lot about kind of the historical

precedent of the kingdom of God. Where it

was at in the old testament, how Jesus

kinda would have understood that, how the Jews

of his day would have understood that, And

now I wanna talk about what it means

for us today

right now in this moment because there are

some complications that we have. That we faced

because we talk about the kingdom of God.

It's here. It's among us. Everything's good. It's

all good in the hood. Right?

But then we have other problems.

Like in 2004

on boxing day, the day after Christmas,

an earthquake registered in the Indian ocean off

of the northern coast of Sum.

The earthquake hit 9.2

on the Richter scale.

Around here, we have hundred year floods.

Earthquakes of that magnitude are so large that

they're given a regular interval, of 800 years

on average.

And when they hit the results are catastrophic,

especially when they occur in the Indian ocean,

like this 1 did, of

When that happens, even islands like Sri lanka

off of the southern tip of India over

a thousand miles from the epicenter of that

quake. Have reason to fear the approaching tsunami,

which broke shore in Sri lanka only 2

hours after the quake, Imagine that, thousand miles,

2 hours, how fast that thing is moving,

and it brought a death toll

to Sri lanka of 46000

people, just in Sri lanka.

And it took time for the news to

get out for information to get out to

the rest of the world,

and over the days and the weeks that

followed, that death coal continued to rise and

eventually over a quarter million people,

were killed,

and countless others displaced from their homes and

all of it on the day after Christmas,

This is a bummer of a wade to

introduce a sermon. Right?

And you might be reasonably asking why is

Kyle doing this? Rest assured. I'm asking myself

the same question.

But what I'm hoping to address by pointing

all of this out is the question

that was raised,

in the days,

weeks and months following the tsunami, which is

this?

How could this happen?

This is not an active war that we

could simply point to selfish sinful broken humanity

or human motives. We can't blame corrupt governments

or mis

countries for this kind of a thing. It

leads us instead to cry out to God

and ask them the question, why?

Why God, when you have the power to

stop such an event, would you allow such

horrific and seemingly ind inexperienced

suffering to occur.

Sadly enough

people began to offer responses.

Many of them poorly thought out and theological

pretty un compelling.

Some use the tsunami as proof for the

non existence of God,

especially a good God,

Others less thoughtfully weaponized the tsunami, claiming god's

wrath against sin and claimed every death every

man, woman and child on that day after

Christmas,

a reasonable target of God's wrath with apparently

no consideration for the fact that Christ satisfied

that wrath once all.

David Bentley Hart wrote what I found to

be a really thoughtful and I think deeply

Christian response to this in his book. Called

the doors of the sea.

It's a small book. I don't have time

to address the whole thing entirely

you can read his book if you want

to, You can borrow it for me if

you want, for his fuller treatment. But I

wanna introduce this sermon on the kingdom of

god, with the Indian ocean tsunami because I

believe it asked a challenging question about the

kingdom of God,

especially for those of us who hold at

the kingdom of God is among us even

now.

How is it that if God's kingdom has

come with Christ

as we begin to establish and as we

kind talked about last week,

that we still exist in a world where

an act of god as it's categorized by

insurance companies,

can still eradicate a quarter of a million

people on the day after Christmas.

But of course, it doesn't take a once

and every 800 year level earth quake

slash tsunami event for us to ask that

kind of a question.

Yesterday, I presided over a graves side service

for Brian Hunter, who I baptized a couple

of months ago, you guys don't remember.

His body eventually came to the cancer for

And in those moments, we cry out to

God with the injustice.

Why Brian?

Why cancer

Why death at all for that matter, if

Christ has beaten this thing.

From a biblical perspective, death is

the consequence of sin.

And Sin came about through Adam and Eve

when they chose freely to eat the fruit

that they were forbidden to eat

Sin and death were never part of God's

design.

There are to be understood as negative things.

Shadows of the actual substance that God created.

God is the creator God. He brings something

out of nothing. He brings light, out of

darkness. He creates S or peace out of

the chaos waters. He speaks into the silence

and out of that word life

and substance and creation abound.

When we see sin in this way as

the inverse, the undoing of creation, the negative

side,

If human flourishing is found by participating in

God's created order as we talked about last

week,

Human flourishing was

participating in God's created order in the way

that we were created to do so, filling

and doing creation with the capacities he gave

us to do,

then sin is simply a refusal

to be fully who god created us to

be.

It's a limitation of our greatest freedom.

Sin

is like the chains holding humanity in captivity.

In heart's book, he describes Evil in this

way. He says, evil consists not in some

other separate things standing alongside the things of

creation, but it is only a shadow, a

turning of the hearts and minds of rational

creatures

away from the light of god back toward

the nothingness

from which all things are called.

He explains that because humans are created to

fill and subdue the earth, we stand as

gatekeepers or a priest. In his word and

and also in the words of the author

of Hebrews,

bridging the gap between the physical and the

spiritual realms between creation, and our creator.

And that, therefore,

when that

intermediary person that person that stood in the

gap fell to sin

all of creation, all of material creation fell

with us and became subject to death with

us. And now the change of sin not

only enslave us, but all of creation along

with us.

This is the world that we live in,

but it's also the world Jesus lived in.

And died in,

and was resurrected him.

This is the chaos.

God is still sovereign over.

The kingdom that Jesus is now king of.

Hopefully, and I don't know if this is

successfully or not yet. But hopefully, we're beginning

to see the connection between Jesus kingdom and

our own mission calling or our role

with inside of that kingdom.

Paul and his letter to the Romans establishes

our relationship to the rest of creation, and

he says this. He says,

creation weights

an eager

expectation for the children of God to be

revealed.

And who are these children of God that

Paul speaks of,

He tells us, they are those who are

led by the spirit of god are the

children of god.

We're not able to find our way through

or out of the darkness on our own.

We can't get over this sin problem on

our own. Through our own evil desires, each

1 of us has been dragged away and

bound up by sin. We've returned back to

that nothingness

that God spoke us out of. Right? We're

unable to do what we were intended to

do. We have been starved of the good

and we're unable to offer

to the rest of creation what we are

lacking ourselves.

But there is good news.

In Christ, we've been showing the good thing

once again.

Recently,

I Don't know,

maybe not the last 20 years recently, but

maybe in the last couple hundred years of

the whole historic picture of Christianity,

Christianity has a tendency to skip over

the examination of the life of Jesus in

favor of developing a theology around his Death

and resurrection and ascension. Right? When you look

at all of the creed, you you hear

about the birth, when you hear about the

birth of Christ,

and then you hear about the death resurrection

and ascension of Christ. And you're hearing a

lot of theology that's being developed around there.

But because it was very important at the

time those creed are developed, to hand that

theology out because they ref a lot of

heresy that was in the church. They've skipped

over the whole life of Christ inside of

their. Because it's hard to do a summary

of the whole life of christ and a

theology around it. Right?

But it's very important

that we do understand what's happening inside of

there.

So these creed are really important,

but if we set aside the life of

Christ, how we chose to spend his time

on earth, we're actually going to skip over

the only example of a human who actually

lived as he was created to live.

Jesus life was a picture of flourishing

humanity.

He was the example

Par.

And he lived the good life in the

midst of a world and chains.

And this is why we see Jesus as

master and commander of this brook world. He

walks on water.

He commands the wind and the waves.

He heals sickness

fucking and is generally about the business of

reconciling

all of this broken creation to God

In Jesus,

we see not only a king,

but the return of the king,

He's coming back to this thing that he's

always

had. He's reclaiming his kingdom.

When Jesus walks on water, he demonstrates his

own capacity

to subdue creation.

He is not however, about the business of

doing this entirely on his own.

When god created man in Genesis, he commanded

him and the command was fill the earth

and subdue it.

Therefore,

the job of steward over creation rightly has

always been

our task as human beings. A capacity that

we lost through the fall.

If the earth is going to be restored

and God's kingdom

established,

it has to begin with the restoration of

humanity.

When Jesus walks on water, it's more than

a cool party trick.

Jesus is establishing his authority

as our king.

Hence,

Peter seems to think it's reasonable,

to walk out to Jesus

on the water.

Isn't that kinda wild?

Peter's like, oh, this is what humanity is

supposed to do. This is how we're made

to be able to live in existence inside

of this world.

We see this as natural because of our

fallen condition, but I believe Peter, is in

fact, reclaiming something profoundly true about humanity in

those few fa

steps of faith.

Peter is practicing his early understanding that Jesus

is in fact leading humanity

out of darkness and death and helping us

to reclaim the light. And the life of

our original created

intention.

Now,

I'm not gonna do it.

Demonstration and walk on water today or anything

like that. And that's not what I'm saying,

but I'm thinking, Peter,

Peter is seeing that Christ is really representing

who we were created to be.

And this,

this

Being able to subdue creation. This ruling and

being the master over it, this like,

putting all things back in order is the

connection between

tsunami in the Indian ocean and the kingdom

of God.

Jesus came as a king

amid a broken and hurting world.

He understood the broken ness, but he also

knew what things were like in that first

week when God said it's good.

And got created all of these things out

of the chaos and the

wild

expanse, and he just says this is good.

And there was somebody there. Jesus was there

and he was going, oh, I know what

that is. I know what that's like. We

don't know what that's like. We don't know

what it was to be good.

Through Jesus and the study of Jesus life,

we come to know the love through which

God created us and the rest of creation.

As Paul says, For now, we see only

a reflection as an mirror.

As we take these first few sinking steps

we walk on water sort of,

but we keep our eyes on Jesus

standing confidently.

The pioneer and the perfect of our faith.

Now,

we know in part, but on the day

of Christ's return,

we will know fully even as we are

fully known.

What we see

we have an obligation to pro.

David Bentley Hart says this about the renewed

vision of the creation. Sorry of the Christian.

Because we see this thing differently now. Right?

See the eyes of Christ. We see the

world differently. He says the Christian, he says,

should see 2 realities at once. 1 world

as it were within another. 1, the world

as we all know it. In all of

its beauty and terror, grandeur and dr,

delight, once and anguish, and the other, the

world in its first and ultimate truth, not

simply nature, but creation.

And endless sea of glory radiant with the

beauty of God in every part, innocent of

all violence.

To see in this way is to rejoice

and mourn in at 1 he says, to

regard the world as a mirror of infinite

beauty, but is glimpse through the veil of

death. It is to see

creation and chains.

But beautiful

as in the beginning of days.

I love that quote.

Because when I look around

the world,

you... This resonates doesn't it. But especially so

when we look

into the face of the people that we

love

of this

creation and chains

If this is how we are to see

God's creation

on account of Christ, how must we view

1 another as the pinnacle of that creation?

If in the world of tsunami, we are

to see an endless sea of glory radiant

with the beauty of God in every part

innocent of all violence,

play it through.

It's not easy. Right? But if somehow,

because of Christ, we're supposed to be able

to see through the tsunami,

an endless sea of glory radiant with the

beauty of God in every part innocent of

all violence, how might we see our fellow

so here on earth?

Indeed, to see in this way as to

rejoice in more at once as heart says,

But let's remember Christ's words,

blessed are those who mourn for they will

be comforted.

If the world could reflect the beauty of

its creator such that we may

regarded as a mirror of infinite beauty,

but as glimpse through avail of death as

heart says,

how much more are we to view 1

another.

The image bearer of God with the same

charity.

Creation and chains, but beautiful

as in the beginning of days.

To this end, we know that the whole

creation has been groan

as in the pains of childbirth right up

to the present moment.

To not only so, but we ourselves who

have the first fruits of the spirit grown

inward as we wait eagerly for our adoption

to sun, the redemption of our bodies. For

in this hope we were saved, but hope

that is seen is no hope at all,

who hopes for what they already have. But

if we hope for what we do not

yet have,

we wait for it patiently.

When we mourn,

we're mourn with Christ,

and we groan,

with the holy spirit.

Our eyes are set on Jesus, the pioneer

and perfect of our faith, who for the

joy set before him

endured the cross, scoring it shame and sat

down at the right hand of the throne

of God.

This is all a part of what it

looks like to be

flourishing humanity.

And if it doesn't line up with what

our expectations are, then we're in a different

kingdom,

we gotta come around to this kingdom,

He's calling us today

just as he called Peter,

out of the boat and into the water.

Onto the water.

As we approach comm this morning,

I want us to think about this,

the body and blood of Jesus is our

invitation

back into a kind of

humanity

that we can't actually know apart from Jesus.

We don't know what it looks like to

be alive,

apart from the study of the life of

Jesus.

The kind of humanity we wouldn't recognize

without his example,

and it leads

to unspeakable glory,

which is the glory of being like Christ,

loving

like Christ,

our king

and our redeem room.

Let's pray.

Father.

We're guilty of just

biting our time and waiting.

For you to come back.

Ignorant or cow to the fact that you've

got a plan for us, A mission for

us

a life for us, a kingdom,

a new way of flourishing a new way

of living of radically re our lives,

to live the way that you lived, Christ.

Help us to see

what it looks like to live, help us

to trust

that we can live like you,

not just in walking on the water, though

that day make come.

But in the

in the trust and obedience that you modeled,

and the kind of self official love

that you modeled

to know what it is to be good.

Would you show us Lord and would you

give us the strength and the courage to

follow you?

Give us faith lord we thank you for,

would living this life

for dying on our behalf that we might

know this life, even now,

in part through veil,

this creation and chains,

god, fill our hearts with your love.

May your kingdom come,

in Nelson in the world.

We asking Jesus name.

Amen.