A Colony of Heaven

A sermon for Faith on October 11, 2009

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” That’s a pretty big question from the rich young man in today’s gospel reading from Mark. I wonder what he was really asking. Was he asking, “What must I do so that I may live forever?” or was it something else? Whatever he was asking, he didn’t like the answer that he got. Jesus got a little too personal when he started talking about his money and his stuff. And so the young man decided that eternal life, whatever that was, wasn’t worth it and he “went away sorrowful.”

But from what was he walking away? Is eternal life really about some “fountain of youth” kind of immortality? The Gospel of John says something different. In prayer, prior to his arrest, Jesus says, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” That sounds a bit different than living forever.

Here’s my take on it…eternal life is participation in the life of the eternal, taking part in the story that God is telling, a story that has a beginning and an end. The beginning of the story predates creation – God who was and is and ever shall be at some point, in some way, created something other than the divine being. Time and space were created and God, the divine, continues to exist outside of such limitations but maintains relationship within time/space with creation. Things were kind of ok until that special bit of creation, us, began acting like the willful, bratty, greedy, violent children that we are. In the Christ event – the Incarnation, something new happened; God began the redemption of the world. This is the part of that story into which we are invited and by virtue of our baptism we have RSVP’d and shown up. We understand what God is like and what God wants because of Jesus. We are invited to be made new, to forsake “willful, bratty, greedy and violent” for loving, committed and faithful, generous and peacemaking.

This work of redemption has begun; it is by no means completed. Jesus invited the rich young man to join in this work but the price was too high. Following Jesus means to love what Jesus loves, more that what the world loves. The rich you man could only understand what Jesus said as losing something; he didn’t hear it as something new gained. The work of redemption is to replace the world’s values with the values of God’s kingdom. That distant time when God’s vision has overtaken the world is the end of the story we are living and that is what gives meaning to the Christian life.

I mentioned in the newsletter that I have a new favorite book, and it’s not by Marcus Borg. It’s called Resident Aliens; Life in the Christian Colony by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon. Hauerwas is a giant in the field of Christian ethics who has written many books and here he has teamed up with a Methodist pastor to propose that we re-imagine the church as something really quite exciting. In their words, “The church is a colony, an island of one culture in the middle of another. In baptism our citizenship is transferred from one dominion to another, and we become, in whatever culture we find ourselves, resident aliens.” But as residents aliens, we have something to offer to the world and that is a vision of what can be, a vision that is from God.

Life in this colony is informed by, indeed modeled after, what we know of God as revealed to us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The colony knows Jesus, believes in Jesus and follows Jesus and he makes the difference for us. In our relationship with him, we are transformed. In Jesus, we understand what God is doing, the future toward which God is drawing the world. The word church in Greek is ecclesia – and it means “those called out”. We are called out of the world and into the Kingdom of God. At the same time, we are not called to withdraw from the world, this is not some utopian experiment in Southern Indiana. The colony that is the church is to be a part of the world, just in a different way with a very clear purpose. Hauerwas says that the only job of the church is to figure out how to be in the world so that the world notices this alternate way of being and is eventually changed by it.

If we really try to live as a colony of heaven, we will find ourselves at odds with the rest of the world but that’s a good thing because it is the way that God will continue the work of redemption in our broken world. How do we do this? Well, we start with the description of the Kingdom of God, which you find all through the Bible, Genesis, Isaiah, Amos, Micah and Jesus, over and over again. It’s a place of generous hospitality, stewardship, peace, health, blessing, justice, and equality. Then we ask ourselves, what does that look like here, in Orange County, California, USA, North America, planet earth. Here’s an example; the Kingdom of God is a peaceable kingdom, a place of non-violence. The US is a country that loves its guns. The 2nd amendment is idolize and each and everyone of us can buy and own as many guns as we wish – that’s the way of the world. But in God’s world, there would be no guns, therefore, in a colony of Heaven, people would probably say, yes, I have the world’s right to own a gun, but I choose not to. We are not trying to tell the world that they can’t have their guns; we are showing them a different way to think about them. That might look like giving something up but it also might look like embracing something new.

One of the reasons that we are receiving a weekly shipment of organic fruits and vegetables here is because it’s good stewardship of the earth and of our bodies which are two attributes of a the Kingdom of Heaven. From here, I hope that we will begin to examine everything that we eat and ask the important questions, it is good for the earth, would Jesus want a little child to have a steady diet of this. We have to ask ourselves about the fish we eat, is it poisoning us with mercury and is being caught in death-dealing drift nets? As a community, we might decide to swear off the kinds of meat that lead to the destruction of the rain forest or create conditions of misery for the animals because those things would not happen in God’s kingdom.

There are lots more difficult topics to tackle, particularly the one that caused the rich young man to turn away. In a colony of Heaven, we must examine our feelings and attachment to our possessions and our money. And since the pledge campaign is coming up soon, we’ll have lots of time to ask the question, “What do you love?”
I find this idea of seeing ourselves as colonists, resident aliens in the world to be most intriguing. The church as a colony of Heaven is very different from a common understanding of the church that I heard the other day. “I don’t go to church because I don’t think I need a middle man between God and me.” We don’t need a middle man, a gatekeeper, or ticket taker and that’s not what the church is supposed to be. Imagine if people could hear about the church as a colony of heaven in which members support one another in living our love for God out loud because we all know what God is doing in the world and we want to be a part of it.