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.