New Life in the Kingdom

Scriptures: John 3:1-21, Ephesians 2:1-10

Nicodemus was kind of a big deal. He was a local religious leader – on all the important committees, with a good reputation for common sense, competence, and reliability. If you needed something done, he was a good guy to go to – he’d know the best approach, if it was a good idea, and he’d know how to break it to you easy if it wasn’t a good idea. People respected Nicodemus and looked up to him.

So in some ways it was a surprise that Nicodemus came to see Jesus and to learn from him. Here’s someone who’s supposed to have it all together, and he’s coming out to the edge of town to meet a radical new street-preacher, someone on the outside with nothing to lose, who’s making big promises and talking about God and God’s work in a new way. You can tell Nicodemus isn’t sure about it himself, because he comes to Jesus at night, instead of during the day when everyone would be able to see him going. This is a meeting he’d prefer to keep private.

With all that in mind, it’s understandable that Nicodemus starts out with a compliment, rather than a strong statement of what he’s hoping for or what he wants from Jesus. “We can tell,” he says, “that you are from God, Jesus. The signs that you do could only be done by God’s power.” You might think Jesus would respond with an answer affirming that assessment by Nicodemus. Something like – “Congratulations! You’re right! I am from God, and now I’ll give you all my wisdom so you can take it back to your people.” I imagine that’s something like what Nicodemus was hoping to hear.

Instead, Jesus comes right back to Nicodemus with some confusing ideas about the kingdom of God. “Truly I tell you,” he says, “You won’t be able to see the kingdom of God, unless you are born from above.” What’s particularly confusing about this is that in the original Greek writing, the word for “again,” and “from above” are the same. So Jesus could be saying, “until you are born all over again,” or “born according to the way of heaven above,” or both those things at the same time. It’s a kind of a clever word play. But Nicodemus hears it pretty literally as meaning that your mother has to give birth to you all over again. Which understandably sounds ridiculous, and which most mothers most likely wouldn’t be willing to go along with.

But what the church has understood for many years is that Jesus is talking about a different kind of rebirth. It is learning to let go of what was before – death in its many forms – in order to hold fast to the new life that Jesus promises us – eternal life, the life that lasts, new life in the eternal kingdom of God. Baptism is the sacrament that shows that change in a person’s life. One moment you were outside of the life God gives, now you are part of the family. One moment you were caught in traps of bitterness, hopelessness and despair, but now there is resurrection, redemption, a chance to begin again. One moment you were dead to the Holy Spirit, but now you are alive.

Jesus goes on to explain this new life and God’s hand in it, and we hear one of the most famous verses of Scripture: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.” Here is the heart of the gospel – death is not the final answer, eternal life through God’s love is.

What does eternal life look like? It starts on earth, with our baptism by the Holy Spirit. Our old life is washed away, and the new life begins. For some of us, we don’t necessarily remember our baptisms. I was baptized as a baby in my home church in Iowa. About a year ago, I was going through old papers at my dad’s house, and I found the bulletin from the Sunday I was baptized, along with my certificate of baptism. It was so exciting to find these artifacts from long, long ago! Well, maybe not THAT long ago. At any rate, it may seem strange for some of us to try to imagine a time before we were baptized, a time before we lived as part of God’s family in the church, a time when we didn’t know who Jesus was, a time when we didn’t pray. These are hard to imagine.

I certainly know people who have had dramatic experiences of God’s transforming power in their lives. When addiction claims a person’s life, for example, but through trust in Jesus’ healing power they find the strength to make a new life, we have seen a person escape death and receive life in the kingdom of God.

Our reading from Ephesians closes with this verse: “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” In The Message translation, the verse reads, “God does both the making and the saving. God creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.”

What this says to me is that whatever way God’s grace comes to us, whether through the church we grow up in as our extended family, through a slow change that takes months or years and that we may not notice ourselves, or through a long hard fall that forces us to make a hard choice to live in God’s presence, whether we come to God in any of these ways, it is really God coming to us, rather than the other way around. First there is God, sending the Son in love and catching us up in the divine embrace. Later, we respond as we are able, accepting the gift of new life.

So what does this new life look like? It is a life of both joy and service. The joy of it is learning to see, as Jesus did, the kingdom of God all around us here on earth. The service is in finding out what those good works are that God has prepared for us to be our way of life. Every baptized person has a calling. Some of us have gifts for compassion and understanding. Some of us have gifts for hospitality and friendliness. Some of us have gifts of wisdom and thoughtfulness. Some of us have good business sense, or good hands for fixing things. But all of us have gifts, and God calls each of us to use them to bring about the kingdom of God - day by day as our way of life. We are called to be Christians every day of the week, not just on Sundays.

There is a secret about following God’s call, which is that only by following Jesus and living out our ministries do we get better at seeing what Jesus was talking about. I know a man who for many years struggled with alcohol addiction. He got involved in Alcoholics Anonymous, but never seemed able to get past about a month of sobriety before he got drunk again. One time his sponsor said, “look, you’re not going to be able to really get better until you start helping someone else.” At first, the man thought, how can I help someone else when I can barely keep it together myself? But he tried, and started to support someone else who was in an even worse spot than he was. And it wasn’t the perfect solution, but it made a big difference, and now the man has been sober for many, many years, and he has started a non-profit agency that helps other people start their lives over in recovery. Who would think that a man who couldn’t stay sober for a month would now be doing God’s work to affect so many people? But his personal experiences with alcohol give him tools to help others that he never would have had otherwise. So God called him to this ministry, in spite of, and in fact because of his weaknesses. And answering that call helps him find the wholeness he could never find at the bottom of a bottle.

One last thought, which is this: baptism is, underneath it all, a sign of God’s love for us. God has created us for good. We face suffering, we face disappointment, and we face our own mistakes and wrongs. But through all of it, God is creating and re-creating us to be the people of the realm of God. This is the gift we celebrate today. God’s gift of love in Jesus to us, and God’s continuing call to us to live that new life, that eternal life, that deeper, truer, more beautiful life, in the kingdom of God. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Meal in the Kingdom

Scriptures: Exodus 12:1-17, Mark 8:31-38

Good morning, friends. It is good to be here with you this morning. This morning, I’d like to take some time to reflect on the meal, the sacrament, the ritual that we’re about to take part in together – the service of Holy Communion. Communion is a gift to us handed down from the very earliest Christians, handed down from Jesus. What we actually do is very simple, but the meanings and the symbolism are very rich. I know I’ll only be able to touch on a few things today, but I hope it will be enough to spark your own reflections as well. I’d like to begin with a sung prayer. If you know the song, feel free to sing with me. Let us pray.

Open our eyes, Lord

Jesus leaned back from the table. He and the disciples had been celebrating the Passover together, here in Jerusalem, remembering the escape into freedom by Moses and the Israelites. They had passed around flat, unleavened bread, a reminder of how the Israelites had eaten that night – in a hurry, with sandals on and bags packed, ready to escape into freedom. They had shared roasted lamb in memory of the roasted lamb the Israelites had eaten on that last night, the lamb whose blood painted on the doorways kept Israelite children safe from the plague God was sending, the lamb whose blood marked them as Israelite and not Egyptian. And they had eaten bitter herbs, a reminder of the bitterness of slavery in Egypt.

The Passover meal Jesus ate with his disciples was a meal reminding them of how, a thousand years before, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Sarah, Rebekah, Leah and Rachel, had remembered the people of Israel, caught in slavery to the Egyptians, groaning under the weight of their oppression, their very existence threatened as the Egyptians tried to keep them from having sons. God remembered them, and staged a tremendous intervention, sending leaders – Moses and his brother Aaron – and plagues to convince the Egyptians to give up their power and their profits from the Israelites. And, once freed from slavery in Egypt, the Israelites lived in a new reality, one in which their allegiance belonged, not to a Pharoah, a human leader, but to God. They ate manna in the wilderness, and lived by trust in God.

All this, Jesus and his disciples remembered in their Passover Meal. And then Jesus added just one more thing. “Listen,” he said, “Tomorrow, I’m expecting trouble from the authorities. I’ve been teaching you about a peaceful kingdom, but what they’re hearing is war. I’ve been gathering the sick to heal them, but they see me gathering supporters for a violent revolution. I’ve been giving good news to the poor about God’s reign here on earth, but they’ve heard it as bad news for them. So, I’m expecting trouble tomorrow, and I don’t expect to make it out alive. And I want you to remember me whenever you eat together.

Look at this bread. It’s just regular bread. But now for you it will be my body when I’m not here. And when you eat it, I will be here. Thanks be to God! Look at this cup of wine. It’s just regular wine. But now for you, it will be my blood, my life which I’m giving up for you and for the sake of God’s kingdom on earth. Whenever you eat and drink, friends, remember me. I have tried to teach you about a new reality – about God’s reign here on earth – and I don’t want you to forget. Sometimes the world can look like just the regular world. But now for you it will be infused with God’s grace, God’s presence, and God’s beauty, just like the bread, just like the wine. Thanks be to God!”


Throughout his time in public ministry, Jesus taught about the kingdom of God. Sometimes we might think of this kingdom of God as being in heaven – something we don’t get to until after death. But what Jesus is talking about, this reign of God, is something that he saw the beginnings of here on earth. “The kingdom of God,” he teaches, “is like yeast that a woman hides in a bag of flour. It’s very small, but it makes loaves upon loaves of bread rise.” “The kingdom of God,” he teaches, “is like a mustard seed. It’s very small, but it grows into a tremendous, flavorful bush that the birds themselves rest in.”

And today, in our gospel reading, we get a taste of what that realm of God will look like, based on what Jesus, its anointed King – its Messiah – says and does. He has just asked the disciples who they say he is, and Peter gets it. “You are the Messiah,” he says. And then Jesus starts teaching that this will mean his suffering, death, and resurrection. Peter gets very upset, because to him Messiah means the guy in charge, the guy who gets waited on, who makes the important decisions, who commands the army, and, incidentally, whose friends get influential political appointments as well. But as soon as Jesus admits to being the Messiah, he gets it all wrong about what it means to BE the Messiah. “Not you, Lord, surely!” Peter rebukes. “Get in line, you tempter!” Jesus answers back. “You are thinking about human things, not divine things. You don’t have your eyes on what God is doing in the world now.”

In the United Church of Christ, we talk about communion as a symbol and as a sacrament. It’s a symbol in the sense that we recognize that the bread doesn’t literally become Jesus’ body, the wine is not somehow changed into blood, while still physically having the properties of wine. But at the same time, communion is one of our two sacraments, which is to say, we recognize that God is present in it in a special way. This is a place where we meet God, not just in our minds or our spirits, but physically, with the taste of the wafers on our tongues, and the wine in our mouths. Through communion, God feeds us a meal in the new world God is creating. This is a meal in the Kingdom of God.

Because of that, this is a meal that reminds us of what the realm of God is about. It is a meal that brings healing and forgiveness, as Jesus brought healing and forgiveness. It is a meal that brings a radical equality – people from all stations of life, men and women, young and old, powerful and weak: all are welcome at the table. This is a meal in which we remember that Jesus was our leader and our teacher, and he lived that out, not by taking advantage of his powerful position, but by serving his disciples, stooping to wash their feet, and stretching out his arms to conquer sin and death.

This is the meal we eat today, a gift from God to the people of God, thanks be to God. It is a meal that creates a new community – a new communion – connecting us to people all around the world, from the past up to the present and into the future, through Jesus. And it is this community, the church universal, created by God, that works together, first to see and then to encourage, the growth and indwelling of God’s holy and beautiful realm on earth.

There is another name for communion, which is Eucharist, and which means giving thanks. Let us give thanks today and every day for God’s gift to us in Jesus, and God’s vision for us which we remember in this meal eaten in the Kingdom of God.