"The Child's Kingdom"
Jesus Christ's gift to us: absolute, enduring and eternal
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, December 23, 2001
Text: John 18:33-37
I took my mother by the arm and rushed her down the aisles and through the many different floors of what was, certainly when I was a 10-year-old boy, the most famous toy store in England. It was called Selfridges, and every child wanted to go there and play with their trains and their other toys.
This was the first time that my mother had ever taken me on a pre-Christmas shopping tour. So we had taken the train into London and I eagerly headed down the aisles, wanting to introduce my mother to what I thought was the most spectacular gift that had ever been made in the history of toys. So, via many forms of manipulation, I finally got my mother to see the toy that every boy dreamed of in 1968: The Secret Sam Spy Case.
Now, if you are not familiar with this piece of magnificence, let me describe some of its many virtues. One of them is the built-in periscope, so you could hide behind the couch and see your cousin kissing her boyfriend without them knowing you were there. It also had a built-in camera. You could carry the case around and press a little button, and take photographs without anyone knowing. So I had evidence of my cousin kissing her boyfriend! And the pièce de resistance, though not politically correct: There was another little button you pressed that shot out a little rubber bullet, just to remind my cousin and her boyfriend that I was there.
This was something I had dreamed of for months. My mother looked at it, looked at the excessive price tag and finally said, "Andrew, you can have this, but there is something I want you to know this Christmas. I want to tell you that if you have this gift, Santa will not be visiting you this year. Now, do you know who Santa really is?"
Well, of course, everybody knows who Santa is; it's Mr. Coxwell at 72 Main Street.
My mother was incredulous, but then realized that I was referring to the man who dressed up as Santa and went to all the parties.
So, she said, "Now, you do realize if you get this gift, he will not be visiting you this Christmas?"
I said, "That's fine. All I want is my Secret Sam Spy Case and I'll be happy."
So my mother bought it and we took a cab to King's Cross station and got on the train. My mother said to me, "Now look, there is one condition: You are not to open this gift until Christmas Day, do you understand?"
"Yes, mother, I understand."
My mother went to the dining car to get a cup of tea and a piece of cake, and realizing that she would be gone for a little while, I opened the gift. My hands were trembling with anticipation and I broke the lock right away! I cracked the plastic handle and I realized that the camera was no longer working. Feverishly, I tried to put the Secret Sam Spy Case back together again. I put it in the box and re-wrapped it and pretended nothing had happened until Christmas Day when, feigning horror, I opened it and said: "Mom, it's broken!" Ignorance exacerbated by lies is not a good way to spend Christmas Day.
I've thought about that gift many times over the years and every time I have heard the hymn "Fleeting is the Worldlings Pleasure" my mind goes back to that moment. For indeed, what moth and rust doth corrupt, said Jesus, will be destroyed and will not last. And even the things that our eyes see and our hearts love aren't always guaranteed to survive.
And so this morning I want to give you a gift. (Well, I'm not the giver; I'm just the deliverer.) The gift is a gift that is not fleeting, does not fade, does not break. It is the gift, of course, of the grace and the love of God and God's peace in Jesus Christ. To understand this gift, I think we do not only need to turn to the beginning of the Christmas story as we usually do. I think to really understand its power we have to go to the end of the story, to the moment of Jesus' trial and His death.
For when you look at the birth and the death of Jesus there are many similarities. In the stable, Jesus was born in an innocent way to Mary; on the cross he died as an innocent man before the unjust. At his birth, Herod was threatened by him and wanted him removed. At his death, Pilate thought that he was a fraud and questioned his kingdom.
When his birth was announced, Mary said that the proud would be brought down and the lowly would be lifted up. At the death of Jesus the proud were exposed and the poor and the sinners were lifted up. At his birth, Jesus was driven out into Egypt, to a foreign land, while at his death his disciples trembled in fear, for they thought he was dead.
The way I liken the relationship between the beginning and the end of Jesus' life is that at the beginning, Christmas is like a fancy wrapper around a candy. But the real middle, the heart, the chocolate, is at the end. For at the end of Jesus' life He gives His very reason for having been born. And in one of the most powerful sayings of the whole of the New Testament, like a phoenix rising from the death and destruction that was around him through Pilate, Jesus prophetically says: "My kingdom is not of this world."
I want to look this morning at what Jesus was saying, because therein lies the power of the gift.
The first thing that he is saying is that, unlike the kingdoms of this world, his is not built by force and is not seized.
Look at the Babylonian Empire under Negachadnezzar, or the Syrian Empire under Tiglath Pileser III (don't you just love that name?). Look at the Greeks under Alexander, or the Romans under the Caesars. Look at the Ottoman Empire, or the empire of Charlemagne. Look at the empire of the British and their battle at Waterloo. Look at the empire that Hitler tried to build or the empire that somehow, Osama bin Laden mistakenly thought that he could bring about through his acts of violence.
All these empires relied on force or power, technology or military might. But the kingdom, the power of Jesus Christ is not like these.
And that is why Pilate was confused. He looked at Jesus and he said, "Are you the King of the Jews?" In other words, have I got something to fear from you? Are you going to be seditious? Are your followers going to cause mayhem? If I put you to death, what cost will there be to me?
So he wanted to know, "Are you the King of the Jews?" Are you, in other words, going to seize power?
Jesus said to him, "No, I'm not going to seize power. If I were to seize power right now, you would know it. My disciples would have come to my aid to protect me."
In Chapter 6 of the Gospel of John, the disciples, after the feeding of the 5,000, felt that Jesus should be reinstated as the King and Messiah. Jesus, according to John, perceived that they were going to come and take him away to make him king, so he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.
So, even earlier on in his ministry, when his disciples thought that maybe it was time to seize the moment and use force, Jesus said: "No, my kingdom is not of this world. My kingdom is a kingdom of peace."
I've often thought, my friends, that there are many people in our day and age who have a fear. They have a fear that Christmas, the spirit of our time, will somehow disappear into the ether, as our culture becomes less and less Christian. I've heard it from many sources who have said that because of the end of the hegemony of Christianity in the west, and the power of Christian culture having tied itself to the empires of the west, that if that were to decline so, too, would the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.
The same feeling was present in the 400's, when Alaric ransacked Rome and undermined the empire. Many Christians felt that if the empire were to fall, Christianity would fall and all that they believed in, from Constantine on, would be destroyed. But St. Augustine came along and said prophetically: "No, no, no, Christians haven't destroyed the empire, it's the pagans that have done that. Do not worry, because Christianity is about the saving of society. Christianity is not about the seizing of society. Christianity is about making a society reflect the grace of the divine, not bringing it down. There's no need to fear." [paraphrase]
I think, my friends, we must understand in our hearts that the kingdom of Jesus Christ is not something that is wedded to empires or to cultures, but is something like a mustard seed that continues to grow in the world. That it might not be of the world, it might not use the power of seizure to make itself great, but it is in the world, it is a seed of peace. It is a seed of justice. It is a seed of reconciliation. It is a seed of forgiveness. It is a seed of grace and it is in the hearts of those who understand the truth and the passion of it. The kingdom of Jesus Christ is not something to be seized, because the kingdom of God in Jesus Christ is something that is given.
Jesus said to Pilate, "For this reason, I was born, and for this reason I came into the world to bear witness to the truth."
And by the truth he did not mean a series of propositions of true and false. He meant, rather, the truth that you find all the way through the New Testament. Mainly, that the truth is the sovereign reign of God. That the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ was to reveal to the world that God is sovereign. That God's grace and God's love triumph above the quagmire of sin and violence and disintegration. That the cross was a symbol of God's very weakness in the world, to show the world that the way is not the way of seizure but the way of grace and self-giving love.
Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth and the life." The writer at the beginning of John said that Jesus came into the world and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us full of grace and truth. The truth, then, is seen in the grace and the love of God in Jesus Christ, and it is precisely that which connects the beginning of His life with the end of His life. The beginning of Jesus' life is the celebration of the Incarnation. The end of His life is the celebration of the crucifixion. Of the power of God demonstrated in weakness and the love of God demonstrated in self-giving love.
Sometimes, my friends, we get so caught up in the commercialism of our time that we forget the very power of the gift. And even when we give thanks to God, we do it always with a hand behind our backs.
That reminds me of a story that I was told of three Ontarians who died and went to heaven. When they got there they went to St. Peter and said: "We were wondering if we could speak to God?"
St. Peter said: "Well, it's kind of unusual but, all right I suppose, you're from Ontario, I'll let you speak to God." And, so the three Ontarians marched into the heavenly realm and God said, "Yes, what would you like?"
They said: "We would like to thank you. We would like to thank you for bringing us up in the most glorious province, with the mountains of the north and the great lakes, with the rivers and the vineyards of Niagara, with the majesty of our great city and the rolling golf courses in Muskoka. We would like to thank you for the capital city of Ottawa and we would like to thank you for giving us a peaceful and prosperous province."
God said: "You're very welcome."
And they said: "Well now, as a token of our thanks, we would like to give you something. We would like to give you some maple syrup from Elmira."
The Almighty was thrilled! He'd never been given a gift.
He said, "Thank you very much, Ontarians. Is there anything else that you would care to say?"
And they said, "Yes, that will be $39.95."
(Well, it's good to make fun of ourselves once in awhile, isn't it?)
But so often our response to God is just like that. We pay lip service to the wonder of creation, the glory and the majesty of God's love and sovereign will, reign and the peace that we have in our land. But sometimes it's like we have a hand behind our backs. The giving of the Son, Jesus Christ, was no such gift, it was a gift that was absolute and it was from the heart.
There was a man who, realizing Christmas was approaching, decided to wire some flowers to his mother who lived 200 miles away. As he was going into the flower store he saw a little girl crying on the steps. He said to the little girl, "Can I help you?"
She said, "Yes, but I'm not sure. I was trying to buy a rose for my mother and I only have 75 cents and I've been told that a rose costs $2 so I can't buy one."
The man, having compassion, said, "Don't worry. Come with me and I will buy you that rose." He took her into the store, ordered the flowers for his mother and bought the most beautiful red rose for the little girl. As they were walking out, though she was thankful, she seemed a little forlorn and lost, so he asked: "Can I take you home? Can I drive you to your mother?"
She said, "That would be really nice." She got in the car with her red rose and they drove along the road. Then she asked him to stop. She got out of the car at a cemetery, walked across to a newly dug grave and placed the rose upon it, and she got back into the car. The man drove her home, then, so moved by what he had seen, went back to the flower store, picked up the flowers that he was going to have sent to his mother and drove 200 miles to see her.
The gift of God in Jesus Christ is like that gift to that little girl. It might appear to be a weakness, but in its humbleness it is a sign of what really matters. Because it is a gift that lasts, because as Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world."
There is one last part about this: It is a kingdom that is eternal. You can't turn to a passage in the New Testament without realizing that the kingdom of God, the reign of God, is something that is eternal. Whether it is at the beginning of John's Gospel when it said "in the beginning there was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God and nothing that was made was made without the Word."
From the moment in Luke's Gospel where there is the annunciation made to Mary, "and his kingdom will have no end," to the words of Paul in the Book of Romans, that "nothing separates us from the love of God in Jesus Christ; neither life nor death, things past or things to come, nor height nor depth." But there is a sense in which in the midst of a world that is continually ebbing and flowing and changing, the eternal presence of Jesus Christ and the eternal love of God is something that knows no bounds.
It is precisely this that reminds those in positions of power that their kingdoms will come and go, but the reign of Christ will never cease. There are those who practise injustice, or those who turn a blind eye to the needs of others, who will understand that even in the midst of their power and ignorance their kingdom will not last, but the reign of the love of Christ will. Cultures will come and go. Systems will ebb and flow, but the Word of God remains and never ends.
Nowhere was this more poignantly demonstrated than a few weeks ago at a memorial service for the firefighters who died in New York City. In the memorial service a poem was read as if one of the firefighters was speaking to the people who were left behind. I do not know its source, I do not know its author, I do not know if it was written just for that moment or whether it was written many years ago. But this I do know: It sums up the eternal power of the kingdom that has no end. It is titled "My First Christmas in Heaven."
I hear the many Christmas songs that people hold so dear,
But the sounds of music cannot compare with the Christmas choir up here.
I have no words to tell you the joy their voices bring,
For it is beyond description to hear the angels sing.I know how much you miss me. I see the pain inside your heart.
But I am not so far away, we really aren't apart.
So be happy for me, dear ones. You know I hold you dear,
And be glad I am spending Christmas with Jesus Christ this year.I send each of you a special gift from my heavenly home above,
I send each of you a memory of my undying love,
After all, love is a special gift more precious than pure gold.
It was always most important in the stories that Jesus told.Please love each other as the Father said to do,
For I cannot count the blessings or the love He has for you,
So have a Merry Christmas and wipe away that tear,
Remember I am spending Christmas with Jesus Christ this year.
My kingdom is not of this world. Amen
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.