Aug 11, 2019          The Father’s Good Pleasure                          

At General Synod, one of the interesting parables I heard was in the Just Peace Church Seminar. It told the story of a town beside a river, and one day, a member of the town saw some people caught in the river’s current, and organized a group of people nearby to save them. The next day, they noticed that more people were in the river, and they saved them. And so it went for days, and weeks, and months.

One day a young woman was saved, and she was so grateful, that she decided to dedicate her life to saving the others who came floating down the river. She baked goods, she held fundraisers, and organized the townspeople to take shifts to save the people caught in the river.

And one day, there was a child caught in the river, and the young woman dived in, struggled against the current to reach the child, but it was to late, the child had struck his head on one of the rocks in the river, and died. As the young woman came to shore, she held the lifeless body of the boy in her arms, and she kept saying, “Why, …. why,….. why?” “What do you mean why”, the people asked the young woman, and she replied, “Why are people jumping in the river?”

The point of the story at the Just Peace Church presentation, was that the church does lots of good works, feeding the hungry, providing shelters for the homeless, homes for orphaned children, educational programs for kids in the inner city, care giving programs for the sick, the shut-in, the widowed, and on and on. But at some point, it isn’t enough to simply care for the people in the condition that we find them, as member of the church, we are also called to care about the conditions that create this human suffering, and see if we can’t stop some of these conditions from happening. And so that’s what being a Just Peace church means.

I chose this story this morning, because I believe it has something to do with Jesus words to us this morning.  For Jesus, the greatest source of human suffering comes from the love of money, or mammon which includes, money, wealth, and possessions. And as long as our hearts are set on these things, then human suffering will continue, and we will not be able to realize the world that God offers to us in the kingdom of heaven. But if our hearts are set instead, upon love of God, and love of one another, then the way will be cleared for the kingdom of God to enter into the world.

One the comments in our local Sandwich/Somonauk Clergy group, as we talked about the Comment by one of my fellow clergy, that biggest problem we face is not socialism, or communism, or any other ism’s you can think of, but unbridled wealth. The world speaks of the power of wealth to create jobs, and to spur innovation, but the power of wealth can also create poverty, unemployment, suffering and destruction. When wealth is put to use in the service of those seeking power and selfish interest, it can wreak havoc on an economic system. When wealth is used in the service of all, then it can be a blessing to all.

There are a number of issues that we face as a nation that we have more than enough years of study and experience in order to choose policies that will bring about the kingdom of heaven in our lives. We know that there are common sense gun control laws that would reduce the number of mass shootings in our nation. But we don’t choose them.   We know that there are policies that are effective in reducing the number of abortions. But we don’t choose them. We know that there are ways to weed out corruption in our government, increase wages, and bring down deficits. But we don’t choose them. We know that there are ways to regulate banks to avoid the collapse of savings and loans, housing markets, and our economy. But we don’t choose them.  We know that there are ways to give health insurance to all, and in the process reduce our medical costs for all. But we don’t choose them. We know that there are things we can do to make our air cleaner, our waters purer, and our soils productive. But we don’t choose them. We know that there are ways to solve our immigration problems. But we don’t choose them.

  We don’t choose them, because we allow our leaders to drag us around by our self-interest, and our love of money. Our hearts are set upon our tax breaks, our privileges, even our religious traditions. We don’t choose them, because we are so focused on what we think we want and deserve, that we don’t concern ourselves with what others need. We don’t choose them, because we are not willing to suffer ourselves for the sake of others, as Christ suffered himself for us.

It is these leaders who drag us around who are the thieves that steal the kingdom away from us. And as always, I am not talking about those leaders from some other political party, the one we disagree with. I am talking about our leaders, the one’s we vote for, the one whose arguments we buy, who then turn and serve mammon, rather than those who elected them.  

The Good News is, that it is the Father’s good pleasure to give us the Kingdom. If we choose to love God and our neighbor as ourselves, then God will give to us God’s kingdom. In fact, every time we see injustice and suffering in the world, God is offering the kingdom to us, all we need do is respond, and not just to the immediate need, but to the source of that suffering, the love of money.

So if we want God’s Kingdom to come among us, to see abortions reduced, to see immigration slow, to have stable markets and economies, to have affordable health care, affordable education, reductions in mass killings and gun violence, better wages, a clean environment, and etc., etc. etc. Then we as Christians have to start advocating for these things to come about, and we need to hold the “thieves” accountable when they do nothing. God wants us to have that kind of life, all we have to do is set our hearts upon it.