The Sunday Sermon: January 21, 2024 – Third Sunday after Epiphany
Scripture: Matthew 4:17, 23-25
Our Good News: The Kingdom of God
I looked back this past week at the sermon messages and Sunday school lessons that we’ve shared in this first period of Ordinary Time in the church calendar, these weeks between the feasts of Christmas and Epiphany and the fasts of Lent and Holy Week. As I noted last week, we have precious few weeks to walk with Jesus between celebrating his birth and retelling his death and resurrection. But in almost all of these periods in years past I have preached a sermon something like this one. Shared the message, the reminder, of why we’re here. We’re “here”, in this sanctuary because the Kingdom of God is here, in the world.
Pray with me …
The last two weeks have been challenging and full of difficult charges: Live into your baptism and find your lakeshore. Jesus did, for very earthly and practical reasons, he went to the River and then to the lake. He was baptized, dying to what was holding him captive in this world so that he could step out of that wilderness into this world and make a difference in the lives of those who were captive, oppressed, hungry and imprisoned. He found his call on the lakeshores of the Sea of Galilee, expressing a solidarity with the peasant fishermen who were being over-burdened, over-taxed, and over-whelmed by an Empire, by a system that sought only more power and control for those already in power and control. Because of Christmas and Epiphany, we are to remember our own baptism into death and new life and find the lakeshores of our time.
And that’s where this sermon message comes in, in one way or another, most often at this time of year. Why do we have to do that? Can’t we just say what we believe, believe in our salvation, and live a simple life doing no harm and being nice. Why do we need to challenge the world?!
You know what I’m going to say to you. I hope you’re already saying it to yourself. Because that is what our Lord, the one we follow, did. Because that is the Way of Christ that he lived and we as Christ-ones must live. We challenge the world because there is injustice, unrighteousness, and violence in it. But there is also something else present in this world. Something definitive, but not complete. Something Jesus not only proclaimed, but embodied. Something he gave his life to and then gave his life for. He didn’t just get baptized and go the lakeshore to be with the poor and downtrodden. He went to share the Gospel, the Good News.
From the time Jesus left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the Sea, he began to proclaim, “The Kingdom of Heaven us at hand.” Mt. 4:17. And after he calls his first followers, fishermen of course, he went … Read Matthew 4:23-25. The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Verse seventeen in Matthew’s Gospel, as well as verse fifteen in Mark’s first chapter and verse twenty-one in Luke’s fourth, are our Gospel-good news in a nutshell. The Kingdom of Heaven, the Kin-dom of God, is here. That is our comfort … and, of course, our challenge.
The good news that Jesus shared by embodying it – the forgiveness of our “sin”, our separation, and our reconciliation with creation and Creator, one another and God, the salvation of our souls and the resurrection of our lives – is available to us now, here … and now. It is here on all the lakeshores of our world, behind all the appaling headlines of our newspapers, planted more deeply than all that is wrong, or evil, or sorrowful in our lives and our world – the Gospel good News … on earth, beyond us and “more than us”, but among us.
I wondered aloud for us last week, why there is so much written and retained about this one particular first century Jewish peasant, when there is little or nothing about almost every other peasant – a few disciples, later apostles, and a Baptizer – but almost no one else. This is why, or at least one major reason why: Jesus’ teaching, his proclamation and his ministry, was different from any other prophet’s message or ministry that came before him, different even from his cousin John’s message. (I dare say, that Jesus’ own message and ministry was different even than that of the church that gathered in his very name by the fourth or fifth century and remains different today. But that’s a history lesson and a sermon for another time.) His proclamation was different from any other prophet’s message or ministry that came before him, or after him until his first followers got with the program because in Jesus’ time, you see, in the words and warnings of the “apocalyptic prophets” of Jewish expectations the Advent of God was always in the future, “Imminent.” Even John the Baptist said, “Soon.” But still “not yet.” Not so for Jesus, the one we call Christ.
Now I don’t want to be too hard on John or others who were surely fully convicted of the very real need for the Empires of the world to do justice and live righteously, but you can say “the Kingdom of God is coming” for as long as you want. In fact, the Jewish prophets of old had been saying it for quite some time by the first century. In further fact, countless Christian “prophets” have been prophesying the “imminent” Second Coming for the last two-thousand years. But to say “the Kingdom of God is here?!” That’s something else altogether. It’s a “paradigm shift within Jewish … expectation.” From “an imminent arrival” to a “present reality.” It’s a bold statement to make in our day. But that was the good news of Jesus and still is the Good News we are to share: God is here … with us … now.
That is our comfort. And it’s our challenge. Because, if we believe it’s here – and we do – then we also know that it’s not fully realized. We know there is work to do. So did Jesus. That’s why he went to the Lakeshore – to be with those being marginalized, but also to give them hope. To proclaim the good news and heal “those who were afflicted”. Mt. 4:24
This good news is not a comfort for all. It wasn’t a comfort to the Roman Empire or to the privileged elite of the first century, including the Jewish aristocracy. If the Kingdom of God is here, then what does that mean about the Kingdoms of this world? What implications, what allegations, does such a profession place on anyone who doesn’t live with and have compassion for, all? Who doesn’t turn the other cheek? Who doesn’t pray for those who persecute him? Who doesn’t love her enemies?
We are a part of the crowd that, by the end of the fourth chapter of Matthew, are following Jesus from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan proclaiming with him, because of him, “Have trust, allow hope. The Kin-dom of God is here.” And because it is, we have a life to live that reflects and fulfills this reality, as much as we possibly can.
We’re laughed at, too. Paul wrote that the message of Jesus and the cross is “foolishness” to those who insist on living for themselves and their own. But to us, to those with trust, hope and have faith in another Way, the Way of Christ, it is the Power of God. That power is in the world, planted more deeply than all that is wrong. That power is in us, through our Baptism and through our lives. That power is the Good News of Great Joy that we just proclaimed to the world: Immanuel, God is with us. The Kin-dom of God is among us. All that’s left to do is live it. In big ways and small ways, but all-ways.
Our Good News is for the world and our Good News is in the world. We are called to be a part of its proclamation. Let’s make it so. Amen.
Reverend Joel Weible, Pastor
Pewee Valley Presbyterian Church / January 21, 2024