Sermon for Sunday, July 3rd 2022 – Fourth Sunday after Penecost – The kingdom of God has come near to you

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, rcl yr c, 2022
2 Kings 5:1-14; Psalm 30; GALATIANS 6:7-16; Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

The kingdom of God has come near to you.

I imagine, if we all took a brief moment, each of us could bring to mind the sort of person that Jesus asks the seventy to be. The seventy are the evangelists, and part of what is, for Luke, Jesus’s first evangelism campaign. The seventy were sent out two by two “to every town and place where he himself intended to go.” And they were to go into homes and to stay there, “eating and drinking whatever they provide,” and saying, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.”

And the first thing the seventy should do, as they go out telling the good news of the kingdom of God, as they enter a home? Offer peace. “[F]irst say, ‘Peace to this house!’ And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you.”

And I imagine many of us know someone like this: a person of peace. I could speak of a number of such people in my life. But I will speak of just one. I once made a pretty big pastoral mistake, and it haunted me for quite some time. While I was a hospital chaplain a man had asked me for a baptism, but out of my own foolishness he died before I could baptize him. After a considerable time of anguish, I told this story to my mentor. And he was quite frank, and confirmed that I had indeed made a significant mistake, and that I was indeed quite foolish. But he also said that we do believe that if a person dies desiring baptism, that God would consider that desire the same sort of profession of faith as water baptism, just without the water. Put simply: human foolishness is no obstacle to God’s grace.

And as unpleasant as it was to have it confirmed that I was indeed a bit foolish, the conversation as a whole brought me real peace through confidence in the fullness of God’s grace towards me, and to the person that I had failed.

I imagine many of us can bring to mind people such as this, people who bring peace. And what’s most interesting to me is that this is, in this account of Jesus’s first evangelism campaign, central to evangelism. Yes, evangelism means risk; it means danger; it could mean poverty; and indeed, it does mean saying something: that “The kingdom of God has come near to you.”

But central to this is the bringing of peace: an ability to confirm that yes, things will be ok; that yes, you may be in the middle of something distressing and unpleasant in life; that yes, it seems the demons, the powers and the principalities, have much power over the world. But. Jesus has seen “Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.” And in this Jesus, all will be well, all is reconciled. Grace abounds in him and in the one who sent him.

I’d like for you for a moment to imagine something else. Imagine that when we hear that “the kingdom of God has come near,” that Jesus means that the kingdom of God has come near in a spatial sense. That’s to say, we indeed believe that the kingdom is about to be upon us in God’s time, but to also say that the kingdom of God is near in such a way like it’s just around the corner: the corner of the church door; the corner between your living room and your dining room; or the corner of King Street and Water Street.

That’s the nearness of the kingdom of God: it’s as near to you as this altar is you you, as your dining room table is to you, as the wild and wonderful downtown of Kitchener is to you. The kingdom of God isn’t just near to us in time, but near to us in a roughly geographical and domestic sense.

Because the mission the seventy are sent on has more to do with map-reading, and where to find the butter, than it does looking towards some future, doesn’t it. “[T]he Lord … sent them on ahead of him … to every town and place where he himself intended to go.” This is about places, about towns. “Whatever house you enter,  first say, ‘Peace to this house!’” This is about houses, where people dwell and live. “Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide,” says Jesus. This is about places like dining room tables, where people eat and drink together.

And so even as we hope and look for God’s future, when things will be on earth as they are in heaven, we would be wise also to look around the corners for God’s kingdom, in our cities, our neighbourhoods, and in our homes and the homes of those we visit. Evangelism is as much about finding God’s kingdom in the world God has made, as it is announcing and preaching that God will, in his time, inaugurate his kingdom in a new creation of his own remaking.

And it is, and will be, a kingdom of peace. A kingdom where all is already reconciled: us to God, us to one another, and even creation to us, to God, and to itself. God’s kingdom is one where things that were once far off from one another, and in enmity with one another, are brought together in a bond of peace.

And we should call the ones we know to be people of peace, people in whose presence we know and experience the peace of God’s kingdom, people we should maybe call evangelists, in that they are people who bring peace just as Jesus describes it should be done in the story of the seventy evangelists.

People who would help us see, know, and experience not just God’s truth, but God’s peace: yes, things will be ok; yes, you may be in the middle of something distressing and unpleasant in life; yes, it seems the demons, the powers and the principalities, have much power over the world; but that, indeed, Jesus has seen “Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.” And that in this Jesus, all will be well, and all is reconciled. Grace abounds in him and in the one who sent him.