Till Kingdom Come (Acts 17:16-34)
Here is my manuscript for the sermon that I preached on Sunday, October 16 at Woodmont Christian Church’s Bridge service. This is not exactly what I said there was an opener shouting out my sister Shari, who preached at her home church that day, but this is the general gist of the sermon.
Six and a half years ago, we were still living in Spartanburg, SC and I had no idea what I was supposed to do with my life. I had just graduated seminary. I had worked for about 10 years in a ministry where I thought I would serve my entire life, but had come to the slow and difficult realization that I wasn’t supposed to be there. Trouble is, I had no clue where I was supposed to be. I left for an ellipses; the dot dot dot of something to be determined. To help feed a young family, I substitute taught and served as an assistant teacher at our school district’s early childhood center. I gained a huge respect for people who hold down those vocations and I was not happy. I felt lost and adrift.
One evening I went for a walk by myself in our neighborhood and I found myself standing by a pond talking out loud to a God who I wasn’t sure was even there. “Where in the heck are You?,” I remember saying, “I don’t know if I can do this much longer.” I didn’t get an answer that night and went home with nothing more than the catharsis that comes with admitting that something sucks. An answer did eventually come that kept and still keeps me holding on. We’ll get there but to make that journey we need to talk about the stories that Jesus told and still tells.
Throughout the last couple of months, we have been doing this series on the parables of Jesus found in the gospel of Luke. These are legitimately some of my favorite stories in scripture because they are so sneaky brilliant. Jesus tells these of profound religious truth yet the stories themselves are hardly ever in a religious context. These parables are not stories of priests and rabbis and worship services and synagogue meetings. Instead Jesus tells stories of seeds and crops, crooked accountants and weeping tax collectors, runaway sons and stubborn widows. In fact, when Jesus does include the religious in his stories it is often to subvert his listeners’ expectations like when a priest and Levite sidestep a victim of violence to setup a despised Samaritan being the hero. What I love about this way of telling stories is that by taking the things of God and hiding them within these stories of earth and the everyday, Jesus is demonstrating how the holy is all around us.
The pastor and theologian Eugene Peterson put it this way: “Jesus continually threw odd stories down alongside ordinary lives and walked away without explanation or altar call. These listeners started seeing connections: God connections, life connections, eternity connections. The very lack of obviousness, the unlikeness, was the stimulus to perceiving likeness: God likeness, life likenesses eternity likeness. But the parable didn’t do the work—it put the listener’s imagination to work.”
With these open-ended, stories of God amongst the ordinary, Jesus kickstarts the imagination of his listeners. And the thing about imagination is that once it gets going, it is unlikely to stop. Jesus sets us up to see God connections in his stories about lost coins and good Samaritans and then our imaginations start wondering where else those connections could be made. Our Spirit-ignited imaginations start making more God connections long after a parable is told thus making the stories that Jesus told to be never-ending. His stories echo and are retold in our lives even today. Let me give you a couple of examples.
One of the parables that Jesus told was about a mustard seed. Like all good parables, this is a story that can go a lot of different ways yet one of the main takeaways is that God’s kingdom, community, or whatever you would like to call it is like this infinitesimally small seed from which a really out of control plant springs forth. God is something that is wild and active and growing all around us. Our family was fortunate enough to go out west for a few days for Fall Break and while we were out there, we went to Muir Woods National Monument a little north of San Francisco. I could honestly not do justice to the almost otherworldly beauty and majesty that existed in that forest of coastal redwoods. Here are these trees that are hundreds of years old, some have been around for over a millennia. They reach up to the heavens two, three hundred feet into the air.
You cannot help but think about how small you are and about how your existence is but a breath in the life of those redwoods. And to think that something that grand and ancient started from a simple seed. I could not help think about Jesus and the mustard seed in those woods. The community of God is like this: it starts small yet it grows and grows, persevering through the ways in which we try to chop it down or make it smaller. We are just a heartbeat in its great story and yet in its canopy we can find awe, wonder, and peace.
My favorite parable is one that Jenny preached about a couple of weeks ago: the parable of the prodigal son. For whatever reason, it has always been a story that has captured me. Its theme of God’s great love for us is a north star for me; a story that is central to my faith. As such, my imagination runs wild trying to find that God connection in any story or song about parents and children or about coming home that I can find. And one of my favorite ways that story continues to be told is through an animated movie about lost fish.
In Finding Nemo, the clownfish Marlin is searching the Pacific Ocean for his one and only son. And I kid you not, I could do a whole entire sermon series on that movie or virtually any Pixar movie for that matter. If I ever pursue my doctorate, my thesis will be about what the movie WALL-E teaches us about biblical apocalyptic visions of a new heaven and new earth. But the fish story that reminds me the most of the parable of the Prodigal Son actually comes from Nemo’s sequel Finding Dory.
The movie centers around Marlin and Nemo helping the titular royal blue tang fish find her parents. Dory has incredible difficulty remembering anything. She can only recall snatches of her childhood and fears that her parents will never accept her because she swam away from home. In flashbacks, we see Dory’s parents try to help their daughter with her perpetual forgetfulness. Since the little fish always forgot where she lived, her mom and dad taught her to follow seashells they had placed on the seafloor to find her way home.
At the film’s lowest ebb, Dory is separated from Marlin and Nemo and is told that her parents are gone. She is out to sea; lost, alone, and barely hanging on to any memory of anyone that has meant anything to her. With hope slipping away, Dory sees the beginning of a trail of seashells and she doesn’t know why but she begins to follow them. She comes to a piece of coral that serves as a home for some fish and then you see that there are paths of seashells coming from every direction leading to that home. And then two older blue tang fish swim in to view; their fins filled with shells for even more paths.
I will not lie, when I first saw that scene in a movie theater I lost it. I cried as a parent. I cried as a child of God. I cried knowing that I would do anything if there was a shred of hope that my lost son would come home. I cried knowing the hollowness that comes when you feel adrift from your spiritual home. In the parable of the prodigal son, Jesus tells us that while the lost child is still a far ways off, the father sees him and starts running because God will always make a way for us to get home. And so the story continues.
I tell these stories not to demonstrate how neat it is that we can find a parallel to the parables today, but to remind you and me that these stories and reminders of Jesus are all around us to sustain us through every single day. When Jesus was telling his parables, he often repeated the refrain, “Let the one who has ears to hear, let them hear.” He was reminding his audience that these God connections were all around them like paths leading home. Making those connections did not happen by accident. You had to have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. You needed to be looking for God. And when our imaginations are God-attuned, we can find wisdom, strength, and hope. We discover that Jesus is ever still teaching and guiding us through our lives.
This Christ-centered imagination is something that Paul ably demonstrated when he was in the city of Athens in Acts 17. He was invited to speak to a group of Greek philosophers about the faith that propelled him to travel across Asia and Europe. The Athenians knew nothing about Jesus and probably very little about Paul’s Jewish background. What do you say to a group that lacks context for the very thing that is at your heart? How do you find Jesus in a land and among a people where he seemingly had never been?
Fortunately, Paul had the eyes to see and ears to hear Jesus even in that foreign land: “Athenians,” he began, “I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is He served by human hands, as though He needs anything, since He gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and He allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for Him and find Him—though indeed He is not far from each one of us. For ‘In Him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are His offspring.’”
Where others would not have expected to see Jesus, Paul found reminders of Christ in Athens. He had the eyes to see and the ears to hear Jesus in altars to unknown gods and in the poetry of the Greek people. He appealed to the philosophical schools of Epicureans and Stoics in his assertion that God was near. As he related their grasping about for the divine, Paul too grasped about for Jesus and remembered that in him we all live and move and have our being. So Paul used his Spirit-focused imagination and found the God connection to speak of Jesus to the Athenians; to invite them into this project of having the eyes to see and ears to hear God at work in the world around them.
One of my favorite things I ever taught was a breakout session at summer camp when I was twenty-three. Three times a week for four weeks, I did an hour long discussion class on finding God where you least expect. We sat down and talked about how we saw God in a magician who was doing public stunts at the time, episodes of “Lost,” conversations with friends, nature, movies, and more. For a lot of these high school Christians, they had been taught that the world was a scary place that could corrupt them and take away their faith. So I wanted to push back with the encouragement that if you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear then you can find these God connections everywhere. For the capstone of that conversation we listened to a song by a non-Christian band and looked for God connections within it.
The song was “Till Kingdom Come” by Coldplay and, yes, I like Coldplay. I think their first four albums are amazing. Fight me. But before we listened to the song, I made the point that what we were about to listen was not a song about God. It was originally written for Johnny Cash and likely was written about someone who had lost someone they loved. But I wanted them to listen for any connections to God or scripture that they could find. And almost every time these students would attach to the love and longing present in the song as reminders of God’s love for us and us willing to wait until kingdom come for God to make things right. In the line, “In your tears and in your blood / In your fire and in your flood,” students latched on to images of Jesus crying over Lazarus and bleeding on the cross, of Old Testament stories of God being found in fire and flood. It was always interesting to see what they would uncover. So I closed with telling them that whenever they hear that song or make God connections some place else that they can remember that God is with them.
Since that summer 16 years ago, I can only hear “Till Kingdom Come” as a song about God. One of the constants in our family’s life is we have a Sunday playlist that we play in the car on the way to church. It’s filled with hymns, worship songs, and others that have been meaningful over the years. The songs have been in regular flux, but “Till Kingdom Come” has been on the playlist the entire time.
A few months after I went on that walk and told God I was not sure what I was doing and wondered where the heck God was, EA and I dropped our two boys off with their grandparents in Nashville and drove up to Louisville to see Coldplay in concert. On the way up, EA asked if they would play “Till Kingdom Come” since she knew it was one of my favorite Coldplay songs. I said that there was no way it would happen. It was a deep cut, technically a hidden track, on an album that was over a decade old at that point. I had resigned myself to the fact that I was never going to hear that performed live. And then in the middle of the concert, the band went up to a B-stage in the audience and played “Till Kingdom Come.”
I will not pretend that God made that song happen for me. But I will also not pretend like that did not feel like the most crystal clear reminder of God’s presence. As I watched that song through tears a mere weeks before I heard about a youth ministry position in Nashville, I was reminded of what I said to those students a decade earlier: God was with me. God was not going anywhere and even though I did not know what was going to happen next, I would not be alone.
When we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear, we are reminded that Jesus is always with us. It can provide comfort in times of strife. It can provide wisdom when we don’t know what to do. It can provide the strength to press on. When we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear, Jesus will always be teaching us, encouraging us, leading us in the way of God today, tomorrow, and until kingdom come.
