Many of you know that I am a great fan of history, especially American history and military history. Many pastors and preachers love history because it is in the story of what has happened before us that we learn so many lessons about who we are and why we are here. The big story, of course, is the story of our faith. And so when a day like Memorial Day rolls around, folks like yours truly have a great time reflecting on the true meaning of the day. Memorial Day was not created to be an excuse for a three-day weekend, or a car race in Indianapolis, or the unofficial beginning of summer. Memorial Day—as we noted for the children—was conceived as a time to honor those who have served our nation in the military, especially those who have given the highest sacrifice. For me, this national holiday is also a time to reflect on why we have a nation at all, on why we have called on certain generations of our citizens to protect and defend the nation and its ideals. That led me to a book I have called Letters of a Nation, a collection of what are called “extraordinary” American letters.

The very first letter of this book was written by a man named John Winthrop. Winthrop was a Puritan, a believer in a whole new way of living the Christian life that contradicted much of the old way as practiced by the Roman Catholic Church. He was born in 1588 in England. In the early 1600’s, Winthrop and many of his Puritan colleagues wanted to leave England. There was a terrible economic depression. King Charles I had just ascended the throne, and he was very sympathetic to Rome and correspondingly unsympathetic to Puritan reformers like Winthrop. And so in April of 1630, Winthrop and a thousand other English men and women sailed to the New World and settled in Massachusetts, with Winthrop as their governor. On September 9, 1630, eleven weeks after arriving in Massachusetts, Winthrop wrote a letter to his wife, Margaret, whom he had left behind in the Old World. In his letter, he describes the hardships and challenges the Bay Colony faced. He told about those like Lady Arbella and Mr. Higginson, who had already died. He told about the arrival of a French supply ship that had been so late on arriving they thought it had sunk, but it did finally get to the new settlers with provisions. The supplies were water-damaged, and only six of the eighteen goats it carried had lived. Then he writes this: “I praise God, we have many occasions of comfort here, and do hope, that our days of affliction will soon have an end, and that the Lord will do us more good in the end than we could have expected, that will abundantly recompense for all the troubles we have endured. Yet we may not look at great things here. It is enough that we shall have Heaven, though we should pass through Hell to it.”ⁱ

“We shall have Heaven.” There are many reasons, of course, that people came to what the Europeans called the New World. Perhaps the most compelling of them was the dream that it perhaps could become a little slice of heaven on earth. That dream was nothing new then and it has never really died. People like John and Margaret Winthrop dreamed of a place where they could be free of religious persecution, and they risked everything to have it. In that sense, they were not unlike a confederation of twelve tribes of Hebrew slaves who went through a great deal of hell in order to escape from Egypt, trek through a desert wasteland, and finally arrive one day in their own New World where they hoped they would have the blessings of freedom and the good life.

The tribes were led by a man named Moses. God had spoken to Moses and given Moses the job of leading the people out of their slavery and into their new homeland. When they had left Egypt, Moses led them to Mt. Sinai, and then Moses went up on the mountain, where God spoke to him. In the report of that conversation that we’ve just read from Exodus, God reminds Moses of how he has rescued the people. There is a consequence, a plan of sorts, related to what God has done. And so God says to Moses, “Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.”

Think about the impact of those words. A band of slaves with nothing to their name except that which they’ve been able to carry out of Egypt are camped at the foot of a mountain. They’ve left everything behind in the hope of having a better life. They are nothing, nobody. But they believe that they follow a God who is the Master of everything, and that this God has called them to become a new kind of kingdom on earth, a kingdom of priests, a kingdom of people through whom God will do something that has never before been done on earth since the beginning of time, which is the restoration and renewal of things as they were meant to be in the Garden of Eden. And so, over the course of the centuries, the Hebrew refugees would become Hebrew settlers in the Promised Land of Canaan. They would establish their new kingdom, with much suffering and turmoil. But, as usually happens in the human way of things, they would lose their original vision, and they would lose their nation. They would find themselves still looking for the heaven that God had promised, still trying to be that new and special kingdom where all is right again.

By the time we get to the time of Jesus, the dream of the kingdom and of the good life was still there in the hearts of the people, but that was about the only place it existed. The vast majority of Jews lived in poverty and oppression at the hands of the Romans. Only a privileged few, mostly in Jerusalem, enjoyed any sort of prosperity. And it was those privileged few who also believed that they had a special relationship with God. They—and only they—were part of God’s Kingdom of priests. They—and only they—had any chance of being blessed by God. But Jesus had a different perspective. Jesus had a different message. Jesus came on the scene and proclaimed that the favor of God was upon all the people. And he went about proving it. He healed the people. He forgave the people. He told them that God loved them, too, and then he proved that love by teaching them how God was already blessing them and how God could bless them even more as they learned to love each other.

A handful of people believed Jesus enough to start traveling with him and learning from him. And before long, Jesus sent them out among the people of occupied Israel, so that they could preach the same message and accomplish the same things. Here is what he said when he sent them: “…go…to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’” There is that word again: kingdom. There is that old idea again, the idea that the good life, the blessed life, the life that you and I want along with everyone else on the planet, is somehow involved with the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven. Somehow, we want to be in God’s Kingdom. We want to be God’s Kingdom. We want something new, something better, something like what we imagine life to have been way back when, when God first started it all. And that is what Jesus said he came to bring. With him, the Kingdom of God and Heaven is here.

Today is the final message in a series of sermons that I began the Sunday after Easter. The series title has been, “From Here On In.” What do we who follow Jesus do with ourselves after Easter? What do we do from here on in? We’ve already seen the other five things that we do, the other five missions we have. We proclaim the Good News about Jesus. We nurture each other and help each other grow in the faith. We preserve and protect the truth about Jesus. We worship God. And we work for God’s purposes on earth as we promote righteousness and justice in human society. The final great goal of the church, the final great mission that Jesus’ followers have, is this: from here on in we live a whole new thing. From here on in, to use the old language, we “exhibit the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.”

How do we do that? On Mt. Sinai, God called the people to be a kingdom of priests. In Galilee, Jesus proclaimed that God’s Kingdom had arrived. What is this business of the Kingdom all about? If we take the metaphor of the Kingdom seriously, it tells us several things. A kingdom implies that there is a king! Christians believe that the King of Everything is none other than Jesus of Nazareth, the one who was crucified, dead, and buried, but who on the third day was resurrected from the grave and lives eternally with God the Father. Jesus is the King of all Kings. The sooner we learn that fact, and learn to obey the true King and not all the false kings, the better off we will be. A kingdom also implies loyal subjects! That’s where you and I come in. Now, I know that in America we don’t like to talk about subjection to anything. We like to talk about freedom and equality. In human society, they are crucial, of course. But in Christian society, we say that all human beings are free and equal because we all have only one King, Jesus. And we find our highest freedom and our highest equality and our highest good as we subject ourselves to his Lordship. To follow Jesus is to make him your King because you finally realize that he is the King.

A kingdom implies a king and it implies loyal subjects. It also implies a third thing: it implies that there are certain rules, certain conditions, certain benefits as well as responsibilities. To Israel, through Moses, God said, “obey my voice and keep my covenant.” Jesus reaffirmed what God said, when he told Israel that he had come to fulfill the law, not to abolish it. Loyal subjects live by the rules of the realm. Amazingly enough, when we do, we discover that all the rules are put there for our own good. Jesus said the Kingdom was all about good news. In the one passage from Matthew, that good news has to do with healing: healing of body and mind and soul. We cannot be well without following God’s design for creation, which is what his voice and covenant are all about. In other places, Jesus talked about the Kingdom in terms of repentance, forgiveness, and renewal. Jesus told his disciples that they had a part in making the reality of the Kingdom come true for other people. In other words, God chooses not to do everything by himself, but God calls us to work and create and make the Kingdom happen. And so you and I work to heal, to forgive, to renew, and to restore human society to what it is meant to be. You and I have the task of being a priestly kingdom, a kingdom of people who live according to the reality of the Kingdom as we follow the King. As priests of God’s Kingdom, we point to the reality of God, we make Godly things happen in the world, and we invite God to demonstrate his power through us.

Here is what that looks like. The existence of The Village Church in this particular place is a witness to the reality of the Kingdom of God. We are here and we are not going away! We are here and we will always be talking about God. But we are not just a place. We are a people. As God’s people we have a job, just like the job Jesus gave his disciples. As we go to and fro across the face of the earth, as we live our lives, we are called to talk about God, to demonstrate God, to welcome others to know God. When we forgive and are forgiven, when we heal and are healed, when we are treated justly and when we treat others justly, then the Kingdom of God is present in our lives. And sometimes that means we go outside our own little lives and take the Kingdom with us! As we speak, 250 Christians—22 from this church—are building homes just south of the border, as a tangible witness to the love of God.

Back in 1630, John Winthrop preached a sermon to the English settlers in the New World that would become one of the most famous sermons in American history. He talked about the great dream that they followed, about the tremendous struggles they faced, about the incredible risk they took and the incredible reward that might result if they prevailed. He talked not only about their own little lives, but about what it might mean to the whole world, if they succeeded in creating an entirely new kind of society the likes of which the world had never seen before. He said, “…for we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us….” Winthrop and the first Puritan settlers knew that their task was to be an example and a reality of something holy. They were connected in that way to the people who followed Moses out of Egypt, and they were connected to the people who followed Jesus into a new way of life. We are connected to them, too. We are all subjects in a Kingdom that knows no earthly bounds, and we are loyal to a King who rules over earth and heaven. We have a priestly task in this Kingdom that we must accomplish for our King. No matter how you conceive the purpose of your life, know this: you and I are called to follow the Lord, Jesus Christ, and as we follow him, we are to learn the blessed reality of living in his Kingdom, and then to take that Kingdom out into our daily lives. We are living in a city on a hill in the Kingdom of God, and we are welcoming everyone to come and live here with us. Remember all of that, as you grill your hotdogs, and watch your car races, and go to the Memorial Day sales, and decorate the graves of our veterans and of all those we have loved.

Amen.