Third Sunday after the Epiphany

The Kingdom Has Come Near

Mark 1: 14-20

Buford St. UMC

Jan. 21, 2024

A Peanuts cartoon has little Linus afraid to be alone in the library. Charlie Brown tries to explain to him that everyone is lonely in some place or other. "Where is that place for you?" Linus asks. Charlie ponders the question for a moment, then answers: "Earth."

The economist Herbert Stein, eyeing the new hordes of men and women who walk city sidewalks with cell phones at their ears and mouths, decided that our need for information on demand is as primitive an instinct as any animal can have.

"It is the way of keeping contact with someone, anyone, who will reassure you that you are not alone. You may think that you are checking on your portfolio, but deep down you are checking on your existence. I rarely see people using cell phones on the sidewalk when they are in the company of other people. It is being alone that they cannot stand. And for many people, being alone really means being without Mommy ...."

A Freudian economist! Their Walkmans, he says, are a way of regaining the steady, comforting beat from the lullabies of infancy. After all, we were born connected. Solitude came with maturity. -James Gleick, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999), 92-93.

Out of the great connection with God and his people, Jesus comes across Galilee calling us. Follow me. Come and See. You will greater things.

Jesus says: The time is fulfilled. The Kingdom of God has come near you. Repent and believe the Good News.

The Kingdom of God has come near you. One translation says the Kingdom of God is at hand, as near as your hand. Mark wants us to see that in Jesus the Kingdom of God is near, close.

In Jesus, the Kingdom of God has swept across us, and across the world, like a great wind or breath, like a wave of light and love.

Of course, when Israel was becoming the people of God, they felt disconnected and lost and afraid. They cried out to God for a King, like the other nations. We want to be like the others, they said. God argued with them about this. But, out of love for his people God acquiesced and gave them a king: Saul.

They wanted, we want, a kingdom with boundaries and limits, with protections and securities. We want a kingdom that will take care of us in this world, a kingdom that will not leave us at risk.

Now, in Mark, Jesus comes at the right time. The Kingdom of God is timely. The Kingdom comes at the “right” time. It’s Kairos time, in the Greek, special time, pregnant time. In time, the Kingdom of God comes with its connections to eternal time, with history. The Kingdom of God, which you’ve been waiting for, looking for, praying for, is here, now.

It's timely. This Kingdom is also available right now. You are living in the Kingdom of God with all the gifts and power that are yours. Reach out and receive it; take it.

The average person may think that the Kingdom of God is distant and you have to jump all kinds of obstacles to get to it, but no, in Jesus Christ, the Kingdom has come here to you. It is available to all who want to be connected to God, to Jesus.

Through us, through the church, no one must feel outside this love and grace, this Kingdom of God. It is available as a gift to all.

This Kingdom is also decisive. Repent, says Jesus. It echoes John the Baptist, who came earlier. All who meet Jesus are called to a decision. Those to whom Jesus preached needed hope. They were ground under foot by the Romans, without freedom. They were under the legalistic whip of the Pharisees. They were beaten down by poverty and taxes.

Jesus says: Repent. Turn around. Come. The Kingdom of God has come hear you.

Then, Jesus says: Believe in the Good News. Elton Trueblood used to say: “To be a Christian is to bet your life that Christ is right.”

Sometimes we stumble over the simplicity of this Kingdom. You are called. Jesus is speaking to you. Follow me. Come and See. The Kingdom of God has come near you. You. Now, believe.

You can trust the news that starts out as Good News, and becomes Better News, and then the Best News.

The Kingdom is near you. And, in this Kingdom you are connected to God in a way that means that you belong and thrive wherever you are on earth.

The empires of the world, as Napoleon said in a moment of candor, depend on force. They have come and gone; and the ones that now exist will follow in their turn. They make fear and death their weapons, and they themselves die when the fear they have generated turns into violent rebellion. Jesus, at his ascension, was given by the creator God an empire built on love. As we ourselves open our lives to the warmth of that love, we begin to lose our fear; and as we begin to lose our fear, we begin to become people through whom the power of that love can flow out into the world around that so badly needs it. … And as the power of that love replaces the love of power, so in a measure, anticipating the last great day, God’s kingdom comes, and God’s will is done, on earth as it is in heaven.

—N. T. Wright, Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Discipleship (Eerdmans, 2014).

If we only had eyes to see and ears to hear and wits to understand, we would know that the Kingdom of God in the sense of holiness, goodness, beauty is as close as breathing and is crying out to be born both within ourselves and within the world; we would know that the Kingdom of God is what we all of us hunger for above all other things even when we don’t know its name or realize that it’s what we’re starving to death for. The Kingdom of God is where our best dreams come from and our truest prayers. We glimpse it at those moments when we find ourselves being better than we are and wiser than we know. We catch sight of it when at some moment of crisis a strength seems to come to us that is greater than our own strength. The Kingdom of God is where we belong. It is home, and whether we realize it or not, I think we are all of us homesick for it.

—Frederick Buechner, The Clown in The Belfry (HarperCollins, 1992).

Here in the light of Epiphany, Jesus says: the Kingdom of God has come hear, as close as your hand, close, near. It’s yours. Take it.