Here is my draft of my message for November 25.  I will try to add my story when it is done.

Empire of God:  John  18:33-37

Jack was a compulsive gambler.  One night, as he was leaving a casino, he stepped in front of a truck and was killed.  He found himself on a riverboat casino with every kind of gambling from slots and roulette wheels to dice and poker tables.  Every time he gambled, he won.  After a week of winning at everything he walked over to a person who seemed to be an angel.  He said, "Heaven is nice, but it is boring to win all the time." The person replied, "Who told you this was heaven?"

We humans imagine other places and other worlds as being similar to ours in some way, and so we tell jokes about heaven and hell that reflect our reality in particular ways: casinos, bowls of soup, actual banquets, houses, cars, jewels, gold paving, and so on.  The author of revelations created pictures of a new Jerusalem that deliberately pushed imaginations to the limit. Try to imagine a city that is a cube that is 1500 miles or 2400 km on a side:  Its top would be about 8 times as high as the space station. If it accommodated 10 billion people, each person would have a space 2.4 km by 2.4 km by 240 m high.  John's description of this new city of God points to it actually being unimaginable, and beyond comparison to anything we know.  In the same way, the empire of God or empire of heaven proclaimed by Jesus was almost beyond the imagination of his listeners.  The author of the Gospel of John presents a carefully crafted dialogue between Jesus and Pilate, almost certainly different from the actual dialogue from accounts of the time of Pilate's character and practices.  John's construction of that dialogue can be interpreted in several ways.  The interpretation I prefer is that John wanted to establish  that Jesus was a ruler, a king, but one whose rule was unlike that of worldly rulers such as Pilate or Caesar. 

The question about what is truth implies that everything about Pilate and the Roman Empire and the self-serving religious hierarchy is not truth.

What do we know about the truth offered by Jesus?  Ghandi led a group of Indian peasants to make salt for themselves by the sea, an activity met with great brutality by the British military in which they severely beat hundreds of protesters determined to make salt for themselves instead of paying the British salt tax.  This march was called the salt satyagraha or truth-force, and was the first of several actions of civil disobedience which eventually led to Britain finally letting India become an independent nation.  Other protests by Ghandi included weaving his own cotton cloth, an activity prohibited by a British government seeking to protect its own textile industry.  The Occupy movement is seen by others and myself as a modern example of a satyagraha, and like the ones which led to Indian independence, has been widely criticized and attacked by established interests. 

What did Jesus say about the empire of heaven?  The concept of being clean or unclean becomes irrelevant  through his story of the woman who took some yeast to make bread, or comparing the empire of heaven to a mustard plant -- both yeast and mustard were considered unclean.  There will be no one without a home or food.  There will be no hierarchy if the one who is first must be servant of all.  There will be no gender discrimination or holding on to grudges.  There will be no place for fear or greed or hate or violence.

And all this will be true because people will no longer see the well-being of others as unconnected with their own lives.  There will be no avenging armies of angels.

There are Christians who eagerly anticipate being saved and watching others perish.  There are denominations rooted in the conviction that their members will be save while others perish, and find pride and solace in that conviction.

Yet the God who wept at the death of the thousands of Egyptians who drowned in the sea while pursuing the Israelites called us to a far different attitude through Jesus.

The empire of God will be one in which the horizontal direction of humanity will be full of love and compassion because we will be thoroughly immersed in the vertical direction of relationship with God.  In our unity with God, we will know to the smallest cells in our bodies our unity with one another.  We will feel no joy in the suffering of others, no matter who they are.

The Lordship of Jesus will be visible in our adoption of his willingness to give what we have and are to the well-being of others, to love one another as he loved us. As we consider what we need to do to participate in the empire of God, here is a quote from The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Callahan.  I needed to get this quote from the internet as I lent, gave away, or misplaced my copy of the book.

“When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.  To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God's grace means. As Thomas Merton put it, "A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God."
The gospel of grace nullifies our adulation of televangelists, charismatic superstars, and local church heroes. It obliterates the two-class citizenship theory operative in many American churches. For grace proclaims the awesome truth that all is gift. All that is good is ours not by right but by the sheer bounty of a gracious God. While there is much we may have earned--our degree and our salary, our home and garden, a Miller Lite and a good night's sleep--all this is possible only because we have been given so much: life itself, eyes to see and hands to touch, a mind to shape ideas, and a heart to beat with love. We have been given God in our souls and Christ in our flesh. We have the power to believe where others deny, to hope where others despair, to love where others hurt. This and so much more is sheer gift; it is not reward for our faithfulness, our generous disposition, or our heroic life of prayer. Even our fidelity is a gift, "If we but turn to God," said St. Augustine, "that itself is a gift of God."
My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.”
 

We are loved by God to a degree that stretches our capacity to understand.   We are called to accept and embrace that love, and to let it flow out to others, so we may experience life in the empire of God through that flowing of love.  May the Spirit walk with us and encourage us as we  learn day by day to more often visit and live in that empire through the flow of love.  Amen.