How Not to Conquer the World

Fellow Citizens! I hope this note finds you encouraged in your quest to change the world, or to put it more correctly, encouraged as you live more and more by faith into a world that has already been changed by the coming, the death, the resurrection and exaltation of King Jesus. I, like many of you, am getting ready to celebrate July the 4^th (while on vacation) and I think my sermon said about all I wanted to say on the topic.  But I leave you these words from NT Wright to ponder further on the topic of our heavenly citizenship and our role on earth:

This is the point at which a great deal of Jesus’s own kingdom agenda comes into its own.  His great Sermon on the Mount opens with the Beatitudes, which are normally read either as a special form of “ Christian ethic” (“This is how you are to behave, if you want to be really special people”) or as the rules you must keep in order to “go to heaven when you die.”  This latter view has been reinforced by the standard misreading of the first Beatitude.  “Blessings on the poor in spirit! The kingdom of heaven is yours” (Matt. 5:3) doesn’t mean, “You will go to heaven when you die.”  It means you will be one of those through whom God’s kingdom, heaven’s rule, begins to appear on earth as in heaven.  The Beatitudes are the agenda for kingdom people.   They are not simply about how to behave, so that God will do something nice to you.  They are about the way in which Jesus wants to rule the world.  He wants to do it through this sort of people—people, actually, just like himself (read the Beatitudes again and see).  The Sermon on the Mount is a call to Jesus’s followers to take up their vocation as light to the world, as salt to the earth—in other words, as people through whom Jesus’s kingdom vision is to become reality.  This is how to be the people through whom the victory of Jesus over the powers of sin and death is to be implemented in the wider world. 

The work of the kingdom, in fact, is summed up pretty well in those Beatitudes.  When God wants to change the world, he doesn’t send in the tanks.  He sends in the meek, the mourners, those who are hungry and thirsty for God’s justice, the peacemakers, and so on.  Just as God’s whole style, his chosen way of operating, reflects his generous love, sharing his rule with his human creatures, so the way in which those humans then have to behave if they are to be agents of Jesus’s lordship reflects in its turn the same sense of vulnerable, gentle, but powerful self-giving love.  It is because of this that the world has been changed by William Wilberforce, campaigning tirelessly to abolish slavery; by Desmond Tutu, working and praying not just to end apartheid, but to  end it in such a way as to produce a reconciled, forgiving South Africa; by Cicely Saunders, starting a hospice for terminally ill patients ignored by the medical profession and launching a movement that has, within a generation, spread right around the globe (N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus, 218-219).

- Pastor Bo Bannister