A Taste of the Kingdom

​I begin with a confession. I love the book of Revelation.
 
If you have ever read Revelation, you know that much of the book is strange and scary. Our world can be like that sometimes, although I am happy to say that I have never experienced anything close to the scale of the trials and tribulations in Revelation. But that is not what I love about Revelation. What I love about Revelation is the happy ending, of which we just heard part.
 
Like the rest of Revelation, the happy ending is mysterious and hard to picture. We get a new, heavenly Jerusalem coming down out of heaven. God Almighty and the Lamb, that’s to say the Father and the Son, will be there, shining with so much holy glory that we won’t need any other light source. The river of the water of life will flow through the city, with the tree of life along its banks. The gates of the city will always be open because nothing unclean or threatening will ever enter.
 
As I say, it’s hard for me to imagine all that, but it certainly sounds great.
 
That, Scripture tells us, is where we are heading. That’s the kingdom of God when it is finally and fully established. That kingdom promise is the basis for Christian hope. We know how our story ends. We know that God wins in the end. We know that life and love and holiness are the final word. That good news gives us courage to live even now as God calls us to live. Even in dark times, that Christian hope, that Christian faith, can endure and can sustain us.
 
That’s already a lot of good news for one morning. But Jesus gives us more good news. The kingdom of God may not be here in all its fullness and glory. But even now we can experience a foretaste of it.
 
In our Gospel reading, Jesus promises that he and the heavenly Father come to us and make their home with us. Jesus promises that the Father will send the Holy Spirit to us in Christ’s name, to teach us and to remind us what Christ has already taught us. Jesus promises to give us his own peace, the peace that passes understanding. Jesus tells us we don’t have to be afraid, no matter what happens.
 
My guess, and my hope, is that we have all experienced that divine presence and peace and courage sometimes. My guess and my hope is that we have all had moments when we rose above our own worst impulses; when we forgave someone who had wounded us, or acted generously and courageously even when it was hard. Those are Holy Spirit moments. Those are moments when the Father and the Son living in us have blessed us. Those are moments when we get a small taste of things to come in God’s kingdom.
 
Those moments come to us as a gift from God. We can’t control them. But we can do a couple of things that make those kingdom moments more likely.
 
For a first one, I turn to an improbable source, the latest Marvel superhero movie Thunderbolts.
 
Another confession, which many of you have heard from me before. I love superhero movies. I especially love superhero movies because Nicholas and I watch them together. I don’t get to see Nicholas nearly as often as I would like, so when he invited me to watch Thunderbolts two weeks ago, I was all in.
 
In general, I think of superhero movies as a guilty pleasure, but what I got that day was almost a parable.
 
The movie plays with images of darkness and light, images we see all through Scripture, including in our reading from Revelation. But what is most relevant for this morning is the evolution of our hero Yelena’s character.
 
The movie begins with Yelena complaining that her life was meaningless, and she was not wrong. Yelena worked for a very questionable employer as a thief and an assassin.
 
As the story unfolds, we see that Yelena is all alone in the world. Along the way, she reconnects with her father, and he comments that the light he used to see in her had gotten dim, which was a serious understatement. Yelena was living in a world without light.
 
But things change for Yelena. She reconnects with her father (who, Nicholas had rightly predicted, I would love!). Yelena finds friends and allies. She gives up her former life and begins using her skills to help people. And not long before the end of the movie, her father sees that her light has come back.
 
What Yelena needed, in her very dark world, wasn’t complicated. Yelena needed people, a community of which she could be a part. And she needed to turn away from her own worst impulses and to a life of service. That’s how she found meaning again.
 
That’s a strategy that can work for us, too.
 
Sometimes our light grows dim. Or, more accurately, sometimes the light of Christ in us gets covered up. It’s as if we have drawn away from God and become blind to God’s kingdom.
 
When that happens, and it happens to most of us sometimes, we need to connect to other people. That’s one of the gifts of Church. We are a community of support for each other. We are people committed to the light of Christ, and to finding that light in each other.
 
And we need to serve, to use the gifts God has given us to meet the needs of the world, in God’s name and with God’s help.
 
When we do those things, when we connect to each other and serve the world, we experience the presence of God in us, and the light grows a little stronger, and we get a little taste of what it will be like in the kingdom of God.
 
Another way to get that kingdom taste, and not one that we are ever likely to see in a superhero movie, is prayer.
 
I don’t exactly have a story on this one, just a left-over feeling. But here is what I have.
 
Several years ago, I was facing a challenge of some kind. At this point, I can’t remember any of the details. But Carrie and I had had a conversation about something that made me anxious. It might have been the decision to move to New England. All I can remember at this point is the anxiety I felt coming out of our conversation.
 
I also felt a compelling need to pray, right then. I know now that need was the Holy Spirit, teaching me and reminding me of what Christ says to us about the power of prayer.
 
So, I said Morning Prayer. And as I prayed, I felt Christ’s peace wash over me, the peace Christ promises in our Gospel reading, the peace that is a little taste of what we will experience in God’s kingdom.
 
I finished praying with a feeling of profound gratitude to God for soothing me when I needed it, for shining light on what could have been a dark time. And I was grateful to the Church for giving me words to pray when I might not have been able to pray on my own.
 
God’s kingdom is available to us, at least in small doses, right now. What we can do to open ourselves up to it is to gather as a community of faith, to live lives of loving service, and to pray. God takes it from there. Thanks be to God! Amen.