What is the Kingdom of God like? This is a question that people of faith have wrestled with and argued about for generations. In the Gospels, Jesus devotes a great deal of time to spinning parables that compare the reign of God to images and situations taken from the ordinary lives of his listeners. The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, a pearl, a woman who loses a coin, a sower; it is like everything imaginable and like nothing we know. The kingdom of God is a bit of an enigma – close enough for us to glimpse in our own lives, but not fully realized yet. It is the dream that God has for us, the world God longs to build among us. But, while it gets a great deal of attention in the Gospels, wondering about the nature of the Kingdom of God is not unique to the time of Jesus. These questions of authority, kingship, and God’s role in it all have their roots deep in the stories of the people of Israel, including the portion of 1 Samuel we heard today.

        Where the Gospels use parables to describe the Kingdom of God, 1 Samuel offers us a story: a story of how God’s kingdom, God’s dream – plays out on the canvas of human history, complete with plenty of plot twists and unexpected detours. In this story, tension occurs when God’s dream collides with human ambition and greed. God adapts, listens, and responds, bending the arc of human history toward justice. Here, God and the people of Israel desire two incompatible things – and through the divine engagement with that tension we glimpse what the Kingdom of God is like.

        The issue at hand is a big one: should Israel have a king or not? A human king, that is, distinct from the kingship of God. That question was the subject of last week’s reading and it’s crucial backstory for the portion of the narrative we read today. Basically, Israel wants to be just like its neighboring nation states, with a king and a palace and all the pomp and circumstance of a monarchy. Israel wants to fit in. They’re tired of being the awkward kid at the cafeteria table, with uncool clothes and a weird lunch. But God has dreams for Israel that go well beyond such conformity. God knows what happens when authority is invested in one, all-powerful human with no checks and balances and God is not a fan of this kind of kingship.

        The conversation that ensues between God and Israel (here reluctantly represented by the Prophet Samuel) is awfully reminiscent of deliberations between exasperated parents of adolescents who have been worn down by constant wheedling. At the end of the argument, God acquiesces – “Fine – you want a king? You got a king. But you’re probably not gonna like it…”

        And that is where our story picks up today. Under the rule of their first King, Saul, Israel is, unsurprisingly, in the midst of growing pains. They are struggling under the capricious and unpredictable rule of their monarch. Just as God predicted, being royal subjects is not quite what the Israelites dreamed of. So, when Saul’s leadership starts to spiral out of control, God intervenes, rejecting Saul as king, and sending Samuel on what should be a treasonous fool’s errand – to visit Jesse the Bethlehemite and appoint a new king from among his sons. While the old King is still living and reigning. Which is exactly as dangerous as it sounds – Samuel fears for his life.

        God’s dream does not hold space for petty tyrants and egomaniacal leaders. God’s dream does not play by the rulebook of human nation states and governments, where rule is inherited through bloodlines and continues regardless of the injustices being done. God’s kingdom does not look like the rigid power structures of this world. God’s dream is adaptive and responsive – when things don’t go according to plan (and they often don’t), God drafts a plan B. God is not afraid to do a new thing; to shake up the existing order; to seek justice, come whence it may, cost what it will. God’s dream is infinitely more than what we can ask for or imagine. And it almost always comes as a surprise.

        In pursuit of God’s dream, Samuel finds himself standing before a line of 7 potential monarchs, ready to anoint a new king from among Jesse’s sons. Seven is a significant number in the Bible, signifying wholeness and completion. And yet, the irony is, despite appearances to the contrary, the picture here is not complete. Even with so many options on the table, Samuel does something extraordinary: he turns to Jesse and asks, “don’t you have any more sons? God hasn’t chosen any of these.” Here it is: the dream of God bursting the boundaries of our narrow assumptions. Where we see limitations, God sees possibilities. Where we are quick to settle for scarcity, God pulls back the curtains and reveals an abundance beyond our wildest imaginations.

        And in that abundance, God chooses the person who wasn’t even thought worthy to be in the room where it happened. Israel’s new king is the youngest, least experienced, least qualified candidate for the job. Someone has to go get David from the fields, that’s how much of an afterthought he was. God makes a way where we fear there is no way. God does not see as we mortals see, but with a sight that transcends our limited imaginations.

        What does this mean for us? What does the appointment of a king thousands of years ago tell us about the inbreaking of God’s dream here and now? Every one of us knows what it feels like to make a decision under constraints, to feel stuck between a rock and a hard place, to feel like we have no good options but need to pick something anyway because life moves on. For so many of us, this scarcity mindset has been the backdrop for the past fifteen months of the pandemic. We have all, in various ways, felt the sting of loss, and the pain of options disappearing into nothingness. We have watched our carefully-made plans be shattered by circumstances outside of our control. We have felt helpless against the raging forces of both the virus and the pandemic of racism, inequity, and violence that it exposed within our society. We have needed to compromise, to settle, to sacrifice. Perhaps we have wondered where God was throughout it all.

        The cost of the pandemic is incalculable. But the past year of extended isolation and restrictions have not only impacted our economy and our healthcare system. On a much more intimate level, it has also shrunk our imaginations and dulled our dreams. When we feel the walls of the world pressing in around us on all sides, our instinct is often to shut down. And yet, it is in these very situations where it is most important to open ourselves, to listen for the voice of God, whispering in our ear, calling us out of our fear, calling us to look again when we think we’ve identified all the options. Because God is always, always ready to shatter the walls of our narrow-minded thinking and reveal the limitless possibilities of God’s dream. God is always doing a new thing. The only problem is, for us to see it, we need to reckon with our brittle assumptions and allow ourselves to be surprised.

        So, as we continue to emerge from the wilderness of this pandemic, as we survey our options and make plans for what comes next, I invite each of us to ask with a truly open heart: In our discernment and deliberations, what options have we left off the table? What have we assumed is impossible? Who’s not in the room? Who have we written off or excluded? If we want to discover God’s dream for us, if we want to know what the Kingdom of God is like, we need to begin by searching in the least likely places. If we want to be renewed, we first must let God kindle our imaginations. People may think we’re being ridiculous. I certainly imagine that’s what Jesse the Bethlehmite and his 7 eldest sons thought when Samuel picked David to be king. But God’s economy does not follow the rules of our world. Again and again, God surprises us by lifting up those people and circumstances that we are quick to dismiss, turning the world as we know it upside down.

        What is the Kingdom of God like? What is God’s dream for us? What spiritual debris do we have to clean out of our hearts to make room for it? Where are our own imaginations pinched by fear, greed, or prejudice? Because, where we see binaries, God sees limitless possibilities. Where we feel constrained, God stands ready to liberate us into a reimagined way of being. May we trust in that divine abundance and find delight in being surprised by God’s dream. Amen.

“Holy Father, protect them in your name… so that they may be one” (Jn. 17)

If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, what would you say to your friends? How would you say it? The last words of Jesus in the Gospel of John are not a linear argument building to a logical conclusion. Instead they have the form of an ancient rhetorical device called amplification.

This speech and the three letters of John share a similar style of cyclical repetition. They use the same vocabulary of hyperbole and exaggeration. They draw stark contrasts between light and darkness, life and death, love and hate, good and evil, truth and falsehood. The goal is to make God’s love really live in our hearts.

This is Jesus’ prayer to God for the sake of his friends who do not feel ready to go on without him. He says, “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one” (Jn. 17). Different followers of Jesus have different ideas of what it means to be one. You will certainly encounter many who believe that being one means thinking and believing all the same things.

But I believe we are one in the way a family is one. My mother’s family first immigrated to North America when her oldest brother decided to go to Princeton instead of Oxford. That was where he learned to play the ukulele and Fats Waller on the piano. He married the daughter of an Anglican bishop and had a long successful career in finance. In retirement he went sailing and took up photography. My mother’s sister on the other hand had an entirely different personality. She married a working class man. The two of them were converted in Northern England by Mormon missionaries who convinced them to move to Heber, Arizona where she was passionate about dietary supplements.

Three totally different people – one family. That for me is what it means to be one. The calendar of saints shows this, as does the art in our Cathedral. In here we have everyone from the vast lancet window in the apse of Queen Margaret of Scotland to the tiny plate on the step below the baptismal font honoring the former Dean’s wife Janette Limmerick Bartlett. We have stained glass windows with Mary Magdalene and Bridgid, the soldier Martin of Tours along with Walter Rauschenbusch and the Christian Socialists.

Today I want to talk about three figures at the bottom of the Theological Reform Window: a Lutheran, a Roman Catholic and a Jew. This is the first sermon in the history of the world about Paul Tillich, Karl Rahner and Martin Buber.

1. Paul Tillich (1886-1965) was a friend from Bishop Pike’s New York City days and he preached here at Grace Cathedral. Tillich’s father was a conservative Lutheran pastor who sent him to boarding school when he was twelve. During those years Tillich felt lonely and consoled himself by reading the Bible. During World War One Tillich served as a military chaplain. He won the Iron Cross for bravery and had to be hospitalized three times for combat trauma. While he was away at the front his wife became pregnant with another man’s baby.

After the war Tillich become famous as a theologian, but during the 1930’s he took a strong position against Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. They removed him from his university position. The German-American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) was able to secure a professorship at Union Seminary in New York City. So at the age of 47, not knowing English very well, Tillich immigrated to the United States. What he produced during the rest of his life is nothing short of remarkable.

In the first volume of his book Systematic Theology Tillich described his “method of correlation.”[1] He believed that the deepest existential questions of modern life find a kind of answer in traditional Christian symbols. To make those symbols accessible he translates them into the language of modern existentialism.[2] He calls God, “the Ground of Being.” He calls Jesus, “the New Being.” He refers to sin as “estrangement,” to grace as “being accepted.”

For Tillich God is not a supreme being. God is the basis for all of existence. Human beings feel a kind of connection to God. The existential problem, the source of our anxiety, is that we are finite beings with a connection to and longing for an infinite which is beyond our control (the philosopher Martin Heidegger called this “Dasein.” I translate this as the idea that we are the only beings we know whose existence can be a kind of problem).

So God is the transcendent “wholly other” (which Tillich calls, “Das ganz Andere”) and transpersonal. God is also personal. Tillich writes at length about the human experience of doubt as a necessary element of faith. We may at times have doubts about our personal relation to God, but for Tillich, behind this there is always the “God above God,” the “Ground of Being.”

Paul Tillich explains how modern doubts fit into faith, but personally he worried that he had fallen short in what he had done with his own life. When I was in my twenties I heard his son talk about this. Tillich’s most famous sermon is called, “You Are Accepted.”[3] Tillich’s son said that this was the message about God that his father most needed to hear and that we all need to understand.

2. Karl Rahner (1904-1984). Karl Rahner called modestly called himself an “amateur theologian.” He wrote and edited thousands of publications and played a central role in the Vatican II Council which reformed Roman Catholicism. Last week I talked about a prayer practice called Lectio Divina. Rahner’s own Ignatian prayer profoundly influenced every element of his thought.

Unlike Tillich he opposed a systematic approach to theology. He writes, “what is called knowledge in everyday parlance, is only a small island in a vast sea that has not been traveled. It is a floating island, and it might be more familiar to us than the sea, but ultimately it is borne by the sea, and only because it is can we be borne by it…Hence the existentiall question… is this: “which do [you] love more, the small island of [your] so-called knowledge or the sea of infinite mystery.”[4]

Rahner used an expression from Gregory of Nyssa and characterized his own theology as “Mystagogy” that is, “an initiation into the mystery of God’s grace.”[5] Not only is God a mystery but we are mysterious to ourselves. More specifically how we know involves not just the thing we know but who we are that know it.[6]

Like Paul Tillich, Rahner connects the Christian tradition to the modern situation through what he also calls a “method of correlation.” The difference between them is that for Tillich this modern (existential) situation is the ambiguity of questions about meaning, while for Rahner it is the divine grace that we encounter in the experience of transcending ourselves.

According to Rahner, all people find themselves directed toward an absolute mystery which what we cannot control. This transcendental experience lies at the heart of all the major world religions. To use the words of Jesus, this is how we are one.

3. Martin Buber (1878-1965) came from a long line of notable rabbis. When his parents first divorced he spent time with his grandfather, a famous Jewish scholar. As he came of age he experienced a kind of personal crisis reading the works of Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. This changed the direction of his academic career and led him to be more engaged in the secular world than his grandfather.

For a few years at the turn of the twentieth century Buber was active in supporting Zionism. Although he soon returned to more academic work, for the rest of his life he supported a vision of a bi-national Jewish-Arab state even if Jews were in the minority. He would have been horrified by the events of this week and by any unequal treatment of Arabs in the region. After Hitler’s rise to power, Buber resigned his university position and then five years later he settled in Palestine where he lived as a venerated Israeli scholar (nominated for Nobel prizes in Literature (10 times) and Peace (7 times).

Buber very much admired the Hasidic ideal of a life lived in the unconditional presence of God without separation between our daily habits and religious experiences.[7] Also influenced by existentialism, in 1923 Buber published I and Thou. For him existence is encounter, it involves modes of consciousness that arise from our interaction with other people, objects, reality as a whole and God.

We experience two utterly distinct and often opposed kinds of relationships. What he calls the “I-You” relationship and the “I-It” relationship. I-You encounters respect the dignity, value and unique perspective of the other. We allow that person to really be themselves beyond our ideas of that person. In this encounter of mutuality and respect we encounter something that cannot be measured or turned into a symbol. It is the way we practically experience the infinite.

An I-It relationship treats the other as an object for our  own use and gratification – as if there is nothing more in the world than our own self, as if our well-being does not depend on the independence of others. In an I-It relationship we never move beyond our idea of the other, we never really meet the other. It is merely a relationship with our self.

Building on this idea the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) writes about the demand that another person’s face makes on us. From a person’s expressions we can see some of what a person is experiencing and thinking, but the whole of that person remains a sacred mystery to us. He calls Ethics “first philosophy” because how we treat that person with a face is far more important than anything else we might believe about the world.

What do these three thinkers share? The horrors of the twentieth century and the existentialist philosophy that responded to this suffering. They all take seriously the modern experience of doubt. Despite this they have an abiding faith in the transcendence of God whether it is experienced as a holiness beyond our anxious questions, the miraculous process of transcending our self, and the holy encounter with the other.

We are pretty sure that we are not going to die tomorrow, in fact one might even say that we are going to begin living again, more richly this time, I think, after COVID. At in-person worship these last two weeks I’ve learned something that I’ll never forget. More than ever before I’ve been giving communion to people who are experiencing deep emotion, who are weeping. This new life will have its richness and challenges. But whether we are Palestinians or Israelis, Evangelicals or atheists, Trump supporters or Biden voters we are one human family. We are one.

[1] Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume One (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1950) 59ff.

[2] This is a bit of an oversimplification. Tillich sees both the difficulty and importance of Christian symbols in the modern world. Tillich writes, “There are few words more strange than “sin” and “grace.” They are strange because they are so well-known. During the centuries they have received distorting connotations, and have lost so much of their genuine power that we must seriously ask ourselves whether we should use them at all, or whether we should discard them as useless tools. But there is a mysterious fact about the great words of our religious tradition: they cannot be replaced. All attempts to make substitutions including those I have tried myself, have failed to convey the reality that was to be expressed; they have led to shallow and impotent talk…” Paul Tillich, “You Are Accepted,” The Shaking of the Foundations (NY: Charles Scribner’s, 1948) 153-4.

[3] Paul Tillich, “You Are Accepted,” The Shaking of the Foundations (NY: Charles Scribner’s, 1948) 153-163.

[4] Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity. Tr. William V. Dych (NY: Crossroad, 1978) 22.

[5] James C. Livingston, Francis Schussler Fiorenza with Sarah Coakley and James H. Evans, Modern Christian Thought, Volume Two, Second Edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000) 211.

[6] “The knowing possession of knowledge as such, as distinguished from its objectified object, and the knowing possession of self are characteristic of all knowledge. In knowledge not only is something known, but the subject’s knowing is always co-known.

In the simple and original act of knowledge, whose attention is focused upon some object which encounters it, the knowing that is co-known and the knowing subject that is co-known are not objects of the knowledge. Rather the consciousness of the act of knowing something and the subject’s consciousness of itself, that is, the subject’s presence to itself, are situated so to speak at the other pole of the single relationship between the knowing subject and the known object.” Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity. Tr. William V. Dych (NY: Crossroad, 1978) 18.

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Buber