UNTIL THE KINGDOM COMES

October 5, 1986, World Communion
11:00 a.m. Worship Service

John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

"...a plan...to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on
earth." ~-Ephesians 1:10 (RSV)

Scripture
Ephesians 1:3-16

In the Broadway show, The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe,
one of Lily Tomlin's wonderful characters is Trudy, a street person whose
transition from creative consultant for an ad agency to bag lady has
included bizarre but often remarkably wise insights into the human
condition. In one sequence Trudy is pondering the enigma of what Paul
Tillich used to call “being itself"--the meaning of life--the mystery of
life: “meaning-mystery: mystery-meaning." “What," she asks the audience,
“if there is no meaning? That would be the reali mystery of life, wouldn't
it?"

Trudy's life is given both mystery and meaning by her relationship
with her “space chums," extraterrestrial creatures with whom she has been
speaking ever since her mental biow-up. People laugh at the line - but it
is nervous laughter because the question of the meaning of life, the
purpose of human life is, of course, the abiding human question: What's it
all about? What does it mean?

It is the question scholars ponder and great literature addresses:
"Life--it is a tale told by an idiot,...full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing." “Human life is like the grass which is renewed in the morning and
fades and withers by evening." Socrates, the Psalmist, Shakespeare,

Charlie Brown's friend Lucy--all have something to say on the subject.

The Christian approach to the uitimate purpose and destiny of life is
called eschatology. It is not a precise discipline. In fact, there is a
sense in which the more precise our eschatology becomes, the less useful it
is. Of course there have always been those who have seemed to know exactly
where we are going and when we are going to get there. The Bible, however,
is less precise. The purpose and direction of history is set forth in a
variety of images but there is one common motif in all of them and it is
harmony, peace, reconciliation. Faith suggests that what God has in mind,
God's plan as it were, is getting back together that which is separated,
healing that which is broken, reconciling that which is alienated.

The preface to the Letter to the Ephesians which we heard this morning
is a doxology to the God of creation whose purpose it is to bring things
back together. Paul uses big words and big ideas to evoke our praise for
God. From ail eternity God has planned to love us and reconcile us and
bring us together. It is no afterthought. Reconciliation is not something

behaviorally is a matter of intense discussion and debate and a wide

variety of conclusions. But on World Communion Sunday, as we sit and
ponder the words of Scripture about God's plan to bring together into
harmony the broken parts of creation, we discover that doing nothing,
saying nothing, thinking nothing is not an alternative.

God's plan is to reunite that which is divided. God's will for us is
that we live in harmony, that we live as if the barriers that divide us
from one another were already down. It is global - and that means political
and economic but it is also very personal. We are created, we believe, not
for isolation, but for relationship. Alienation, separateness is not our
natural state. We are individuals when we are together.

I discovered a new hero this summer. His name is Dodge Morgan. He
boarded a 60-foot sailboat last year and fulfilled a life-time goal by
sailing around the world alone. His adventure covered 25,671 miles and
took 150 days. I was fascinated by his answer when a reporter asked what
he had learned: What he learned was, first, that solo navigation wasn't
all that much fun. And second, “All we have," he said, “is the few people
we have direct contact with--family, friends, whoever... As beautiful as
solitude can be, as close to the truth as you can come in the soul's
presence at sea, I've made up my mind that the race I really want to belong
to is the human race." [People Magazine, Summer, 1986, p. 40]

We were made for each other, apparently. T:he deepest insights into
our humanity suggest that we are most human when we are in relationship.

Joseph Sittler, Emeritus Professor of Theology at the University of
Chicago, has published a wonderful new bock of reflections and essays in
which he concludes, after eight decades of life, "a solitary person doesn't
have a chance of becoming a person..... The meaning of the Adam and Eve
story, in particular the introduction of Eve, is not simply to say that it
takes two to tango. The Eve story communicates to all of us the meaning of

the German proverb: 'Ein Mensch ist kein Mensch': a solitary person is no
person: personhood is relation and presupposes another for its
actualization." [Gravity and Grace, p. 47]

That's not a psychologist or an enabler of personal growth and
sensitivity groups. That's a very distinguished and scholarly theologian
speaking on the basis of scriptural tradition--we have been created for
relationship, tc be together. We need each other--in order to be... The
impetus, the internal energy for reconciliation and healing and unity is
already in each of us.

On the night of his arrest and betrayal Jesus took bread and wine, and
using words and gestures we have never been able to forget, he broke it
and poured it out, and they ate and drank together and among the
unforgettable words he said were “I shall not drink of the fruit of the
wine until the Kingdom of God comes..."

The in-between times, before God's Kingdom comes in its fullness, are
characterized by brokenness and division--but also by signs, by hints,
giimpses, of healing and reconciliation. The time before the Kingdom comes
is characterized by alienation but also occasions of coming together,

10/5/86 3

God thought of after he noticed how terribly broken human life can be.
From al] eternity, Paul suggests, God had this in mind. In Christ, God
brings together the separated pieces of creation. It's a big theology: it
stretches our minds a bit. Markus Barth called the Christ of this passage
a "Cosmic Christ." He wrote:

"Jesus Christ has to do with wherever divisions exist between
races and nations, between outsiders and insiders.... Christ has
broken down every division."

There is a behavioral imperative in that cosmic theology. To believe it is
true is to be under mandate to act as if it were true. Barth wrote:

"To confess Jesus Christ is to affirm the abolition and end of
division and hostility, the end of separation and segregation, the
end of enmity and contempt, the end of every sort of ghetto."

[The Broken Wall, Markus Barth, p. 43]

I was in residence last week at Union Theological Seminary in New
York--and all week long the most remarkable dynamic kept happening. I
' would work on this passage in the morning and then it would be illustrated
for me. On Wednesday the theme of the chapel service was the peace of God
which crosses all barriers. Students from the Philippines, Japan, South
Africa, Ghana, Malawi, India and Scotland each talked about the power of
the Gospel to break down the barriers that divide us: from the caste
system of old India, to tribal customs in Africa which made it very
difficult for the woman and man from Malawi to be married, to the South
African's experience of apartheid and the Scottish young woman's
experience of racial and imperial pride. It was startling to see the
manifestations, in life, of what the Biblical writer clearly struggles to
put into words: "a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in
him, things in heaven and things on earth...."

The temptation is to keep that safely abstract, to nod in casual
agreement with the Biblical rhetoric about the unification of ali things
and then to go our merry way, perpetuating, enjoying, profiting from,
hiding behind, all the barriers that divide and alienate. the temptation
is to conclude that what the New Testament means and what faith is about
and what God wants of us is something like peace of mind: a private,
internal sense of comfort that essentially allows the status guo in the
world in spite of the glorious and sometimes revolutionary promises of the
Gospel. The temptation is to refuse the difficult task of asking ourselves
about the economic and political and social--as well as religious-—-
implications of reconciliation.

The world is broken. The barriers are high. East/West, Rich/Poor,
Black/White, Men/Women, Christian/Muslim, Catholic/Protestant. The issue
for Christians is whether those barriers are acceptable: whether faith in
Jesus Christ, for instance, is compatible with a system of government
which, on the basis of race, denies basic humanity and human rights that we
have said we believe are ordained of God. That's why the churches are
exercised over apartheid. That system institutionalizes a barrier which
Christians believe Jesus Christ came to overcome, and has already
destroyed. Apartheid is offensive theologically. What that means

10/5/86: 2

harmony, peace. They happen often enough to give hope when we have about
given up on the possibility of human beings ever actually living in peace.

Gn Monday the chapel service at Union Seminary was led by two members
of the staff: Kosuke Koyama, a native of Japan, and Robert Handy, recently
retired, distinguished professor of American Church History, whose books
many of-us have long admired. Kosuke Koyama was born in 1933. He was 12
years old when fire bombing destroyed Tokyo. He recalls it vividly. He
lived just outside the city and will remember until the day he dies the
fire raining from the sky. Robert Handy was a chaplain on an American
troop ship, stationed in Japan immediately after the war and in the early
months of occupation. Handy recalls the wariness and fear and hatred which
the occupying troops--including himself--experienced during the slow
Pacific voyage. He recalls the weariness and anguish of troops on the
ship on the westward leg of his mission: young soldiers and marines, some
of whom had been in combat 500 consecutive days, many of whom had watched
buddy after buddy die, and all of whom wanted to know from him, the
chaplain, why? He stood in the chapel at Union Seminary in the early weeks
of his distinguished emeritus status beside a Japanese man and told us
that his faith had been brittle in. those days, that he participated in the
hatred and fear of the Japanese, and that he had despaired for the human
race, He told about visiting Tokyo and witnessing the sight he will never
forget--the endless gray of a city devastated as far as the eye could see,
where 90,000 had died in one four-hour period. He shared the meaning and
how it was a spiritual crisis for him: "What help is there - if civilized
nations can do this to each other?"

And then, Professor Handy said, he visited a Buddhist shrine where
Japanese families traditionally visited and enjoyed a day together. He was
wearing the uniform of an officer in the U. S. Army--the enemy, whom the
Japanese had reason to hate and fear. He was leery, a little afraid to
encounter Japanese civilians, and how he did that at the shrine, and how
they nodded at him, extending wary but genuine respect, and how the people
who were the enemy became people and how he experienced the reality of
humanity's unity, and how he knew the power of Jesus Christ to overcome
high and venerable barriers.

Kosuke Koyama read Scripture next, the incident in Luke where Jesus
promises his disciples that if they order a tree to be rooted up and tossed
into the sea, it would actually happen.

Jt was a powerful moment for anyone in the room whose life was touched
by the Second World War. It was an equally powerful moment for anyone who
ever wondered about the human prospect and the relevance of the Gospel of
Jesus Christ...in this time until the Kingdom comes... It was testimony to
the hope we celebrate this day as we break the bread and drink the cup of
World Communion.

The heart of God has been laid bare, the Apostle wrote. There has been
a plan at work throughout eternity. In our time, in God's love, you and I
are part of that plan. It is "a plan to unite all things in him, things in
heaven and things on earth..."

So let us come to table. Amen.

10/57/86- 4