The Last Session - Notes

 August 16, 2024

Our final discussion took place dipping our toes in the Garden of Eden, where God first created and placed us and then we screwed up and have been hunting for that Garden ever since.  Surely it is our heavenly home?  (If so, this day it contained donuts, oatmeal raisin cookies, watermelon and drinks.)

Chapter 1 of Genesis is the “In the beginning…” creation story in six days, and on the seventh God rested.  The poetry enters the recasting of the creation story in Chapter 2, where God creates heaven and earth, a garden of Eden, Adam (“means “first man”) and planted Adam in the Garden.  

We listened to what we thought the kingdom of God was the first week when we went around the table and shared our thoughts.

- I think the Kingdom of God is everywhere, all encompassing.

-  I think the Kingdom of God is everywhere, but not necessarily a place, but a decision or a way of living.

- One foot in heaven, one foot on earth, going back and forth.

- I’ve not thought about it an awful lot.  I think there is something there, somebody looking down on me.

- Something to do with love.  That whole John 3, “God is Love”.  When you see the result of love, it grows, and the Kingdom has something to do with expansion of love.

- I haven’t really thought about the Kingdom of God.  I think it must be mostly internal, a spiritual place I can go to.  But that it includes our environment.  I think this community here is part of the Kingdom.

- We’re all children of God, and honoring that Kingdom, and growing the Kingdom of God.  Beyond that, I don’t know.

- I  think the Kingdom of God is the reign of God over His kingdom, which encompasses all things that bow and confess to Him.

- I believe the Kingdom of God is upon us and in us, and I don’t really think about it a lot.

- The Kingdom of God to me is Heaven, and it’s ’up there’ somewhere.  I’m trying to flesh out that definition here.

Having trawled the bible and each other’s thoughts these past 10 weeks, one participant said:  The Kingdom of God is here now and the Kingdom of God is because Jesus came and said the Kingdom is now.  The center of that is Jesus.  God is a gardener and made this beautiful place for us—it is a place and it is waiting for us.”. The name of Jesus had not come up in our initial defining of the Kingdom.  

One of us said, “I feel like every morning when I wake up, I’m in the Kingdom,  I’m being taken care of.  God is watching over me, and God sent me an angel who is with me all the time.”. If envy was not a sin, we all wanted her mornings as our own.  

The Kingdom starts within each of us, with faith.  In the Garden, it became Paradise Lost.  Now we’re in Paradise Finding,  Someday we will be in Paradise Found.

The Kingdom of Heaven is here.  All we have to do is be in it.  We have a freedom of choice as to whether we want to be in it or not.

Noah and the flood and the de-creation story revisited.  God looked around and said this isn’t working, and He flooded the Kingdom out (except for a remnant) and started again.  And God says, “I will never do this again,”—the only covenant in the bible that is all on God.  If God has remorse, this is what remorse looked like.  Did the Kingdom of God come to earth in Jesus?  He is the King of the Kingdom.

You have to allow yourself to enter the Kingdom.  Jesus said, I AM the door.  He is the Way.  The “Light of the World” image at St. Paul’s Cathedral shows Jesus at the door and it only opens one way - we have to open the door.  The Kingdom is here, but we constantly have to strive to be a part of it.

I THINK THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS LIKE A MUSTARD SEED, said one (anonymous) co-facilitator, and followed that with a question:

WHEN DID YOU FIRST MEET THE KINGDOM OF GOD?

We all loved this question, had never thought about it, and we all responded at length and feeling, and everything anybody said became a mustard seed.

May all our mustard seeds mature in the fullness of time in the Garden.

Week 10: August 16 : The Eighth Day

Welcome home.  Again.  Hopefully.

Read and discussion: Genesis chapter 1 

Notes from Today’s Discussion and Next (Last!) Reading

 Week 10 :  August 16: The Eighth Day

Welcome home.  Again,  Hopefully.

➡️Reading:  Genesis, Chapter 2.

⬇️Attached:  discussion notes from Week 9 Thy Kingdom Come

Nobody said tackling Revelation would be easy, but we were chomping to get at it.  What was a little harder was staying with the verses we had (Rev 11:5-19) and not stray into the other parts of this wonderful, difficult, book.  We strayed, sure, but we kept coming back to what the Kingdom of God looks like when it comes again.

(It did not help that a co-facilitator (anonymous) referred to the book as “Revolution”.)

This is not “the word of the Lord”, but a revelation, a dream, a vision by John of Patmos.  It is highly symbolic - that is one way to read it, but even John himself said he didn’t understand all the symbols, an angel had to help him.  Revelation means “uncovering what was previously hidden”.  This vision is the coming again; Jesus is back and triumphant and He wins.  After our reading, is the cosmic battle between good and evil, taking on everything that has happened since the Garden of Eden, the snake.  The Kingdom of God is coming—this is the last call.

You can read it as a message to hold on to the faith.  You can read it as prophesy, this is what’s going to happen.  You can take it as the ongoing conflict between humanity and Satan.  

 We are told in this vision that Jesus wins.  The vision is so hard to decipher that a lot of people decipher it by saying it has already happened, usually by naming a political power.  

Do we get our hope in the Resurrection of Jesus or in the final judgement?  Where is our Christian hope located?  The kingdom of the world has become the Kingdom of our Lord.  That’s the hope.  The Kingdom of God is in this hope.  Will be in this hope.  

What is adversarial to God’s Kingdom today?  Politics is what we think of, where the noise is, but that may be too little.  Sin.  Evil.  The Kingdom will dissolve all the nations; it will be only, all, people.  The battle will be between good and evil.

Putting human processes on top of Revelation doesn’t work. The more you do it, the more you can get misled.  We were getting in trouble doing this in our discussion.  (That’s because we’re human….). In discussing the figure of the anti-Christ (or “a” anti-Christ, as one of a continuing series and battles), what if we said “anti-Kingdom”, could be anybody, could be within us, our actions with the Kingdom, nations’ actions, cosmic actions.  

This book does not come up much in Sunday lectionary - we don’t just lay this out in front of people because it is prone not so much to interpretation as misinterpretation.  One of us suggested the book can be read as a confirmation of what Jesus said:  that He would return, that He would judge the living and the dead, a day of final judgement. This is what it looks like in John’s vision.  Jesus comes back.  Jesus wins.

One of us pointed out to verse 15 to give us hope.  (We all scrambled back into our bibles.). The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign for ever and ever.  Which is fitting, as we have discussed in other sessions, ancient Mediterranean texts arranged the most important message, the “end” in the middle of the work, and these verses are in the middle of the Book of Revelation.

P.S.  This is not the end of the discussion.  You might think so:  it’s the last book of the bible; Jesus returns, but there is one more session.  One more reading, the last word on the Kingdom!

Week 9: August 9: Thy Kingdom Come

 What does it look like when the Kingdom of God comes again?  

Read and discussion:  Revelation 11:15-19. 

Discussion notes for Week 7

 ➡️Reading for next week:  Week 9:  August 9:  Thy Kingdom Come

What does it look like when the Kingdom of God comes again?

Reading: Revelation 11:15-19

⬇️Attached:  discussion notes from Week 8, The Lord’s Prayer

What an interesting discussion this was, particularly in light of how familiar this prayer is to all of us, “automatic pilot” as someone said.

A co-facilitator opened the discussion with praying the Lord’s Prayer in Rite II version, and played the prayer in Aramaic that had been sent as an email attachment.  A participant prayed it in German for us.  The co-facilitator recollected what it was like in the late 1960s when the Book of Common Prayer was being revisited and updated from its 1928 edition and the strong feelings parishioners had about the project, particularly around changing anything with the wording of the Lord’s Prayer.

And yet, it was a 1928 edition in English, had undoubtedly been many things (and in many languages) before that.  So perhaps it was the memory of learning it as a child; the memory of parents and grandparents praying it and teaching it that way which was where the strong feelings of loss came in.  There are now multiple bible translations of the bible and therefore the Lord’s Prayer, but even in our Rite II, that prayer is offered in both its traditional and updated mode options.

Co-facilitator explored the structure of the Sermon on the Mount, as well as how the author known as Matthew might have assembled the gospel.  The Sermon would have been many different teachings done at different times and eventually written down by different people with different memories and purposes.  The author known as Matthew wouldn’t have been a transcriber, literally translating word for word, but would have gathered up the sources, grouped them, structured a particular viewpoint to a particular audience.

Co-facilitator gave a small example of how this works with the notes from the discussion.  These are recorded on her phone and then, rather than transcribed, the words are arranged in a structure that might resemble the meeting, but would group things said by topic whether or not they were spoken together; would have to leave off remarks the microphone didn’t pick up, might delete what she thought was off-topic, etc.  Author known as Matthew was writing in literary Greek traditions to literate Greek-speaking Jews.

Structure of Sermon on the Mount is in five parts:

1. Beginning (chapter 5:1-16, includes Beatitudes)
2. Teachings on the Law (chapter 5:17-48, “You have heard…”)
3. Practices (chapter 6:1-18, alms, fasting…)
4. Worldly concerts (chapter 6:19-7:12, money, judging others…)
5. Ending (chapter 7:13-27, “listen to me…”)

where the Lord’s Prayer is chapter 6:9-13, the middle of the middle of the middle of the Sermon on the Mount.  Additionally, each of the three middle sections contains three sections, although there is scholarly dispute about the dividing lines by verses of where these begin and end.Whereas our own western literary traditions and story telling put the most important part at the end, a kind of gradual rise to a concluding point, the ancient texts - particularly Jewish and Greek traditions - put the most important part in the middle.

A well-known arrangement of the Sermon on the Mount structure by Dr. Jonathan Pennington, New Testament professor, was presented.  This is a mountain chiasm (chiasm being the crossing of two tracts in the form of an “X”) which leads up to the Lord’s Prayer at the peak where the x’s cross.  A modified version of his mountain chiasm looks like this hand drawn illustration. 

We liked this way of looking at the Sermon and the Lord’s Prayer because we had spent time last week discussing how Jesus went up the mountain and brought disciples with him, and taught to the people who stayed below as well.  This made the Sermon itself become the mountain.

Co-facilitator had come up with a slightly different arrangement when she plotted the chapters out and it look like a checkerboard.  She suggested that the “center of the center of the center” looked more like the heart of the Sermon.  Maybe it is representing the heart of Jesus?  The Kingdom of Heaven as the heart of Jesus’ message?

 This got us discussing language but also meaning, got us away from literally looking at each line to see what it says to what it might mean, and what it might mean for the Kingdom.  It was an excellent discussion and everybody participated.  You had to be there.  Really.  The co-facilitator forgot to turn on the voice memo app to record the discussion and is working from memory (always shaky) and her own presentation notes.  This is kind of funny when you realize she had just used her taking notes process as an example of how the author known as Matthew might have worked.

Could anybody close this up and wrap up the  Kingdom within the Lord’s Prayer?  One of us read aloud from a reflection by Father Richard Rohr, which seemed to do a great wrap up:  Remember this: There are always two worlds. The world as it operates is power; the world as it should be is love. The secret of kingdom life is how we can live in both—simultaneously. The world as it is will always be built on power, ego, and success. Yet we also must keep our eyes intently on the world as it should be—what Jesus calls the reign of God. 

We closed out with the Lord’s Prayer, old one, and know that we will never pray it on autopilot again.

Week 8: August 2: The Lord's Prayer

The perfect prayer Our Lord taught us calls out the Kingdom of God.

Read and discussion:  Matthew 6:9-13.  Luke 11:2-4 is the shorter version, and especially appropriate if you read the entire Sermon on the Mount last week.

 

Week 7 discussion notes and readings for next week

 ➡️Reading for Week 8:  August  2:  The Lord’s Prayer

The perfect prayer Our Lord taught us calls out the Kingdom of God.

Reading:  Matthew 6:9-13.  Luke 11:2-4 has the shorter version and especially appropriate if you read the entire Sermon on the Mount last week.

⬇️Attached:  discussion notes from Week 7, Sermon on the Mount.

The discussion started with a chorus of “I’ll Fly Away”.  (You had to be there.)

It discussion continued around a question brought from a off-site participant requesting we discuss:  Who are the Beatitudes addressed to?  The disciples, the crowd, apostles?  All of the above?  We talked about Jesus going on top of a mountain to address everybody.  We talked about what the word “disciple” includes—followers? apostles?  The final verse of the entire Sermon on the Mount (end of chapter 7) says that the crowd was astounded at his teaching.  Disciple means learner or follower.

It matters knowing who Jesus is speaking to:  it affects what He says and how.  There are three groups present:  (1) the crowds, meaning everybody who has come to hear Him talk, (2) all of His disciples who follow Him, the 12 apostles,

Some of us thought He would be speaking to the poor, the hungry, the ones who grieve.   And, others added, He would be speaking to those who are not poor, hungry, grieving, to tell them why the others matter.  He is talking to us, the poor of spirit.   Everyone has every problem, we all experience these at some time.  And if God shows up, there is the Kingdom of Heaven.   Could someone who is physically poor not be poor in spirit?  You don’t have to be all of these things to enter the Kingdom of God.  All those beatitudes seem to be virtues, and are contrasted to strength, force, and power that are rewarded on earth to winners.

Perhaps Jesus can safely assume many/most in the crowd are broken or suffering because they are seeking the teaching of a rabbi, and generalizes his message to them.  We discussed blessing, how we can lead others to the Kingdom by being a blessing to them, reminded of last week’s healing of the paralytic and being brought by his friends.

We talked about the persecuted, which is true for Christians in these times as well as for Jesus’ audience, who lived in severe persecution—and not only by the Romans but by their own Jewish puppet government and religious authorities.  These Beatitudes are consolations.  They are giving the listeners hope.  He is speaking to them as one of them.

We talked about difference in Kingdom of Heaven or Kingdom of God.  Matthew uses Kingdom of Heaven.  There is an audience that Jesus is speaking to and also the audience the gospel writer is writing to:  Matthew writes for Jews.  We have discussed the Kingdom and what it is and isn’t; the Beatitudes adds to our definitions of what it is and it isn’t.  

Each line of the Beatitudes outlines one characteristic of the Kingdom of God:  mercy, pureness,  poorness in spirit, holy sorrow, controlling anger, seeing God in His Kingdom, love set in motion, worshiping God with no compromise, sharing peace with all, upholding truth.  The opposite of these things is rewarded in our world.

We are never going to look at the kingdom again the same way before we started these discussions.  The words just roll over us — but they are huge, they are everything.  Coming together to discuss them means we’re not going to hear them the same way again.