The Horn is Blowing

Mark 1:1 Here begins the Good News about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God.

I spent a few years living in a dorm in a Bible College, a strange life that I wouldn’t ever want to repeat. There was the usual parade of characters - Fred, who threw apple cores at the wall; Carl, who insisted on bouncing a large ball bearing on the floor above my head whenever he was nervous (and who went on to become a spy); Larry, who made his roommate sleep in the hallway for no obvious reason. But none of them was as colorful as Billy.

Billy was a good guy, pure of heart, strong in body, filled with energy and fierce joy of life. He'd come to us with his head in a totally different space. Let's just say that Billy marched to the beat of a drummer, it was beating a rhythm that none of the rest of us were hearing. He was a musician, and the brilliant sounds of his trumpet sparked many a church worship service. An early riser, he also went for regular long runs before dawn.

One morning the early rising and the trumpet somehow came together in Billy's mind. For some unknowable reason, he decided to greet the day with a melody, a series of brilliant piercing trumpet blasts of praise to his God that rang down the halls of the dormitory and shot every sleeper awake in an instant. The tune was cut short, however, by angry shouts and then there was the inevitable chase and capture, after which Billy experienced such horrifying tortures that he never again played his trumpet before breakfast.

Billy and his trumpet blasting a tune down a dorm hallway reminds me of the way the good news about the Kingdom comes to us. You see, the message announced at the beginning of the New Testament’s Gospel of Mark – “Here begins the Good News about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God.” - is not something to cheer every heart or take away the troubles of every troubled soul. It's a blast of hope and challenge that brings any number of reactions from the people who hear it.

Some hear the trumpet sound when Jesus announces God’s kingdom and find it shocking. They chase down the one who’s playing the tune, murder on their minds. Some pull a pillow over their ears in some sort of vain hope that it will stop. Others don’t hear it at all and miss the opportunity to respond to the melody. But some listen to the beauty of the song, as strange and troubling as it may be, and recognize that their lives will never be the same again.

Forget Everything You Knew

Forget everything you ever knew, because I want to invite you into a vision of life that is nothing like anything you’ve seen before. To a place where up is down, down is up, left is right, right is left. I want to show you how to find significance in a place God calls his “Kingdom,” where nothing is the way we find it in our world.

It’s not by chance that C.S. Lewis, a follower of Jesus and member of his Kingdom, set his Narnia in a place beyond the confines of this world. He knew that reality is only to be found when everything we believe about this world is abandoned and we are open to something completely different. God’s Kingdom may not be a Narnia of actual beings, actual snow, actual trees, but it is a genuine realm different from our own, where nothing of what you once knew survives the journey.

If independence from God has made us wrong to the core of our beings, then there must be another world where we can be right. There must be a place, even if it’s a place of heart and mind, where things are the way God intended them to be.

Let me invite you on a tour of that place, the Kingdom of God. You get there by abandoning your independence and making the risen Jesus who died for you the ruler of your life. Once in the Kingdom, you will find magic, because all the things you’ve been searching for are there – meaning, connection, freedom from loneliness, forgiveness, purpose, hope. And reality, a reality so real that you’d swear that this is the first time you’ve ever actually been alive.

Too bad that so many people have trivialized the Kingdom and its leader, Jesus. How sad that we've made him and his world so common. His name is on our lips in moments of anger. We find him at the movies, where we Da Vinci Code him, rewriting him to make him as common as the rest of us, while his reality is left behind in the gutter. He stares at us silently from a million crucifixes. Monuments to his memory are found on many a street corner, tall steeples and stained glass surrounded by parking lots.

The real Jesus was not so common. The real Jesus made those around him more than a little ueasy. Why? Because once and for all he told them what was real. He compelled them, and us, to understand that the things we once thought were so important are nothing in the eyes of the only Person who matters.

He taught us how to make a difference with our lives. In his Kingdom there are no nobodies, no leaves in the wind. In the Kingdom where Jesus lives we find the answers to everything that matters.