This past Sunday, I had the pleasure of guest preaching and serving at my previous church post: St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church. If you’d like to watch that sermon to find out what the Kingdom of Heaven is like, then you can watch it here: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1BC44LAVZt/. The sermon begins at about the 21-minute mark. As usual, if you’d prefer to read a text version, then you can just continue on below:
Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12 Year A)
July 26, 2026
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Lubbock, Texas
Readings: 1 Kings 3:5-12, Psalm 119:129-136, Romans 8:26-39, Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
Hi, everyone! I am so happy to be back here with all of you, and I bring warm greetings from St. Christopher’s (and I do mean “warm” greetings, as we’ve been having air conditioning issues of late).
Most of you know me, but I do see a few new faces, so I’ll introduce myself. My name is Dann Wigner. For the past year, I’ve been one of the deacons at St. Christopher’s here in town. For the 15 years before that, my family and I have been connected in one way or another with St. Stephen’s. In fact, this was the first Episcopal Church that we ever visited. And the very first time we visited, my wife Leann and I looked at each other and said, “We’re home.” I know several of you have had similar experiences, and I want to talk today about experiences.
Interestingly, my last experience of preaching here was almost a year ago today – on July 27, 2025 – and, unsurprisingly, the Lectionary had queued up for us a similar set of passages, although we were looking at Luke rather than Matthew, since it was Year C then, and now we are in Year A of the three-year cycle of the Revised Common Lectionary.
Consequently, my sermon last year was on the theme of the Kingdom of God. Now, while Matthew prefers the term “Kingdom of Heaven,” let us make no mistake – we are talking about the same thing: one of the central themes [or, perhaps, the central theme] of Jesus’ teaching and preaching. Other New Testament writers use the term “Kingdom of God,” but they sometimes had their own preferred terms too. John, being the most mystical of the Gospel writers, preferred the term Eternal Life. Paul, never one to be short on words, had many terms to illustrate this concept like New Creation, Life in the Spirit, and the Body of Christ [and he used the term Kingdom of God occasionally too]. However, since we are in Matthew’s Gospel today, I do want to disambiguate a bit. The Kingdom of Heaven is not synonymous with Heaven as an idyllic afterlife; rather, it is a catch-all metaphor for the Rule of God – of a world balanced and set right.
And, it is a powerful image that the Jews of Jesus’ time looked forward and backward to — in a backward sense, they recalled nostalgically being a nation of their own under the courage of David, or the wisdom of Solomon, as we read in our Old Testament passage this morning. But, by the times of the Hebrew prophets, that backward glance was eclipsed by a hopeful looking forward for a more perfect Kingdom of God. Isaiah envisioned the Kingdom of God outwardly and socially, as he prophesies in the 65th chapter of his book:
For I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth; …
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy
and its people as a delight. …
No more shall there be in it
an infant who lives but a few days
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime,
for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth,
and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.
They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. …
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. …
The wolf and the lamb shall feed together;
the lion shall eat straw like the ox, …
They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain,
says the Lord.
That’s Isaiah’s vision of the Kingdom of God on earth.
Now, Jeremiah offered texture to a view of this type on an inward and individual level. For example, in the 31st chapter of his prophecy, Jeremiah writes:
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. … I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. … they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, … for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.
Also importantly, the early Church knew the interpretation of these symbols. They prayed, as Jesus taught them, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” but they also went out and lived it. We can read that most clearly in the earliest portrait of the church after Pentecost in Acts ch. 2:
They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Awe came upon everyone because many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds[j] to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.
The last time I was with you all, I talked a lot about these external, social aspects of the Kingdom and offered some practical steps toward that type of justice in our world today (I seem to remember saying something about “love your neighbor,” or something or other).
Today, I want to look at the Kingdom of Heaven through that inward lens, because the Kingdom is also an experience, a particular type of experience, a unique experience that words often fail to describe. That is the reason for all of the analogies through parables that Jesus offers again and again in today’s Gospel passage: “the Kingdom of heaven is like…the Kingdom of heaven is like…the Kingdom of heaven is like…” Also, we see the experience of the Kingdom in its effects on a person who has experienced it: Paul. We see the courage and trust of a man who says, and means, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” We see the wonder and gratitude of a man who had truly experienced and been transformed by love and mercy, when he says: “Nothing can separate us from the love of God!” Not death, life, angels, rulers, the future, the past, height, depth, or anything else. We may not understand all about Paul’s experience, but we can’t fail to see that it changed him.
So, let’s unpack the Kingdom of Heaven as an experience – remembering, of course, that it is also a community – but, for now, let’s look at it from the personal, individual side of things.
There are four things that I want us to note about the Kingdom of Heaven as an experience:
First, as I’ve already mentioned, this is a unique experience – and it hits each of us as unique, different from other types of experience. It is so important that we have to say something about it, but it is so difficult to talk about to someone who hasn’t experienced it. That type of difficulty should not surprise us because we deal with it in more ordinary matters too. For example, if I were talking to you about Wyoming, and you’ve never been there, I could say that Wyoming is a state in the western United States, that is comprised of approximately 97,000 square miles and a population of around 600,000 people. Information that is easily verifiable and probably easy enough to grasp without ever being there. But, what if I told you that Wyoming is beautiful. That I’ve never seen skies so blue, grass so green, or hills and cliffs so picturesque. That’s harder to grasp. For each of us, on hearing a statement like that, we’d try to think of blue skies and green grass, which is tough enough in west Texas, and picturesque hills. We internally try to create an analogy with what we already know – and then guess what could be more than that.
If the Kingdom of Heaven is a world set right and balanced, where love and mercy, are worth more than silver and gold, then Jesus is going to have to give me an analogy (or several), because I’ve never lived in a world like that. Have you? What would that be like? So, first, the experience of the Kingdom needs analogy – it is difficult to describe – because it surpasses our normal, everyday experience of life.
Second, it is unpredictable. Experiencing the Kingdom happens on God’s schedule, not ours. We can plan to respond (that’s the external, social piece), but only God can do it. Only God can bring the Kingdom to you or me. We see that in Paul’s experience (though not in today’s passage). In the ninth chapter of Acts, when Paul is on his way to go persecute the church in Damascus, like you do, Jesus – rather inconveniently – meets him and blinds him through the surpassing greatness of that meeting. Similarly, in the Gospels, Jesus finds the Apostles in the midst of other tasks and settings. They aren’t planning for their lives to be changed. And, no one could predict the strange mixture of people that Jesus chose. Similarly, when we read of the miracles of Jesus – why heal this person of blindness, or deafness, or raise that person from the dead – and not everyone. It’s unpredictable. The experience of the Kingdom is unpredictable, but we can pray for it to come. Remember, “Thy kingdom come, they will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” And, we can expect to respond.
Third, the experience of the Kingdom is fleeting. Now, don’t misunderstand me, on the practical level of a social community, the effects of the experience can be lasting. But, that initial moment – that can be over quickly – before we even really know what happened. For Leann and me, our first time attending St. Stephen’s, of realizing “We’re home” was brief, and we were still part of another denomination – professionally, clerically – part of another denomination at the time. It took us some time to unpack that fleeting experience.
Now, these second and third aspects of the experience – unpredictability and fleetingness – that serves to show that an experience of the Kingdom of Heaven is definitely not something that anyone can control. In fact, if I may be so bold, if anyone or any group claims that they can “conjure” this type of experience for you, that’s a red flag. Run, don’t walk, from that place.
Fourth, and finally, experiencing the Kingdom of Heaven changes a person. No matter how fleeting an experience might be, it is this change that is the strongest indicator of what has happened. Experiencing the Kingdom of Heaven provides a new perspective on life, the universe, and everything. It is this perspective that leads us to the work of the Kingdom. When we’ve experienced the type of love and mercy that Paul rhapsodizes in our Romans passage, it engenders in us the need to act, to express in some way what has happened. Now, the practical outcome – the actions we take – will look different person to person, but there is an internal reality which is the source of energy and motivation for those actions. It’s hard to describe (see, back to point one again), so I would like to use the words of the twentieth century monk Thomas Merton to try and express what it is like, his words for his own experience of the Kingdom:
In Louisville [Kentucky], at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even through we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness…Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. … It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see the billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely. … I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven [or, we might say, the Kingdom of Heaven] is everywhere.
— Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 156, 158
That’s what the Kingdom of Heaven is like. And that’s what we pray for when we say “Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done.”
Amen.