November 25, 2018 “King of Hope” – II Kings 25:27-30

II Kings 25:27-30, Kingdoms p. 271
“King of Hope”
November 25, 2018 – Christ the King

My father-in-law’s workshop in the basement of their home was an amazing place. I have never seen such a variety or amount of interesting junk either before or since I knew the man. He had filled every inch with power tools and benches and floor-to-ceiling shelves. The shelves were crammed with hardware and solvent cans and mechanical devices in crumbling cardboard boxes, old mason jars and rusty coffee cans. Larger objects like machine parts and motors and piles of scrap wood and metal were mixed in with it all.

Dad pretty much knew where everything was and what it might be for. I discovered the philosophy of his glorious mess by pointing to an overflowing box or a mysterious mechanism and asking “What’s that?” Dad would tell me a story something like how twenty years ago he got a killer deal on a box of 18-volt relays at an auction or a hardware store going out of business. Or he’d explain how 15 years ago he scavenged a strange-looking device from a printing machine that was going to the scrap heap. Then I’d ask something like, “What are you going to do with it?” or “Why have you kept those all this time?” His answer was always the same, “You never know. I might need it someday.”

My father-in-law’s workshop philosophy might be God’s answer to why the book of Kings ends the way it does. If we knew nothing more about what follows, like the Jews who first wrote and then read that book during the time of the Exile, it would seem a very odd and depressing conclusion. The last king of Judah, the only royal survivor in the line of David, spends 37 years in prison before he is released to sit on display at the king of Babylon’s table, a living trophy of Babylonian conquest. Why?

Maybe a little irreverently, imagine God standing in His own divinely cluttered, cosmic workshop. One of the angels points to a moldy cardboard box at the back of some shelf high up in a corner. It’s labeled, “Jehoiachin, last surviving king of Judah.” The angel asks, “Why are you saving that?” The great Machinist of history replies, “You never know. I might need it someday.”

We read the ups and downs of two kingdoms after Solomon. When his son Rehoboam failed to heed sage wisdom of older men and lighten the burden of labor and taxes on his people, ten tribes rebelled and formed their own kingdom to the north. Those ten tribes kept the ancient name of their common ancestor and called themselves Israel, while the remaining people centered around Jerusalem became known by the name of their tribe, Judah. Kings is written mostly from the perspective of that single, smaller nation Judah, because it’s the one that survived longer.

Israel in the north had mostly terrible kings. There was a hint of possible revival of true faith in a rebel named Jehu. But he was too bloody and violent, too focused on his own power. He got rid of Baal, but never got rid of the original idols of the northern kingdom, the golden calves created by the first rebel king Jeroboam.

So in 722 B.C., God had enough of that rebellious, violent, idolatrous kingdom up north. The capital city of Samaria was taken by Assyrians under Sargon II. A large number of Israelites became refugees elsewhere. Those remaining intermarried over generations. Their identity as descendants of Israel dwindled away. In Jesus’ time there were people known as “Samaritans” in that area, but their mixed blood branded them as less than true Israelites in the eyes of “Jews,” people descended from the tribe and kingdom of Judah.

In the south, God protected Judah under good King Hezekiah. The Assyrians were miraculously held off by God killing 185,000 of them at one stroke. Their general was recalled to deal with a rebellion closer to home, and he died there. So Judah lasted another 135 years. But they too were finally overcome by foreign invaders.

The Babylonians had been fighting the Assyrians for years. At the Battle of Carchemish in 605 B.C., the new Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II utterly defeated an alliance of Assyrians and Egyptians. On the way home, Nebuchadnezzar stopped by little Judah and took control of it, capturing their king who had ruled only three months and installing his uncle as a puppet he renamed Zedekiah. When Zedekiah rebelled, the Babylonians came back in 587 B.C. and smashed Jerusalem and killed Zedekiah, effectively bringing an end to the southern kingdom. That’s pretty much how the story finishes in Kings, except for some messy business with the assassination of a Babylonian-appointed governor and the final scattering of people left in and around Jerusalem.

Then the scene shifts for four final verses to Babylon, years later, with Nebuchadnezzar’s death in 562 B.C. His son Amel-Marduk, or Evil-Merodach as it is written here in Kings, then became king of Babylon. Evil-Merodach is closer to the way the name was actually pronounced. By this time, Jehoiachin, that 3-month king captured 11 years before the fall of Jerusalem, had been in prison in Babylon 37 years. For some reason the new ruler of the Babylonians took pity on him.

By the time Jehoiachin was released, Jews taken to Babylon had been there a generation. Some of them heeded the prophet Jeremiah’s advice in Jeremiah 29. They had settled down, built homes, planted gardens and had children. God had told them “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Unlike some of us Christians today who quote that verse for ourselves, those exiles rightly understood that God meant plans for them in Babylon. Yes, there was a distant hope for a return to Judah, but that was for their children or their grandchildren. God’s plans for them right then were to live and prosper as exiles in a foreign land and to even pray for Babylon. There grew a thriving Jewish community that remained even after some of them went home another generation later.

The first book of Chronicles, chapter 3 tells us Jehoiachin himself had children in Babylon. In fact, there is a long genealogy of Jehoiachin’s descendants. Later on, maybe two or three hundred years later, that Jewish community in Babylon began to give an honorary title to a person descended from David through Jehoiachin. He was called the exilarch, the ruler of the exiles. That honorary office, with no real authority, continued in the Babylonian Jewish community well down into the middle ages until the 12th century A.D. There are all sorts of legends about that lineage of exilarchs, including loony attempts to connect them to a British royal family and somehow make England the new Israel.

That sort of straightforward, carefully recorded genealogy of succession seems logical if you look at it all in human terms, if we imagine that God’s plans all work out in a straight line that we can discern if we only study them carefully enough. But God’s workshop is bigger and more complicated than we can grasp. He didn’t take the family descended from king David and just keep tinkering with them through generations until He found one He liked. No, during the exile God did what I suggested before, He boxed up that whole idea he promised to David, a kingdom that would last forever, and put it on the shelf along with Jehoiachin and his descendants for over 500 years.

Jewish people did go back to Judah and rebuild Jerusalem, but they were never quite a kingdom again. Oh, they had kings. In the second century the Maccabean revolt led to the Hasmonean dynasty that lasted a century or so. But those kings were vassals in a bigger Greek kingdom. Then in 37 B.C., the Romans took over and made Herod the Great king. But there was no real kingdom for Israel. Rome was in control.

We’re celebrating today how the kingdom came back out of the box. The idea of a real royal successor to David was always in the air, but no one had a good claim. The genealogy was confused and lost. Some people thought of themselves as descended from David, but no one knew for sure. That’s what was going on when Jesus showed up.

I think you can see the confusion in the fact there are two genealogies for Jesus, one in Matthew and one in Luke. They don’t match up. One ad hoc explanation is that Matthew gives Joseph’s genealogy while Luke gives Mary’s. But both of them explicitly say they are tracing Joseph’s lineage. It’s Joseph’s genealogy, but then both Matthew and Luke tell us that Joseph was not really Jesus’ father. The whole royal-line-of-kings-genealogy thing sort of gets dumped on its head.

When Jesus came along, God took down the box labeled “Kingdom,” but He didn’t just roll out the same old business, finding somebody in the lineage and having him crowned king and throwing out the Romans and restoring Israel’s power. In Jesus, God did something completely new and different with the idea of kingdom. Yes, Jesus was David’s son, David’s descendant, however that worked out in human ancestry, but even more He is God’s Son. As you can read at the beginning of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus came preaching not about the kingdom of David, but about the kingdom of God.

We heard today from the Gospel of John, chapter 18, where it’s at the end of the story that the idea of kingdom shows up. Pilate, a governor appointed by Rome, which seems to be the only real kingdom around, asks Jesus what He has done. Jesus starts talking about a kingdom “not of this world,” and then tells Pilate, “You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.”

The truth that Jesus testified to is that God is King, and because Jesus is God, Jesus is King. The rest of that truth is that, in Jesus, God’s kingdom broke into this world’s kingdoms and is taking over. This idea of the kingdom of God is not just a nice metaphor, like my story about my father-in-law’s workshop. It’s the biggest idea in the whole Bible. As Bible scholar N. T. Wright has taught us for decades now, it’s what the story is about. It’s everything that God is up to. God has invaded this world in person through Jesus Christ in order to transform this world into His kingdom.

So don’t hear Jesus wrong when He says to Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world.” He didn’t mean God’s kingdom was somewhere else and He and the rest of us are all just waiting and hoping to go there someday. No, what Jesus meant is what some translations have Him go on to say, “My kingdom is not from this world.” Jesus came as King from somewhere else, from heaven, but He came to be the King of this world. God’s plan has always been to bring this whole world and all its little kingdoms into His own kingdom.

A kingdom exists wherever people do the will of a king. Wherever people do the will of God, that’s where His kingdom is. That’s why Jesus was God’s ultimate and perfect plan for bringing His kingdom into the world. Jesus was the one and only human being who completely and perfectly did the will of God. Jesus is not just the King. He is the kingdom, the whole thing in Himself, the one place on earth where what we pray for in the Lord’s prayer totally happened. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Jesus came from heaven and did God’s will on earth like He’d done it in heaven. And the kingdom arrived.

So where does that leave poor old Jehoiachin who spent 37 years in prison? Where does it leave you and me who sometimes feel like we’ve been dropped in a box or an old coffee can and shoved to the back of the workbench? Is the kingdom of God any more real for us than the magic kingdom of Disneyland? Yes, it is. The kingdom of God is more real than Disneyland and it’s more real than any other government on earth.

I may have misled you a little with my picture of Dad’s workshop. I may have got you thinking that God took His kingdom and put it on the shelf and let it gather dust for 500 years until He got around to sending us Jesus. But it would be wrong to think that the kingdom of our Lord is some small part of whatever God is up to in the workshop of the universe. No, it would be better to say that the kingdom is His workshop.

Everything from the expansion of the cosmos to my expanding waistline is there in God’s kingdom. Whether it’s the glorious resurrection of Jesus from the dead or what Jehoiachin had for dinner there in Babylon, it’s all part of it, all part the great kingdom workshop. And like my father-in-law in his much smaller workshop, God knows where everything is, where it came from and where it’s going, how it fits in the plan, and how it will all come together someday.

What Jeremiah wrote to the exiles is true for you and me. God does have a plan and a purpose for us. We just have to remember that like they did. We often cannot see what that purpose or plan could possibly be, what use God might have for us. Like the exiles, like Jehoiachin in prison for 37 years, we have a hope and a future, because our Lord is King.

That’s why the book of Kings ends the way it does. It’s God’s reminder to us all that when we place our trust and faith in Him, we are part of something greater than ourselves, part of a pattern and plan much larger than our own situation. If we sit growing old and rusty on a shelf, something is being constructed in another part of the workshop in which our own lives and pains and waiting will fit perfectly.

God is King. Christ is King. You may not be able to see it, but what is happening in your life, even if it’s sad or difficult could be just the piece your Lord is saving to fit into someone else’s story.

I like to talk about my friend Howard. He long ago went to wait with the Lord on workshop His shelf. I met Howard when I rented an apartment from him and his wife my first year of graduate school in Indiana. He was old, starting to slow down and halfway on the shelf already. But he did two important things for me. He did a lot of things for me, but two stand out.

First and most important, Howard invited me to his church. In fact, he bugged me for weeks until I finally went one Sunday. It was a Covenant church. It’s why I’m here today as a Covenant pastor. Howard was part of God’s plan for me.

Second, less important, but still precious to me, Howard taught me to cast a fly rod. He sat in a boat with me and coached me for hours until I got it right. His patience blessed me with a skill I have been able to enjoy and pass on to my daughters. It’s a small thing, but I believe that too was how God fit Howard into His design for my life. It all happened because Howard knew that Jesus Christ is King.

Let Jesus be King for you. You have a part to play, a place to fit, a plan to fulfill in His kingdom. If you feel like you are on the shelf, it’s not forever. He has something in His will for you to do, someone to invite to church or a way to help a person in need. On the other hand, if you feel like you are right there in the center of the bench and God is putting you to fantastic use at the moment, whether it’s in caring for your family or Christian service or whatever, don’t get too proud about it. Remember you are one member of a big kingdom, a small part in a huge workshop. Focus on the King and His Kingdom.

Jesus said, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” You have a gracious King, a King who loves you and has a place for you in His kingdom. Seek that place today.

Amen.