Thy Kingdom Come
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, September 21, 2025
Reading: Matthew 6:9-15
We’re in a series here at the church on the Lord’s Prayer. Maybe some of the most recognized words in the English language and some of the least considered. We’re trying to show the power hidden in these ordinary words that we usually say without examination. Someone wise said “prayer is the hardest thing we do as Christians.” The hardest. Even harder than loving enemies? Serving the poor? Advocating for justice? Yeah, because prayer can feel like talking to yourself, like no one else is listening. So, Jesus gives us this prayer and promises it works. And we’ve repeated it ever since. I’ve heard from lots of you already how helpful this series will be. We all pray. Badly. Because it’s hard. And we could use a little help.
Today “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven.” The Lord’s Prayer starts with a name and an address. The name: Our Father. And the address: who art in heaven. This is already a surprising start. Most of my prayers… are about me and what I want. I treat God like my servant, my butler: hey, Jeeves, could you fix this, sort out the other, good, let me know when you’re done, here’s a tip. But Jesus’ own prayer, entrusted to us, starts with naming God and asking that God’s will be done. We’re three weeks into the prayer and the word “I” hasn’t come up yet. It won’t later either.
In Jesus’ day, Jews in Judea were ruled by Herod, a Roman puppet. And the Roman empire gave names to its emperors like king of kings, lord of all, saviour. As NT Wright says, Rome’s emperors were a joke, Herod a curse. Folks complained then about their leaders as we do now, perhaps all people do. But Jesus also brought a hope as ancient as Israel, and as new as tomorrow: God is coming. And God is going to heal everything. When we pray “thy kingdom come” we tap into that hope. Political arrangements, as they are at present, are not the only options there are. God is opening up a radical set of new options: a world in which not Caesar, not Herod, not Donald, not Carney, not King Charles, but God alone is in charge.
A friend asked a Muslim friend of his why Sharia law has so much support in the Muslim world. She said ‘In Islamic countries we have a record of strongmen, either Islamist or propped up by some external power. Sharia is the only counter we have to authoritarianism. So, embracing Islamic law gave us a little distance from the dictator.’ Makes sense to us too. Thy kingdom come, Lord, no one else’s.
Early Christians were considered disloyal to Rome, and untrustworthy citizens, by our neighbours. We have a Lord different from other Lords, better even, Lord of Lords. The word “church” has political overtones too. It’d be like us calling ourselves, TEMC, the rightful legislative assembly of Ontario, or the real parliament of Canada, Toronto’s actual city council. In the 4th century the emperor of Rome became a Christian, lifted persecutions of Christians, and granted the first religious freedom ever heard of in the world. Something about Jesus being Lord dislodges the notion that you have to worship your ruler.
Even before Jesus came talking about his kingdom, Israel had a deep skepticism of rulers. Every king of Israel is a dolt, even the good ones are bad. Because God alone is meant to be Israel’s king—who could measure up? And one reason Jesus is executed is that he claims to be a king. Kings like Caesar don’t appreciate others taking their titles. Jesus’ only crown is one of thorns, his sceptre a rod that beats him, his throne a cross. This is his way of ruling: as king of pain. Jesus is God alone ruling Israel; a threat to a Roman empire that tolerates not threats.
For a long time, since Caesar’s conversion, we Christians tried to rule the world through states and empires. And that produced some grandeur. I already mentioned the birth of religious freedom. Christendom saw the invention of the monastery, the hospital, and the university. Occasionally the church tangled with emperors—and usually won.
Pope Gregory the VII excommunicated a Roman emperor who misbehaved—and that emperor knelt in the snow for three days begging to be reinstated. Can’t have a “Christian” king who’s excommunicated, on the way to hell, now, can you? King Henry II of England wondered out loud who would rid him of that meddlesome priest, Thomas a Becket, archbishop of Canterbury. Some of King Henry’s thugs jumped to do what he wanted and murdered the bishop in his own cathedral. Thomas became, in death, the most revered saint in all England, and Henry did penance, walking shirtless through the streets, whipped by monks, to be reinstated to God’s favour. Lots of the things we moderns are proudest of, like tolerance, science, care for the needy, checking the power of the mighty—those are Christian ideas, we just usually don’t recognize that anymore. And we certainly don’t get credit for them.
We’re in a volatile political moment in North America. Something about the assassination of media pundit Charlie Kirk seems to have put us on edge even more than usual. Having a US president vow revenge is no comfort. Russia is still at war in Ukraine unjustly. Israel is trying to eliminate Hamas as a threat and is making new enemies. But maybe here’s the bigger problem. We always thought hard work and a free market would mean that our kids will be better off than we are. And for much of the last two centuries, capitalism has delivered that. But now, who of us really thinks our kids will be better off? It’s hard to find someone genuinely optimistic about the future, let alone hopeful.
It just makes me wonder: can we, church, be a people of hope, in a world without much hope?
In Jesus’ temptations, the devil leads him up to a high place and offers him all the kingdoms of the world. Satan says this interesting thing:
To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. 7 If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.
The devil owns all the kingdoms of the world. I saw a stained-glass window of this in the church that hosted me last weekend in Atlanta. You can see at Jesus’ feet those kingdoms, once vast, now forgotten. Jesus says no. But when we’re offered power, we rarely do the same.
The romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was not, as far as I know, an ancestor of mine. He wrote this about a statue of the Pharaoh dug up in Egypt, now in the British Museum. Pharaoh once the most powerful person alive, his statue now half buried, his kingdom gone. Ozymandias is the Greek for Pharaoh:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
If there’s one thing true about empires, great kingdoms, it’s that they fall. All that work to acquire power and eventually our monuments are buried and forgotten.
Only God’s kingdom will not fail. Christ will come soon, friends, and rule this world the way only he can, no earthly king or emperor or president or prime minister can match it. When we Christians are asked what our politics are, we say “thy kingdom come.” We’re not waiting on the NDP or the Conservative Party or the Liberals to deliver us, let alone the hapless Democrats or Republicans. We’re waiting for the true king to come and reign.
“Thy will be done.” We add these words to all our prayers. When we pray, we open up our desire to God. We ask for help and change in the world. But we do so knowing that what we really want, more than what we think we want, is God’s will. Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane before his arrest that this cup would pass from him. That he wouldn’t have to face his passion of suffering and death. But then he adds, “not my will but yours be done.” St. Paul has what he calls a “thorn in the flesh,” some kind of ailment. Don’t you know scholars have fallen all over one another to guess what it is. Paul says he prayed three times for God to remove it. And God says ... no. And adds “My grace is sufficient for you, my power is made perfect in weakness.” If Jesus and Paul don’t get all they ask for, I’m guessing we won’t either. When we pray, what we’re really asking for is more of God, even if we’re not aware of it. The thorn made Paul pray, and that brought God close—why remove it?
One of my favourite moments in our service is when Joanne reads the names of those asking for our prayers. For every name read there are other folks who don’t want their names read. And for every name we know, there are hundreds we don’t. The sick, the dying, those in trouble, afraid, bankrupt, without work, unhoused, subject to violence—including many in this room. The world is a broken place. When we pray, we ask God to repair it. Hold back the horror and let life grow. And sometimes, it works! More often, we can’t tell. But we will only stop praying when Christ comes and blankets his creation with love and healing. Until then it’s “thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”
On earth as in heaven. Y’all heard a stem-winder of a sermon last week from Dayle on God’s name and on heaven. When I preside at funerals in here it seems like heaven has another name: Muskoka. So many of you spend your happiest hours on the lakes north of here. Where you worked or lived 9-5 seems to fade from memory, and the hours on the dock or the boat, grandkid in one hand, beverage in the other, yeah that seems like what heaven is about. My buddy used to say the problem with living on the north shore of Vancouver is that when you try and preach about heaven, people think they already live there.
I should tell you this line is responsible for some of the United Church of Canada’s proudest moments. In the early 20th century, there was a move in mainline Protestant like ours to bring heaven to earth by our own efforts. That’s what temperance was about: women reclaiming their own power and demanding legislators close the bars and get their husbands and sons home before they drank up their paycheque and came home abusive. It’s why we had laws to make everyone take a sabbath. This is sometimes called The Social Gospel: we wanted earth to align with heaven. Child labour laws, union protections, the end of racism—these are all examples of the social gospel in action. We should be proud of it. But we aren’t, we mostly make fun now of temperance efforts and mandated sabbath closings. I just want you to notice: These were efforts to wrestle heaven into earth now. Some of the things we are proudest of in church history come also from this prayer. William Wilberforce and the Clapham sect demanding Britain end slavery. The Civil Rights movement in the US. Universal health care here in Canada, all cooked up in church basements.
And here’s why this matters just now. I’ve sat with folks from multiple places on the political spectrum recently who are plumb out of hope. Either the Kirk shooting or government policies here or elsewhere or climate or what have you. One asked me plainly—are we going to be okay? Is our world still going to be here in a few years’ time? I don’t know any other answer than to pray: thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth. A prayer is not a plan. It’s a hope pinned on God. It says we can’t hustle all this to turn out right on our own. We need a power and a strength none of us have, we don’t have cumulatively. We have thought democracy, capitalism, human rights, peace order and good government would save us. It seems now they won’t. God, can you do what we can’t seem to do for ourselves?
Let me give you some examples of when Jesus answers his prayer.
One of the fastest growing churches in the world is in China. In a country of more than a billion people, tens of millions are relatively new Christians, despite government harassment and persecution. Why? Well, so I read and hear, capitalism is brand new there relatively speaking, people are making money. But why should anybody behave? Not cheat or lie or steal? Communism used to say because the oppressed don’t harm one another. But it seems they do. Always the failure with communism—trying to have the kingdom without the king, assuming people can act redeemed without a redeemer. So as people by the billion ask ‘well, why should we follow the rules and trust one another?’ Christianity answers: because there is a God who commands us to obey, and will judge us when we don’t, save us when we can’t. In a century we may think of Christianity as a Chinese and African religion. That’s an answer to thy kingdom come.
An archbishop named Oscar Romero was appointed in El Salvador because he was considered a moderate who would tolerate a violent junta. But they killed his friend. And he went feral. Started ordering the government to stand down. Using his office to protect the innocent. He was assassinated while saying mass and holding the cup up for God’s blessing. Before that, when they came to arrest him, he started saying mass. In the name of the Father... some of the soldiers crossed themselves. Hard to arrest someone when your hands are busy worshiping. That’s the kingdom come: interrupting violence by inviting bodies to pray. The church has always taught that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. That military junta is long gone, but St. Oscar is still teaching us.
When the Nazis rolled to power in Austria, a farmer named Franz Jägerstätter refused to do as he was told. Wouldn’t sign up for military service, wouldn’t do the salute. His friends remembered him as not being particularly pious, in fact, he was just sort of a pain, didn’t like being told what to do. God can use that! So, the Nazis did what they did and executed him. Beforehand when he was being interrogated, he was heard to yell, “Jesus is my Fuhrer.” Any ruler who claims ultimate power has a rival in Jesus, and in Jesus’ people cussed enough not to bend the knee. Lord give us more maladjusted farmers!
What do we take from these stories? That Christian hope is wild, extravagant, lasting. The regimes I mentioned are long gone, except the Chinese Communist Party that soon will be. The church is still there, fumbling and failing, sure, but keeping rumours of God alive in a hopeless world. The Church of England is twice as old as the monarchy, three times as ancient as parliament. That impresses me. This impresses me more: Christ’s kingdom is forever, and he will reign, not somewhere else, but here, now, on this earth. Final story is a little longer, forgive me, it just moves me every time.
In 1944, the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko's mother took him from Siberia to Moscow. They were among those who witnessed a procession of twenty-thousand German war prisoners marching through the streets of Moscow:
The pavements swarmed with onlookers, cordoned off by soldiers and police. The crowd was mostly women – Russian women with hands roughened by hard work, lips untouched by lipstick, and with thin hunched shoulders which had borne half of the burden of the war. Every one of them must have had a father or a husband, a brother or a son killed by the Germans. They gazed with hatred in the direction from which the column was to appear.
At last, we saw it. The generals marched at the head, massive chins stuck out, lips folded disdainfully, their whole demeanor meant to show superiority over their plebian victors.
‘They smell of perfume, get em!’ someone in the crowd said with hatred. The women were clenching their fists. The soldiers and policemen had all they could do to hold them back.
All at once something happened to them. They saw German soldiers, thin, unshaven, wearing dirty blood-stained bandages, hobbling on crutches or leaning on the shoulders of their comrades; the soldiers walked with their heads down. The street became dead silent – the only sound was the shuffling of boots and the thumping of crutches.
Then I saw an elderly woman in broken-down boots push herself forward and touch a policeman's shoulder, saying, ‘Let me through.’ There must have been something about her that made him step aside. She went up to the column, took from inside her coat something wrapped in a colored handkerchief and unfolded it. It was a crust of black bread. She pushed it awkwardly into the pocket of a soldier, so exhausted that he was tottering on his feet. And now from every side women were running toward the soldiers, pushing into their hands bread, cigarettes, whatever they had. The soldiers were no longer enemies. They were people.”
Lord, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven, amen.