One of the ways that being a person of faith, of caring for our relationship with the living God, can be helpful – and more than that: life-saving, soul-saving – is to give us a perspective outside ourselves and outside the immediate environment around us.

Our sense of who we are and who other people are can be deeper and broader than the other things that try to define us, like our names and history and roles and social status. We are each and all at our barest and most essential children of the living God, who bare within us reflections of our Holy Creator.

Not only this, but our sense of what is possible for our lives and for history itself can be deeper and broader than it may first seem. We ultimately belong to the Realm of God, we are citizens of the Kingdom of God, deeper and broader than any earthly order.

All of this can help us to find and share human dignity where there is dehumanization; to find and share hope where there is despair; to find and share moral courage where there is numbness or depravity; to find and share purpose as fellow workers in a great and beautiful and sacred project far beyond the scope of any of our individual lives.

When we get a little look at a bigger perspective, a glimpse of a God’s eye view of things, we can realize how we each and all need mercy, we each and all need deliverance. We can start to see how we suffer unnecessarily because of human pride or delusion that, somehow, we are the center and measure of everything, rather than God.

Knowing our deepest and truest identity and belonging is a liberating experience, and is all the more important when our sense of possibility and purpose gets constricted, with despair or desperation or oppression or meanness, embattlement, fear.

We can see it as being similar to how important it is that people who are incarcerated to have relationships outside the walls of the prison, and dreams to work toward for the time when they are free, and a faith that can remind them of their own value and the value of others. Or when someone is growing up in an unhealthy family situation, it’s so important that they have at least one person in their lives who can show them that it doesn’t have to be this way, that abuse does not have to be the norm, that they are not crazy for thinking it is wrong, and there can be a way out. Or how important it is that we have visionary leaders in times of war or injustice who can “write the vision and make it plain” [citation], who can go up to that holy mountain and see the promised land on the far horizon, who can carry the truth that peace is still yet possible, that the way of war is indeed insane and wrong, that our Holy Creator’s covenant endures that there can yet come a time when all peoples can “sit under their own vine and fig tree and be at peace and unafraid,” [citation] so we can take courage and persevere in doing our parts to be peace-workers.

My Dad, of blessed memory, always liked the image of whales who at times pop up out of the water vertically and rotate like a periscope to get oriented to their wider surroundings. It’s called “spyhopping.” Whales are terrific at navigating and maneuvering underwater, of course, but sometimes they find it helpful to get their heads above water, literally, and have a look around and get a view outside their normal limitations.

Our faith can help us to “spyhop” like this, to get our heads above the water for a peek at a wider view and truer orientation.

For those of us who follow Jesus, Jesus can be for us a glimpse and a guide to a way of life free from the agonizing webs of the human condition entangled as we can be in sin.

As I have been saying throughout Lent and this Easter season, the way of Jesus is not just about believing the right things so we can get to heaven after we die. It is about the vision and the promise of life on earth as it is in heaven, a vision and a promise that can free us and guide us to live on behalf of hope and love and peace despite the strife and confusion of our days. For us, it’s the person of Jesus who can guide us by reminding us who we truly are and to whom we truly belong, and to whom this world and its history truly belongs. Therefore, our vocation is to be fellow workers with all our ancestors of the faith past and all the descendants of the faith to come, fellow workers building for the “Kingdom” (or “Kin-dom”) of heaven on earth.

This way of putting it comes from the bible scholar and church leader N.T. Wright: Building for the Kingdom. Not building the Kingdom itself – that no human can accomplish, only God – but building for the Kingdom of heaven on earth.

N.T. Wright has done a lot of work to recover a New Testament understanding of the “Kingdom,” and what it can mean for Christians. The whole epic of the Christian story – of Jesus’ life and teaching and suffering and death by crucifixion, followed by his resurrection then ascension and promise to come again at the culmination of history, followed by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost upon the community of disciples – all of this is about God showing the victory of God’s love over the powers of sin and death, and the enduring promise of God’s covenant that history will be fulfilled when God redeems and restores all of Creation to Godself and the realm of earth is transformed through its reunion with the realm of heaven.

Jesus’ resurrection is seen as a foretaste and a promise of this universal resurrection. Through Jesus’ life and teachings, through the ongoing activity of the Holy Spirit, through the ongoing presence of the Cosmic Christ, we are given glimpses of the unified reality of heaven on earth, we are given reassurances that this reality is indeed real, that it is indeed the true source of our being and our belonging.

Jesus gives us looks above the water, where we can scope around for a second before plunging back in. This can give us the courage and comfort and conviction in doing and being as Jesus guides us to do an to be, as agents of mercy and healing, peace and reconciliation, justice and hope, come what may.

In other words, after the Ascension experience, Jesus’ followers didn’t just stand around gazing up at the sky waiting for Jesus to beam back down again. They turned to each other and out to their neighbors, strangers, enemies, and friends, with transformed hearts, and started working toward a way of life here on earth transformed by all that Jesus revealed, reoriented around the truth and power and love of God who created each and all of us and endowed us with value. Those are the faithful efforts we inherit and have to pass on.

An image N.T. Wright uses is a cathedral that takes hundreds of years to complete. Each artisan and laborer has their work to do and their part to play, but they may not even be aware of the full vision that the architect has laid out and that gets passed down from the generations.

Let me quote N.T. Wright more fully about what all this means:

“What you do in the present – by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself – will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly or a little more bearable until the day when we leave it behind. They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom…”

To Wright’s list, we can add the examples from the song we just sang, “Lord of Justice,” by Larry Olsen, which are restating what Jesus taught: To the stranger/ May we give welcome / To the hungry / May we give bread / To the naked / May we give clothing / To the homeless / A place to lay their head/ To the wounded / May we give healing / To the voiceless / May we give words / To the captives / May we give freedom / To the tortured / Release from all the hurt

Back to N.T. Wright: “You are – strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself – accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world. What you do in the Lord is not in vain.”

What we do matters, and it matters in ways that are measured differently than what how our society measures success or failure.

Again, it’s not by our efforts or righteousness or virtue or good deeds somehow that the Kingdom comes on earth as it is in heaven. Thank God, because we are not up to the task. Rather it’s more that we can have moments of alignment with what is true and good, holy and enduring.

Even if just for a moment I realize: My God, you and I are both children of the Living God, we’re both in this together, we both have value, we both struggle, we both need mercy, we both ultimately depend on God, I ought to treat you like that – that is a moment that lives in eternity. That is a holy moment. The moment before I may have been treating you like an enemy – defensive, aggressive, dismissive – but the truth has set me free, even for a moment. Even a glimpse of seeing things with the eyes of Christ, a spyhop above the water, is a contribution to the Realm of Heaven on Earth. How much more when it moves us to action. How much more when it moves us to commit to reorienting ourselves and our lives and our lives together.

So, thank you all for being a part of that, and trying to do your part.

Above all, thanks be to God.

Delivered Sunday, May 17, 2026, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge