Heaven Can’t Wait!
October 18, 2026
21st Sunday after Pentecost
MINISTER
Rev. David J. Wood
SCRIPTURE
Isaiah 11: 6-9; Matthew 6: 10
“Heaven Can’t Wait”
by Rev. David J. Wood
21st Sunday After Pentecost, October 18, 2026
First Congregational Church of Camden
Scripture Readings: Isaiah 11: 6-9 & Matthew 6: 10
Over the next three Sundays, we will continue our slow walk through The Lord’s Prayer… to dwell on the different stanzas of the prayer…to linger with each phrase in an effort to comprehend it more fully…to pray it more deeply.
Last week, we took up the first stanza of this prayer:
“Our Father, who art in heaven
Hallowed be Thy Name.”
This prayer begins with the naming of an intimate relationship—like a parent to a child—that God has initiated.
Prayer begins with the recognition of that relationship.
Prayer begins with God…not with ourselves.
Prayer begins with the turning of our attention FROM ourselves to God. It does not end there…but it always begins there…
And so we begin by praying….
For God’s name be hallowed
For God’s Kingdom Come
For God’s will be done…
I want to come back that quote from the theologian Karl Barth that I referenced last week…he wrote from the heart of Europe in the years leading up and during and after the 2nd World War: “To clasp hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”
That notion of prayer as “uprising against the disorder of the world” is front and center as we take up what I am calling the second stanza of the Lord’s prayer:
Thy Kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven…
It has been said, the more popular version of this stanza reads like this: “Lord, let My will be done on earth as yours is in heaven!!”
Talk of “Artificial Intelligence” is everywhere these days.
If you have paid attention at all to all the chatter about Artificial Intelligence, you have probably come across references to what they call: “The Alignment Problem.” It is thought to be the fundamental problem the creators of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are desperate to solve: how do they get the powerful AI systems they are creating to not go rogue and catastrophically diverge from the will of their creators.
Aligning creatures with the will of their Creator is an age old problem. You can hear God looking down on all this and saying:
Now maybe you will finally understand
what I have been dealing with since Day one!!!
One common scenario of a catastrophic divergence is that AI agents...perhaps thousands of them, or millions, or a thousand million of them, will conspire together to bring an end to humankind. The fear is that these soulless AI agents will commit, not suicide or genocide…but humanicide.
One AI researcher defines the alignment problem this way—it’s “getting AI to ‘try to do the right thing’ by human standards.” THIS he says, is the “core problem” of AI research. To put it in more everyday terms, AI researchers are struggling with the challenge of how to give AI agents a moral education.
The thing with AI is that no one is sure there is any sort of moral backstop…as far as an AI agent is concerned, there is nothing that could be invoked or evoked that would cause these AI agents to decide for the good and benefit of humankind rather than for its demise and extinction.
It’s not that AI agents lack something akin to a will—they have agency…it’s that in the digital world of AI, there is no meaningful conscience in play, no moral rationale to put a check on a catastrophic divergence. And so, solving the Alignment Problem is of the utmost importance.
What I want to suggest is that this petition of the Lord’s Prayer we are taking up today names our enduring ‘Alignment Problem.’
Thy Kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven…
There is an enduring misalignment between heaven and earth; between the kingdoms of this world…and the Kingdom of God; between what we have made of the world…and what the world was created to be, and was meant to be.
This world is aligned too much with our own rogue will and not enough with the holy, just and righteous will and intentions of God. The Kingdom of God is the Bible’s way of naming the realm where God dwells and there is no differential, no misalignment between what is and the goodness, the righteousness, the justice, the love and mercy of God.
In our reading from the prophet Isaiah we have a vision of the Kingdom of God…Images of wolf living with then lamb, calfs and lions together, cow and the bear grazing together…children will have no fear for their safety…and “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”
In an earlier chapter of Isaiah (chapter 2) the Kingdom of God, the realm where God’s will reigns, is where ”swords are beaten into ploughshares…and spears into pruning hooks”. The Kingdom of God is where “Nation shall no longer lift up sword against nation, nor will they learn war anymore.”
In God’s ‘Peaceable kingdom,’ weapons of war become tools for gardening, for the cultivation of food and sustenance—no longer will they be used as instruments of violence and death.
We don’t live in that Kingdom. We live in a world that transforms toys into lethal weapons. Remember when a drone was more like a toy for amusement and entertainment? And now, if you live in KIVE, drones swarm, and are the dreaded and feared instruments of terror and death.
Those who pray this prayer feel intensely the differential, the divergence, the misalignment between God’s will and our world.
There are times when we feel that misalignment acutely. It happened for me this past week when the news came of a 16 yr old, special education student, who took his mother’s shotgun and killed a 5, an 8, & an 11 year old, and a teacher…before being shot and killed by a father who happened to be driving by his daughter’s school. Closer to home, next week is the 3rd year anniversary of Lewiston shooting.
Sometimes the slippage, the misalignment between the the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world is almost too much to bear…But pray we must…and pray we will:
Thy Kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven…
NOTICE: this is NOT a Plea for ESCAPE…it is not a giving up to despair or cynicism…it is a heartfelt plea for God’s sovereignty, God’s rule of justice, peace, righteousness to be established HERE and NOW:
Heaven can’t wait!
This prayer picks up on the story of a God who has not abandoned this world to its own devices. This prayer is premised on the story of a God who, in Jesus Christ, has crossed over…breached the divide between heaven and earth…spanned the chasm…and who refuses to let us go. And so we pray…
Thy Kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven…
Amidst all the misalignment between God’s Kingdom and the kingdoms of this world, between God’s will and our own, sometimes we do experience alignment…a kind of congruence…and when we do, it is a foretaste of heaven.
Surely one of those times we all felt that, on a global scale, was the day the all Berlin Wall. It was a moment of alignment.
And, for all of us, there are times when it dawns on us in more personal, intimate terms as well. The writer Annie Dillard died a weeks ago. In her book, Pilgrim a Tinker Creek, she wrote:
“I had been my whole life a bell,
and never knew it until at that moment
I was lifted and struck.”
It’s in those moments of alignment, we feel ourselves caught up in something larger than ourselves…and we feel fully alive. Life rings true.
Someone once said, “What we seek is not meaning in itself, but participation in a struggle that is meaningful.” This prayer is how we place ourselves in that struggle. The ‘misalignment’ becomes a place for creative, hopeful engagement…whatever present we may find ourselves in, the future is never foreclosed…even in the face of death. To pray this prayer is nothing less than the refusal to allow the future to be stolen from us…It is to claim that another way of life is possible.
It is nothing less than a petition of hope.
Thy Kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven…
It was May, 1992. Vedran Smailovic was living in Sarajevo…which was, at the time, surrounded and under siege by Serb nationalists. Residents were reduced to a daily ordeal of finding food and water amidst shelling and sniper fire.
Vedran Smailovic lived in a small 2nd floor apartment across the street from one of the few remaining bakeries in the city…people were lined up daily in hope of bread.
On May 27, a mortar shell landed in the middle of the cue killing 22 people. For Vedran it was a breaking point. He was desperate to do something amidst the carnage and the hopelessness of the moment. He was not a politician. He was not a soldier. He was a musician. He felt powerless.
In an act of desperation, put on his tuxedo, he took his cello, and a chair. Went out into the street below and set his chair in the middle of the rubble and the remains of where the mortar shell had exploded and he began to play…
He played Albinoni’s “Adagio in G Minor.” People gathered to listen undaunted by fear. When he finished, he packed up and went to a local coffee shop. People followed him thanking him saying “This is what we needed.” The next day, he went back...the day after that…and the day after that…he played in the rubble for 22 straight days…one for each person killed. Regardless of the conditions that surrounded him, he played on. Eventually, he went to other sites of massacre and mayhem in Sarajevo and he played.
He played at countless funerals. It as if by his playing, he kept the sound, the imagination of another world alive. As the reports of his playing spread, he became a symbol for peace.
When Jesus spoke of what the Kingdom of heaven looks like, when it breaks in…he, more often than not, did not use metaphors that were grand or cosmic in scale. More often than not, he pointed to small things that have great effects: like grains of yeast, tiny mustard seeds…and precious pearls that begin with a speck of grit.
When Jesus talked of the signs of the Kingdom of God, he spoke of the eternal significance of everyday life and deeds: a cup of water, an act of mercy, the breaking and sharing of bread…forgiving someone who has wronged us…
To pray,
Thy Kingdom Come
Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven...is to pray…
Let your will be done
In me,
In my life,
Through my life, in this situation…today…here…now.
It is to place ourselves in the service of God’s will.
As one theologian put it,
“We, each one of us, individually and collectively, are called to be the bridge that connects the world in which we live to the Kingdom for which we pray.”
Thy Kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven…
Amen. Let it be so.