The City of God

Text: Mark 10:2-16
Full Draft of Sermon

Augustine is one of those people who even if we have never read him still influences our thoughts. He influences the categories that place things in without us knowing it. Two of those categories are the City of God and the City of Man. We tend to slip into a little too dualistic thinking, making the City of Man all bad or evil. That isn’t really the case. The City of Man has its good and proper things. In fact it is usually good enough that we refuse to consider something else and spend out days desperately grasping what we have in the City of Man.

In Mark 10 Jesus lays out core distinctions between the Kingdom or City of God and the common perception. And he starts with marriage and divorce, which to be polite, Jesus is beyond the bounds of polite discourse.

But core distinction that he is trying to get at I think is this. The City of Man runs on accommodation. Because everything in the city of man comes with an expiration date, everything runs on making accommodation. The City of God runs on absolution. Accommodation hides. Absolution reveals. Accommodation eventually fails. You run into something that can’t be accommodated. God never runs out of grace. And that’s it, the currency of the City of God is grace. It buys nothing in the City of Man; but its what opens out eyes to something better.