"When I compared the vision for life in the kingdom that Jesus put forth in the Gospels with the experience I had at church as a new Christian, I noticed a discrepancy. Jesus' fresh perspectives on money, suffering, justice, love had been refashioned into a tidy way of life for those who did their best to convey that they no longer needed much of what he had to say.
At eighteen, I sensed the problem without quite being able to say it. In all the tidiness, the wonder of the gospel of Jesus seemed to be disappearing. As a new convert, I was alive in that wonder. It was changing my life. But lookoing around, I realized that most of Jesus' followers lived pretty much like everyone else - except we hoped for heaven. The Christian life began to look like one long waiting game of Bible studies and boring parties. If I was lucky, a bus would hit me and I'd go straight to heaven. Until then the kingdom life I was reading about in the Gospels would have to wait.
I felt disappointed - like I had entered into C.S. Lewis's wardrobe, full of anticipation, but instead of standing in a magical place with fawns and witches and every kind of possibility, I had somehow managed to walk through the wardrobe and into a dentist's office. People sat around reading magazines and asking me to calm down, to be quiet, to take a seat. They said it very nicely, of course, like you would in a dentist's office. The place was clean, with polite smiles everywhere, sterile smells, and bad Muzak. What are you supposed to do in a waiting room except try to kill time? I did a lot of that. I killed time in college groups. In church. In Bible college. I even killed time as a pastor.
But leaning back in my chair one day I realized that the walls of a waiting room were actually papr-thin. Behind the veil of Western evangelicalism existed an untamed, revolutionary reality. The world on the other side of the wardrobe did exist, I realized. You just have to tear down the fake walls first, kill the fake music, and let yourself go crashing with newborn, wide-eyed anticipation out into the world.
And there it is all around you. The kingdom of God.
What would happen if we recaptured appropriate wonder at the present reality of the kingdom? What if we could see it and could collaborate with the Spirit as it breaks into our world? What if we discovered the simple miracle of participating with God in his kingdom and practicing the presence of it all around us?
Practicing the presence of the kingdom changes how we see the world, our neighbors, and ourselves. It changes the way we use money, understand children, and play in creation. It causes us to stop and listen, see, touch, taste, and feel. The kingdom is found in justice breaking in all around us, in the beauty in the midst of the mess.
The kingdom also calls us to to be signposts along the road of life, pointing to the reality of heaven and our King. It calls us to hold that sign up among those who suffer. The kingdom shows up, and we stand in the midst of their suffering with them and declare that they are loved.
That kind of signpost, showing up all over the place.
This is the kind of articulation I have been looking for to explain the kingdom. Something not safe. Something not comfortable. I only hope I can break through those walls myself. As Mike Cope calls it, we are "The church that has left the building".
1 comment:
Interesting perspective...I like that "the church has left the building". My one goal in life is for God to say "well done, good and faithful servant". It keeps me on my toes. I think it's important that we surround ourselves with vibrant people. Focusing on seeking and saving the lost keeps a freshness to our faith that I think we can't always get from our mature church body. Jesus made himself AVAILABLE. We can't get too busy or too comfortable to do the same. I think the paper walls are composed of pride and fear. That's just my take on it.
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