Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Matthew 6:10 (NIV)
The Kingdom Here – Teach Us How To Pray – Part 4
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I've prayed a lot of prayers begging God to bring his Kingdom to earth. ‘Your will be done here, God, just like it is in heaven! Make earth more like Heaven; invade it with your glory, consume it with your love, COME LORD…”
It was a kind of striving and a kind of wish. I suppose unconsciously (maybe a little consciously… I’m bad at being objective about my past) I thought that if I prayed enough, said all the right words and did all the rights things and put them all together in the right combination, I could “bring on” the coming of Christ in the world.
As if he was “out there” somewhere, and earth and heaven were as far apart from each other as the east is from the west…
It’s a strange thing to let God know that he is welcome in the world that he created; to invite him into a space that he already occupies. I get the sentiment, but the language doesn’t quite do it justice. And if you go far enough east, and you’ll end up face to face with ‘west.'
The ancient Hebrews didn’t see heaven as being a separate place: it wasn’t the end goal, or even where they went they died if they had been good and sacrificed enough. Heaven was all about the here and now: justice and mercy and compassion and freedom. Living well, here.
Embodying the name of God in our living and being.
We keep praying that heaven would come to earth, but Jesus is telling us that heaven is already here: in you and me.
The Kingdom is here. You are here. The Divine is in you: inextricably wound around your blood and bones and breath and heart and spirit.
The Kingdom is also coming. We’ve got more to learn, more to grow, more to become aware and alive to in this whole “embody the divine” in and through our lives. It's a work in progress.
And that's OK, because grace, grace, grace…
To see The Kingdom, you have to abandon most of what you know about other Kingdoms: God’s not building an empire, he’s not building monuments to himself that make man shake in fear and dwindle in smallness. He isn't conscripting an army to waste up with violence and conquering and tax collection. He’s not setting up town with cookie cutter houses and workplaces and people.
You have to flip it. God doesn’t build up – he builds down. Right into the soul. Deep into the hearts of people. And then from unique person to unique person, through faith, hope, and love; kindness and compassion, mercy and justice, forgiveness and healing (healing people – not the quick fix miracle but deep work of the heart. Inner transformation).
It’s like smoke… it wafts through the earth, being breathed in. Lived into. It’s passed along by touch, not decree. It’s more faith than sight, more hope than platitudes, more love than dominance.
Kingdom is the truest you you can be. And prayer helps you find it.
Frederick Buechner said:
“The Kingdom of God is not a place, of course, but a condition. Kingship might be a better word. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” Jesus prayed. The two are in apposition. Insofar as here and there, and now and then, God's kingly will is being done in various odd ways among us even at this moment, the Kingdom has come already. Insofar as all the odd ways we do God's will at this moment are at best half-baked and halfhearted, the Kingdom is still a long way off – a hell of a long way off, to be more precise and theological.
As a poet, Jesus is maybe at his best in describing the feeling you get when you glimpse the Thing Itself – the kingship of the king official at last and all the world his coronation. It's like finding a million dollars in a field, he says, or a jewel worth a king's ransom. It's like finding something you hated to lose and thought you'd never find again – an old keepsake, a stray sheep, a missing child. When the Kingdom really comes, it's as if the thing you lost and thought you'd never find again is yourself.”
Your turn… Leave us your comments below.
Go to Part 5 – Daily Bread »
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