The Kingdom of God is Within and Amongst You

My apologies to anyone who has been looking for a blog entry and not seeing anything new in the last while. I have been in the midst of the madness of moving. Now that I am settled I was reminded by a friend to get back at this blog.

One of the things that has been on my find lately is that I think that Christianity has gotten its time frame all wrong, or at least significantly wrong.

When Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God, he spoke of it in the present, and as being within and amongst us. This changes things quite radically.

So often we have thought (and taught) that the focus of Christianity is on some future heaven. During periods of time, such as the reformation, when death was ever present and near this makes sense. It also makes sense if you are an empire that doesn’t want the implications of faith to effect its rule.

If we focus on the present though suddenly Christ’s teachings look very different. They are not about getting into heaven, rather they are about becoming a new and different sort of people here and how. Salvation is no longer about who gets through the pearly gates, but rather it is about our current healing.

Suddenly the many moral lists of the scriptures which are framed with “such as these will not enter the kingdom of God” are not a list of who is in and out, rather they are a list of those things that we do that prevent us and others from being healed and becoming the people of God. Instead of lists to scare they are a differential diagnosis, that is lists of things we may need to pay attention to and address if we want to experience healing.

If Christianity is about the present, then God’s grace is not just God’s final act in history, but rather it is God’s first and ongoing act of creation. Grace is the begining of all that we do. It defineds who we are, and it is God ongoing action to bring us to become who we are called to be.

When I look at the great harm done by the Christian church these days, again and again it goes back to its failure to be transformed and to live out the faith to which it is called. So often this is rooted in our failure to not just share our bread, but our failure to ask why we are not the ones both sharing our bread, and challenging the systems which produce hunger. The result is a religion, whose relevance has been often limited to its ability to scare people into morality, and provide comfort, but no healing. While this was convenient for the empires which Christianity served, and the Empire that Christianity has become. It has robed us of far too much of what faith has to offer.

For the kingdom of God is with within and amongst us. Let us no longer be distracted. The feast is set and we are invited to the table. Let us taste and share of God’s kingdom.