The crucified and resurrected Christ gives us "eyes to see" and "ears to hear" in a new way. Most of my life I've seen Christianity and the Church as kind of a temporary part of the world, a critic and a minority, waiting to be plucked out of this place. But over the last few years I've been realising that my default setting being the way the world appears is actually incorrect - that the early church understood that because of Christ, everything has changed - that the Powers have been defeated, or more correctly, won over through the power of the nonviolent suffering love of the cross, and that the world is just struggling to come to terms with that (or as William Gibson puts it, "The future is here, it's just not widely distributed yet"). Eschatology reaches back towards us with an invitation to live in the light of the defeat of sin and death now, of the ultimate redemption. In other words "Seek first the kingdom" could perhaps be paraphrased "Make the Kingdom your default setting..." We live in the light of the resurrection, and are called to be signs of the inbreaking Kingdom, examples of what the world looks like when it is fully transformed, here and now.

This is the outworking of the Lord's Prayer - "Your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven...for the Kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, forever and ever!" or as NT Wright puts it, "If the church isn't prepared to subvert the kingdoms of the world with the kingdom of God, the only honest thing would be to give up praying this prayer [the Lord’s prayer] altogether, especially its final doxology." (N. T. Wright, The Lord and His Prayer) This is the discipline and invitation of the practice of the Lord's Prayer - to see again God and God's Kingdom as our 'default setting'.

I preached a couple of weeks ago at a Unitarian Church (hey, you preach the gospel wherever you're invited!) on 'Another World is Possible, Another World is Necessary, Another World is Already Here!' - podcast here: http://www.3cr.org.au/aggregator/sources/1939. It fleshes this out a bit more in case people are interested.

Blessings of encouragement and peace to you all, Simon

June 2009