The Kingdom
From Fredrick Buechner:
The Kingdom of God? Time after time Jesus tries to drum into our heads what he means by it. He heaps parable upon parable like a madman. He tries shouting it. He tries whispering it.....what he seems to be saying is that the Kingdom of God is the time, or a time beyond time, when it will no longer be humans in their lunacy who are in charge of the world but God in his mercy who will be in charge of the world. It's the time above all else for wild rejoicing---like getting out of jail, like being cured of cancer, like finally at long last....coming home. And it is at hand, Jesus says.
Sign me up!
4 Comments:
Everybody get on board! The kingdom caravan is leaving the station!!
Thanks, David, for bringing this up. I remember someone, somewhere writing that the Kingdom is to be our "marvelous obsession”.
Brian McLaren’s reflections on the kingdom (“The Secret Message of Jesus”, p. 85) speak to my heart more powerfully than any of his other writings. I got goose bumps the first time I read the following:
What would happen, I wonder as I sit in the light of the glorious stained-glass windows of a cathedral in Prague or Vienna or London or Florence, if we again tasted the good news of Jesus—not as a tranquilizer but as a vibrant, potent new wine that filled us with joy and hope that a better world is possible? What if, intoxicated by this new wine, we threw off our inhibitions and actually began acting as if the hidden but real kingdom of God was at hand?
When I asked my eighteen-year-old son to read this paragraph his eyes lit up and he responded, “Yea, that’s cool!”
BW, I JUST finished that McLaren book this week.....what a great book! I plan on bloggin about it soon.
Thanks for your comments, brother!
DU
McLaren also helped get our gears started at Rochester as we challenge each other to re-think the church. Since the word "kingdom' doesn't conjure up what it used to, what if we thought of the church as a party, a dance, a movement, a search and rescue mission, a revolutionary force, etc? We are going to do 12 sermons with these and other "what if we imagined the church as...?" ideas. Thanks to McLaren!
Yes, Patrick! I can almost hear Brian McLaren say: "...today, if we speak of the kingdom of God, the original electricity is largely gone, and in its place we too often find a kind of tired familiarity that inspires not hope and excitement but rather anxiety or boredom."
Actually, he did say that in "The Secret Message of Jesus" (138).
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