The prayer of Our
Father brings to us the reality of the Kingdom which is Jesus and Jesus who is
the kingdom. Once the kingdom comes we see the risen Christ, Jesus opens up the
future for us to choose. God doesn’t manipulate our history, but offers us a
future and we become protagonists, playing our part in its consummation. This
kingdom is in our midst, it’s provisional, complete and not yet complete. The
challenge is that we do not play as per God’s will or what he wants for us.
The Lord’s Prayer
is a royal road to the kingdom. It’s a sign post on how best we need to live,
serve and become what the kingdom requires, making out of the new culture a
frame of a new reference, by which we know, we belong to Christ. We need to
admire the wonder. Like Moses we should realize that we are standing on a holy
ground once we are saying Our Father who art in heaven…allowed be your name…
We have to
present our own failings and inadequacies of our societies, but the sense of
forgiveness turns that judgment into a vision of what might be, but above all
repentance, a change of heart, and mind. So pray ‘Thy will be done.’
There exists
powers and principalities which will try to get us off the track, vision, and,
so we must therefore tear away those obscuring curtains by praying for wisdom
and discernment so can keep time to the vision. Our poverty today derives from
our family failings, globalization expects us to buy into its obscuring myths,
so as we pray for God’s will to be done, we should make sure that these myths
do not succeed in obscuring the kingdom vision. We are slowly finding ourselves
in 666 market place, where everyone is given a price tag, brand and label but
not necessarily their values. (Rev 13:17) “So
that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is, the name of
the beast or the number of its name.” We need to understand that the word
Ecclesia was a Greek word used in antiquity for the assembly in the market place
at which the whole community would decide together upon community issues, it
became an alternative, non commodifying way of being in the market pace. The
kingdom of God theology therefore demythologized market so that it doesn’t become
the hidden assumption underlying our life choices, but helping tool for some.
The gardener who
only gardens and never stops to look at the beauty of the garden has somehow
missed out on the very reason for gardening. The demand for ever increasing
efficiency in the urban life means that anyone who is not ruthlessly efficient
goes to the wall. Competitive efficiency shouldn’t drive the weak to the wall.
Today at the
press of a button we are in touch with vast reams of data to the extent that
many of us now feel we have information overload. The happiest key on the key
board is the delete key button. We are often convinced that the more information
I have the better my judgment may be. “I know that fact, I believe that
information, then I can assert that I have the truth” But the truth as an
information was actually the rampant heresy of Gnosticism (A heretic movement of the 2nd Cent Christian church, partly Christian
origin. It taught that the world was created and ruled by lesser divinity, the
demiurge, and that Christ was an emissary of the remote supreme divine being,
esoteric knowledge (gnosis) of whom enabled the redemption of the human spirit)
which assailed the church in its earliest years and which the Bible vigorously
challenged.
In the Bible the
word “to know”, doesn’t refer to an information at all but to loving intimacy.
The God if truth is found in loving relationship and, what is more, actually it’s
a relationship of the Holy Trinity. Christian truth is not a statement but a
relationship and it’s the quality of the relationship which we have with God,
through Christ that will be for us the truth (John 15:1-2). “I am the true vine and my Father is the
gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every
branch that does bear fruit he prunes, so that it will be even more fruitful.”
The globalized
world always wants us think that information is the root of all wisdom, then we
are simply being profoundly misled. Even the very word globalization may hinder
our discernment of God’s will. Governments both national and international have
failed to address injustice which are within their field of responsibility,
claiming as an excuse, that their hands are tied by global forces. This hides
very much behind the media, music production, arts, professional football and entertainment.
We have to rise above the earth idols and “seek the kingdom of God and its
righteousness.” Whatever we have we must share it, treating our physicality
with respect, we are not disembodied spirits, even though intellectual and
class elitism has, since the time of Plato valued more above matter in most
exploitative ways. We are living in our sedentary lives so much by the
application of our intellect that we get almost no physical exercise. We are
watching screen all day and another each evening is to live a life as an out of
body experience.
How can we pray “Give
us our daily bread” when we have so evidently squandered our bread from
yesterday? We have wasted the potential of others by offering them sparse and
inadequate training, education, and opportunity that is effecting us, de-stabilization
and urban violence. Our economic theory and practice is predicated upon scarcity
that is why we draw economic charts of demand and supply. But God’s economy,
much to our surprise, is predicated upon generous over abundance and extra
ordinary preparedness to share. The labourers in the vineyard are paid a
generous day’s wage even though they have not been able to work a full day and
how much more will the heavenly father give to those who ask him “unlike ours,
God’s economy is one of extravagant generosity. And when it comes to debt, in
God’s economy it is all forgiveness, even seventy times seven times. This is
different from the loan shark mentality of our housing estates and our city
finance houses.
Generosity is a
gift the young people can bring to us the old, our life together must mirror
the self-sacrifice which Jesus makes as he forgives us, includes au at the banquet
and gives himself as the bread for the world. This can only be possible once we
know the other. We just have to have a sense of responsibly one for another.
God is “Our Father” makes us all brothers and sisters in the commonality of the
human race, but you still get people who fear to give a seat to someone else
dressed differently, or in clothes form another culture, who look so very
different from us. We realize that we have no common language with which to communicate
and all that seems to be communicated is otherness, so we construct defences
against them in a form of a wall.
Jesus crosses the
ultimate boundary of the otherness, from divinity to humanity, so that the veil
of the temple is torn in two- the holy and common at last in “holy communion.”
In the land of exclusion and racial conflict, he reaches out even to the
collaborator Zacheus allowing him to entertain him in his home, Syrophoenician
woman, a person of altogether another ethnicity, is granted her request,
excluded lepers are healed and welcomed in. Jesus life demonstrates that the
Kingdom of God must be marked by welcoming inclusion and embrace of difference
and otherness, God’s work of reconciliation meets very powerful counter forces
that ours sins may be mutually forgiven and must be in ardent prayer. Even on
the cross, where Jesus is being attacked by the powers of fragmentation and
dislocation, he prays, Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are
doing.
Our gospel must
become Pentecostal, multi-voiced, allowing the Holy Spirit to speak in each language
and each culture and context in ways that each of us of us will understand. The
gospel in a local accent, mutual respect and acceptance which is life
transforming. If we treat people like rubbish, they will end up to behaving
like rubbish. We are today, becoming fearful, even to our personal cohesion. It’s
easy to lose memory of who we really are, for our identity feels threatened, so
we heat out at those who appear to have found a sense of identity by belonging
to an alternative group. The person who looks vaguely different begins to
count, more and more as an enemy. Sometimes the tearing apart, in
fragmentation, bringing us back to our senses of who we are.
We have to be a church
that reconciles, listens and a forgiving community, a meet and listen church,
connections ought to be made, voices have to be heard, stories told, and
meeting the victims, even if it means for a moment. Jesus tells his disciples
to stay in the city, to confront the city challenges, not to flee from them
into holy huddle. It’s there that we will meet God. In the midst of struggle, surrounded
by others who are very different, so that we can learn that our sins are
forgiven, as we forgive those who sin against us the gift of reconciliation.
The structure
which surround us have a way of controlling us, they form the culture which we
must critique. The complex hidden structures of society are not always benign,
but can be quite beastly. We always feel powerless to sort out our problems.
The beast had invaded the structure that we felt no solution. The beast makes
us impotent because of the sheer scale of the problems, the beast is just too
vast to manage. Some structure promise well, but let us down.
But in Jesus, “we created all things in heaven and on
earth-all things were created through him and for him. He exists before all
things and in him all things hold together? (Col 1:16-18). Holding all
things together is simply “systematize”.
The structures are meant for service, but have fallen from grace, we can appreciate
the market forces, but we refuse them to dominate us. We must engage the powers
of evil, just as did the lamb, with courageous action and vulnerability. Just
as the kingdom is now and “not yet.” The Church is the privileged instrument of
the kingdom of God, but it is sometimes more concerned for its own welfare than
it has to sacrifice itself for the sake of the kingdom of God. The church has
to change radically into listening, engaging and trustworthy community, and
must be seen to have become so.
Evangelism is
about sharing the good news of trust, hope and reconciliation between different
generations of the estate, breaking down barriers of fear and antagonism and
finding new ways to be church, proclaiming Jesus with our hearts.
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