Upside right
I am sure you have seen it, maybe you have done it yourself. Reading directions, or some such thing, and once you have read it, it doesn’t make any sense. So you take the directions, and you turn them upside down hoping to gain a little clarity. Ok, mostly it is done out of humor, we know we are stuck and don’t understand things, so we act out our confusion and frustration in a silly way. I think there is truth in that silly action.
Often when theologians and others talk about how Jesus viewed the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God, they say Jesus turns the world upside down. In our book of faith devotions today the verse they use is from Matt. 20:25a-26 where he says if you want to be great you must be a servant.
But I tend to think of things this way… Jesus is not turning things upside down… he is in fact turning things upside right. Our view on power, glory, honor and position is broken by sin, and as such we see and operate in an upside down manner.
To live in the Kingdom of God is to live upside right. Oh it is easy, way too easy to be flipped back around by the way the world sees things, but there are those moments when living in the fullness of God’s love we live and operate upside right and those moments my friend make all the difference.
One of my congregation members answered the question I asked yesterday. Where do you see the Kingdom of God? Sheri said; “Every day in the eyes of the little children that surround me!” Now Sheri does daycare, God bless her indeed. This is not a job that I was gifted for, but she is and in living in her giftedness she see the Kingdom in the eyes of those kids.
Maybe she can see it there, because for the most part these kids know what it is like to be totally dependant on another. As grown ups we think we are suppose to make it on our own in everything. But the words “Your kingdom come…” also remind us that we are to trust as Brother Martin put it: “The kingdom of God comes indeed without our prayer, of itself; but we pray in this petition that it may come unto us also.” It is trusting in God acknowledging our depending upon God that sets the world upside right.
in heaven, the fine point of Both and…
The otherness of God
Yesterday we pondered God as “Father” an intimate and relational term for God. Today we follow that with “in heaven” a phrase that puts a bit of space between us and God. God is God we are not. This basic and perhaps very obvious fact is often lost on us. We like a god that is at our beck and call, one that likes the same things and people we like, says things we agree with, and generally doesn’t demand too much of us that we are not already willing to do. But this God is “in heaven” in heaven implies distance, otherness, mystery. A fancy word for this is transcendence (had to use the spell check on that one!) basically it means a going beyond; God is beyond us, apart from. So in this prayer we pray in a relational way to one who is beyond us?
In Christ God has come to us, though God in his fullness is beyond us, God chooses to come to us and become known. In this he is not beholden to us, but rather reaches out to establish a relationship rooted in love. God is not some prime-mover who set things in motion and now sits back and watches what happens to us like a bad sit-com. God comes that we might have life, and for that to happen God chooses to get God’s hands dirty. In Christ God comes and mucks about as one of us, the one who is all things chooses to identify with us, his creation and reaches out in love. No one is excluded from this love except those who exclude themselves. Maybe we have grown so accustomed the Abba Daddy image of God that we risk losing what a big deal it is that this God, amazing, mysterious and Omni everything has chosen to relate to us. Lutherans love to keep things both and… we are both sinner and saint, the kingdom is already and not yet and God is both an immanent Daddy and transcendent Awesome Creator of everything, to be feared and worshiped.
In this balance we have a God who loves us and yet pushes to move beyond who we are now to become what we already are in Jesus Christ.
