"nor will they say, 'See here!' or 'See there!' For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you." Luke 17:21
If there isn't any other reason to come together as one church, this is the one.
Jesus says this in response to the Pharisees, who were people who did a pretty good job at isolating themselves from everybody else. They considered themselves the purest of Jews, alienating the rest of the ethnically Jewish people who were in the area. They came up with so many different interpretations of the law so that only a select group of people would be able to become true Jews.
I don't have to say much else in order to bring this same issue up to today's world. At the highest levels, we have many bishops, pastors, and other major leaders calling for discrimination of anybody they feel should be taken out: women, the ill, any LGBT person, single parents, orphans, people of different races, non-English speakers. If we delve even deeper into supposedly united denominations, we can see issues that break communities apart. Even at the parish/mission/church level, there will be people who want to tear the congregations up. The worst is that now, with the availability of social media, everybody has a platform they can stand upon to shout and make their points, bringing out their own poison and breeding weeds among the wheat fields. They will all spread their hate with the same conclusion: See here! This is how the Kingdom of God will be, once we clean it up.
But that's not what Jesus preached. Jesus made the image plain and simple: the kingdom of God is within you (or y'all, the Greek is plural). I'm sure we all know what happens whenever teams break up, or when people decide to go their own way, deviating from a great team project - failure. When we decide to take on the role of a schismatic in a community, we cannot lie that it will be a way to build up a community. If we are going to maim the body of Christ, that's exactly what we will do. Rather than build up the Kingdom of God by uniting all the many residents, we will be taking it apart, brick by brick, and, ultimately, execution by execution. There will be no kingdom to speak of when we finish up our goal of dividing people up.
We are called to learn how to live with each other. And why is that, exactly? The Kingdom of God relies on one thing: the abundance of love. If we do not have love, we cannot be builders of the Kingdom. Before we start to take construction into our own hands, we have to take a moment and think, are we acting with love? If not, then reevaluate what you're doing. God has worked through all of our lives, showing us what the miracles of love are. How about we start bringing love into our communities to build them up?
No comments:
Post a Comment