This weekend we have a lot going on at St. Mark. In addition to continuing our October theme “The World Where It Happens,” we will be welcoming new members and meeting our new Parish Nurse Beth Schwarz during our Saturday and Sunday worship, following Saturday worship with “Meet Me at Muldoon’s,” and following Sunday worship with a workshop on Parenting as well as a study of the Gnostic gospels. If you think that was a very long compound sentence, just imagine what the weekend is going to be like. Jump in and enjoy!
Speaking of #TheWorldWhereItHappens, I invited everyone in worship last week to use their cameras of every sort in order to look for and to try to capture images of where the Reign of God is taking place in the world. When you do so, please send them to stmark@stmarkpresbyterian.org and we will collage them, post them on social media, etc. And please feel free to post them to your own social media sites, using the hashtag #TheWorldWhereItHappens. The primary goal of our month-long theme is to live into our faith by participating in what God is doing in the world. In order to do that, we are training our eyes to see glimpses of where God is at work, particularly in moments of resistance and liberated, or when walls of prejudice and bigotry come crashing down. We are taking our cue from the church in Antioch, which was established when some of the believers broke with the habit of speaking only to people like them and began to share the joy and justice of the gospel to people they perceived as ‘others.’
Some of the responses that I’ve heard since we began this week’s journey is, “It is hard to see where God is at work when the world is torn by violence and genocide and separation walls and glass ceilings and environmental destruction and constant divisiveness.” Indeed that is a valid response. If our goal were to pretend none of those things is taking place and only to focus on sunsets and kittens, then we would be reducing our faith a comforting illusion or even a distraction. So, allow me to offer three responses to the real difficulty of the task before us.
First, as difficult as it may seem, our task of looking for signs of God’s reign is vital to really living into the rhetoric of our faith. The familiar expression, “May your will be done on earth as in heaven,” shows that our faith is built on trusting in God’s real presence in our world. And, frankly, it is tempting to assume a kind of baptized atheism, which more or less sees “God’s will” as a good aspiration, but does not expect Godself to have anything to do with it. It is hard to see where God is at work in our world, but I suspect that developing that kind of vision comes through being a lifelong disciple, who practices the skills again and again day after day, and only achieves the skill after failing at it over and over. Think of a beginning dancer, a student of martial arts, or an aspiring writer. It is a trained eye, not a simple glance.
Second, the Christian faith has long sought a way to name how the reality of God’s reign is here, and yet the fullness of it is not. Theologians speak of God’s reign as a “Yet, but not yet” reality. Liturgists have shaped the season of Advent as pointing toward the “first Advent,” the first coming of Jesus, and anticipating the “second Advent,” when the reign of God comes in all of its glory. Biblical scholars focus on “the Word” that “became flesh and dwelt among us”; as well as the invocation, “Come, Lord Jesus.” Pastoral Caregivers have spoken of God as “a present help in times of trouble” and “our only comfort in life and in death.” When we look for signs of God’s reign and struggle to see them, we are not alone. The paradox that God’s reign is here and that God’s reign is yet to be fulfilled has always been a challenging part of the church’s entire ecosystem.
Finally, I want to lean on the wisdom of Reinhold Niebuhr for a moment – at least as far as I think I understand him. Niebuhr spoke often of achieving the “proximate good” as opposed to “ultimate good.” Any language about the “ultimate good” here and now in our lifetime is arrogant and blasphemous. At best, until the Reign of God comes in its fullness, even our best efforts are tainted by human sin, human finitude, our failure to see future consequences fully, etc. If our greatest achievements are, at best, proximate goods, then we can continue to find hope, encouragement, and purpose in doing justice, even if injustice is rampant around us. And for those of us who say at times, “The World Where It Happens” and are tempted to say at other times, “The World Where $#!& Happens” – here is small ray of hope. Injustice is also proximate, never ultimate. That is the point of our longing for the “second Advent,” the fullness of God’s reign. The “real world” has an arc that bends toward justice, even when injustice is rampant.
To live into the fullness of God’s reign, to discipline ourselves to see it, to name it, to capture it, and to share it – no matter how awkwardly we do so – is a way of resisting evil and living in faith.
#TheWorldWhereItHappens
Mark of St. Mark
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