December 18th

The Coming of the Kingdom

The new way of looking at the rosary is really proving a boon for writing these daily entries. The last time I wrote about this mystery (the first one of advent I believe) I was psyched out the same way: this should be the easiest one for me to write because this is my main thesis. We are living in the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of God is not to come or in the past but is happening now so let's live like it does.

Not that I do a great job of living that way myself.

We've gotten very used to the Beatitudes and the rhetoric of Christianity, humility and love of neighbor. But "Who is my neighbor?" seems to be less our question these days; we have that answer all figured out. I wonder if it's almost easier to say that the slain of the Sudan are our neighbor, so we send money and prayers, than to say that, for example, the bum on the corner we're worried will attack us or at least get his smell on us if we roll down the window at the light (happens a lot in Houston). But that's an easy soapbox. The real problem, as I see it, is our refusal to allow certain groups of people to be fully human.

We're better these days, don't get me wrong. Bigotry isn't dead though. The outright racist can find fewer places where he or she is tolerated, and homophobes, though prevalent, receive at the very least contemptuous looks from the general population.

I keep thinking of things like the Bechdel Test, however. It's a test that's fairly simple. It's meant for movies but works for most mediums and originally sprang from a television show: to pass the Bechdel Test the movie must 1) have at least two women in it, who 2) have at least one conversation 3) about something other than a man or men. It's shocking how many movies and televisions shows just don't pass. And gay characters on television shows are far more likely to be caricatures flaming into the night in sequins than fully fleshed out characters. And the movie 21 felt that the main character, an Asian based on the true story, had to be changed to a white male.

What I suppose I'm on about is that it always upsets me to hear Christian Values lumped in with prejudice because I've always felt that this was the sort of thing that Jesus came down here to explain was inappropriate. So that He moved from the protective and exclusive God of the Hebrews to the God of all mankind, accepting a Samaritan woman, a sinner at that, as a human being worthy of His attention and love, worthy of being His messenger. Making the Tax Collector the hero of a parable and another Samaritan the only kind soul in another. People it was okay to hate Jesus insisted that we take into our hearts, that we view as people.

Church isn't about money, He told us repeatedly. The Church isn't about power or influence, He rained down scorn on the Pharisees. The Church isn't even about a kind of fire insurance policy for eternal life, as shown in Jesus refusing to dignify the Sadducees' hypotheticals with a direct response but instead explaining that they were misunderstanding God and heaven.

Religion isn't about control or perfection, because what I see as the main reason Jesus had to come down was because free will was given to imperfect apes on a little round ball circling an insignificant star in the cosmos. Because love doesn't count the same way unless it's a choice. So He came down and suffered - not so that suddenly we would be perfect, but because that was never God's aim in creating us so the inevitable consequence of that choice had to be resolved.

But, getting back on topic from the far flung cascade of ideas on display above, this Mystery, the Coming of the Kingdom of God, is the point in the spiritual journey when you realize that this means that the entire world is different now. That for the rest of your life, the things that you do just won't quite make sense to the rest of the world. That they'll be off-kilter with what the world expects. Because we're called to operate on a different moral system than the eye-for-an-eye or at least get-what-you-can or succeed-at-any-cost mentality. And that's a harsh way of looking at it, but even more favorable moral compasses based on worldly values are no longer applicable to a person of faith.

Because we are living in the Kingdom of God, where there is no real currency as we think of it (currency is a thing to pay bills with and do good with, preferably not in that order but being reliable is also a virtue) and there is no single person on the face of this planet who is not a child of God with the right to be treated as such. There is no offense unforgiven by God, after the Crucifixion, so there is no reconciliation we can refuse to make (not that we do not have to have justice on earth or that we condone any sin).

Honestly, I still stumble over this step in my faith journey and perhaps that's why I muse over it so often and in so many disguises. This is most of what I'm talking about in this blog, this Mystery, and it flummoxes me every time. Our actions aren't meant to make sense to the rest of the world. Our moral compass isn't suppose to be practical. It's not supposed to follow an agenda that leads to power or follow blindly in any worldly authority's path.

We are meant to suffer and weep and love God, miss our families and friends so that we can go out and do good, and treat every person on this earth as a free and equal brother or sister in Christ. We like to think that we do already, in many cases, but have we really turned our entire world upside down to really build a model of what Jesus described in His teachings? Or did we just become a bit nicer and hope that we were doing well enough? At least to be getting on with.

When Jesus came down, He changed the whole world. We are living in the Kingdom of God. Those still on Earth should find us strange - or we probably aren't doing it right.