the Interconnectedness of the Kingdom of God

In high school, I took a European History Class. It started during the Renaissance and moved toward present day, the course ending (I think) around 1850. I had an amazing teacher who made course material that could have been very dry into something that intrigued me. The book we used talked about everything in terms of social, political, economic, and religious contexts. This often infuriated me, because throughout most of history, it was nearly impossible to separate these things. The official Roman Catholic Church was involved with government and social realities and how money was spent. Kings and Princes held powerful sway within church politics. How money was spent and on what was affected by politics and religion.

This is not how we often see our world today. We have separated these things in our mind. Politics should not impact religion, and vice versa. We are satisfied (at least in practice, even if we disagree intellectually) with our capitalist market. We disregard the social realities of how our policies and systems affect the most vulnerable among us.

When I think about the world today, I realize how much of an impact my high school history class had on the way I see the world. It was the starting point for me in realizing that the world is not neatly separated in these boxes. Our social lives affect how we spend our money and what our politics looks like. Our political views and the policies of our elected officials impact the social and economic realities. Our religious views change how we perceive the world around us, what is right and wrong, why the world is the way it is and how it should be. All of these things are interconnected.

This interconnectedness is what allowed me to see the Kingdom of God as both a future thing and a present reality. When I read "Thy kingdom come, they will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" I see that the Kingdom of God is a place where all things, social, political, economic, and religious, are brought under the reign of God. But it is not a kingdom of power and might, for Jesus did not come in power and might establishing his reign through force. So neither should we.

We see Jesus as a servant, declaring that the Kingdom of God has come. He literally feeds hungry people. He heals people. Following him meant changing how you related to money, how you spent your time, how you treated the ostracized of society. They already had a list of moral duties and church attendance and an air of superiority. If that was the religion God sought, he wouldn't have needed Jesus to come and die for us. That was already had in the Pharisees and the law.

But the Kingdom of God is wherever God reigns. He reigns in the hearts of people. When we say our hearts though, we cannot separate that as some spiritual thing. Our physical hearts are what keep us alive; without them we die. So, when we say he reigns in our hearts, that means he reigns in our lives, because if he isn't interwoven into every part of our lives, the parts without him will die. It is the same physically; if our hearts stop pumping blood to part of our body, it dies. If he is not entirely integrated in how we treat people (the orphans, the widows, the voiceless, and marginalized in our society), if we don't think about the unintended consequences of our market economy and how our money is a part of that, if we don't wonder at how politics never seem to address the real issues of our society, then those will essentially be dead weight upon us that drag us down because we didn't allow them to be given life that comes through Jesus.

Ramblings on Life in Brazil (or "on Courage") {matul}

Yesterday, with the help of a couple internet sites, I completely disassembled my laptop in order to clean the fan in it. And then I put it back together and it still works!  In fact, it works better than it did before I cleaned the fan! I'm pretty freaking proud of myself. My host mom called me courageous for doing something that I'd never done before that had a potentially disastrous outcome (like my computer not working anymore). For me, it was just what needed to be done, since no on I knew could point me to a computer store that also cleaned laptops here in Rio.

I've found a renewed sense of purpose being back in Rio. My month in Sao Paulo taught me a lot things, without any explicit lessons. But one of them was that I needed to take better care of myself, and not to call that selfish. One such way I take care of myself is by living my life by a fairly rigid schedule.  I go to bed earlier than the people I live with, I have to say no to things that are extremely normal here. I have to be, sometimes, entirely different than those around me. 

Courage, I'm reminded isn't necessarily about doing great things. It is about doing difficult and sometimes risky things. What I'm learning is that following God's call always takes courage, because it will always be difficult to stand outside of the norm, which the call of God always is. It doesn't always have to look like my call, which involved moving to a country I'd never been to before and taking part in a program that few in this country or my own seem to understand. But, I know that the call of God never asks us to toe the party line or be satisfied with the status quo. Whether in our churches, our jobs, or our neighborhoods, we are called to be courageously different.