Lord, teach me to pray, "Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."
This has been one of those incredible weeks of news in the world, one filled with events that leave me as a Christian struggling to decide what to make of it all. Muslim mobs are incited by a film produced by “Christians” here in the United States, a film created to embarrass and incite hate among faithful Muslims, angry mobs resulting from the film turning on the very American diplomats who had worked long and hard at great personal risk to help those Libyans gain the freedom of their nascent democracy, those same angry mobs used as cover to kill those American diplomats by people filled with even more hate, and still others using the tragedy of these lost lives to personal ends without regard to the pain of family, friends and coworkers of those who have died. That chain of events only scratches the surface of this week.
Every day I pray the words, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” and I still wonder if it will ever come. I wonder not in a way like those obsessed with the Apocalypse and whether God is expecting to draw closed the curtain on all of this at any moment but rather in the way that looks around and sees and hears the real divisions that exist in the world. Often divisions based in religions that acknowledge a belief in a common God if not the same belief in that God.
I suspect Luther had some of those days, too. Days when he found himself wondering just how to make sense of it all because nothing around him, nothing around me, looks anything like the Kingdom of God coming to our lives and to this world. It all looks like hate and chaos and a will to destroy rather than a will to build up.
In his Small Catechism Luther reminded us that the will of God and the coming of the Kingdom of God does not need my prayer but that what I engage in is to pray that God’s Kingdom might come to me and that the Kingdom does this in God’s grace given to us, you and me, in God’s Word, Jesus, and in our living Godly lives NOW and in eternity. There is nothing either you or I can do to hasten or delay the Kingdom of God. It comes in its own way and at its own pace but it becomes ours in our living it in the Spirit, continually, even when the rest of the world rails against it. In speaking to the how this is done Luther writes, “Whenever God breaks and hinders every evil scheme and will of the devil, the world, and our flesh which would not allow us to hallow God name and would prevent the coming of His Kingdom. And God’s will comes about whenever God strengthens and keeps us steadfast in His Word and in faith until the end of our lives. This is God’s gracious and good will.”
Living this will of God IS the evidence of our salvation. It is not something we do to gain the Kingdom and salvation. Salvation is God’s inexplicable gift. That is what makes me a saint, God’s grace, nothing else, sola gratia. By faith, belief and trust, in God’s grace I find myself drawn into God’s life not because it gains me anything. I’m drawn because to it because of the words of Peter from John’s gospel that we frequently sing in the liturgy, “Lord to whom shall we go, you have the words of eternal life.”
Mahatma Gandhi wrote, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” David Thoreau said, “Live the life you imagined,” and, also, “The world does not change, we change.” As we receive the Word of God we receive the change we are called to imagine in our lives and the one we are called to be. It is costly change, because it calls us to give up our lives for God’s life, our ways for God’s ways. In that imagination and vision we are called not to worry about the world and the chaos around us so much, and to go about living faithful lives a bit more. This is not to neglect responsibility for the world but to understand the best thing we can do for it is to live faithfully in God’s Kingdom which is already present, already given to us, already ours in Jesus Christ.
So today let me walk a little closer to Jesus, let his will be my will, and let me forgive all those who perpetrate hate and suspicion and a belief that I, as a Christian, believe myself better than them or different than them. Let me show them I am not, “the other," but rather I am as Christ, servant to all.
This has been one of those incredible weeks of news in the world, one filled with events that leave me as a Christian struggling to decide what to make of it all. Muslim mobs are incited by a film produced by “Christians” here in the United States, a film created to embarrass and incite hate among faithful Muslims, angry mobs resulting from the film turning on the very American diplomats who had worked long and hard at great personal risk to help those Libyans gain the freedom of their nascent democracy, those same angry mobs used as cover to kill those American diplomats by people filled with even more hate, and still others using the tragedy of these lost lives to personal ends without regard to the pain of family, friends and coworkers of those who have died. That chain of events only scratches the surface of this week.
Every day I pray the words, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” and I still wonder if it will ever come. I wonder not in a way like those obsessed with the Apocalypse and whether God is expecting to draw closed the curtain on all of this at any moment but rather in the way that looks around and sees and hears the real divisions that exist in the world. Often divisions based in religions that acknowledge a belief in a common God if not the same belief in that God.
I suspect Luther had some of those days, too. Days when he found himself wondering just how to make sense of it all because nothing around him, nothing around me, looks anything like the Kingdom of God coming to our lives and to this world. It all looks like hate and chaos and a will to destroy rather than a will to build up.
In his Small Catechism Luther reminded us that the will of God and the coming of the Kingdom of God does not need my prayer but that what I engage in is to pray that God’s Kingdom might come to me and that the Kingdom does this in God’s grace given to us, you and me, in God’s Word, Jesus, and in our living Godly lives NOW and in eternity. There is nothing either you or I can do to hasten or delay the Kingdom of God. It comes in its own way and at its own pace but it becomes ours in our living it in the Spirit, continually, even when the rest of the world rails against it. In speaking to the how this is done Luther writes, “Whenever God breaks and hinders every evil scheme and will of the devil, the world, and our flesh which would not allow us to hallow God name and would prevent the coming of His Kingdom. And God’s will comes about whenever God strengthens and keeps us steadfast in His Word and in faith until the end of our lives. This is God’s gracious and good will.”
Living this will of God IS the evidence of our salvation. It is not something we do to gain the Kingdom and salvation. Salvation is God’s inexplicable gift. That is what makes me a saint, God’s grace, nothing else, sola gratia. By faith, belief and trust, in God’s grace I find myself drawn into God’s life not because it gains me anything. I’m drawn because to it because of the words of Peter from John’s gospel that we frequently sing in the liturgy, “Lord to whom shall we go, you have the words of eternal life.”
Mahatma Gandhi wrote, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” David Thoreau said, “Live the life you imagined,” and, also, “The world does not change, we change.” As we receive the Word of God we receive the change we are called to imagine in our lives and the one we are called to be. It is costly change, because it calls us to give up our lives for God’s life, our ways for God’s ways. In that imagination and vision we are called not to worry about the world and the chaos around us so much, and to go about living faithful lives a bit more. This is not to neglect responsibility for the world but to understand the best thing we can do for it is to live faithfully in God’s Kingdom which is already present, already given to us, already ours in Jesus Christ.
So today let me walk a little closer to Jesus, let his will be my will, and let me forgive all those who perpetrate hate and suspicion and a belief that I, as a Christian, believe myself better than them or different than them. Let me show them I am not, “the other," but rather I am as Christ, servant to all.
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