Kingdom

"Your kingdom come,your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." (Matthew 6:10)

Woe to you who long
for the day of the Lord!
Why do you long for the day of the Lord?
That day will be darkness, not light.

It will be as though a man fled from a lion
only to meet a bear,
as though he entered his house
and rested his hand on the wall
only to have a snake bite him. (Amos 5:18-19)

What is this Kingdom we are praying for? Well, quite literally, the Kingdom is anywhere God is in charge. Jesus came preaching the kingdom. His very first sermon had one point (and only one sentence, a reminder to all of us who want to "preach like Jesus"): "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near" (Matthew 4:17). The Kingdom is the first "request" we pray for in the Lord's Prayer, that it would come on earth as it already exists in heaven.

We pray for it, and we assume, like the ancient Hebrews did, that when it comes we will be vindicated. All of our hard work will be acknowledged and we will be shown to be "right." But what if, when the Kingdom comes, it's not like that? The Kingdom is about God coming to set the world to rights (to borrow N. T. Wright's phrase), and I wonder how aligned our desires, our plans and our schemes actually are with God's heart. More often than not, I think, we hear our own voice and think it is God's.

Amos was living in a time when that was true. The people he preached to were, also, praying for the Kingdom. They desperately wanted "the day of the Lord" (the Old Testament equivalent of the arrival of the Kingdom or what we would equate with the return of Christ) because they were oppressed and burdened and thought that "the day of the Lord" would vindicate them and reward them for all their troubles.

Amos says, "You couldn't be more wrong." Read again his description of the Day of the Lord. He doesn't say this because he knows for sure they are wrong about what is to come; Amos doesn't know any more than what God has revealed to him about the coming Kingdom. What he does know is that our human expectations and our limited understandings do not compare to what God is actually up to. "Don't long for the Day," Amos says, "because it's not going to be about your vindication. God is making the world right again; he's up to more than you can imagine. It's not about you."

When we pray for the Kingdom to come, we are asking God to align our hearts with his, to want what he wants. It's far too easy, it seems, for us (at least me, maybe I'm only preaching to myself here) to pull back on that alignment, to hit the proverbial pot hole in life and find ourselves derailed into thinking (again) the Kingdom is about my comfort, my relief, my happiness. The Kingdom is not the American Dream. The Kingdom is not about vanquishing our political enemies. The Kingdom is not even about purifying the Church. The Kingdom is about God setting the world to rights, remaking the world so that it is what he intended all along.

So, are you really sure you want to pray that dangerous prayer?

+++++++

If you want to explore the best wrestling with this topic, no one talks about it better than N. T. Wright. You can check out his fine work on the coming Kingdom here. This book has shaped my thinking in incredible and profound ways.