We live in a country without kingdoms, except in abstraction or in faraway places. In America since 1776 or so we have learned to live without a personal sovereign. The people are sovereign. That is abstract. And we are sorting out what it means.
This affects us not only as citizens, not just as consumers, but as people of faith. As Christians we hold that there is a king indeed, just one not of this world. And we are sorting out what that means. Since about the year 30.
We have some help with that one. Human beings have been puzzling out their relation with the divine being since time began to pierce our consciousness.
What does it mean to be under God, and not under an earthly sovereign? How then do we further the coming of a kingdom not like earthly kingdoms? “On earth as it is in heaven” - what does that mean, and how do we play a part in its coming to be?
Bishop Michael Curry refers to the ‘realization of the beloved community’ - this is part of it, and a pressing part of it for Americans. The beloved community as envisioned by thinkers from Josiah Royce to Howard Thurman and by activists from A. J. Must to Martin Luther King, is a community where all belong, together.
Where the lion lies down with the lamb, so to speak. Where we learn to live with each other in harmony, delighting in our differences and celebrating our commonality. Where intolerance is not tolerated, and love is an active verb.
Specifically right now the Episcopal Church, like so many other church bodies and institutions, is aching through a process of reconciliation, restoration, and perhaps restitution, as it takes upon itself the historical necessity of confronting the past.
Sins of the fathers, yours or mine or not ours at all, are still affecting us. We may say we were not there, we did not come into this church or this society or this world until long after those sins were past, over, long forgiven.
Or, as it turns out, not so much.
People are saying, my children will have less freedom than I have had. Not just less money, less of a material future, but less in terms of rights. Freedom, liberty, and justice for all.
We may have had it. Or felt we never did. As individuals or as a part of society that has never felt free.
But now we have that in our face. And how can anyone be free if not all of us are?
It is getting harder to say.
***
Part of how it is hard to imagine kingdom come is that we no longer live surrounded by people who believe it is “in heaven” as we long it to be “on earth”.
Heaven–what is that? Will it pay the rent–yours? It is possible to live now in a way that takes no account of the presence of God, of the imminence and transcendence of his kingdom. At least for a while.
You can live not as if you have stopped believing but as if you do not know what that is.
Do we? Do we also, as much as we see ourselves as believers, act as if we do?
Functionally are we in our personal and social lives “living into the kingdom”, that is, living as if Jesus is real, and his kingdom is here at the stretch of our hands?
As it is in heaven - so let it be on earth.
***
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Michael Curry. Remarks during the 80th General Convention of The Episcopal Church.
See also https://www.episcopalchurch.org/publicaffairs/episcopal-church-presiding-bishop-michael-currys-comments-to-house-of-bishops-on-july-9/
JRL+
