The Practice of the Impossible

It’s a world reconciled, resurrected, brought to life in unexpected ways. It’s also just!
There is giving and receiving, everything’s open handed.
In a phrase, it’s the Kingdom of God - the idea of what the world looks like when God’s design for the world is lived out.

Can get talked a lot about in churches and other discussions, so if you wanted to know what it looked like, this is it.

It requires a different way to doing that fights against some of our instincts
And it seems like maybe some of this we can do one person to another, but then you keep adding people into groups and this seems harder and harder to believe will happen.
Let’s not forget that this world that Jesus talks about and he himself worked to bring into the world was the vision that led to his death. Cultural norms have to be transgressed in this world. After all, isn’t it nice to have an enemy to blame?
But everything that we have discussed up to this point leads us to here.
If we really believe that this impossible life can exist, that the world Jesus talks about could come into being, then its life-altering changes will carry their consequence.

It’s easy to see, given that it must change us and will change the world, that we may be apt to drift back as “church” into feeling safe, perhaps not wanting to push the boundaries of the status-quo in order to bring the Kingdom of God forth is apt to drift back as “church” into a safer place.

If the scandals rocking both the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Church are any indication, however, the unwillingness to move past the norms of power towards the Kingdom have deeper, and most terrible, consequences.

MLK. Trying to bring this vision to life. At first for African-Americans, but as time went forward for all poor people in particular. His assassination came in the midst of his push to create the Poor People’s Campaign.
In 1963, he penned a letter form his jail cell in Birmingham that called out the norms within the church - and in particular the white church in Birmingham in their desire to maintain the status quo: “I had the strange feeling when I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery several years ago that we would have the support of the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests, and rabbis fo the South would be some of our strongest allies. Instead, some few have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all to many other have been more caution than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows."
He also outlined the steps he worked for change:

How much of this sounds like Luke? Our passage today? The Kingdom of God come to earth?

Our danger here, in a safe area with a secure budget and a stable population will be to just stay here and not roam out.
Taking seriously another part of the Letter: “[In the early days of the church it] was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was the thermostat that transformed the mores of society… they were small in number but big in commitment… they Brough an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest. Things are different now. The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s often vocal sanction of things as they are."
But it doesn’t have to be that way.

We can know our neighborhood. Our section of the world between Delaware and Marysville. Know who is around us, not expecting them just to come here.

Our call to worship at times may need to be the referee’s while just at the start of the next basketball game.
Our hymns are the resonant clangs and choruses of hammers as we repair the homes in our neighborhoods.
Our benedictions might be the tears wept as we hold hands of someone escaping violence from their home at one of the new shelters just built in Delaware.
This place, this time are sacred, but it cannot be more so than the people who are literally dying waiting for the world to change.
13.6% of children in school right now are economically disadvantaged enough to receive reduced or free lunch. That’s much lower than a lot of other areas in Ohio, but that is there at all should worry us.

We can know it so well that we notice the power structures in this world push against people and make their lives more difficult. That we seek justice for these folks. We want redemption for them and we seek it thoughtfully.
Finally, we have to continue to ask ourselves if we are willing to live this impossible life.

We may not face violence.
But if we are doing this well we are pushing against the systems of the world that would rather stay where they are. We as church people get mad when our prayer and pews are moved around. Imagine trying to ask people to lift up the poor around us?
Don’t we all want to live into a life that urges our feet into Christlike motion to the places we might fear the consequence because we seek a world redeemed?

It may not be in our lifetimes. Recently, there were incidents in Circleville where there were hate filled posters disseminated everywhere.
MLK had a 75% disapproval rating when he was assassinated. But the world can move towards justice, and we must be part of that slow and steady movement.