The Reign of God.

In recent years, tens of thousands of people from all over the world have gathered at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and in Mumbai (Bombay), India, to celebrate their conviction that "another world is possible," a world free of mass poverty and environmental degradation, and to explore ways to bring it about. Are they deluded? Can we overcome poverty, violence, and environmental crisis before they overcome us? What do efforts like this have to do with the call and cause of Christ, and what does his message say about their values and prospects? (Brackley, 67)

The Reign of God is a banquet, a party, that all are invited join (Matt 8:11; 22:2; Luke 15:23). But since faith is lacking, God's revolution, which gathers us for that banquet, is slow, painful, under siege. Jesus said that God's Reign was underway in his ministry (see Matt 12:28; Luke 17:21). Already a present reality, it will fully triumph only in the future, even over the grave. "According to his promise we wait for a new sky and a new earth in which justice dwells" (2 Pet. 3:13). All creation longs to share in this liberation and communion (Rom. 8:19 - 21). The Reign of God means new human beings, new communities, a new, transfigured world (Rev. 21:5). That is the cause to which Jesus calls (Brackley, 70).

For some, this way of thinking about the Reign of God - or God's Project, depending on the language you prefer - may be new. It certainly was for me when I first encountered an inkling of it several years ago. Like a bolt of lightning, the idea that God's project was about more than getting us to heaven (and maybe getting us to be polite/pure along the way) opened my eyes and commanded my attention ever after. God's project is about justice? God's project is about making sure everyone has enough? In this world? Not only in some heaven, light years away?

It's a lot to take in - and can be hard to believe in a world trained on skepticism.

In the last few years, though, I've come to discover that there is a whole world of people who know this project of God's well - and they've been participating in it for a long time. From the south side neighborhoods of Chicago to the montañas sureste de México to a groundbreaking Sunday School program put into wonderfully creative practice in the Seattle Lutheran church I'm blessed to serve this year, I've encountered community after community that is living into God's project today.

Even when you catch a glimpse of this project, however, living it isn't always smooth sailing. It's so easy to become discouraged at the temples of injustice still to be torn down, at the banquet tables still to be built, at the slow, slow progress of change. How to we keep going when these start to weigh us down?

Maybe it's by remembering the promise of God's project in all its fullness. In our OT reading this week, God is speaking to Abram in a vision. Implicitly we understand that they are inside - maybe it is a darkened room, and maybe Abram is discouraged. So,

The Lord brought him outside, and said,
"Look toward heaven and count the stars,
if you are able to count them."
Then he said to him,
"So shall your descendants be."
And he believed the Lord;
and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.

May it be so for us, too.