From ordinary to extraordinary

     One of my favorite (perhaps most favorite) stories or scenes in C.S.Lewis' powerful book The Great Divorce is that of the lady in the grand procession. The narrator sees a glimmering like a river flowing his way; yet it is not a river of water, but a stream of saints, angels and animals that form an elegant train around a beautiful and revered lady. Thinking that a person of great renown has drawn near, the narrator asks his guide to identify her. The teacher replies, "'It's someone ye'll never heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green...Aye. She is one of the great ones."
     On earth she was an ordinary woman. Her face was plain and she was poor. Her accomplishments were few and she was not well known. In the everyday course of events, she was insignificant, forgotten and even belittled. Even her faith was small. But... she was redeemed, she had been "bought with a price." When she was "yet a sinner, Christ died for [her]", and that made all the difference. For in the eternal now of Heaven, she had become extraordinary, beautiful, rich beyond all telling, and known by God!
     This tale leapt into my memory last month, as I was writing a eulogy for my stepmother, who died three days short of her 90th birthday. Her life, though filled with a variety of experiences, was ordinary. Her influence, though kindred with that of the Greatest Generation, was limited. Her contributions, though many, were limited to her small circle of friends, family and church members. My Mom was intelligent, but not thoughtful, a hard worker, but not industrious, friendly, but not intimate. She was firm in her faith, but not deep in her theology. She made plenty of mistakes, which, thankfully, I learned to let go of long ago. But all of that is now but a shadow of the greater redeemed reality that she has become.
     You see, when we exit this body with its crushing limitations of old age or disease or suffering, we are set free to be not only all of what we could have been without sin, but also all that we shall grow be in the world to come. The Apostle John wrote (vaguely) of this: "...and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." (1Jn.3:2) Ordinary people may enter Heaven, but they will not stay that way. The truth behind this, one that defies all explanation, is that the soul of the Christian is now fully redeemed, but our other faculties -- our minds and bodies and relationships -- await a greater redemption that will only find fulfillment in the life eternal with God. And this will be the journey, the telos, of Heaven.
      After the narrator in The Great Divorce is introduced to the Lady, and learns of her paradoxical story, he witnesses a dramatic encounter between her and someone she knew on earth. Although she is radiating joy and goodness, she stoops to ask for forgiveness from this individual, who now looks ghostly and dwarf-like. We would think that in her holy state she would have forgiven him, and not the other way round. Yet this is the picture of the true process of redemption, the occupation that will fill our heavenly days -- every relationship that we have here on earth will be slowly, deliberately and thoroughly redeemed, conforming us continually into the likeness of Christ, who forgave us all our sins.
     No Christian, however well-known or revered is immune from the ordinary life. We all have failures and broken relationships as well as negative life experiences that we cannot control. But God has placed us on a trajectory that will sweep all of those things away as we enter the resurrection life of the Kingdom. We are destined by grace to be victorious over sin and death. Jesus said, "I am making everything new!...He who overcomes will inherit all this, and I will be his God and he will be my son." (Rev.21:5,7)
     But in spite of the certainty of the wonder of the redemption to come, we are given the opportunity to begin this journey in the here and now. In the passage mentioned above, after the Apostle John marvels at the future possibility of our transformation into the likeness of Christ, he urges us to seek the present formation of our life in Christ: "Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure." (1Jn.3:3) Although we are so ordinary, we are given with each new day the invitation to do something extraordinary -- if we will only surrender ourselves to the Holy Spirit, who enables us to do (more often than not) the greater works of the kingdom in humble, almost insignificant, ways.
     Thus the Christian creed confirms the transforming power of the resurrection: "I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting." The Apostle Paul likewise declared: "...the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed." (1Cor.15:52) But the power of that change is not merely the body reborn and impervious to illness and decay, it is as well the reality of the soul liberated from sin and evil, so that our entire being, body and soul, will finally live fully and completely as the true humanity we were meant to be.
     For the Christian, this change begins the moment we die. "It is sown a natural body, it is raised an spiritual body." Death is the beginning point of eternal redemption. Through physical death we enter into a new and greater life made possible because the death of Christ defeated soul-death and his resurrection guaranteed our everlasting life. So, if we understand death this way, it should change the way we prepare for our own passing, because we will want to see to it that our redemptive actions (done to the best of our ability) begin today and lay the groundwork for who we shall become and all that we must redeem in the world without end. We must live every day with a view to dying well. As Paul reminds us: "For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body." (2Cor.4:11)
      A favorite song of mine says, "We the redeemed, hear us singing, You are holy, you are holy!" Although we often sing it now as looking back at the Cross, we sing it forward,too, as we anticipate Heaven. And sometimes when I sing that song, I almost see it; I, trembling, touch the boundary of knowing... I, too, along with so many saints in my family, am an ordinary person with an extraordinary future.


Lewis, C.S. The Great Divorce, HarperOne, c1946, 1973. Print.
   

"Thy kingdom come"

     In Matt. 6, Jesus instructed his disciples (and, through them, us, as well) to pray that his kingdom would come. Jesus is our king; he has a kingdom, but the kingdom is in flux. In one way, it has come, but in another, it has not. His rule and reign have been long established, yet we know so little of what this means.
     I used to dismiss the paradox of the kingdom by thinking that it was all in the future. Whatever it was that God was planning had something to do with the Jewish nation and something called the "millennium." But that never felt quite right. Jesus seemed to be teaching his followers that the kingdom is all encompassing -- it is "within you," it is coming, it is "not of this world," it "fills the whole earth."
     Generally defined, the kingdom of God denotes the rule and reign of Christ over all things. His rule is his authority; what keeps us on the straight and narrow, as it were. It provides our guidelines for living, writes the laws of nature, and speaks through the voice of natural law. The reign of Christ is the overall atmosphere of leadership and relationship that we find when we are (or will be) brought into the reality of the kingdom. It is the spirit of living a fulfilled life in peace, holiness and justice. As Christians, aka kingdom-citizens, we have been called to experience the governance of God in three ways: the kingdom within, the kingdom that comes, and the kingdom that will be.
      First, the kingdom within is our experience of salvation from sin that comes by grace through faith in Christ. Jesus, when pressed by the Pharisees to explain the nature of his kingdom, said, "...the kingdom of God is within you." (Luke 17:21) He told Nicodemus one-on-one that "...no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again." (John 3:3) This kingdom is necessitated by need, founded on faith and forged by a love so powerful that it nailed Christ to the cross, only to resurrect him from the grave. When we, as aliens, are given access into this inner kingdom, we receive a birth certificate sealed in blood, our citizenship papers, which will one day grant us entrance into heaven itself. It all begins in the heart. It starts now in our physical being, where our eternal soul abides. The kingdom within is the territory of pilgrimage, for all is not what it shall be, so we must walk by faith, overcoming obstacles as we go. In Eph.3:16 and 17,Paul prayed that the Spirit of God would strengthen us in our "inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith." Jesus must establish his rule and reign in our hearts, and we must allow him to do what is best for us.
      Second, the kingdom that comes is the life and love of God being lived out in the world through the church. Jesus said that as the church is being built as his kingdom in the world, the gates of hell, that kingdom of darkness and evil, will not overcome it. There may be war between Christ's righteous kingdom and the forces of sin, but the church will go out into the world in every age and in every place as conquerors. Jesus said, "This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to the nations, and then the end will come." (Matt. 24:14) The first priority of the church is to preach the message of salvation, to bring the kingdom of God into individual lives. Next, believers must be instructed in the fundamentals and practice of the faith. And the church must stand for truth against all the evil forces that are trying to tear it down. In many ways, the activities of the church pursue an unseen end -- as the Christmas carol reminds us: "for hate is strong, and mocks the song of peace on earth, goodwill to men." But she is called to be faithful to Christ in every dark hour. The deeds of justice and righteousness done here will remain forever.
     Finally, the kingdom that will be is the restoration of all things in Christ. We commonly think that this kingdom will be in heaven or just heaven itself. But it is far more than that. It is what will be when Christ makes everything new, and this includes all energy, matter, time, space, our physical bodies, as well as what is "now" heaven. All things will be united or fused into one great, eternal reality. This reality will be, of course, quite different from the reality we now experience, in either the physical or the spiritual sense. It will be greater, bigger, truer and far more beautiful than anything we can ever know or experience in this life, for it will find its source in the infinite love of God.
     The apostle John wrote, "...now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." (1John 3:2) He perfectly captures the "now and not yet" tension inherent in the kingdom of God. Even though we have received the love of God in all its fullness, we are not fit to enter heaven's door. We must be remade in order to enter in. And that fact gives us our greatest clue as to what heaven will be like. It is a never-ending remaking, restoration and redemption of all things, and when the kingdom finally comes, we will be called by God to participate in that great work of reconciliation. We will be given, one by one, all of the incomplete stories of this life, and with Jesus by our side, we will write the happy endings, as the kingdom, forever, comes.      

No perfect families

     Someone has remarked that there are no "perfect" families mentioned  in the Bible. When my husband and I heard this, we immediately tried to come up with evidence to the contrary. Jesus' family must have been ideal -- after all, Jesus himself was a most illustrious member of it, and he is the most perfect person who ever lived! But, upon close examination of the text, we learn that his family lived in the backwaters of Israel (Nazareth), his mom and dad mistakenly took off for home and left him in the temple, and his brothers and sisters thought he was crazy and tried to do an intervention to keep him from spouting all that nonsense about God being his real father!
     We also thought of Noah and Mrs. Noah -- they stuck together through difficult and improbable circumstances, and Mrs. Noah heroically put up with her husband's boat-building hobby for all those years, and in the middle of the desert, for heaven's sake... And I thought of Isaiah and his wife (referred to as "the prophetess") who agreed to the crazy names he came up with for their sons -- "Shear-Jashub" and "Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz." (They don't get any better in English: "a remnant will return," and "quick to the plunder, swift to the spoil.")
     The Bible stories are littered with tales of imperfect, less than ideal families. We read about incest, polygamy, arguing, murder (in the very first family!), adultery, wayward children, sickness and sorrow. It seems that every family takes up a cross of some kind; the greatest being in the family of our Lord, for as the elderly sage Simon prophesied to Mary: "a sword will pierce through your own soul also." At the foot of the cross, newly adopted into the disciple John's household, she felt the sword of separation from her firstborn son, who was, at the same time, in the dark agony of separation from God, his Father.
     But, like so many things in the Bible, the point of the stories of imperfect families is not their brokenness, but their restoration, not their sin, but their salvation, not their failures, but their redemption. For Adam and Eve, it is baby Seth, the beginning of a long unbroken line to Christ, for Noah and his family, a second chance at life in this world, for Abraham and Sarah, a child so long-awaited, loved and unexpected that his birth resounds with joyful laughter. In every story, something comes along to wipe away the sorrow, even if it is only the promise of eternal life to come. Even in the story of Jesus's earthly family this rings true -- our last picture of them is found in Acts chapter 1-- "Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers" are gathered with his followers in the upper room, waiting for the Holy Spirit, who, as Jesus said, "will abide with you forever."
     Perhaps the greatest lesson we can learn from the Biblical families is that the child of Bethlehem, when born in our hearts, is the one who brings peace and hope into our chaotic lives. When we become a member of his family, we are born into an eternal oneness with him and partake in the blessed position of sonship with him. "How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called the children of God!" -- John writes with joyful pride. He will never abandon us, or make an unwise decision about our lives, or think of anything else as being of greater importance than his relationship with us. As children of God, we have truly found a forever home.
      And during those dark times, when we look at our own families and despair, for many and complex reasons, we must bear in mind that "there is one God and Father of us all" who "works in all things for our good." He is, in his own and perfect way, working in each life, in each family, with an eternal purpose in mind, for a time when we will all be related and living in true relationship. There is no better description of Heaven than "home," because it illustrates to the fullest degree how God will take the broken, disconnected things of this life and make them perfectly whole. Until then the greatest work of love we can do for our families is to be redemptive in our relationships; to take the things that go wrong and, by the power of God's love and grace, turn them into something touched by goodness, set free to love and be loved.