On Being Where You Are

Image by Orange_Beard via Flickr

There is a strange phenomenon you experience as a parent. For example, within about two days or so after my sons had received a healthy dose of Christmas presents they began thinking about the gifts they wanted for their birthday. Quite literally surrounded by enough toys to choke a horse (granted, I am not sure how many toys this would take) my sons were focused on some obscure future instead of enjoying the present they had been given.


Of course, they come by it naturally. It is an entirely human thing to do and this brings me to my point. As Christians, I think we neglect the joy of the Kingdom we have been given by focusing on an experience of heaven we have yet to see. Our hymns are full of the imagery. You have heard the songs: “When we all get to heaven”, “I’ll Fly Away”. These are songs which place the focus of the Christian life on something that happens at the end rather than on how we live today.

I do not even believe that Jesus meant going to heaven to be our focus. His earth shattering news was that the Kingdom of God, or Heaven if you wish, was breaking in and people could live in it now. His was a message of impending grace which was in the process of becoming. In his mind, the point of a faithful life is not so much about getting to heaven as it is about having heaven define how you live your life now. To put off the reward of a Christian life until death is to miss the point of Jesus’ promise entirely.

The point of Jesus’ good news of the Kingdom is that we can have the joy of God’s presence now, living with us and within us. This is, after all, the point of the beatitudes. They point to a whole new way of living and being that is defined by God’s living presence. The outcome of that presence is an inheritance in the here and now. The vision of the beatitudes is of a people going forth in glory rather than waiting around in an upper room somewhere.

Now, I hear you saying, “But it says that you will store up treasures in heaven.” Yes. That is the outcome of how we live our lives in the kingdom today. The notion still remains that we have been given a life to live now and the way we live that life, amazingly enough, greatly impacts what goes on in heaven. We are in a sense living out on earth the holiness that is in heaven, sanctifying creation by being present in it as God is present in us. It is God’s presence in this world – his Holy Spirit with us – which is the true treasure store of heaven. It is amazing to me that we can ignore that fact in search of some greater reward.

Jesus spent a considerable amount of time explaining this to his followers. “The Kingdom of Heaven is like…” was a common way for him to start a lesson. In one instance the Kingdom was like a pearl for which you would sell all other jewels. Again, it was like a hidden treasure which would make you buy the whole field in which it lay. The Kingdom was, in short, the great inheritance for which the faithful had waited. It was, as Jesus said, here and now, and still is. The Kingdom of God is a treasure he was willing to die for and it is one we should be willing to live for.

And yet, we sit around in the midst of the Kingdom waiting for something else, something new, something better, as if the thing God has given us just is not special enough. We are like children who can focus on nothing else than what Santa forgot to bring us.

We fail to enjoy the present day that Christ has won for us. With our eyes fixed on heaven we neglect the Kingdom that God has entrusted to our care. We look to the horizon for the next thing. The funny thing about the forgiveness is that you never seem to reach it. I fear that a person who walks only to the horizon may stumble past the very thing they were looking for.

The key is learning how to be present in the world that Christ has won for us. We need to focus on being where we are. In the Empire Strikes Back the character of Luke Skywalker wants nothing but to be a Jedi. The problem is that he cannot seem to stay put long enough to work on being one. It is a failing that his master Yoda points out to him. “This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away... to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. What he was doing. …You are reckless.”

It would seem that we Christians can be a lot like young Luke, wanting all of the honor and glory without any of the investment. We have a very difficult time focusing on the becoming part of Christianity and wish to jump straight to the being. That is “being” Christian in the sense of some instantaneous beatification.

You remember that I said the beatitudes are about living out your life here in the Kingdom according to the rules of heaven? Well, let us consider what the term beatitude means. To beatify something is to make it holy or blessed. For instance, our brothers and sisters in the Roman Catholic Church are pondering the question of beatification for Pope John Paul II. This means that he is up for promotion to sainthood. In the process of beatification the church seeks evidence from the life of the individual that he or she possessed an unusual degree of holiness. It is not the Roman Catholic Church’s pronouncement that makes the saint holy; rather, it is a confirmation of the individual’s sanctification by the community. Their understanding is that holiness is something experienced and lived out in this life.

Once again, the beatitudes are interested in the ongoing work of holiness with in our lives. They represent the way in which God is working to sanctify us in each and every moment of our lives. He does not wait until the last moment to make us like his son; He chooses to work on it every day. Therefore, we must be alert to the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit as it instructs us in those seemingly mundane details of daily life in the Kingdom. We must be constantly watching for the moments in which we can practice peacemaking, humility, and all of those other holy practices.

We have been promised eternal life in the Kingdom of God. It would be a shame to spend all of that time looking for something better. So, instead of locking in on that horizon let us begin today living on earth as it is in heaven.