“Therefore, restoring identity and recovering vocation must be the focus of a biblical understanding of human transformation.” (WWP)

If our vocation is to be working for the kingdom by loving God and loving others, what exactly does that look like? 

What does it mean to love something, someone?

What does it mean to love God?  Is it simply reading our Bible and praying?

We separate our spirituality from the world we are called to cultivate and care for when we reduce God to quiet time, when we reduce loving God to an individual experience.  Yes, I can love God when I’m alone with Him.  But I am ‘alone’ with him all the time, even when I’m with others.  And often, other people help me love him even more.  I don’t know that we can truly love God without being connected with his creation and our fellow images.

“We are to embrace the ‘other,’…this is the heart of the gospel and the beginning of transformation.” (WWP)

What does it mean to love others? 

Honor the image.

Be realistic about the deception of death.  Live and work with hope for the future.

Know the cycle.

Creation.

Fallen.

Redeemed.

People, relationships, social structures, political structures – all of it created.  All of it broken.  All of it redeemable.

“To work for human transformation as a Christian means working for the redemption of people, their social systems, and the environment that sustains their life – a whole gospel for all of life.  This is the kingdom of God.” (WWP)

How can we live in a kingdom oriented way?

(These concepts come from Walking with the Poor):

Incarnation

God was real.  “Real people were healed; a dead man lived again.”  We have to embody this realness.  We cannot reduce God to quiet time.  The reality of God, the incarnation of Jesus is all around us.  The redemption of things on earth mostly depend on our incarnating the ways of Jesus.

Redemption

Jesus was real.  He was human.  “Redemption is material as well as spiritual.  Both our bodies and our souls are redeemed.  The new heaven comes down to earth.  The glory of all nations will enter the city…”  There is possibility for everyone. Burma. North Korea.  All can be, will be redeemed.  Because the people are redeemable.

We must believe in redemption to fully participate in our vocation. 

I heard a pastor say once, “we don’t forgive people, because we don’t believe we are forgivable.”  We must believe in grace, mercy, forgiveness and redemption.  This is the narrow road that leads to the kingdom.  Believing everything is redeemable is not optional.

“He has no enemies who he doesn’t love.” (WWP)

If we are to take seriously the command to love the other, to love our enemies, we have to take seriously the ideas and lifestyles presented by Yoder, Haurerwas, Boyd, Claiborne, et al.

You don’t have to agree with them on everything.  But you do need to sit with their ideas and challenges.  Kingdom theology must be talked about as Jesus talked about it.  We have to break ourselves of the idea that ‘kingdom of God’ is code for heaven.

It’s not.

It’s not. 

It’s not.

We are required to sit and think beyond our Sunday School definitions about what being the Good Samaritan means.  He loved his enemy, and showed mercy.  “Go and do likewise.”  We need honest conversation about what this means if we are really going to figure out how we can love others.

“Again and again I found that some issue that we had raised in small group, thinking we were the first ones to discover it, indeed had a long and rich history of theological inquiry surrounding it, often with the best minds of Christian history coming up with brilliant responses 16 centuries before our present day.” -Bezzerides

We have to remember the fact that people have not practiced Christianity the same way we are practicing it right now, for all of time.  Right now, the rules might say you have to be a straight, creationist, Republican to be a Christian.  But tell that to the Greek Orthodox, the Palestinian Christians, and the medieval peasants.

The Kingdom of God is for all people, at all times, and we can not put limitations on who is allowed access.

Oh, and one other thing that will make loving easier.  To love others, you need to know others.  We need to seek out other people.  I’m a miserable failure at this part, myself.  But we need to seek out other people – people with differences, people of different experiences, stories, lifestyles, cultures, beliefs – people who are different from us.

We need to love the other.

All the others.

The Iranian and Afghani others.  The Burmese and Vietnamese.  The French and the Dutch.  The lesbian an the Episcopalian.  All people.  All over the globe.  All the time.

If our orientation towards people different than us is not one of the Kind Taliban (I mean, the Good Samaritan), then we are not loving God and loving others, and we are living out of a deeper marred identity and distorted vocation than we know- and we need restoration.

Of course we are all marred and distorted to some extent.

But are we aware of it?  Are we growing and changing?  Are we working toward wholeness and transformation?  Or are we passing by, on the other side of the road?

 

What do you think?  What are your thoughts on vocation, loving others, and the kingdom of God?