Invaded by Heaven

I have no way of knowing for sure, but the Lord's Prayer may be the best known prayer in American culture.  When I was growing up, it got repeated before the game with every football team I ever played on.  I'm not quite sure why this prayer got attached to such events, but I suppose it was a "religious" counterpart to playing the national anthem.

Growing up in the church, I don't think I ever took part in a worship service that didn't have the Lord's Prayer.  How deeply ingrained this prayer is in church folk can be see by people's habit of adhering to their way of saying it, (debts or trespasses) even when they are with a group that says it the other way.

Given how integral this prayer has been to generations of Christians, you would think it might have shaped our Christian life more than it seems to have done.  The prayer's first petitions (from the version in today's Matthew reading) say to God, "Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."  In other words, "Your reign appear on earth.  May your will be done here on earth as it currently is in heaven where you live."

This prayer basically asks that God's reign, a world where things operate as they do in heaven, would be born.  Yet despite praying these words over and over, many of us have somehow reduced the good news to what some have labeled a "gospel of evacuation."  This gospel says, "Believe the right things; have faith in Jesus, and you will get taken somewhere better."  But the model prayer Jesus gives us says nothing about going to heaven.  Rather it asks that heaven invade earth.

 Prodded by those in the Emergent Christian movement, I have wondered a great deal in recent years about why and how the Church traded talk of God's Kingdom coming to earth for us going to heaven.  No doubt some of this was simply a way of dealing with the delay.  The early Church could expect Jesus to come back soon.  But as years and centuries went by, hope for that waned and was replaced with dead believers going to God's abode.  If the Kingdom wouldn't come to us, we would go to it.  But somewhere along the way, an essential piece of the gospel got lost.  We kept praying the prayer, but forgot what it meant. 

And this relocation of God's reign to heaven also goes hand in hand with a tendency to separate "the spiritual" off from the real world.  It allows the gospel to be relegated to our interior lives.  After all, its culmination has nothing to do with earth, but our evacuation from it.  (A fascination with a Rapture seems inevitable with such a gospel.)

Confining God to "the spiritual realm" does not, of course, confine God in any way.  It does, however, confine our faith and understanding of God.  The God of our imaginations cannot transform earthly life.  The world is beyond hope.  That is an impossible project, even for God. 

I wonder how we might live out our faith lives differently if we actually embraced the prayer we say so frequently, if we actually thought is possible that heaven might invade earth.

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