Last week we considered the opening phrases of the Lord’s Prayer as a way to help us Center our lives on Christ as we respond to God’s love. This week we consider how the phrase Your Kingdom come, Your Will be done can be lived out in our rule of life. Slides from the Thursday study are here.
When we look
at Christ and Center ourselves in Christ as our example of Godly living, we
must, as Becoming the Church notes, look at “the way of “cruciform
love”—Jesus’ act of unselfish, sacrificial, self-offering love, or losing one’s
life in order to gain it—is our way to authentic life.” We have to let go
of our desires and seek God’s heart.
God’s love
is full of compassion, a word derived from Latin meaning to ‘suffer with’.
Living compassionately calls us to a deeper
relationship with one another. We might ask is sacrificial love the same as compassion? Joyce Rupp in
her March 2022 newsletters says it is “I learned that compassion has to be a
way of life, affecting my thoughts, words and deeds, my attitude and approach
to others who suffer. Compassion requires that I not only be mindful or aware
of suffering, I am to be non-judgmental, non-violent, and forgiving toward all.
Only then will I truly live as someone who bears a heart of compassion.
Isaiah uses the metaphor of a mother’s love to express
compassion: “Can a woman
forget her nursing child and have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even
these may forget,
but I will not forget you. “Behold, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands;
Your walls are continually before Me. (Isaiah 49:15-16) Jesus calls us to have that same sort
of compassion for one another. In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, we hear of
the Father who is overjoyed when his son returns. [the son] got up and came
to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and
felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. (Luke
15:20)
As we look
at the phrase Your Kingdom Come, Your will be done, on earth as in
heaven, "heaven meets earth in acts of compassion…we pray that God’s heart-desire
be done consistently through our lives in form as it is in sound (word) and
light (image or vision).” (Prayers of the Cosmos, Neil Douglas Klotz,
pg.23).
The Lord’s
prayer invites us to offer our wills to be in line with God’s. To come
alongside God’s compassion and love. Saying “Your Kingdom come” is about
letting go of a “my way or the highway” mentality and saying to God “you are in
charge.” God’s will for creation is peace,
justice, freedom and mercy. As we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we are opening
ourselves up to be a conduit for God to work through us. That means we have to
lose our life.
As ElizabethElliott (20th century missionary to Ecuador and author) notes, “I must be willing, if the answer requires it, that my will be undone.” That can be pretty uncomfortable, but Elliott lived the sacrificial, self-giving love of Christ. She and her husband were missionaries to the Quichua people in Ecuador. Even after the tribe killed her husband she remained to serve them until 1963.
Elliott is
quoted as saying , “I have one desire now—to live a life with reckless abandon
for the Lord, putting all my strength and energy into it.” She practiced a life
that literally was built on “Leave it all in the Hands that were wounded for
you.”
As we format
our Rule of Life incorporating being
self-giving and cruciform, we are warned by Deborah Smith Douglas, “There is a
perilous tendency in Christian activism to cut ourselves off from the vine. In
our passion for justice, in our impatience for change, what we may fear most is
being able to “do nothing”…we can come to believe that social change is more
urgent than…the source of all life…[risking becoming] so engrossed in the
visible results of our doing…forgetting the necessity of making ourselves
available to the hidden depths of God.” (The Praying Life, pg. 101-102) Douglas
goes on to quote Henri Nouwen, “The question is not…how much are you going to
accomplish? Can you show some results? But: Are you in love with Jesus?” (pg.
104)
That is a question we each need to
answer as we seek to conform our lives to God’s will, which is justice
and mercy. God’s action is always grace. No one is outside God’s
love. It is not up to us to decide who is in or out. As we live into the
will of God “on earth as in heaven,” we are urged to seek out the ones who feel
separate and lost. We are to treasure the disenfranchised, the hurting, and the
lost. We are to remember
Jesus says Greater love has
no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. (John 15:13)
Some adults retain, or reacquire, the
ability to look beyond appearances and even actions. Although he experienced
some of the worst of human behavior, hatred, and degradation during his
imprisonment, Nelson Mandela believed that there was good in everyone. In his
autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (1994), he states, “I always knew
that deep down in every human, there is mercy and generosity. No one is born
hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his
religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be
taught to love…Man’s goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never
extinguished.”
We, too, can learn to look for God in
one another and celebrate God in them. We can recognize and acknowledge the
good rather than reacting to the negatives. We can be part of the will and
Kingdom of God’s love on earth. Whether we serve God’s kingdom by caring
for the environment and animals, or by standing with those who do not have a
voice, or by simply being open and friendly, we are opening the way for God’s
will to be done. Participating in Cruciform Love, we are helping to erase
the false teachings of the world by helping people learn that God’s love is
embedded in everything and everyone.
Our individual
actions are necessary and important in allowing Kingdom work to be done on
earth. As we live and grow in our
relationship with God, we learn more and more about what it means to proclaim,
serve, love, and work for the justice and peace of God’s Kingdom. God,
amazingly, needs us to participate in the grand Story of creation and salvation.
No one would deny the need for
self-giving, selfless love right now. There are so many situations that feel
out of our control. War, injustice, hate… The cruciform love seems to be
missing. Yet, if we look on the fringes of all the raging in the world, we can
find glimpses of the self-giving love. In people driving across Europe to offer
rides and rooms. In new movements of solidarity with the disenfranchised at and
within our borders be they POC or LGBTQ+ or women. In young people stepping
forward to raise money with lemonade stands in order to donate it to some
disaster.
Mandala speaks of “Man’s goodness is a
flame that can be hidden but never extinguished.” Draw or use the candle in the
slides to list instances of cruciform love and things that self-giving love can
defeat.
