2 Kingdoms
Sunday, we began our new series, The King and His Kingdom – over the next few months we will be journeying through the Sermon on the Mount.
I began by painting a picture of 2 kingdoms.
The Kingdom of God, and the kingdom of the enemy.
The Kingdom of Life and the kingdom of death.
The Kingdom of Light and the kingdom of darkness.
The Kingdom of truth and the kingdom of confusion.
The kingdom of freedom and the kingdom of fear.
I won’t rehash it here….catch up on the podcast.
I’ve been pondering God’s Kingdom ever since, and have found myself grabbed by the thought that we won’t understand the glory and beauty and joy on offer in God’s Kingdom unless we first grasp the bleakness on offer in the alternative.
Good news is only good when we understand the opposite.
Anyway, I sat down this morning to pray….and found myself reaching for my copy of Every Moment Holy, Vol. II – I often turn to it and use their liturgies to help me pray.
And I came across this one…..
A Prayer of Intercession Against the Kingdom of Death.
It’s in 2 parts, both quite long, but I have copied the first part below.
(If you prefer listening to it you can do so here )
The human heart, apart from your light,
O Lord, is lost in those dark shadows
cast by death. The human heart,
apart from your love, will drink itself
to ruin on the wine of unholy communions
of hate, of envy, of fear, of prejudice, of pride,
of greed, of resentment, of self-pity,
of envious entitlement, and rage,
and every other ugliness that festers
in the wounds of a broken race.
This is our unlawful claim,
bounded by the embattled trenches
of our rebellions.
Here is our own broken kingdom—
shoddily established, ever precarious,
beset by endless war, propped up
by a usurped power preserved only by
the spilling of blood, peopled by
cracked women and splintered men,
a world swerving wildly
through the guardrails and over
the precipice of anything good and true.
This is our illegitimate puppet kingdom—
free-wheeling, death-dealing,
downward spiralling, making-it-up-as-we-go,
fashioning the world in our own shattered
image and unto our own twisted ends.
We see its fruit anew every day; fruits of cruelty, horror, atrocity. This kingdom of ours is demarcated by a dark line that runs not between the people it divides, but along the fault lines of every human heart, dividing us even from ourselves.
Pressed together we writhe and seethe
and teem with chaos and disorder,
debased as dogs scrabbling for scraps—
but blind enough at the same time
to somehow believe ourselves above all
rightful authority, insisting against all evidence
that we will, by our strength, our intellect,
our goodness, our inevitable progress,
build some better Babel
apart from you, O God.
Does creation laugh, or weep,
when those fragile structures collapse
beneath the impossible weight of our ambitions
and all that we are left with are the orphans,
the widows and widowers, the grieving parents,
the bombed-out villages, the ruined
communities, the uninhabitable spaces,
the tortures, extortions, executions,
gross injustices, tyrants, and victims who—
so long force-fed on resentment—
often reveal themselves as cruel as their
oppressors, the terrorists of every stripe,
the users-of-others, the abusers,
the statisticians who deal in the
demonic economies of collateral damage,
the ones who make the world less hospitable,
who plunder and desecrate your creation
in service of their own greed, those who
inhumanly employ human shields, the enslavers,
the exploiters, the manipulators and pirates and
profiteers—those parasites of suffering.
These are all evidence and the inevitable
outworking of the human kingdom,
upbuilding itself, doing violence to reality,
while tearing its own very fabric apart.
This is the abode of an insatiable absence,
the haunt of abominations, now briefly
occupied by clamouring,
misbegotten, piecemeal nation formed
of the enemies of all flourishing,
united only in our allegiance
to death’s sprawl,
wittingly and unwittingly effected
in and through us all.
This is the human kingdom.,
now unmasked as
the inhuman kingdom.
This is the inhuman kingdom,
revealed at last as the kingdom of death.
To call death natural is a lie,
to spin it as but one more spoke
upon a “wheel of life” is to ignore
the groaning cry of all your creatures, O Christ.
Death is a catastrophe, an obscene enemy,
a poisoned arrow piercing the eye of creation,
twisting history and nations, bereaving lovers,
warping the constellations of community,
of family, of flourishing.
And each of us has played our guilty part.
For we men and women, in our sin
First sought god-likeness, ushered
in instead futility and dread,
long ago destroying our own immortal thrones
in the very act by which we sought to
crown ourselves as sovereigns of ourselves.
And every generation since has learned
at what expense such liberation came:
Death is the rock upon which
every raging wave of human pride
is dashed and proven
impotent and tragicomic.
Like runners stumbling at the starting gun,
snapping bone and tumbling face-first
into mud, we have lapsed absurdly short
of the glory of God, distorting each facet of
the divine image we were given to reflect.
We have twisted those glories
first displayed in us,
into the debasements of a billion idolatries,
tyrannies and pornographies,
until we are finally and hopelessly
imprisoned in the twisted pilings
of our own wrecked innocence.
What we now call life is rife with sickness and death, a world where each of us must learn to make the best of these hollows bereft of ones we loved, a squalid shanty town of tattered souls whose ragged holes are visible, however desperately we try to hide our insufficiencies, even from ourselves.
And when the darkness parts
just long enough that for an instant
we perceive our monstrous need,
the horror of the things we have become,
and done, and left undone,
held up against the light of God,
reduces us, deluges us, enrages us,
or breaks our hearts
and drives us to despair,
for the settling weight of such a great
conviction is more than we can bear;
to see ourselves defined in stark relief,
too wretched, enslaved, and powerless
to effect our own release or absolution.
Where then is our hope,
if we have hope at all?
Who will rescue us now
from this kingdom of death
with which he have so long been aligned;
these toxic roots and thorny vines
in which we’ve grown
so desperately entangled,
so deeply intertwined,
in deed, and heart, and lineage, and mind?
Have we no hope? Where is our hope?
When I came to the end….
….that last haunting line –
Have we no hope? Where is our hope?
I found myself saying out loud Jesus’ words in Matthew 4:17 – Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven has come near.
And there’s the good news.
Right there.
There’s the hope.
Against the backdrop of the kingdom of death and darkness in which we, by nature live, we have the One who declares the good news of the arrival of God’s Kingdom.
Into the death dirge in which we live, comes bursting the joyful refrain of Jesus’ new world symphony.
Jesus’ announcement of the arrival of the Kingdom leapt forth from the page as the words from Every Moment Holy reminded me of the darkness and futility of the kingdom of the enemy.
Folks, I pray that the good news of God’s Kingdom is good news for you today.
Love you family.