As I think, read and pray in the context of the world we live in, there is something slowly emerging in my heart and mind. On one hand this emergence is obvious – how could I have missed it – but, on the other hand, it is, nevertheless, just arising to full view, even if it’s like a November sunrise.
This emerging picture is a mix of the vision of the Kingdom of God, of place, culture, transformation, revival and preservation; of community, the deeper life and ubiquitous hope.
Let me be as plain as I can by telling a story which I think explains my thoughts to myself, and maybe to the reader.
Here goes.
Quite simply, here I am on Arran. Not a place I was born in, not a place I grew up in, but which is (and in a way has always been) the epitome of home to me. I feel more at home here than anywhere else I’ve lived, and I’ve lived in a lot of places.
Here, three generations of my ancestor’s bones are in the ground right next to my current home; I’m in weather and landscape which feel like the natural habitat for my DNA; I no longer look at this place with longing from afar, I love it from within; I have a vivid memory of the call of God which confirmed that I should come here, which I never would have dreamt was possible; and, here on this Rock in the Clyde, I am beginning to live out what God showed me to be his design for my life, to which the landscape witnesses as a parable (see my post here about ‘Sannox‘).
This all feels important because what it creates is this very real sense of homecoming, not only in a geographical sense, or in a cultural sense, but clarifying that spiritual promise of our ‘coming home’ to God – a parable, if you like. Our world need this sense of being able to come home to him, even as a Prodigal.
It’s like this: ‘the Kingdom of God is like a man who wandered in exile from his home for mean years in search for a continuing city. Off he went and did exploits for his King, but the yearning for home never left him. When the call was so strong that he could bear it no more, even although he’d petitioned the King for permission to return home and had no word, he determined that he would strongly petition the King once again. Yet, when he was on his way, the King’s servants swept up the man, carried him home and planted him like a tree in the soil where he could watch for the King’s coming.’
You leave. You explore. You yearn. You return, but you don’t return as the same person you left as. You return to a place which has shifted. As T S Elliot says,
‘We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.’
The world, at the moment, rages against the ‘local’. Everything is global. My newsfeeds inform me about things in far flung places. My finite heart and mind have no capacity to comprehend them, let alone ‘fix’ them. The world downplays the richness of our rootedness in any sort of locality, and insists we are all to be monochromatically the same. The world sets me up for anxiety, overwhelm and despair as the ‘Machine’ churns on, especially in the second chapter of the Trumpian Dystopia.
But what being here on Arran does is root me in the soil of the land where God ordained that my people should emerge. I am returned from a weary desert exile after an arduous Exodus, and I’m home. It’s not the Promised Land, but the launch shore.
The Celtic monastics talked about heading off under the power of the Spirit and the elements to find your ‘place of resurrection’ – that place where you plant yourself as you seek the coming of King and Kingdom, and where you wait and testify to his coming no matter what or when.
What is needed? A grass roots expression of life together the Kingdom of God in the face of the crumbing empire of ‘the West’. This is crucial because every people and place needs to know that the King and Kingdom is coming to it. Every ‘nation’, ‘tribe’, and ‘tongue’ will gather round the Throne of God one day, and so the gospel must take root. And so, the alternative world of the Kingdom is planted in the ruins of the ruins and it will be a beauty to behold.
End note:
I wrote most of this post in the wee early hours of the morning where possibility and hope dances. Now, as my tired eyes crank open after a fitful sleep, a layer of extra fog lies over it.
Where does the realisation and further revelation of such a vision begin? The prayer of Jesus,
‘Your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven’
Andrew S M Clark 