The Kingdom, The Power, & The Glory
For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. Forever, Amen. The Lord’s Prayer began by grounding us in our relationship with the Father, and it ends now by solidifying our faith in that kinship. We have already talked about how the kingdom, power, and the glory of God are played out within the living hour; but most of us are not satisfied with this daily bread. We want to know that there is a divine plan, with a definitive beginning and end, that’s been arranged by the Father.
Our desire to see the culmination of God’s plan is what led Jesus’s early Jewish followers to believe that he was an earthly messiah. And it is what fuels today such false beliefs as the rapture and Jesus’s second-coming out of the clouds. Without an end-game in place, we find our faith under assault, (1) as we try to make sense of a world filled with horrors, suffering, and loss. Yet it is precisely this lack of knowledge in God’s final act (like our uncertainty in what happens to us after we die) that creates the condition which rewards those with the faith of but a mustard seed.
If we are to acquire that life giving faith, and get glimpses of the Father’s divine plan, we must take a “big picture” view of our lives and the history of the world. This means letting go of human time and entering God time. With human time we focus on beginnings and ends, and see time as a product that can be saved, lost, and spent. And we view morality within the limits of those human constraints. But with God time we are dealing with a cyclical ebb and flow that cannot be pinned down–and where moral reckoning occurs on a timeline that far exceeds an individual lifetime.
Our life in Christ is beyond beginnings and ends–which is why Jesus says that he existed before Abraham (2) and his words will live on even after heaven and earth pass away. (3)
This is an excerpt from Chapter 12 of the book The Living Hour: The Lord’s Prayer for Daily Life (with New Testament Gospels). An SBNR faith book especially suited for Progressive Christianity workshops, Bible Study Groups, Unitarian Christians, and all who seek a richer life. The book’s SBNR (Spiritual But Not Religious) meditation is richly supported by over 200 Gospel book citations.
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To read thoughts on the current state of Christianity from a Progressive Christian and Unitarian perspective, please go to: Where is Our Joy?
