A Word from Pastor Nathan

Dear Friends:

The Election Day Bake Sale concluded with $428.43 being raised for the Cleveland Christian Home and the WACC Youth Group. I sampled far too many sweet treats, all of which contributed to a higher-than-average calorie count, not that I’m complaining. The Church Life and Growth Committee did a fine job of soliciting your delicious desserts and recruiting volunteers to work the sale. Well done, church. With the conclusion of the bake sale comes the end of the mid-term political season, and our commercials can return to their consumer-centered messages. Hopefully we will have a reprieve before the campaigning for 2020 begins, though we are not holding our breath.

When watching the returns last night, I was both hope-filled and disappointed. Perhaps you feel the same. Going into the evening, however, I knew that to wake up on Wednesday morning would require no small measure of grace and grit: grace to be compassionate, kind, and generous of spirit with our neighbors and ourselves; and grit to keep seeking the reign of God on earth as it is in heaven.

Each week we pray for God’s kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven. Translators often interpret the word basilea (Greek: βασιλεία) as kingdom, but some prefer the alternative word empire. We hear and imagine the Lord’s prayer differently with the words “your empire come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The New Testament has 155 uses of basilea, sometimes describing the reign of God and sometimes describing the empires of this earth. Each time, though, the empire of God stands in contrast to the empires of the world.

In Matthew 6, Jesus teaches his followers the well-known prayer. Immediately following the prayer—and part of the Sermon on the Mount discourse—Jesus says, “Seek first the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness/justice.” Basilea appears here, too. Jesus gives his followers in the first and twenty-first centuries the imperative command to “seek first the empire of God.”

To seek God’s reign—to pledge allegiance to God’s empire—proclaims a loyalty to God and God’s desires for God’s world. God’s empire on earth will not come as a result of a mid-term or presidential election. However, when we live to pray, when we live to seek, when we live to strive, we know that we’re not very far off from God’s reign, not very far off at all.

Seeking with you,

Nathan