"Christian hope...arises from the resurrection of Jesus, understood as the definitive event of divine promise for the future...The promise is not for some other world to replace this, but for the new creation of this world, in all its material and worldly reality, with which Jesus on the cross was identified. Christian eschatology is therefore the hope that the world will be different...The promise reveals the world to be transformable in the direction of its promised future, and so it arouses active hope which seeks out possibilities of change and creates anticipations of the future kingdom of God. This hopeful activity is the church's task in the world." " ---Richard Bauckham
"They told me to just go out into the street and die." The fellow who was telling me this today was wearing a heavy trench coat over top of his bare chest. It was in the upper 80's today. He collects keys and hangs them around his neck like jewelry. He also wears a fishing hat that has a feather sticking out of the top of it. He has arguments and fistfights with people who are not really there. He will not stay at the shelter. Instead he lives in the woods behind a local church. He recently caught those woods on fire and barely got the flames extinguished before they reached the church's propane tank. He has been banned from virtually every building in town. The folks on the street have joked that he is also banned from the local jail. He goes to the hospital several times a day and asks for weird procedures. He walked in this morning and asked them to do something about his gunshot wound in his chest. He pointed to his chest to show me. There was nothing there, not even a scratch. He claims they told him to get out and go die in the streets. That conversation may have only been as real as his gunshot wound. "I told them that I cannot die. I am immortal. I have been enthroned since King David." He likes to read the Bible. Sometimes he stands at attention for hours on end like a toy soldier under the overpasses and reads his Bible. The police went to the magistrate and had him involuntarily committed for psychiatric evaluation recently. This is a very, very difficult process that I have had to do on several occasions.You have to prove that the individual is a danger to self or others. The police did. The hospital had to let him go. There were no psychiatric beds available here or anywhere in our region. You see our mental health system is a joke. Everyone knows it. I have spoken out about it publicly for years. One of my staff members said, "There has to be somewhere they can send him." I replied, "Where? Over the rainbow?" Our regional funding entity that pays for mental health for the uninsured and indigent is already in trouble for its high rate of hospitalizations. The mentally ill are simply not a high priority in the kingdom of men.
"Do you think I can get to heaven if I listen to heavy metal music?" The young man who asked me that today is 18. He has the mind of a 12 year old. He stayed with us this year while finishing high school. My heart truly aches for him.His father died five years ago. His mother lost interest in him when she stopped getting a check for him at 18. The law now says he is an adult. He is not. He loves Star Trek and reads science fiction constantly. I know that I cannot raise every child that comes through the shelter, but with all of my heart I want to take him to a Star Trek convention or something and let him know that he is valued. I know I would do so for my own kids and it tears me up inside that he has no one to do that for him. There are so many "aimless youth" who stay at the shelter. They are 18-25. Many of them have aged out of the foster care system. Some are still in school. Some are too young to stay at the shelter without a parent or guardian, so they sleep in cars or on different sofas each night to avoid causing legal trouble for their families. I told the young man that I thought he could go to heaven and still listen to heavy metal. He just will not be able to hear the heavenly music as well. I told him that God is far more concerned about our hearts than our musical tastes. When I tell people that our society is failing its youth, I usually get blank stares or polite nods. One young man was so glad to check into the shelter recently. "It is so much better than the hell at home." A teacher recently told me, "Someone is going to have to do something soon." In my little county there were almost 300 reports of kids in the school system who were homeless last year.
"Someone, somewhere,someway, somehow, something, someday." That is the intersection of our Christian hope and this present world. I used to pray for the kingdom of God to arrive and I pictured it somehow coming down from 'above'. I now see that it is coming from up 'ahead' to us, but we cannot just sit back and wait without moving. Christians are called to be impatient pilgrims who see it on the horizon of the future and move toward it. I am not so naive as to think that I can bring in the kingdom, but I also do not think the transformation of the world is something we just sit back and wait for while we watch it all unravel. There are some who retreat into a narrow, individual, privatized version of salvation. The kingdom of God is a future destination somewhere in the clouds for them. I understand that impulse to stick one's head into the sand and ignore the terrible problems while singing Amazing Grace. However, I have come to believe that whatever the mystery that awaits us, we are called to move toward the pattern of it in the here and now. We cannot help but take off in that direction of that promise which causes us to counter death with life and evil with good. If we are really serious about that prayer, "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.", then you and I must be willing to walk toward it as well as say it. In doing so, we become God's agents of transformation of the world somehow, someway, somewhere for something now.
