Kingdom come-post

Two posts in 24 hours? Today I'm using this space as a quick personal reflection on today's 'class:' a trip to an organic farm.

During the past year, I’ve had a lot of questions. About Christianity, the Christian life, everything. What does it mean to be a Christian? What does it really mean? I often fell into unmerciful cynicism, leaving very few things sacred.

It’s good to go through those times of questioning, I’ve been told, and I now understand. And I think today I realized that many of my questions arose from a confusion or an effort to distinguish the difference between God’s kingdom, the Kingdom of heaven, between the kingdom of this world. In college I saw the inconsistencies of Christian community and wondered whether Christ made any difference at all. Though I entered college with huge dreams, I grew calloused, even spiteful, toward poster after poster and club after club and bright-eyed freshman after bright-eyed senior wanting to save this or that corner of the world. “Don’t these people think of the practicalities?” I often wondered. “They don’t live in the real world.” I scoffed. (Though how I knew what the ‘real world’ was, spending most of my life in suburbia, I have no idea.)

But today at an organic farm in Costa Rica I saw what I hadn’t been seeing this past year. We met a man named Roderick who has worked for almost 20 years on the same 11 hectares of land. The way he talked about his work, it was clear that his very veins and arteries were bound up in that earth and in Christ; he, his work, and its relation to God could not be separated. 

Roderick told us that, working with earth, with the elements, he feels strongly the forces of darkness and light. He told us that the soil was humus, human, Jesus. That we are made to live on the earth and eat from it. That we are not made to eat food grown by industry, taken from plastic wrap.

He spoke poetically of the science of agriculture, saying that there’s magic in the minerals that make plants grow. That the leaves are the lungs, the soil is the stomach of the earth. That farming should give to the land, not take from it. That in this way, soil is an altar to give thanks to God.

In Roderick’s eyes, these things are not just factual, but beautifully and wonderfully true. He doesn’t love organic farming because of the points that are so often listed on campaign posters or in textbooks. He loves organic farming because he is working with Christ.

As Roderick was talking, I could hear voices inside me prodding. How could he survive? Surely one has to be able to make money. This might be great for him, but clearly would not work on a large scale. How does his 11 hectare plot of land change the world? Is this practical?

And the amazing, wonderfully confounding answer is no.

This past year I've been frustrated trying to reconcile the kingdom of God with the practicalities. How can I give to the poor without giving up the things that make me part of my culture? How do I tell people about Christ without messing up? How do I study God’s Word without slacking in my studies or time with friends? How do I radically obey Christ without losing my comfortable worldly things?

The answer to many, dare I say all, of these questions is I can’t. I don’t. God’s kingdom is not one to be reconciled with the world. God’s kingdom is one that values the opposite things that the world does.

For Roderick, he doesn’t make much money at all, but he and his family survive. He knows he’ll receive his profit beyond this world. His 11 hectare plot of land isn’t changing the world. But Christ is there with him, loving him in his work. And I get the feeling that when Roderick gets to heaven, he and Jesus will have plenty to talk about.  

Today I'm thinking that living for Jesus isn’t about reconciling the practicalities. It’s about embracing the beautifully impossible. I easily become weighed down by the heavy ugly problems in this world, so that I forget God's wondrous mysteries. But I believe in a man who died then rose from the dead, after all. There are zero practicalities there. 

God has not given Roderick “a job to do,” but an art to pursue and love with Jesus, the pearl of ultimate price. We are here to serve Jesus and He is gracious enough to have redeemed heavy practical work and life so that we find Him in them. Praise be to the one and only God, Yahweh, the King of heaven and earth.