Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In our reading from Isaiah this morning, God speaks through the prophet and says: “When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the LORD will answer them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them.” God then challenges God’s people to make a case for how their ways are better than God’s ways with the not-so-subtle subtext being, “Guess what? They’re not.”

When I read this passage, I was driven to reflect on my desire for the Kingdom of God. Friend, I really want the Kingdom to be built! I long for the consummation of blessedness and bliss that is the Kingdom of God. I want justice, and peace, and compassion. I want a social and political order that is conducive to justice, peace and compassion, to fulfilling what the prophet Micah says is required of us: that we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. I want to do my best to contribute to the building up of the Kingdom in this world…

…which sometimes means: I’m ready to convince myself that I can build that Kingdom; that my vision of the Kingdom ought to be- or is in fact the Kingdom itself; that the Kingdom isn't a reality that is already coming to be—with or without me—but a thing that depends on me to be real. The challenge to this sort of thinking, though, is succinctly articulated by the Psalmist in Psalm 127: “Except the Lord build the house, their labor is but lost that build it.” Which is to say, in part: we don’t build the Kingdom—God builds it in and through us. We don’t create justice—God justices in us and through us. We don’t manufacture peace or compassion—God compassionates in us and through us; God works God’s peace in us and through us.

Why is this an important sort of distinction to make? Well, it can often be the case that the kingdoms we build are more about our sense of what the Kingdom ought to be than what the Kingdom truly is. The kingdoms we build can be very lovely and beautiful, they can even be just and compassionate, at least for a time. But if the justice and compassion are ours and not God’s, then they’re shadows of justice and compassion and not the real things. And it’s only a matter of time before a kingdom built on shadows, a kingdom built on images and idols of the good, on simulacra of the good, will fade into oppressive darkness before slipping into ruin and eventual obscurity. Moreover, the reality of God’s lovingkindness is that God is already at work in the world—God is already doing God in the world—and our job is not to create an alternative doing to God’s doing, but to come alongside what God is doing in order to participate more fully in it, to become a part of it, and to allow it to become a part of us.

Prayer is of essential importance here! Saint Augustine teaches that prayer is a school of desire whereby we learn to will what God wills, love what God loves, and become agents of that Will of Love to love in the world. Prayer is not principally a means by which we change God’s mind about something or divinely enforce some change on the world: it’s a means by which the Spirit of God removes obstacles and idols, shadows and illusions in us, opens doors and windows in us, to allow God to move in and through us to work the Divine Will in the world and to build the Kingdom of Love.

How might our vision of the Kingdom change if prayer were the cornerstone of all of our doing and all of our living? What infinite oceans of love might break through us into a world desperately in need of love? What good work that God “hast prepared for us to walk in” could possibly go undone if our life and our prayer were one?

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+