And most of us were raised with the idea of Heaven being "up there," some place and time after physical death. Either of those Kingdom phrases seems to describe a static place, a place apart, a physical place.
I have come to believe that Jesus is trying to tell us about a state of mind which leads to a state of relationships. He's telling us that we don't have to wait for a later date to experience the kind of life that God envisions for us. The Kingdom of God is both now and not yet. It's arrived, but it's not done yet. And we get to be part of creating it--that is, if we accept God's invitation.
The other morning, I came up with the idea of The Cosmos of God, which I think is a better way of capturing that idea. The Cosmos is both here and still in the process of becoming. It's both somewhere else, and yet we're part of it. It has potential while being fully formed.
In some ways, I think that 21st century brains are primed to accept these ideas about God and how the vision that God has for us that is both now and not yet. If we've been reading Physics at all, we have an inkling of that.
Yet when it comes to theology, many of us have been trained to leave our 21st century brains turned off. We think about God and theology with our 14th century brains. Another reason why I like the phrase The Cosmos of God is that it moves us away from the 14th century in a way that Kingdom or Heaven does not.
Let me continue to play with this language, keep trying to find a way to more perfectly express these ideas, to short circuit our 14th century brains.
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