whatever you do.

We are strangers in a strange land. Admitting that means, however, that we are acknowledging that there is a land that is our home. For the Israelites, the first journey home was a lifelong march from Egypt across barren wasteland. The second was a hasty retreat from Babylon around the Arabian Desert. Our alien identity does not refer to this planet, but to our place in it.

We are tied to this place, and it is God’s place. God’s crib. We live lives that are designed to be connected to this planet. We often work hard to disassociate ourselves from this place. This kills us.

When we yearn to desert this world to go to another place we tell God that this creation is not acceptable to us. In a sense it isn’t and shouldn’t be. Its present form is cracked. Those cracks are sin. Lost harmony, broken relationships and prideful rebellion are the sinful cracks that cause us to long for our real land. But it is not somewhere else. It is here.

God’s plan is clear… Full restoration… of this, his good creation. Not just people.

We often come to see heaven as a place for people (instead of what I believe is its rightful designation as the place where God is). This view of heaven reflects our understanding of the earth as an object. We refer to our environment as a resource to be mined instead of being the life-giving, cycling, renewing, gifting environment of life that it is. We can’t exist as God’s people without God’s grasses and God’s cattle and God’s oxygen. He designed it that way and called it good. Why do we long to leave it all behind?

These hilarious, fake church signs are a marvelous commentary on the disconnect between heaven as complete and restored earthly creation fully embodying the purpose and mission of God vs. heaven as escape hatch for born-again Christians. I, for one, am a firm believer that my pet rock is included in the redemption of all things. Heaven is most definitely a place, but it is – and is to become – this place.

Tags: heaven, earth, kingdom, creation, environment, green

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Kingdom, Religion, Spirituality, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.