How Far Is Heaven?

Rediscovering the Kingdom of God in the Here and Now

McBrayer

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781621897071
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In How Far is Heaven? Ronnie McBrayer explores the kingdom parables of Jesus and finds in them an urgent challenge for Christians to reassess the gospel they believe and the role their professed faith plays in the world today. He argues that the gospel cannot be reduced to apocalyptical escapism, whereby the true believers will one day be rescued from the sufferings of planet Earth; nor can faith be used as a type of benefits program, providing the individual with the privileged comfort of membership. Instead, the gospel audaciously enters the sufferings of this present world with transforming love, as Jesus can never be locked away in our hearts. He, his message, and his followers break defiantly free to renew and reshape not only tomorrow, but also the here and now.Thus, the gospel according to Jesus is not just about a harp-playing, cloud-riding, pie-in-the-sky heaven. It is holistic, all-encompassing, redeeming deliverance for people today, not tomorrow. And the follower of Jesus is called to live out the active, participating presence of Christ in the world of now--right here where we live, work, love, and serve--because heaven is far closer than we think.

Chapter 1

The Kudzu Conspiracy

Then Jesus said, “What is the Kingdom of God like? How can I illustrate it? It is like a tiny mustard seed that a man planted in a garden; it grows and becomes a tree, and the birds make nests in its branches.” He also asked, “What else is the Kingdom of God like? It is like the yeast a woman used in making bread. Even though she put only a little yeast in three measures of flour, it permeated every part of the dough.”

—Luke 13:18–21 (NLT)

Kudzu arrived in the United States as a gift, given by the Japanese as a centennial birthday present, in 1876. It was immediately loved by gardeners, what with its large green leaves and purple blooms, so individuals began planting it and nurseries began selling seedlings through the mail. But it was the Dust Bowl years that really rooted kudzu in the American soil and psyche.

The United States government was seeking an effective way to conserve soil, and kudzu seemed to fit the bill perfectly. The vine was touted as a “wonder plant,” a near miracle of nature, and the Department of Agriculture used the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s to distribute and plant the seeds everywhere. Over one hundred million kudzu seeds were planted, and the government actually paid farmers to cultivate it in their fields. They thought, once the soil was healthfully restored, that farmers could just plow over it and return to planting cotton, soybean, or corn.

Yet, kudzu could not be gotten rid of so easily. No one knew that the greatest “wonder” of this plant was its exponential, unstoppable growth. Kudzu, a gift that keeps giving, can now be found throughout North America, including more than thirty US states and parts of Canada.

Nowhere is kudzu’s reach more pervasive, however, than in my home region of the American Southeast. It is impossible to drive more than a few miles down a Georgia highway or a Mississippi back road without seeing kudzu smothering road signs, telephone poles, barns, pine tree thickets, school baseball fields, and even the sleepy farmer who takes an afternoon nap too close to the woods. With an ideal climate for its slithery vines, kudzu has climbed, coiled and crept its way across millions of acres of Southern land, changing the countryside forever.

Kudzu has also invaded and weaved its way into Southern culture. It is now as much a part of our shared experience as homemade biscuits, sweet tea, and Baptist church steeples. Thus, we have adapted. We shade our porches with it, feed it to our livestock, use it as a dye, and make baskets with it. We brew it, ferment it, spray it, cut it, mow it, and curse it; but there is one thing we cannot do: ignore it. It has overrun our world, and it is here to stay.

“The kingdom of God is like kudzu planted in a Georgia field.”

Would Jesus have said such a thing? Yes, I believe so, because he said something similar to his original listeners with his first story about the reign of God. With picturesque description rather than detailed explanation, Jesus provides a sketch for how the “God Movement”5 works itself out in today’s world by saying, “The kingdom of God is like a tiny mustard seed . . . like yeast used in making bread.”

Jesus was saying much more than, “The kingdom of God starts small but ends big.” Rather, he is telling us that the kingdom of God has intrusive, invasive, takeover qualities about it. Illustrated in the mustard seed and the yeast, Jesus makes clear that his rule is a steady, unstoppable, always growing, always persistent force brought to bear in the world.

The mustard of first-century Palestine overgrew and consumed everything around it. Jesus’ first listeners knew this just as Southerners know about kudzu. A farmer who planted mustard in her garden could not turn her back on it for very long. If she did, it would overrun every other vegetable or herb in the field. And yeast worked the same way. Mysteriously, inexplicably to those living before the understandings of microscopic science, the yeast would find its way into the bland, tasteless flour and transform it. They didn’t understand how it worked, but they knew that a tiny amount of yeast had a way of overtaking an entire lump of dough. Mustard and yeast overwhelmed and changed the very nature of their surroundings.

So yes, if Jesus were here today, telling his parables to those who would listen, he just might choose kudzu instead of mustard or yeast to characterize the kingdom of God. These three—mustard, yeast, and kudzu—all have the same properties: they quietly overtake the environments into which they are introduced. They transform the landscape in which they are planted. They overrun everything else they touch. From just a few little seedlings, a few microscopic bubbles, or a few sprouting vines, they explode and cannot be stopped. Such is the kingdom of God and the rule of Christ in today’s world.

Just let it have its start—in people’s hearts, in people’s lives, in the midst of this planet’s pain and suffering—and the world will, in fact, change. It will be redeemed. It will be revolutionized. The status quo will be insurrected by hope and transformation, as slowly and steadily the God Movement invades this world with certain salvation. This is not high-minded idealism or a feigned quest for utopia. It is a hopeful, defiant trust that God’s will indeed will be done and God’s kingdom will come, on earth as it is in heaven, deliberately moving across this planet inch by inch and foot by hopeful foot.

This hopefulness, however, is not shared by all who profess faith in Jesus. To hear the faith peddled from many pulpits and seen practiced in many churches today is to witness a form of Christianity that is neutered of its world-changing power. It is a faith that offers people a chance to forget their current pain and suffering (and the suffering of others), a faith that helps the believer sleep at night, and reminds him or her that there are “just a few more weary days before we take our heavenly flight.” But this otherworldly faith does very little to inspire and move people to join God’s redeeming mission in the world today.

This is tragic because the world cannot bear much longer a Christian faith that sleeps soundly in the confidence that the faithful will soon be evacuated, for the suffering of this world is too great. We cannot rest in our pews, lulled into a catatonic state, while

• there are nearly fifty million refugees dispersed over this planet;
• one hundred forty-five million orphaned children go to bed each night without a parent;
• twenty-five thousand die every day due simply to contaminated water;
• one hundred million of earth’s residents live without a home or permanent shelter;
• a million children are trapped in prostitution and sex slavery;
• and three billion people are denied access to a Christian community of any type.

The love of Christ surely compels us to address these conditions with the good news of the kingdom of God, because this good news does more than ready a person’s soul for eternity; it serves body and spirit today. We willingly work to transform the present while aligning ourselves with the will of God, trusting him to bring the world a different future, a future that sets the world to right. Thus, we recoil from focusing all of our attention and energy on the “sweet by-and-by” of tomorrow, leaving only the leftovers for those in this world who cannot afford to wait till tomorrow; and we absolutely refuse to deny the hopeful revolutionary power of the kingdom of God for today’s world.

A vivid display of this type of denial comes from an unexpected source: a man named Kim Il-Sung. Il-Sung was the “Great Leader” of North Korea for almost fifty years (his son and grandson succeeded him and have perpetuated his savage legacy), but his greatness could not be more falsely defined. Il-Sung led one of the most tyrannical governments and closed societies in world history. He destabilized an entire region with his thirst for war and nuclear weapons. He accrued one of the most atrocious human rights records in recent decades, and he operated massive internment camps for political prisoners. He subjected huge segments of the North Korean population to starvation and dismantled all Christian churches in the country, martyring many of its leaders. And for all this tragedy and injustice, life in North Korea did not have to be this way.

Kim Il-Sung was not raised as a God-hating, church-destroying, human-rights-violating tyrant. He was raised in a Christian family. His grandfather was a prominent pastor, and his father was a church elder. But Kim Il-Sung did not turn to the faith of his fathers. He turned away. Why? Il-Sung answers with these words: “Many people believed that . . . Jesus would save them from their misery on earth; faith in Christ would give them a better life . . . but I thought Christian doctrines were too far off the mark to suit our misery and problems.”6

Those are incredible words, almost impossible to believe, coming from the lips and pen of a man who would become one of the darkest figures of the twentieth century. In his assessment, there was a disconnection between the message of the Christian gospel and the suffering of the world. This separation was not the result of Christian hypocrisy or because the Christians that Kim Il-Sung met were poor witnesses. No, it was one of relevance. “Christian doctrines were too far off the mark” to address the misery and problems of the present world. In the oppression and cruelty of his society, a society that desperately needed rescue—and needs rescue as badly or worse today—the gospel was judged too anemic to address life’s real troubles. The result in that country is now evil upon evil, and suffering upon suffering; much of it unnecessarily so, as the trajectory set by Kim Il-Sung could have been much different.

Granted, North Korea’s founding father was channeling proto-communist Karl Marx. It was Marx who once said, “Religion is the opiate of the people.”7 Marx observed that religion had a tranquilizing effect on people, but religion did very little to actually help people. Rather, it acted as a barbiturate, keeping believers and the world trapped in its current state. It pains me to admit this, but for all their evils and inflicted harm, these men rightly articulated what many Christians fail to see: a Christian faith that does not set people free from their bondage or reverse the deplorable conditions of society is of little worth. Faith that leaves people and the status quo unchanged is useless. It’s worse than useless, for it aids and abets the misery of the world rather than revolutionizing the world.

Let there be no mistake: Marx and Il-Sung’s revolution was a failure—and remains so. From Communism to Capitalism and Humanism to Utopianism, all “isms” fail to transform a society, because they all fail to transform the human condition (and in many cases, the proposed solutions offered by these movements do more eventual harm than good). We don’t need more clever ideas or more impassioned application to change the world. What is needed is a redemption that comes from outside of ourselves. What is needed is a divine, healing insurgency whose growth cannot be overcome by this planet’s devastating problems or its people’s inability. What is needed is exactly what Jesus offers: a revolution that steadily and effectively brings change and hope to the world. So we throw ourselves into the fray of this fractured world, not only because we care and not because of obligation, but because we believe God isn’t finished with this world yet—not by a long shot.

You see, I believe that when you wipe the tears from the cheek of a crying child, the kingdom of God comes. When you feed the hungry in the name of Christ, the reign of God begins. When you offer shelter to a battered woman, the mustard seeds are planted. When you show kindness to your neighbor, the yeast mixes into the dough. When you stand up against injustice and right a wrong, the kudzu vines begin to crawl across God’s creation. When you point a person out of poverty and indignity, God’s nation expands. When you lead a person to the hope and redemption found in Christ, the world takes a step closer toward inundation with grace, love, and redemption.

All these acts—and a million more just like them—make a real difference because we are not simply helping people, but in Jesus’ name, we are actually joining God’s divine plot to revolutionize a society tiny step by tiny step. No, we can’t take in every single orphan, but we could all take in one. Your Bible Study class can’t drill wells for every person dying for water in this world, but it could drill a well for one village. Your mission team can’t treat every AIDS patient in Africa, but it could provide medicine for a few of them. Your church can’t build a house for every homeless person, but it could go build at least one. We can’t rescue every refugee or child of prostitution, but we can—we must—save some of them. The gospel demands it of us, for we are not here to occupy space until we are yanked away by God’s sky hook. We are here to deliver God’s love and hope to a desperate world.

Some time ago I wrote a Bible study curriculum that began with the obscure story of the US Navy S-4 submarine that sank in Cape Cod Bay in the 1920s. A portion of the story goes: “The submarine, with its crew of forty, sank in less than five minutes. It came to rest more than one hundred feet below on the ocean floor. Res...