Songs for the present reality (ICEWS, e*b 08)

For: The Institute of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen's University, Essentials Blue Online Worship Theology Course with Dan Wilt

This week's pondering has been right at home for me. I love the Kingdom and I love the lifestyle it calls out of us, and incredible change when we respond. And to put my two favourite things together- the Kingdom and worship, is like putting Cadbury's chocolate sauce all over a bowl of Cadbury's Top-Deck ice-cream, and then covering it with chunks of Cadbury's Dairy Milk chocolate... 

One major pondering I have had was this: Is our worship lining up with the "heaven when we die" thinking, or more towards the "the Kingdom is here and now, the rescue mission has been complete!" kind of thing. I can see now, I need diagrams to make my point:

"I'll fly away, oh Glory, I'll fly away. When I die, hallelujah by and by, I'll fly away." To me, this song is expressing and declaring a thinking which leaves the church stagnant, which leaves it just buying time and which leaves it not functioning in power, but rather complacency and apathy. The thinking is that "the Kingdom" is the heaven we go to when we die. It leaves us just waiting, just biding our time till we pass from this world into the "golden palace in the sky". We live our lives the best we can, we die and we go to heaven if we have done a good enough job. 

Not something I would sign-up for, that's for sure. But this on the other hand... 

Paul writes that we are "citizens of heaven" and that we live as "ambassadors". When the rescue mission took place, when Jesus came and was sacrificed on the cross and was resurrected from the grave he did not just grant us eternal life. He gave us the keys to the Kingdom, he handed over authority to do what He did as the Word who became flesh. 

He called us to walk as citizens of the Kingdom, walking our story at the same time as the Kingdom around us, drawing from it with the authority we have been given to do so. 

In a nutshell, this is why my blog is titled "not just a ticket to heaven", we are not on a quest to live as nicely as we can before heading off to the clouds, we are called to live, to sing, to create and to worship as citizens of heaven NOW. 

We walk double lives, we are beings of earth, but we are carrying a Kingdom passport.