This is a poem I heard, that hints at the nature of hope and faith.

Walking To Oak-Head Pond,
And Thinking Of The Ponds
I Will Visit In The Next Days
And Weeks

by Mary Oliver

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of a stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I'm fooled--
I'm wading along

in the sunlight--
and I'm sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead--
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week's trees,
and I plan to be there soon--
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don't know where
such certainty comes from--
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind--

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage--
which, day after day,before such brisk,
corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way

Jesus said, "The Kingdom of God Is Within You"

Saw this on a coffee mug in Cambria, California yesterday.

"There is no use trying," said Alice; "one can't believe impossible things." "I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the queen. "When I was your age I did it for a half an hour a day. Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." - Lewis Carroll

Repentance is the way into the Kingdom of God. Most people repent enough to get to heaven, but not enough to see the Kingdom. You know when you've repented enough, because then the impossible begins to look logical.

Dredging History with a Magnet

I've been re-reading Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy, and ran across of wonderful quote by Jaroslav Pelikan. The quote is from Jesus Through The Centuries:

"Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of Western culture for almost twenty centuries. If it were possible, with some sort of super magnet, to pull up out of that history every scrpt of metal bearing at least a trace of his name, how much would be left?" (Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries, p.1 or Divine Conspiracy, p.12)

It sounds an echo from John's gospel: 25And there are also many other things which Jesus did. If they should be all recorded one by one [in detail], I suppose that even the world itself could not contain (have room for) the books that would be written. (John 21:25, Amplified)

Surrealism and The Kingdom of God

You can see on the side of my blog that I have a Salvador Dali “picture of the day” display. Surrealism is one of my favorite art forms. I guess that’s because I believe that, above and beyond my five senses, there is a reality that is something I must pay attention to. John Wesley said (an I am convinced) that “The things that are invisible are more real than the things that are visible.” Surrealism is tribute to that higher reality. The prefix sur literally means “above”(a surtax or surcharge is a charge or tax on top of the regular charges) and, when added to realism denotes a realism or reality above what our five senses indicate. 
  Surrealism has seems to have come to describe a state of perception that people have when they experience an event that seems so bizarre and they are tempted to misapprehend it because of the way things appear at the time. It’s not that it seems too real; it seems that it can’t really be what their senses are telling them. It’s come to mean a false sense of reality. Surrealism is trying to point to a reality that is more real than what we can’t account for by ‘normal’, sensical and rational means of apperception.
One of the best cinematic demonstrations of this is when Neo was initiated out of the Matrix. In the film he discovered that he had never experienced reality, but, with the help of Morpheus and the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar, he discovered his true reality was the impersonal and slave-like confines of the real world. He awoke to find himself tethered to feeding machines and that his body’s energy was being harvested by machines, which controlled the Matrix. In a scene analogous to the new birth, he was detached from his artificial womb and ‘flushed’ into the cold harsh reality of the real world(click here to see the 'birth of Neo clip). 
  The Kingdom of God is everywhere, yet it can easily escape the attention of most people – even Christians. Everything Jesus taught about life and reality all stemmed from the reality of the Kingdom of God. Jesus said in John 3, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” What Jesus is saying that unless you have a spiritual awakening of such magnitude that it can be compared to a birthing process into a new world that you’ve only heretofore guessed at, then you’ll never come to apprehend the reality or enter into the dynamic operational reality that is the Kingdom of God. 
  The writer of Hebrews tells that God is shaking the world and will continue to shake it until there is nothing left shake loose of real reality. Hebrews 12:25-27 says See that you do not refuse Him who speaks. For if they did not escape who refused Him who spoke on earth, much more shall we not escape if we turn away from Him who speaks from heaven, whose voice then shook the earth; but now He has promised, saying, “Yet once more I shake not only the earth, but also heaven.” Now this, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of those things that are being shaken, as of things that are made, that the things which cannot be shaken may remain.
  Another way to say this is: God is, today, shaking everything that doesn’t look like or facilitate the further implementation of the Kingdom. Plain and simple.  

Tomorrow's Bread Today

  I have recently swerved into a deeper appreciation of the Prayer that Jesus taught his apprentices to pray, commonly known as "The Lord's Prayer."  It's the one that we can most-of-us can recite from memory.

  At the same time I have a acquired a new set of 'lenses' through which to view the prayer of Jesus.  Recently I heard a friend and teacher Bruce Friesen say that "We are always evaluating the world around us, but rarely evaluating the lense through which we see."  

George Ladd said that the Kingdom of God is The Presence of the Future.  So I keep coming to that phrase in the prayer that says, in most translations, "Give us this day our daily bread."  In the back of my mind it nags me that this phrase doesn't sound very 'kingdom.'  Recently it's caught my attention that there are alternative readings to that phrase that appear in the margins of many bibles.  For instance, in the New Living Translation, it gives an alternative reading:  or Give us today our food for tomorrow.   The English Standard version offers Or our bread for tomorrow  The Holmon Standard Bible gives this alternative: or our bread for tomorrow  The Greek word epiousios only occurs here and has been treated with some uncertainty.  But among the possibilities, the idea of praying for tomorrow's bread today is not only plausible but academically integrous.  

It also allows the prayer to take of more of a real kingdom dimension.  Anyone who has read multiple translations, and who is even an amateur theologian will readily admit that one's theology will influence how one translates the text.  If one translates through a kingdom lens, then it's plausible to make a case that our 'bread' comes from the future.  This is reinforced by the previous phrase, "on earth as it is in heaven."

When we think of daily bread, in a biblical sense, where do our minds go to find a context for such a phrase?  The answer is to the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.  As the story goes, the children of Israel were fed manna from heaven.  In Exodus 16:4-5 we read Then the LORD said to Moses, "I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days."  God instructed them to pick the bread up from the ground every day.   And this was the rule for 40 years.  So it's really easy to see the principle of daily provision in the scripture.

But we know that the wilderness economy was not a permanent one but a temporary one.  God's destiny was that they would occupy and enjoy the promised land, where they would enjoy a land flowing with milk and honey.  The later writers of scripture would develop this as a place of 'rest', which was theologically concurrent with the laws of the Sabbath.  

So the children received daily bread, BUT there was a caveat:  They received daily bread and gathered daily bread for only six days.  There was one day of the week where they did not gather daily bread.  This day was the day before the Sabbath.  On the sixth day, they gathered twice as much—two omers for each person—and the leaders of the community came and reported this to Moses. He said to them, "This is what the LORD commanded: 'Tomorrow is to be a day of rest, a holy Sabbath to the LORD. So bake what you want to bake and boil what you want to boil. Save whatever is left and keep it until morning.' (Exodus 16:22-23)

So there actually was a day where they gathered 'tomorrow's bread today'.  The Sabbath was the day of rest for the people of God.  The entire third and fourth chapters of Hebrews describes the New Covenant meaning of rest as a restful confidence in Jesus, the apostle and high priest whom we confess. (Hebrews 3:1)  That state of rest is characterized by faith.  And faith, as defined in a later chapter of the same book, "is the assurance (the confirmation, the title deed) of the things [we] hope for, being the proof of things [we] do not see and the conviction of their reality [faith perceiving as real fact what is not revealed to the senses]."

It is not a question of whether God provides.  Neither is it a question of how.  Rather the question is from wher God's daily provision comes.  This is what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount:  So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.(Matthew 6:31-34)  What Jesus is saying here is that worry does not, nor will it ever, produce the kingdom.  Present faith will manifest the provision.  All provision is from the future and worry is the misuse of our God-given imagination to conjure the future, when in fact it destroy the object of that worry: supply.

So Father, thank you that you supply supply tomorrow's bread today.  Because it's Your kingdom, power and glory!  That's a prayer that makes me happy!