Today, take a moment and look at a globe. Spin it around. See if you can find a place full of tragedy and injustice.

It’s not that hard, is it? The names roll off my tongues one after another. If you’ve been exposed to the world outside your own borders at all, you’ll recognise them. They have existed, and they exist right now, these places.

There’s so much evil in the world. So much injustice. So much stricken poverty and horrible injustice. There’s so much evil that standing before it makes me feel powerless, unable to help. I’m just one man. What can I do?

It’s always been here: the scale of our atrocities as a species increases, but it’s the same thing that’s been happening since the first humans sinned. It is not right that some go hungry, but some have always gone hungry. It is not right that some die in genocides, but some have always died like that. It is not right that brutal dictatorships flourish while the church is poised at the brink of the abyss, but this awful balance has always just been kept.

So going forward, what now? What is my posture towards these things to be? How do I, as a Christian, effect change in this world?

I don’t have a very good answer for that, I’m afraid. I don’t have a grand revelation. I haven’t had an epiphany or seen a blinding light. All I know is that I am convinced that what I do matters, not simply in the sense that people are important and I should care about getting their souls into heaven, but in the sense that the physical world is important, that taking care of it is important, and that justice here and now is something God speaks of over and over in the scriptures.

All I can say is, keep plugging. The church has done an amazing amount of work in the world. It has done some evil, some grandly evil things it should never have done, but the unspoken kindness and grace and justice it has visited on mankind is a testament to its greatness, its transforming power. The church is a beautiful thing with a great opportunity to do work today, here, now, on this physical planet. We have the keys to the kingdom in our hands, so to speak.

We work in the hope that at the end of this earth, this earth will become something new, but yet not new. That when we rise to life again after the brief sleep of death we will rise to a world without injustice, as God judges and begins to set things aright.

I know judgement is not a particularly comfortable thing, and our culture is decidedly MPD about it, but it must be done. Evil must be identified and pronounced against and rooted out. Jesus will do that when his kingdom comes in fullness, yes, but I am his agent here and now, part of his kingdom or revolution that exists now in bits and pieces. Should I not do the same?

Should we not all do the same? Should we not identify evil, judge against it, and proceed to root it out wherever we can?

In reading N. T. Wright’s book Surprised by Hope, I’ve (thus far) drawn together a bunch of strings in my own thought that I hadn’t really put together. This surprises me because I was not at all expecting this book to do that.

In the last few years I’ve harboured a suspicion that most popular Christian thought about the kingdom of heaven is simply missing the point. The seminal moment for me was reading Brian McLaren’s The Secret Message of Jesus, which tried very hard to weld together the ideas that God’s kingdom is about saving souls, yes, but also about making the world a better place. Now, if McLaren got there by saying “I am not a Platonist, I am post-modern, I am trying to re-envision the true meaning of the church”, and if N. T. Wright got there by saying “I am not a Platonist, I am orthodox, I am trying to re-discover the true meaning of the church”, there’s something to be said about looking differently at the physical world and what comes after it and what that means for today. And where McLaren offers a compelling vision, N. T. Wright provides a brilliant theological underpinning for the whole idea.

Take for instance the miracles of Jesus. We often — and I’m as guilty of this as anyone — suppose that Jesus’ miracles are signs that point to his authority as the Messiah. Then we stop there. Of course they are that, but they are also more. They’re woven into God’s story, the story that we often skim over while calling the kingdom of heaven something else entirely. Jesus’ miracles are directly related to his saying that the kingdom of heaven was there right then, and look what happens when the kingdom of heaven enters the world: spiritual healing, yes, but also physical healing. The language of scripture is absolutely, starkly clear on this: your sins are forgiven, your body is made whole, you are saved. As N. T. Wright points out, our ingrained division between spiritual salvation and physical salvation didn’t really occur to the early church, and they weren’t really bothered by both being part of the same ball of wax.

The point is, when the kingdom of heaven is here, healing happens. This is both spiritual and physical healing because when Jesus rose from the dead he didn’t simply redefine death as something that happens to release you from your earthly body so that you can spend eternity as a disembodied soul in paradise. He conquered death. His resurrection is a sure promise that death itself will one day die, but also that in death dying we will reclaim the sort of physicality we were meant to have.

I believe this is part of God’s story, a story that has so many times bewildered Israel, and I’m firmly convinced will bewilder the church as well: we have signposts pointing into a bright mist, but we don’t know exactly how things will turn out. God’s story seems to be a tale of flowering, of outgrowth. Every time we think we’ve got the whole thing down pat, God grows something amazing and new and unforeseen and barely hinted at out of our familiar surroundings. Take the children of Israel. We know in retrospect that they are the seed from which the entire world will be fed, but for them the ultimate question was “How is God going to save Israel?” God comes along and says, “I’m not going to. I’m going to cause an outgrowth from you that will save the world, and in that, you will also be saved.”

It’s the same for us. We ask, “How is God going to save our immortal souls and bring us to heaven?” God comes along and says, “I’m not going to. I’m going to grow from you the kingdom of heaven on earth that will eventually transform the world, and in that, you will be transformed.”

Which of course means that what we do now, in this world, has significance. What we do here is not all doomed to be cast away, to be burned, and to be no more after we die or after Christ returns to earth. No, the opposite is in fact true: what we do here matters because what we do here effects who we are are what we will do eternally. It makes me quite happy to think that one day, when I receive a glorified body and am living in the earth made new with the New Jerusalem’s grand appearance, I am going to be writing poetry there too. My hope is that I will be much better at it then than I am now. My confidence is that I’ll still enjoy it then as much as I do now.

But this whole train of thought also underpins the whole idea of the Missional Church. The idea that we must be God’s hands and feet in our community derives from the fact that when we help people by giving them food and clothes and credit counselling and HIV/AIDS relief, and when I steward God’s creation by recycling and attempting to be sustainable and spewing less carbon into the air, I am fulfilling part of God’s mission on earth, that I am really being a member of the kingdom of heaven.

It’s bothered me for a long time that the vanguard of evangelicalism seems to be simply co-opting their secular liberal counterparts’ fashionable concern for this world without knowing why exactly they’re doing it. (Not to mention those who don’t like it because it smells a bit like those dirty Christian liberals who’ve converted Jesus into a mascot for world change.) But here are the underpinnings. This is the engine that drives the whole thing. If one day we are going to rise physically and inhabit this physical world, when heaven and earth are made new and the New Jerusalem (a picture of the fullness of the kingdom of heaven, and heaven itself, natch) meets up with earth, our labours now matter. It makes sense of Paul urging people to labour in Christ, and makes sense out of our post-modern urgency to do something, anything, about the state of the word our liberal secularist forefathers left us in.

It’s all there. The great flowering of the church is when we are resurrected and glorified and then go about doing exactly what we’re supposed to do exactly the way we’re supposed to do it. That’s the bright fog: all I can say is that it will be sometime in the future, and that it will absolutely blow my and your mind.

In the meantime, we have our mandate. We are the kingdom of heaven, right here and right now, and we are called to bring healing into a very, very broken world. And not just one kind of healing, but a holistic healing that not only prepares the soul for glory, but the body as well.

Here I was, all set to watch Mad About You, and settle down for a nice evening of not really thinking about anything. And of course the internet has to come along and spoil it for me.

Having read several books that place the focus of Jesus’ message on redemption not only of souls, but also of creation, I found a review of one of these books that called the author’s formulation of scripture’s message as a “sad substitute for the gospel”.

But is it?

It keeps prompting the question in me that if Jesus came to save souls, great: but what comes after that? What does that look like?

Or, why does salvation have to be this either/or thing between a liberal social gospel (which, I agree, standing alone doesn’t make much sense at all) and the liberation of souls from the devil’s grasp?

Why does it always seem to come down to that?

Scripture says that Jesus came to reconcile all things to himself. All things. Not just human souls, but his creation as well, unless I’m reading that verse completely wrong. Putting it another way, the creator of the world, the Word, comes back in the flesh to re-create things and make them good again, the way they were before the fall.

But what does that look like? I admit, if you’re looking for the end of the world in a decade, if you’re thinking that Jesus is going to–excuse the hyperbole–come down from on high in his spaceship and beam up all the saved people, if you’re expecting everything to just end, if you’re expecting that heaven is the final destination, yeah that makes sense. It makes sense in an individualist sort of framework, where you have a personal relationship with Jesus, who has come to save your soul, so you can eventually end up in heaven, where you will be happy and you and you and you and on and on and on.

If scripture talks that way, I must have missed it, and I’ve been doing my fair share of reading lately. I’ve poked these ideas with a sharp stick, and they bleed true, I think.

For instance, the kingdom has come. It has. Jesus said the end of the world would be in his generation, and the children of Israel saw it come, but they also saw the replacement for their small corner of the earth. They saw the children of Jesus strewn across Asia, and then across the world.

Yet the kingdom hasn’t come, not really, not the full thing, has it? Jesus isn’t reigning on earth yet. Things aren’t good here. We don’t have our new heaven and new earth. We still have entropy, and microevolution, and death, and suffering, and war.

So what do we do in the meantime? Is the kingdom this sort of inward-focused blessing machine for the people behind the walls, or is it maybe a blessing to all nations? Do we have a responsibility just to ourselves, or to the whole world?

Does this include helping the poor? Yes. Does this include saving the environment? I think so. Does this involve saving souls? Absolutely.

See, I can’t separate the two things in my head. Saved people do good things. It’s true. Sometimes they do bad things–I do bad things, for crying out loud, all the time–but in general Christians, real Christians, are a blessing to those around them. If you’re saved, doesn’t that mean the default position is feeding hungry people? If you’ve been redeemed, doesn’t that lead to a life of compassion?

Maybe the whole point is not just getting to some place where we all have a personal transformation and that’s it. Maybe the point is God’s glory, Jesus’ glory. And maybe, just maybe, he’s more glorified when we seek to redeem not only the souls of people, but everything, or anything at all.

I am unabashedly for sola scriptura.

That is, scripture is my only plumbline, my only yardstick. Not to say I’m good at it. Not to say I ever will be. But when push comes to shove, that’s where I’ll stand. When Jesus says, for instance, that the kingdom of God is at hand, meaning that it’s here, it’s now, it’s on this earth, I take that at face value. When Paul says that the kingdom of God is after the resurrection, I take that at face value, too.

But I am not ashamed to say people are imperfect. The “but” beginning that sentence may not make sense now; let me explain. Scripture only goes as far as it goes. It lays down hard and fast rules sometimes, but most often it lays down principles to follow, or guidelines to observe.

Our depravity as people enters here, that we are asked by holy scripture to figure it out for ourselves. (Incidentally, this is why the way of Jesus is so transferable, from culture to culture; there’s no one way to dress, for instance. There’s just decency and modesty.) The writers of the canonical books didn’t have a clue about optical information transfer and the hive mind of the internet, or internal combustion engines. They probably didn’t even understand the vast immensity of the universe that the Hubble telescope has unfurled for us in such vivid photography. Yet they had the seeds of it all there. Why is the free transfer of information good? Why is unlocking the secrets of the universe good? How should we do it? What should be our aim? And even when our goals and methods aren’t very good at all, what should be our response?

That God gave us brains to do this stuff is amazing. It draws glory to him above all. The fact that I can talk to some guy in Indonesia, the fact that I can send money to Come Over and Help to feed and clothe the young people of Eastern Europe, the fact that I can understand how I can’t grasp the vastness of the universe - these things all glorify God in their own way.

Yet, our brains, our beings, these things are all incredibly tainted. The vestiges of perfection are there, yes, but think of the ways humanity, created in God’s image, has mis-applied the gift. War. Weapons. Cruelty. Racism. Poverty. Sexism. Materialism.

These are things that even Christians have perpetuated on other Christians. Let’s not even mention what non-Christians have done to eachother in this and the last century alone! Even with our continuing personal reformation there is still a big chunk of absolute shit in each of our hearts. Think of what you, if you’re a Christian, have done to your brother or sister. To your fellow kingdom member. To your family. To your neighbor. I know: I’ve done my fair share and a bit more.

But focus merely on the application of scripture. Imagine the Roman Empire with its abundant slavery, and imagine Paul giving slaves the same dignity in Christ as their masters. Imagine how this will, eventually, snuff out slavery altogether. Now imagine Africans being sold by their fellow Africans to slavers, then sold again to the nominally Christian American southerners. How does that fit with the message of the Bible that slave, free, man, woman, black man, and white man are all equal under Christ? It doesn’t. Slavery is evil. Period. And those that promoted slavery while claiming to be Christians were committing a heinous crime against the ethos of scripture, and of Jesus’ and Paul’s message.

Imagine the battalions of Roman soldiers stationed over the known world, the emperors of which empire exercised every manner of cruelty against their enemies. Imagine Jesus’ message that the kingdom of God is not perpetuated with a sword, or with a spear, or Isaiah’s message of weapons being melted down and made into plowshares. Now imagine a nominally Christian president of a nominally Christian nation waging an unjust war against an equally unjust dictator, all while under a flag of a nation that mentions God in every pledge of allegiance. Imagine the thunderous trampling feet of nominally Christian armies lifting sword and shield to free a holy land. Imagine heretics being burned alive. War is evil. Unjust war is even more evil. And those that promote war in the face of scripture’s repudiation of it, and who promoted “redemptive violence” in the name of the Prince of Peace are committing and have committed a heinous crime in and against the name of Jesus.

All this to say, “We’re not perfect.” The sins of Christianity in the 2,000 years after Christ are many and complex. They are more numerous and more complicated that the sins of the Jews in the 2,000 years after Moses. I’ve mentioned some overt sins. But there are more, and they are personal. They are in the hearts of Christians who embrace a Hellenistic version of Christianity, or a rationalistic version of Christianity, or a Judaic version of Christianity, or a post-modern version of Christianity, or a materialistic version of Christianity, or a Pharisaical version of Christianity, and on, and on, and on.

We’re not perfect. This is the reason we stand on scripture as final authority. It is perfect. You can laugh at that from your modernist standpoint if you wish. I am convinced of it, like Paul was convinced.

But I am not convinced we Christians always get its spirit right. I am not certain I do, either. This is why I am unable to simply accept human tradition as an augment to the word. Isn’t that what the reformers fought against? This is why I am unwilling to simply submit to a certain cultural interpretation of scripture. This is why I am unable to say that things lacking clarity in scripture must go only one way. This is why I am suspicious of people who say that such and such is a necessary result of following scripture.

This is why I feel compelled to re-examine practice in the light of scripture over and over again, and to ask questions, and be convinced in my imperfection by that which is in itself perfect in every way. Have you done these things? I think they’re necessary. Essential, even. Simply because my evil runs deeper than even I know (and some of you will of course point out with a wink and a nudge a few places I haven’t noticed yet), and because, like the church, I am my own greatest enemy, and like the church, need Jesus, and only Jesus.

The irony of praying for the leaders of our countries is this: they aren’t Christians. We can never expect them to make God-glorifying decisions when their hearts are everywhere else. So we pray, but understand that if our prayers are answered, it’s a marvelous intervention on God’s part; and marvelous interventions are few and far between.

In this light, maybe the church is much better off understanding that it works within a secular nation. Is it not possible that the greatest wakeup call for the church of this age might be that we don’t, after all, live in a Christian nation? Or that it’s not enough to merely be called a Christian Nation when instead we need to be a nation of Christians?

It’s the nature of democracy, isn’t it, that our leaders reflect who we are as a people. The question becomes, “Who are we as a people?” And further in, “How do we change who we are as a people?” And higher up, “How will that change add to the spiritual revolution of God?”