"Your Kingdom Come…" (Matthew 6:10)

“The kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea which collects fish of every kind.” (Matthew 14: 47)

In The Large Catechism, Martin Luther teaches us that when we pray these words of the Lord’s Prayer we are praying that the kingdom of heaven “may come to those that are not yet in it, and that it may come by daily growth here and in eternal life hereafter to us who have attained it.”

Sometimes, I believe, we feel like we are always striving to realize the kingdom of heaven in our lives. We seek ways to become more holy only to feel disappointed, like we have failed, when we inevitably resume in our sinful human ways.

We will rest in God’s grace when we finally realize that the kingdom of heaven includes each and every baptized child of God, whether or not we act in ways which qualify as “holy.” God’s net catches everyone, and it’s not for us to judge who is in and who is out. Our earthly measure of what is holy may be very different from God’s.

Roberta Bondi writes, “In God’s profound love and profound valuing of my life and every other human life,… holy beauty is simply given. Doesn’t the very fact of the incarnation declare God’s love of the ordinary as well as the extraordinary parts of our lives? … My life as a human being, made in the image of God, is holy because God loves it and has always loved it, and so in some mysterious way it is the site of God’s beloved, holy presence.” (p 46)

The kingdom of God comes to us and through us. We find the kingdom of God in ourselves and in each other.

Prayer for today

Teach me how to treat myself and everyone I meet as the incarnation of your kingdom. Amen.

Bondi, Roberta C. A Place to Pray; Reflections on the Lord's Prayer; Abingdon Press, 1998