Like many others who have found such life in and around this thing we have come to call ’emerging church’, I have such a love for these words ‘Kingdom of Heaven’.

For many years they were words of condemnation for me…

Something other.

Something distant and dangerous.

Something I had to fight to enter, and at best, I might scrape my way into on a technicality.

Something that was wrapped up in charismatic ideas of spiritual warfare and triumphalistic ecstatic wierdness.

Something that in order to serve, I needed to be Holy. And I was not.

I remember that moment when I began to catch a glimpse of a different meaning of the words- as spoken by Jesus.

Of the Kingdom of God as something that grows inside me, like an infectious bubble of blessing.

As something that is here now, but also still to come.

As something that I participate in, but is beyond my understanding.

That welcomes the weak, and the weary, and the child like.

And is glimpsed, almost as a mirage, in our communing and loving and laughing together.

And the call on us, the agents of this kingdom, not to turn the whole world blind or salty, but to shine light on truth and beauty, and to season the flavours of Jesus wherever we taste them.

If these ideas are new-ish to you, or you would like to hear some more about the context that Jesus was speaking into, when he spoke of the Kingdom- check out this excellent Aussie radio programme…