It would be so much easier, of course, if white supremacy were just about some pitiful neo-Nazis whose ideology and violence we could condemn and sanction and then dismiss. But white supremacy is far more insidious and far more pervasive than that. So undoing it requires much more than simple denunciation, much more than protest.

The Kingdom just isn’t something that can be humanly constructed. It isn’t something that can be /achieved,/ even through our very best efforts. The Kingdom is something to be received, rather than something for us to make.

And this is uncomfortable knowledge. It doesn’t match our understanding of ourselves as people who want to do good, who want to make the world a better place, and who think that trying harder is almost always the best way forward.

I think we in progressive Christian churches DO need to talk about sin. Because even though God made us in God’s own image and called us very good, we don’t always treat one another or ourselves as God’s image-bearers. We so easily get separated from the deepest truth of who we are – that we are God’s beloved daughters and sons – and we allow fictions masquerading as truth to define us and our potential and our future.

When it comes down to being a provider of God’s love, there is really only one provider—the One who sends us out with absolutely nothing yet with everything we need: healing, forgiveness, restoration, resurrection. That is really all we have to share with the world and, coincidentally, that is exactly what the world really needs.

Trinity tells us that God is the ground and source of all being and is the life from whom all being takes life and exists. That God delights in everything that is and wants to be in relationship with everything that is. That God is, within God’s own self, relationship: Holy 3. Eternal, Unending Love flowing from Creator to Word to Spirit and back in an endless circle—a dance of life.

It is rhythm, more than any other language, that powerfully draws people together across lines of race and class. It is rhythm that builds new communities as it moves our bodies together; as it coaxes our faces into smiles; and as it erases just a little bit of our tightly wound inhibition. We ease into the beat and let ourselves move. Dance even.

“Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” asked the angels. The angels wanted to remind the disciples, God’s friends, that if you wanted to see him again, standing looking up was not going to cut it. They needed to look around instead, at each other, at the world, at ordinary people living ordinary lives. The angels wanted to make sure they knew that the way they would find him was not the way they used to know him but the new way, not in his body, but in their bodies. The angels wanted to make sure they knew that the Risen ascended Lord was not anywhere on earth so that he could be everywhere instead.

Think about the way. The way is a road or a path or a trajectory. It is about movement and action, about coming and going. It is not snug or static or sheltered. The road that Jesus traveled was certainly not comfortable or safe. And frankly, neither is ours. But that doesn’t stop us. We are strengthened by our faith and inspired by the model that Jesus gives us of a loving and just and outwardly focused life with and in God.

“I know my own and my own know me” is first century Palestinian for “I love you and I’ve got your back”. We all need to have someone who will stand up for us. Someone who has our back. Always—no matter how unworthy we are of having a champion, no matter how screwed up we are and what a mess we have made of our lives. We all deserve to have someone who demonstrates the self-giving love, the constant care, of the good shepherd. The one who is willing to lay down life for a band of scruffy, sorry looking, rock-headed sheep.

God’s vision of how things should work is often quite different than ours. Which seems to be why God must use disruptive innovation to catch our attention, to catch us off guard, and to open us to a freer, truer way of being human.