I first read Richard Rohr's Jesus' Plan for a New World: The Sermon on the Mount several years ago now, and it blew me away. It helped reorient everything I believed. At the time I hadn't yet considered an evolutionary worldview, but when I read it now it positively drips with an integral message.
Here's a taste for you from one of the good Father's daily emails this week:
Jesus announced, lived, and inaugurated for history a new social order based on grace and not on merit. He called it the Reign or Kingdom of God. It is without doubt his most common message and metaphor, so it must be very important. Maybe we should just call his Kingdom “the final and big picture.” Many of us would put it this way: “In the end it all comes down to . . .” There we believe that all will be found and revealed inside of the love and mercy of God—for everyone without exception—and for all of creation. All of our little divisions and dramas will be revealed to be just that. All smaller kingdoms and criteria will pass away and mean very little. To live with that final consciousness today is to live in the Reign of God.
This now and not-yet Reign of God is the foundation for both our personal hope and our cosmic optimism, but it is also the source of our deepest alienation from the world as it is, which is all based on largely meaningless merit badges, and various forms of win or lose (at which almost all lose!).
I must warn you that living in this Big Picture of God will leave you in many ways as a “stranger and pilgrim” on this earth (Hebrews 11:13). It is not a popular position, because you can no longer easily fit into ordinary superficial conversations and anti-any group jokes. Nevertheless, our task is to learn how to live lovingly in both worlds until they become one world—at least in us. True Kingdom people bridge worlds and do not again create separate or superior little kingdoms. This is a common mistake.
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