The reign of God has much more to do with right relationship than with being privately right. It has much more to do with being connected than with being personally correct. Can you feel the total difference between these two?
The reign of God is not about a world without pain or mystery but simply a world where we would be in good contact with all things, where we would be connected and in communion with what Mary Oliver calls "the daily presentations." Then all the world is your temple and church.
This is living in the big, full, and final picture - and we can begin to do it now!
"Why do you reject the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and good faith, while offering your pious sacrifices in the temple? You strain out gnats while you swallow camels!" (Matthew 23:23b, 24b).
Richard Rohr, adapted from Jesus' Plan for a New World, p. 11
I love it that the St. Matthew we know, and whose Gospel we read so often in church, is a man whom most of us would have given a wide berth were we around in Capernaum when he was at his tax collector's booth. Jesus' grace, and the utter precision of his discernment, are some of the things about him I find most reassuring. If he calls us, he really calls us. We don't have to worry if he's got it right, or if we can manage to hold it together. His grace is sufficient for us, for his power is made perfect in our weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). If that is so, then if the Son sets us free, we are, like Matthew, free indeed! (John 8:36)
