The first day of Spring arrived this past Monday, March 20th, at 5:24pm.  Spring should be the time when one would expect more light, more green, more degrees of temperature.  Instead, winter continues to hold us in her grip.  This week we have had gray days, continued white, cold temps.  And yet, the promise of Spring is still alive.  We trust that it will eventually come because, well, it always does.

For those of us who follow in the Way of Jesus, we are used to proclaiming Spring-like words of hope.  Here are a few of the things that we say in the course of a Sunday’s service of worship:

“Blessed be God’s kingdom, now and for ever.”

“He will come again in glory.”

“His Kingdom will have no end.”

“We look for the resurrection of the dead.”

“Christ will come again.”

“At the last day, bring us with all your saints…”

These are hopeful, powerful, future-tense expressions of our faith.  These words pack a punch. They denote confidence of spirit.  The words reveal our trust in God’s capacity to change the course of the cosmos.  The Kingdom of God, we Christians maintain, is coming,  and all the evil forces in the universe can do nothing to stop it.

And yet,

not yet.

The Christian faith is an already but not yet sort of thing.  Already, God has created the universe, brimming forth with beauty and promise.  Already, Jesus has come into the world, incarnating love and showing us a way to do the same.  Already, human beings, filled with the Spirit of Christ, are living lives of generosity and grace.  Already, there are signs of God’s Kingdom all over the place.  

Clearly, however, God’s Kingdom, while already present, is not yet fully here.  There is still so much in the world and in our lives that stains and separates.  There is still such violence and abuse.  There is still such a dearth of love in the hearts of so many humans, such need for us to confess all the ways that we have sinned against God “by what we have done and by what we have left undone.”

That is the tension that we people of faith live… We celebrate and embrace the hope of Spring even when it still feels like Winter.  We celebrate and embrace the Kingdom of God even when so much is still broken.  We live in already but not yet times.  May we live them fully, abundantly, joyfully, and hopefully.

~Father Art