How Far Is Heaven Rediscovering the Kingdom of God in the Here and Now by Ronnie McBrayer

Author:Ronnie McBrayer [McBrayer, Ronnie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781621897071
Publisher: Wipf and Stock
Published: 2013-07-18T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Where Nothing Is Sacred

A man sitting at the table with Jesus exclaimed, “What a blessing it will be to attend a banquet in the Kingdom of God!” Jesus replied with this story: “A man prepared a great feast and sent out many invitations. When the banquet was ready, he sent his servant to tell the guests, ‘Come, the banquet is ready.’ But they all began making excuses. One said, ‘I have just bought a field and must inspect it. Please excuse me.’ Another said, ‘I have just bought five pairs of oxen, and I want to try them out. Please excuse me.’ Another said, ‘I now have a wife, so I can’t come.’ The servant returned and told his master what they had said. His master was furious and said, ‘Go quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and invite the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’ After the servant had done this, he reported, ‘There is still room for more.’ So his master said, ‘Go out into the country lanes and behind the hedges and urge anyone you find to come, so that the house will be full. For none of those I first invited will get even the smallest taste of my banquet.’”

—Luke 14:15–24 (NLT)

I was fifteen years old when the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday first became the law of the land. Having lived my entire childhood in Georgia, also Dr. King’s birthplace, I knew his story and his heroics very well. I also knew that he was often maligned, sometimes viciously. So when that first official King Day rolled around on the calendar, it produced some very brisk conversations within my extended family, my community (a community that always had an element of the Ku Klux Klan lurking beneath its respectable surface), and yes, it produced some reaction within my childhood church.

Never can I forget standing outside the church sanctuary on a cold Sunday night, a nosey and curious teenager listening to the old men talk, just weeks before that first January observance of the King Holiday. One man asked the group, “Well, what y’all boys think about getting a day off for this King fella’?” With a big, fat, leather-bound King James Bible under his arm, and a plug of tobacco in his mouth, one of the other men answered, “Oh, I appreciate a day off. In fact, if we kill a few more of ‘em, we might get a whole week off next year!” This was met by uproarious laughter and backslapping from the rest of the group. Then they all marched inside to sing praises to Jesus, apparently with clear consciences.

This attitude is very much alive in many circles, and that heinous joke is still laughed at in some Christian congregations; congregations that profess allegiance to Jesus, the same Jesus who welcomed all people regardless of their nationality, skin color, sexuality, gender, or any of the other factors that divide people. If we who are Christians are genuinely part of the church Jesus initiated, then love for our neighbor must be our calling card.

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