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\u201cRemember the instruction you gave your servant Moses, saying, \u2018If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the nations, but if you return to me and obey my commands, then even if your exiled people are at the farthest horizon, I will gather them from there and bring them to the place I have chosen as a dwelling for my Name.\u2019 They are your servants and your people, whom you redeemed by your great strength and your mighty hand.\u201d (Nehemiah 1:8-10)

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These are the same verses from yesterday, but today I\u2019d like to lift up a different thread.\xa0 One that Pastor Michael touched on a few days ago, but that bears repeating.

Nehemiah\u2019s prayer lives in the real world of God\u2019s kingdom.\xa0

What do I mean by that? It can be really easy to take the things that we see as if they are the things that are.\xa0 We see governments in power in our country and across the border.\xa0 We see the pandemic rearing up again around us.\xa0 We see inequalities and hatred between peoples.\xa0 We see our church building begin to open back up for in-person worship and live stream.\xa0\xa0\xa0

But not all of these things are as they appear to be.\xa0 In the eyes of Nehemiah\u2019s prayer, the eyes shaped by the kingdom of God, the world looks differently.\xa0

Governments in power (whether the king of Persia or a modern day Prime Minister or President) only hold that power in so far as God grants it to them for a time\u2014but always the Lord is the true King, the true holder of power.\xa0 It was not the power of the Babylonians that exiled Israel nor the mercy of the Persians who allowed them back: it was always the Lord their God working in the events of history and through the powers of this world to accomplish the things he had decreed, as Nehemiah says.

Evil and suffering likewise, even this current pandemic, are not the way God created this world to be, and thus they are not fixed and immovable realities.\xa0 Instead, evil and suffering are things that somehow, strangely God can and at some times does and at other times does not intervene in, but are things that he can and does work through and things that in the end, he will expunge from His renewed creation, because evil and suffering have never been part of his intention for life.\xa0 That includes enmity and injustice between peoples: racism has no place in the kingdom of God.\xa0

As for church: it is Jesus\u2019 church.\xa0 As Pastor Michael reminded us yesterday, Jesus himself has become our temple\u2014the place where we meet with God is in and through him.\xa0 And he is the one that creates, builds, sustains, and preserves his church by his own good will and pleasure for the sake of his glory.\xa0 And Jesus does not only dwell inside our church buildings.\xa0 He is with us wherever we are.\xa0

We are participants, and we have a place, and we are invited to put our own hands to the work of being this community of his church, but always with our eyes on Jesus, who reminds us that there is more at work than just what we see.\xa0

There are lots of worrisome things afoot right now, but through the lens of the real world, the world of the Kingdom of God: we are reminded that Jesus is still on his throne, that God is still God, and that the Spirit is still at work.\xa0 That real world is our world, just, seen differently through the eyes of faith.

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