This Beautiful Mess | Rick McKinley

Rick McKinley. This Beautiful Mess: Practicing the Presence of the Kingdom of God. Multnomah, 2006. 192 pp.

Discovering the Kingdom

When Jesus was on earth, He painted a radical vision for His followers. He called it the “kingdom of God.” His kingdom is a heavenly reality that lands smack in the middle of everyday life. Even here, Jesus said–in the harshness and mess of earth–His kingdom is the way things really are. His announcement was nothing less than revolutionary.

Maybe it was the clash of opposites or the paradox that Jesus’ kingdom exists in parallel with many lesser kingdoms, but either way, His followers were not quick to pick up on the revolution.

They longed for another world–a world without oppressors, injustice, beggars, or messes. For three years, Jesus walked among a people overcome with longing and spread the Good News of His kingdom. And He said that His kingdom was already happening all around them.

It is a historical scene that captures my heart: God in the flesh breaking in to their world with healing spiritual authority and simple yet profound words. “The kingdom of God is near,” He said. “The kingdom of God is within you.”

Jesus invites us to live out the historical reality of His kingdom in our contemporary post-everything culture, but we have to face a hard truth: Most followers of Jesus have grown accustomed to a spirituality that doesn’t remotely resemble revolution. We call Him Lord but not King, and we’ve gone deaf and blind to the “whole” gospel He came to share. . . .

This Beautiful Mess is intended to help us hear the words of Jesus again and begin to shift our affections toward Him and His brilliant vision. What we’ll discover is that His radical call still goes forth today. We will realize that the empire we long to embrace is His. We will understand in a new way what it means to be human, to be forgiven, to live as disciples, to become the people of the revolution. . . .

Re-visioning Life in the Kingdom

Once we gain an understanding of what the kingdom of God is, we need to know where to look for it. “I’m ready to see the kingdom messages of Jesus in a new light,” you might be saying, “but where is His kingdom in my life now? I just don’t see it.”

To recognize the kingdom, we need to learn to see differently. And not just see differently in a theoretical sense, but in a real-world sense–like when sin and brokenness and a world gone wrong show up on our doorstep. See the kingdom breaking in there too. . . .

For most of us, it will take effort to reorient our thinking and expectations toward the new reality that Jesus came to announce. In fact, since most of us have been imagining a King-less world for years, a certain amount of deprogramming will probably be involved. But after we leave some comfortable assumptions behind, we’ll be ready to grapple in new and healing ways with our culture and the relentless demands it places on us to make a destiny for ourselves apart from God.

In doing so, we’ll begin to see what we’ve overlooked before: His present kingdom in the midst of the ordinary miracle we’re living in. . . .

Practicing the Presence of the Kingdom

When I compared the vision for life in the kingdom that Jesus put forth in the Gospels with the experience I had at church as a new Christian, I noticed a discrepancy. Jesus’ fresh perspectives on money, suffering, justice, and love had been refashioned into a tidy way of life for those who did their best to convey that they no longer needed much of what He had to say.

At eighteen, I sensed the problem without quite being able to say it. In all the tidiness, the wonder of the gospel of Jesus seemed to be disappearing. As a recent convert, I was alive in that wonder. It was changing my life. But looking around, I realized that most of Jesus’ followers lived pretty much like everyone else–except we hoped for heaven. The Christian life began to look like one long waiting game of Bible studies and boring parties. If I was lucky, a bus would hit me and I’d go straight to heaven. Until then the kingdom life I was reading about in the Gospels would have to wait.

I felt disappointed–like I had entered C. S. Lewis’s wardrobe, full of anticipation, but instead of standing in a magical place with fawns and witches and every kind of possibility, I had somehow managed to walk through the wardrobe and into a dentist’s office. People sat around reading magazines and asking me to calm down, to be quiet, to take a seat. They said it very nicely, of course, like you would in a dentist’s office. The place was clean, with polite smiles everywhere, sterile smells, and bad Muzak. What are you supposed to do in a waiting room except try to kill the time? I did a lot of that. I killed time in college groups. In church. In Bible college. I even killed time as a pastor.

But leaning back in my chair one day I realized that the walls of the waiting room were actually paper-thin. Behind the veil of Western evangelicalism existed an untamed, revolutionary reality. The world on the other side of the wardrobe did exist, I realized. You just have to tear down the fake walls first, kill the fake music, and let yourself go crashing with newborn, wide-eyed anticipation out into the world.

And there it is all around you. The kingdom of God. . . .

This . . . is my small attempt to begin to tear down the fake walls of a sterile kingdom. My hope . . . is that it will help begin important paradigm shifts in how we think about life. That we will begin to see the kingdom of God in ordinary miracles all around us. Because they’re there, happening right now–as you breathe, think, read, and focus on these words. What would happen if we recaptured appropriate wonder at the present reality of the kingdom? What if we could see it and could collaborate with the Spirit as it breaks into our world? What if we discovered the simple miracle of participating with God in His kingdom and practicing the presence of it all around us?

Practicing the presence of the kingdom changes how we see the world, our neighbors, and ourselves. It changes the way we use money, understand children, and play in creation. It causes us to stop and listen, see, touch, taste, and feel. The kingdom is found in justice breaking in all around us, in beauty in the midst of the mess.

The kingdom also calls us to be signposts along the road of life, pointing to the reality of heaven and our King. It calls us to hold that sign up among those who suffer. The kingdom shows up, and we stand in the midst of their suffering with them and declare that they are loved.

That kind of signpost, showing up all over the place.

I know this is just a book. But I dream that a book can be more than a static document. I think God could use this collective of readers and dreamers to bring about a dynamic real-time expression of the kingdom. And I dream that we will begin to share our stories, because what you read in This Beautiful Mess are only a few of many stories that need to be told. You have a story to tell as well. . . . As you and your friends or faith community launch out in practicing the presence of the kingdom, I invite you to share your stories and questions with others. There are no experts in this kingdom, only novices who are trying to figure it out, full of wonder and together.

Go to the website www.rickmckinley.net. It will provide a chance for others to hear how the kingdom of God is breaking in all around us, to be inspired by ideas that the Spirit is giving others (and to steal those ideas), perhaps even to instigate a global conspiracy as we practice the subversive reign of Jesus’ love around the world.

See our Bookshelf Entry on This Beautiful Mess

Excerpted from This Beautiful Mess © 2006 by Rick McKinley. Used by permission of Multnomah Publishers, a division of Random House, Inc. Excerpt may not be reproduced without the prior written consent of Multnomah Publishers.

Like this post? Subscribe to our feed .