In time, I’m sure, your perspective has changed. It constantly unfolds, and it unfurls more fully if you allow it, if you let it, if you welcome it. The job is to let your perception change, or more precisely, to let go of it, so it will become what is most helpful for you and for the people you love.

The work of letting go is counterintuitive anyone who is experienced at controlling their life, managing it, and who thinks of nothing other than perfecting their life. To let go is to face the possibility that there isn’t a job to be done, that we are not as important as we thought we were, that we are not as powerful as we believed ourselves to be.

To receive the Kingdom of God is to acknowledge and to understand that God is the One who is powerful, not us. Faith is the realization we are not in charge; we are not the ones who know best what we need; we are not the ones who decide what the world should be like.

To receive the Kingdom of God is to become increasingly interested in the wellbeing of others, to become less self-involved and selfish, and to grow in the knowledge that the Kingdom itself is not an accomplishment we can boast about but a gift we have been blessed to experience – like sharing a life with someone, or seeing the sun rise over a new day.

Gradually the Kingdom of God takes your preferences from you. It takes your favorite time of the day away from you and makes you share it with others. It takes your extra cash and gives it to the poor. It takes your silence and fills it with the voices of people complaining to you. It withholds from you your shortcuts, your cheats, your vices, your secrets. The Kingdom of God makes you its citizen, and it holds you to a law that is not your own.

To know we are not the powerful ones, not the ones in charge, ultimately helps us face the problems we can’t fathom on our own. When you have a problem, placing your trust in the Kingdom of God will help you see it differently. Allowing yourself to believe that God will take care of you can help you maintain a sense of peace, equanimity, and acceptance, even at the sight of trouble, even in the valley of the shadow of death. You can, like the psalmist, fear no evil.

To fear no evil is a miracle in a life filled with uncertainties and problems. Imagine that your mind is like a theater, and your problem is on the center of the stage.¹ You’re puzzling over a question of how to move forward, how to make this year’s event work better than last year’s, how to have a better interaction with someone tomorrow than you had today with her, how to finally get your work done that you’ve been struggling with. You have a problem to deal with, and you’re not making any progress. And you’re becoming worried and overwhelmed, stressed, anxious, and fearful.

But your fretting doesn’t mean you have a shortage of solutions before you. You have so many thoughts hiding in the background, trying to get your attention. Your entire life, stored in memories and recalled every day, matches your problem with the experiences you have had and the lessons you have drawn from other people’s lives. Ten million processors in your mind are competing for your attention, and a few of them might help you find the way through. But the urgency of your worrying takes your attention away from the solution. All you can do when you are anxious is say, over and over, I am scared!

The worry and the fear block the path of a solution finding you. One way to allow the answer to come your way more quickly, one way to allow your perception to unfold more completely, is to let go, to relinquish the need to solve the problem yourself. One way to move forward in your life is to trust that God will move you forward, even more quickly than you can move yourself.

It is a challenge to our entire way of being, to give the problems we’re facing to Someone else. It is hard to trust that we will fare better. And it is especially hard for anyone who has been let down by those they love. That, I think, is the most unfair part of the Kingdom of God. Those who are in terrible shape, who have such daunting prospects, also have the most to gain from giving their problems to God to puzzle with. But they also have the greatest reason not to trust, not to hope, not believe that good can come about, that poverty can be alleviated, that this world’s warring madness can be quelled, that loneliness can be quieted, that what is damaged can be restored.

It is so hard to trust in God, when the whole world teaches us not to count on good things happening anytime soon. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Might is right.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;²

The whole world teaches us not to count on good things coming our way. And so we are hesitant to put our faith in Someone else to solve our problems. We are wary of trusting our lives and our loved ones to God.

Too often we wait for the right time, the right occasion, the right circumstances,
the right setting for us to believe
that we are loved by a God we cannot see,
that our needs are provided for, and that we are to provide for the needs of others,

that we are called to stretch out our hands and be made well,
that we are to pick up our mats and walk,
that we are to take a risk we did not think we could manage,
that we are to expand our world so that the distance between you and me
is abbreviated, shortened, eliminated, and made no more,
so that we can know that we walk not alone but with one another,
not in isolation, but in community,
not in desperation, but in confidence,
that when we are weak, which is often,
we also find among us those who will carry us,
those who will keep us,
those who will claim us
as friends and as children of God.

Too often we hold our breath, speaking sternly to those full of hope,
as if guided by a misconception
that what we need we do not have,
what we lack is another gift from God,
what holds us back from living with boldness and freedom
is not our own fear
but the stinginess of God,

as if the One who made the world
from a single Word
could not give us a Kingdom
big enough to live in,
strong enough to withstand every calamity,
and to change lives
and to make us to become

something other than what we are ashamed of,
other than what we are used to,
something new, something unfamiliar,
something frightening to us because it is unknown,
something which defies our efforts to be in control.

When we speak sternly to those who have hope,
and when we speak sternly to the God of hope,
it is because in that moment we do not live in God’s kingdom:
We are gaslighting ourselves,
misleading ourselves, convincing ourselves of a lie –
that we are the victims, we are the impoverished, we are the ones who need more,
more of what we want,
more of what we desire,
more of what we have decided in our hearts we deserve.

Jesus challenges our sternness, saying
“It is to such as these children that the kingdom of God belongs.
Truly I tell you, [verily I say unto you]
whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child
will never enter it.”

And no one spoke sternly anymore, not a word.
No one said a thing, not to Jesus, not to the children, not to those who have hope.

Too often we wait for the right time, the right occasion, the right circumstances,
the right setting for us to believe
that we are loved by a God we cannot see,
that we are provided for our needs and that we are to provide for the needs of others.
Why are we still waiting? As my favorite poet knew well:

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.³

May we never shun those who are hopeful.
May we stop waiting for the blue iris to make its appearance before we pray.
May we each have an ounce of hope, a wafer of bread made sacred,
an entire life redeemed and restored and made into something
beyond our control, so that the whole world would be transformed
into something new.

Will you have hope? Will you place your trust in Someone else? Will you give your problems away so that they might be solved more quickly, and better than you could imagine? Will you allow yourself to be like a child? Will you receive the Kingdom of God?

I pray you will. Amen.

1. See for discussion, the Theatre Model of Consciousness, presented at the World Science Festival, by Brian Greene, Lenore Blum, and Manuel Blum, accessible here: https://youtu.be/Vqe5TmTHU9E?si=Q5MF2pkFeUcKqqPI ↩︎
2. [1] William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 1989 (written in 1919). ↩︎
3. Mary Oliver, “Praying,” in Thirst (Boston: Beacon, 2006). ↩︎