Ecclesiastes 3.1-8 (CEB)
There’s a season for everything
and a time for every matter
under the heavens:
a time for giving birth
and a time for dying,
a time for planting and a time for
uprooting what was planted,
a time for killing and a time for healing,
a time for tearing down
and a time for building up,
a time for crying and a time for laughing,
a time for mourning
and a time for dancing,
a time for throwing stones
and a time for gathering stones,
a time for embracing
and a time for avoiding embraces,
a time for searching
and a time for losing,
a time for keeping
and a time for throwing away,
a time for tearing
and a time for repairing,
a time for keeping silent
and a time for speaking,
a time for loving and a time for hating,
a time for war and a time for peace. 

Albert Einstein
“If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”

“Ideas are the natural enemy of the way things are.” That line gets me every time. It’s such a shocking thought: Ideas are the natural enemy to the way things are. Ideas.

It’s true when you think about it for a moment. Ideas exist to create change, to upset the accepted wisdom. Ideas move the entire species forward. From stone tools to iron horses, from burning wood to imploding atoms, innovation displaces and disrupts, especially the status quo. 

People often meet such new, especially radical notions with distrust and disdain. When the person that invented the wheel showed it off, my guess is everyone’s first reaction was, “Hey! I don’t know what that is, but if you lay it flat, it would be a great coffee table. What’s that you say? It makes it easier to move things? What do I need that for? The gods gave me feet! Now shut up and give me my coffee table.” 

It’s tough for people to accept new ways of doing and thinking. Comfortable with “the way it’s always been done,” few consider there might be a better, or at least a different, way. Our comfort with the present often exacerbates the status quo’s unwillingness to abdicate power. 

But now and then, someone with incredible vision comes along who thinks differently.

When we talk about visionaries, we often discuss people like Steve Jobs and Nikola Tesla, who pioneered technologies that forever changed the world. Jesus was also a visionary, who pioneered a more direct and intimate path to God. 

Jesus saw a better way to be human, by embracing our divinity—not in an egocentric way, but through obedience to the call of love. Jesus sees an entirely different social system created through covenantal love instead of contractual commerce. Like so many progressive ideas, being a better human—at least, the way Jesus envisioned, teaches, and exemplifies—means the entire, intermingled human systems of economics, politics and religion must topple. 

Jesus has a singular radical vision. Everything he does and says is about teaching us how to fulfill that vision, which is to co-create the Realm of God, a united global society whose governing rules are based on the fair and equitable treatment of all living beings. 

For Jesus, God’s Realm has a single principle: love. Love everyone. Love God, love your neighbor, love yourself. Eliminate your enemy by seeing God in them. 

Love everyone.

And why does Jesus say we should do this? Because God loves us. It’s the order of the universe for Jesus. God loves us—radically enough, as it turns out, to consciously become human and remind us to love so wholly that we create a new world ordered around good and fair relationships with friends, lovers, cities, states, and countries. 

Mutual respect. Not homogenized, white-robed religious automatons. God through diversity. 

Jesus calls this world of universal cooperation “the kingdom of heaven” (sometimes translated as “the kingdom of God”). I prefer the more contemporary sounding “Realm of God,” and I’ve been experimenting with “Dimension of God,” as it speaks to the reality of the multiverse and the constant in-breaking of God into our existence. 

Although, honestly, now I’m limiting God to dimensions, so it’s a bigger box, but it’s still a box.

Whatever we call this new reality, for Jesus, it represents the end of selfish, warring human kingdoms and the beginning of a new era in which all humans live and prosper together by loving God (in many names and images). 

It’s a beautiful vision unless you’re currently in control. 

It’s evident from scripture that Jesus understands he’s talking treason. Which is why he is so careful about the way he says things. Knowing he needs to preserve these radical ideas, about an almost unimaginably different and beautiful reality, for future generations, Jesus often speaks in mysterious parables.

All of the parables—sowers, weeds, seeds, treasures, growth—are about the dimension of God and what the status quo today still consider Jesus’ hazardous idea: The real kingdom, the ultimate God-dimension, lies within (Luke 17.21).

Jesus’ dimension allows for direct, personal communication with the eternal consciousness we call God. Like Jesus, we understand God as the connective consciousness of the universe, flowing in and around all things. If you’ve said anything like that on social media, you know how unfortunately radical that statement is still today. 

Yet, Jesus is clearly telling us we are one with God, like him, and that through that communion, we create the dimension of God on Earth. Right here. Right now. The parables are Jesus’ way of couching this radical thinking in metaphor. It’s the way he cares for and feeds his dangerous ideas. Because he knew that dangerous ideas take time to take root (remember that parable) and spread (remember that parable)? 

He also knew that the entrenched powers would do their best to eradicate everything he ever said and taught. And they did a pretty good job. 

The Romans destroyed the Gnostics and their spiritual wisdom texts. They usurped Jesus’ message of God’s Realm as superior to all human governments and created the Holy Roman Empire.

The establishment takes Jesus’ radical idea and perverts it year after year, century after century, until today, the idea is often unrecognizable from anything Jesus birthed.  

Which is why I think Qoheleth’s sentiment is as relevant as ever:

There’s a season for everything
and a time for every matter
under the heavens:
a time for giving birth
and a time for dying,
a time for planting and a time for
uprooting what was planted,
a time for killing and a time for healing,
a time for tearing down
and a time for building up.

May God make this a time for building up, and we God’s builders.

Amen.