The world seems more broken lately. It's hard to even make the list of how exactly it is broken. The news cycle ebbs and flows with stories of violence between Israel and Palestine. News from Ukraine and Syria fill the ebbs, at least as far as world news goes, with some ebola sprinkled in for good measure. Riots follow the death of Michael Brown. And yes, Robin Williams' suicide fits in there, too. I admit, I feel differently about his death than I would most celebrities' deaths. Some gifts that people share with us are life-altering; his definitely was.
Yet, it's strange, because somehow, all this brokenness feels normal. It feels like the reality of the world I was born into. I make it into the category of "millennial" no matter who is drawing the lines. Sometimes I just squeak in with my 1984 birthday. Others people who study demographics draw the line a little earlier, 1981 or so. As with most things, there's ambiguity about when something truly begins or changes. Suffice it to say, though, that I am thoroughly a millennial. My distrust of institutions surprises even me. Friends are family and I trust friends to help me make decisions more than other generations have. And yeah, I'm just fine with making pot legal and a liberal view of economics is putting it mildly. The list could go on and on.
My personal theory is that being born in the United States after Vietnam created a lot of the world views for my particular version of millennial, particularly distrust of institutions. I've also grown up as 24 hour news cycles were being created. In my lifetime, the shift from evening news to news bombardment has happened. Now it's a world of clickbait to see which news sources can get the most traffic. I don't remember a world where there weren't US troops somewhere in a desert on the other side of the world. At times, it's a frightening echo of the book titled for the year of my birth, 1984: we're always at war somewhere. In my lifetime, we've mostly not called the endless something somewhere war. Partly due to where I grew up, the problems of poverty have always been part of my life, even if my family was mostly comfortable. The Great Recession just took what I knew beyond the hills of Kentucky.
I don't say any of this with anger or even disillusionment. I'm mostly neither optimist nor pessimist, just realist. In fact, plenty of people find my detachment and analytical habits maddening. (And I'm good with that.) Yet, all the things that make me so typical of my generation lead me to the thing that makes me atypical for my generation: I'm still doing church.
I might have SBNR leanings in my faith language. I might have just as little hope and trust in the institution of church as I do other institutions. I'm a religious sampler in a lot of ways and a Christian tradition sampler in many more ways. Being in ministry within a particular tradition is a near-constant negotiation for me. No one would ever describe me as orthodox; I call it mannerism in practice. In the midst of all of my doubts and weirdness about my faith, though, I can't shake the hope of the reign of God.
The idea that maybe, probably, hopefully, the reign of God is at hand, breaking into this world at any moment, ready to redeem, to pull us out of the worst messes, holds my imagination. I get glimpses from time to time. There's are brief, glittering moments when it seems like something so new, straight from the hands of God, is about to take over all the brokenness. Then the glimpse is gone. And I want it again so much that I keep going, keep putting faith in the fact that it was not merely a glimpse, but something new coming.
And I live that hope with the church. The broken, often-crazy, weird beyond all belief thing that is the church. I do it despite church life being out of sync with my life a great deal of the time because they're the people who get it. They're the people who have also seen the glimpses and long for more. They're the people willing to say, "Yes, let's give this reign of God thing a shot," even if they're not remotely sure what that looks like right now.
So I do church. And I proclaim faith that God is doing a new thing in the midst of all the brokenness. And somehow, it gives voice and life to all the millennial who-knows-ness I feel most of the time. So I do the reign of God things that I understand and I pray that God will redeem all the messes and mostly, I live in the hope that God is not done with this world or with me. And maybe, just maybe, there is salvation after all.
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