The Covenant Made Flesh- The Kin-dom Embodied in the World
Malkuth of Yesod Day 42 of 50 · Presence within Foundation
The Covenant Made Flesh- The Kin-dom Embodied in the World
The forty-second saying of the living Christ as spoken by Mary Magdalene:
When you behold the pillars of the temple, do you think they are the covenant? Of course not. Even Boaz and Jachin reminded us that in Him is strength that He will establish, but they were not the covenant. Neither marble nor copper can contain the power of the covenant. It is not the priesthood, nor the priests, nor the teachers. It is not the seats they claim nor the titles they take. The living covenant can never be written into a rigid and unchanging form. Its laws are love and liberation, both defy control and must themselves be lived. We guard life and the living; the covenant guards itself. It is not the cup that must be used no matter how chipped and cracked it becomes. It is the heart that chooses the cup, the spirit in which it is filled, and the relationship that shares it. If the covenant becomes an empty cup on an altar to be worshipped, the Spirit has departed.
Just as the Word became flesh and walked among us, so too must the covenant become flesh in us. If it is words spoken but not lived, they are dead. The kin-dom is not coming, it is here, now, among us. We must not wait for the kin-dom, or hope that it will one day come. This is like standing in the hot sun, next to a shadow, hoping that soon the shade will come and relieve us from the heat. Step into the shelter and take refuge in it. Why would you point to the shade and promise people it will come one day instead of encouraging them to walk the way to shelter? The covenant is our guide to the refuge of grace.
The kin-dom is among us, here and now.
The covenant is alive in the world. It is not a longing we reach for, nor an order enforced by those in power. The house of prayer is the people who gather to pray; a house of study, those who study; a house of justice, those who do justice.
The kin-dom is not coming. It is here wherever two or three gather in the refuge of the Word. Where life is fostered, the covenant lives. It lives in the balance of giving and receiving that we are called to. Justice, mercy, and a steady heart are the signs that the covenant is alive through the people.
At the empty tomb, I thought I saw a gardener, before I realized it was the living Christ, who is the gardener of the world. He tends the vine through us. We are here to grow and foster life. In this world, we are the living covenant embodying the grace of God in Christ every day.
The foundation of the kin-dom is the covenant’s journey from the heart of God through the ground beneath our feet. We are healed when we stop waiting for the kin-dom to descend from the clouds; it is rising from the soil beneath our feet. In the daily acts of giving and receiving, we make it visible to all the world.
As we live in the covenant, our souls are repaired as we heal the distance between what we believe and how we live. The world is not repaired from above, but from within. A community that lives love and liberation in every relationship and every act of faithfulness who refuses to wait for a distant spring when the Spirit is breathing now.
You left the institution but not the longing. Creation’s Paths: A Creation Spirituality Primer is for everyone who still feels the sacred moving through the world and wants a language worthy of that feeling.
