Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Your kingdom come.”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, June 9, 2024
by Madison Johnston, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: Imagining and yearning for God’s kingdom is what will ensure that we can be a part of building it here on earth.
What comes to mind when you think about manifestation? What kind of things do you associate with visualization? Maybe you go to your TikTok “For You” page, where an influencer is explaining their spiritual practices. Maybe you’ve been in a therapy session where imagining a specific place or item was an important part of a guided exercise. A quick Google search for “visualization statistics” or “how important is manifestation?” will produce study after study claiming that if you articulate your goals fully and consistently, you have a significantly higher chance of meeting them than if you don’t. How does the old adage go? “If you can see it, you can be it.”
The notions of manifestation and visualization continue to be interpreted, reinterpreted, co-opted, commodified, in some cases diluted, and, in a nutshell, stretched by a lot of people with a lot of different agendas to cover a lot of ground. In teaching us to pray, Jesus gives us one interpretation that we can depend on.
Jesus thinks we should ask for the coming of God’s kingdom every time we pray. This isn’t because God’s kingdom is a kind of polished, packaged reality that we’re hoping will arrive someday for us to consume. It’s because God’s kingdom is something that God imagined would require and be beautified by our participation. God’s kingdom is something we’re called to build with each other and for each other. And that means that we need to give it our attention. We need to give it our imagination. We need to see it so that we can be it! In prayer, we have the opportunity to grow and rededicate ourselves to our understanding of the kingdom of God.
