One of my favorite episodes of Seinfeld was the Bizzaro world episode. The premise of the story is a spin on the Bizzaro world found in Superman comics. In the Bizzaro world everything is opposite. Bizzaro superman was the opposite of superman and lived on a planet where good was bad and bad was good. In the Bizarro Seinfeld episode Elaine was confronted with 3 friends that were exact opposites of their real world counterparts Jerry, George, and Kramer.

The more I understand the teachings of Jesus the more I realize that Jesus was trying to show us a “bizarro” world. He talked about this thing called the kingdom of God but the whole idea of a kingdom with a king and armies fighting evil is a horrible image for us today. Lately I have come to realize that it isn’t what I always thought it was. When I was a kid I was taught that this kingdom was some place called heaven that I would go to when I died. As I grew up and stopped believing in a literal afterlife and a supernatural spirit realm I never really found a good replacement for that theory. Some people tried to tell me that this kingdom might not be a place but be more like a “time” in the future. But that didn’t really add up either because Jesus said the Kingdom of God is within us. That doesn’t fit the model of a place or a time.

In his lectures last weekend, Walter Brueggeman said, “In order to be subversive, one must have a sub version of reality”. All great revolutionary figures seem to see the world different. In Jesus’ version of reality the last is first and the first is last, the meek inherit the earth, people love their enemies, disputes are settled with compassion instead of violence, and peace is preferred to war. Maybe that is the key.

What if the kingdom of God isn’t a place or a time but instead it is an alternate subversive image of reality? What if this version of reality is all in our heads (i.e. “within us”) and we can learn to experience it just by changing the way we view our surroundings? What if becoming a Christian was no longer taught as adopting an ancient belief system and renouncing the existence of dinosaurs, but instead it was taught to be more like putting on a new set of mental lenses to view the world. What if the version of God that was taught to us in Sunday school is a horrible mistake given to us by ancient people that used God as an excuse for natural disasters and as an explanation for their victory or defeat in war? What if Jesus’ purpose was to give us an alternate view of God and an alternate way to live? What if the personal transformation that Jesus talked about is a natural byproduct of living life wearing a new set of lenses? What if God’s solution to save the world is the natural byproduct of more people wearing these new lenses? What if our objective is not to sit back passively and wait for God to bring a magical kingdom in the future, but our objective is to put on these new lenses and start seeing and living a subversive anti-imperialistic life right now?