We first sang Rend Collective’s Build Your Kingdom Here on Pentecost.
On that day the church remembers and celebrates the coming of the Spirit fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus (we include Easter Sunday as the first day; the church measures time in all kinds of fun and unexpected ways). The book of Acts describes the Spirit descending on the church in a particularly powerful and public way at that time.
This song is a cry for revival, a prayer that the Spirit might do something similar in our time and place.
Build Your Kingdom Here calls on God to build the kingdom of heaven on earth, and thus echoes what Jesus teaches his disciples to pray in the Gospels (“thy kingdom come…”). But the kingdom that Jesus speaks about isn’t like the worldly kingdoms we’re familiar with. This kingdom isn’t worried about power and control, but rather, about revealing God’s compassion and love.
Christians believe that this compassionate kingdom is revealed in a particular way through the church. Now, that theory hasn’t always held up in practice. The church has made some horrendous mistakes over the years, and our local community is no different. One of the reasons I like this song is that it recognizes both our desire to live for love and our tendency to fall short of that goal as it cries out to God over and over saying things like, “Set your rule and reign in our hearts again!” and “Set our hearts ablaze with hope like wildfire in our very souls!”
Importantly, it doesn’t stop there. This isn’t just about insiders confined to their own little compartment; this is a song about joining God in God’s love for the world. I think that’s why it works so well in our United Church context. This song isn’t just about celebrating God’s presence; it’s also about living with respect in creation, loving and serving others, and seeking justice and resisting evil. When we do all that, we both have been (in action) can be (in words) effective in proclaiming Jesus to the world. This song is a cry from our hearts to God, asking for the Spirit to fall on us in Langley in the summer of 2015 so that we might testify in a particularly powerful and public way. So let it be.
Written by: Scott Reynolds