This year I've been going along to monthly discussions with a bunch of others interested in Servants to Asia's Urban Poor (check out their website if your interested: http://servantsasia.org.
A few weeks ago, one of the guys mentioned this series of videos from Peter Block and Walter Brueggemann. The series talks quite a bit about our call as people of faith to be building the kingdom and not the empire eg. "kingdom building" or "empire building."
One of the videos is entitled 'Pain and Marching' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5-g-LRZmW4) and has this particular quote in it that I loved:
"Pain brought to speech, turns to energy;
Pain not brought to speech, turns to violence."
I recently went to a gathering/service for friends of mine that had lost their baby at 17 weeks. The service was a time of lots of crying and sadness but also a powerful expression of grieving communally. In the video, it talks about the "communal cost of empire is isolation" - by grieving together with pain expressed to one another, I experienced the powerful alternative of kingdom building rather than empire building.
This morning I also watched Barack Obama's eulogy at the funeral of the Reverend who was one of the people who died in the shooting at the church in South Carolina a few weeks ago. Putting aside some of the political rhetoric, parts of his speech really talked of kingdom building rather than empire building and turning pain into change, rather than violence. Here's a link to the speech if you would like to watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDXMoO9ABFE
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