Ridiculous Optimism?

When I talk about the Kingdom of God, and say that I have hopes at some point for a world order of justice, peace, inclusion and love, I've been called all sorts of things, from a hippy, to a liberal, to a ridiculous optimist and told it will never happen.

A conversation with a tutor at college threw a new light on the Easter story from this point of view. Jesus, the perfect human who exemplified the Kingdom of God was crucified by imperfect humans who couldn't care less. They killed the ideal of perfect humanity... however he didn't stay dead! And for me that is a story of great hope, that the ideal of a just world, a world order of Shalom, even though it is trampled and seems to be hopelessly dead will not stay dead! Perhaps if Christians everywhere started to focus on life in this world before death, rather than getting through life as quickly as possible to get to some abstract life after death, there would be even more hope!

The BBC News site today has an artical about Social Entrepreneurship. A trend amoung young bussiness students to want to use their bussiness skills to tackle some of the problems faced by the world, rather than capitalising on a huge profit. If this is a trend amoungst the younger generation of students, then maybe the hope for the future shared by some Christians is a little more than ridiculous optimism.