As people of this world, we stand with one foot in creation and one foot in new creation, which means that we know both the messy business of being a human formed out of the dust and the eternal business of being a new creation in Christ. It’s not just happenstance that we live here in a world where God's kingdom is present but still hidden. Jesus tells us that we have been sent into this unfinished world as ambassadors of God’s love and life promised to all creation.

The theologian Jurgen Moltmann, in his Following Jesus Christ in the World Today, describes the space between the world as-it-is and the world as-it-will-be-revealed as sacramental space, where our lives of faith uncover the hidden God in all the dimensions of our world.

He is a dense writer, but says excellent things. Take time to read and re-read this quote, because it is worth the work to digest it. Inspiring words about living in this world and letting our very lives be worship:

Christian messianic ethics celebrates and anticipates the presence of God in history. It wants to practice the unconditioned within the conditioned and the last things in the next to last.

In the economic dimension, God is present in bread; in healing, as health. In the political dimension God is present as the dignity of the human being; in the cultural dimension, as solidarity. In the ecological area, God is present as peace with nature; in the personal area, in the certainty of the heart. Every form of his presence is veiled and sacramental; it is not yet a presence face-to-face. God’s presence encounters human persons in the concrete messianic form of his liberation from hunger, oppression, alienation, enmity and despair. These messianic forms of his presence point at the same time, however, beyond themselves to a greater presence, and finally to that present in which ‘God will be all in all.’

God’s real presence as bread, as freedom, as community, as peace and as certainty thus have the character of exploding the present. To act ethically in a Christian sense means to participate in God’s history in the midst of our own history, to participate in the comprehensive process of God’s liberation of the world, and to discover our own role in this, according to our own calling and abilities. A messianic ethic makes people into co-operators fo the kingdom of God. It assumes that the kingdom of God is already here in concrete, if hidden, form. Messianic ethics integrates suffering people into God’s history in this world; it is fulfilled by the hope of the completion of God’s history in the world by God himself.

Messianic ethics makes everyday life into a feast of God’s rule, just as Jesus did. The messianic feast becomes everyday life. As Athanasius once said, ‘the resurrected Christ makes life a feast, a feast without end.’ As we celebrate the presence of God’s kingdom by identifying with and serving the needs of the poor, the downtrodden, the lonely, and the powerless, Christian ethics becomes a sacrament. Then in our normal daily life in the world, politics becomes worship. (emphasis mine)