I’m not one who is quick to process new information. My wife and I will be having a terse discussion (not quite an argument yet) and I will have the situation figured out in my mind, but then she will give me something new to think about, and my brain short circuits. Lately, at these moments, I have begun to say to her that I need about twenty minutes to process before I can respond because, otherwise, I get really silent and it seems like I’m shutting her out. What does this have to do with concepts like worship, Christ, and nation?
I have still not processed how to reframe, rename, or reclaim the concept of the Kingdom of God. I am in a congregation that bristles at the term. This church is far more comfortable with terms like “family of God,” “the community of God,” or a term that is becoming more and more normalized in mainline church space, “the kin-dom of God.” When I use the term “the kingdom of God,” all that many can hear is patriarchy, top-down leadership, violence in the name of the Lord, or even a self-interested metaphor. In so many different spaces around the congregation or in my denominational setting, I have been asked to stop using the term, but I just can’t give it up, at least not yet. I just don’t process quickly enough to have made that decision.
That said, I did once give up another term to which I was tied: Evangelical. It took me nine years to process its removal from my vocabulary for self-identification. I had not been in a so-called Evangelical church in years. I left the Church of the Nazarene in 2004 for a charismatic congregation. Then in 2007, I began working as a Youth and Family Pastor in the United Methodist Church, a denomination with historic Evangelical ties, but one that should probably be considered a mainline denomination if one pays attention to the Bebbington Quadrilateral to define what an Evangelical actually is, because of its lack of focus on conversionism.
My connection with the word Evangelical slowly eroded for years. Fast forward to 2016 and I am watching Evangelical faith leaders support Donald Trump for the presidency. I kept asking the ones around me, “How?” They set up complicated scenarios in which the alternatives became nightmarish. I would ask, “How can you expect me, the father of a daughter, to support a person who is on tape saying that he is famous enough to sexually assault anyone he wants?” One person said, “I don’t think he actually did that.” I offered to show her the tape and she declined to watch. After dozens of these conversations, I found myself unable to use the word for myself anymore. By the time 2018 rolled around and we saw how much of a rejection of the gospel Donald Trump really was, I found that the word Evangelical in America became shorthand for who I could and could not trust.
Donald Trump revealed what large swaths of the Evangelical Church believed about the Kingdom of God. To many, the Kingdom of God is an authoritarian vision in which Christ will compel the world, by the power of government, to obey a puritanical set of ethics, laid out by a theocracy made up of politically-motivated faith leaders. No wonder my congregation hates the term. Maybe the way in which I now hear the word Evangelical is the way they hear the term the Kingdom of God.
I just can’t help but think that some form of the word for the kingdom that comes from the Greek Basileia (βασιλεία) is essential to describing who God is and what God will do. It’s not a canonical text, but the Gospel of Thomas has an interesting interaction that highlights this. In contrast to Acts 1 in which a disciple asks if this is the time the kingdom will be restored to Israel. In Thomas, the disciples ask Jesus when the kingdom will come and Jesus answers that it is already here, but people do not see it.
His disciples said to him, "When will the kingdom come?" Jesus said, "It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying 'Here it is' or 'There it is'. Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it." - Thomas
Here’s the thing: when I say Kingdom, I am not thinking of King George, or Donald Trump, or Putin, or anyone other than Jesus. In fact, the word that sits behind my eyes as I say the word ‘kingdom’ is that Greek word basileia that functions as a stand-in for all the things I believe about who God is and what God will do in this world. Using one word, it is an eschatological vision. It is one that no one seems to see until they have a relationship with Christ and the people of God.
It is a complete reordering of the way this world appears to operate. It removes crowns from the heads of those ones I mentioned above. Jesus is king, not Donald Trump. Jesus is king, not Putin. Jesus is king and frees us from those politically-motivated authoritarian cabals. Better still, that same Jesus is on a mission to heal the world and heal our hearts. That same Jesus wants to heal my heart enough to be able to see even those so-called bad actors in Evangelicalism and in government as God’s beloved children.
So maybe there is a better word, but I’m still looking for it because I need the core of my faith centered in a God who is working not only to bring the world together around God’s grace, but I also need a God who is working to heal our hearts enough to see the belovedness that lives in every person in creation.