Jan. 20 Reflection: Your Kingdom Come
Dear Holy Covenant community,
Thank you for your generous response to Haiti, through prayers and gifts. We will continue to collect items for health kits through The United Methodist Committee on Relief. You can bring toothbrushes, soap, and combs to the church. There’s a box in the gallery for donations, and you can bring items Sunday and throughout the week. If you’d still like to donate to UMCOR, you can give online.
We continue to move through the Lord’s Prayer in Sunday morning worship, and this week we explore the line: Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. When we think about the “kingdom of God,” it’s easy to picture a bejeweled throne holding a man with a crown, staff, and long white beard, ruling the world with absolute power. This is not the kind of kingdom Jesus is talking about. As we discussed on Sunday, God is beyond gender, not a man in the sky. And God is intimately with us, not solely over and above distantly sending us orders.
Why, then, do we use this phrase to describe God’s reign? In fact, some choose to use the word kin-dom instead of kingdom, to reflect our human relatedness as God’s beloved community. Kingship was the way the world was run in Jesus’ day…ultimate power and authority rested with the king. Jesus came to completely subvert the ways of the world and bring the good news of God’s ways, God’s power, and God’s authority, which are antithetical to the world’s. For God’s power comes in vulnerability, giving instead of getting, love instead of laws, peace instead of violence, mutuality instead of hierarchy, and life instead of death.
So by using the world’s word, “king,” in reference to a completely different kind of power, Jesus was radicalizing the term and taking ruler-ship away from human systems of legalism and oppression.
Come on Sunday to learn more about what this kingdom looks like, how we can help bring about the kin-dom, and live into God’s reign instead of the world’s reign. This is government we can all believe in (no crowns or beards in sight).
See you then, and think about who you can invite to come along.
Grace and peace,
Kate
