Last weekend was the General Assembly of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the denomination in which I am ordained. It’s a gathering that has happened every two years for decades (though we are moving to every three years going forward). I experience General Assembly mostly as a celebratory gathering, a time to see old friends and make new connections, but of course there are other, more businesslike parts of it. This time around we approved changes to our design (kind of like our constitution), reelected our general minister and president, and passed some sense-of-the-assembly resolutions (including one condemning Christian nationalism and one encouraging Disciples to oppose anti-trans legislation…I love my denomination).
One of the highlights of any General Assembly for me is the nightly worship services. They’re the most celebratory part of the celebration, with fantastic music and preaching and lots of creativity. This year, I had the honor of being asked to say a few words each night between the scripture reading and the sermon. My job was to speak to the theme of the General Assembly, which was The Kindom of God Within Us Among Us, and to make some connections between the theme, the texts, and our time together. I had about five minutes per night, four nights in a row, although by no means did I exhaust what there was to say on the topic in that time.
Several folks have asked me for a copy of what I said, and since I’ve been traveling this week and haven’t had time to write something else for this Substack, I thought I would post the transcript of my thoughts here. Just remember—this is taken from a different context, so you’ll have to use your imagination to place yourself in a large auditorium!
Night 1
You may have noticed the theme of this year’s General Assembly, and you may be asking questions like: “Is there a typo in this year’s General Assembly theme?”, and “What is a “kindom?” No, there is not a typo, it is supposed to say “kindom,” which is very close to the word “kingdom,” but not quite the same thing.
As anyone who has ever tried to translate something will tell you, every translation is also an interpretation. There are no words that have a simple one-to-one meaning that transfers easily from one language to another. The New Testament was written in Greek, as you may know, but even that Greek was already a translation from the words spoken by Jesus and his disciples, who would have spoken Aramaic. And most of the time we read the New Testament neither in Aramaic nor Greek, but in our own modern languages, which involves translation, interpretation, and choice.
There’s a word that appears over a hundred and fifty times in the New Testament. And if you count only nouns and verbs and leave out all the conjunctions and particles and things like that, it’s one of the twenty five or so most common words in the New Testament. That word is basileia. Jesus is always going around talking about the “basileia of God” or the “basileia of heaven.” Many scholars see Jesus’ proclamation of the basileia as the core defining thing about his message and his ministry; if you had asked Jesus, “what is the thing you are trying to say,” he might well have answered you, “that the basileiahas come near, that it’s within us and among us.”
So what is a basileia? The most common translation for that word is “kingdom.” Jesus and his followers lived in a kingdom, they lived in an empire, so it’s not surprising that Jesus would have used that word. But Jesus does not seem to have been talking about just any old kingdom, not even the one he lived in. Jesus was using the word basileia, the basileia of God or the basileia of heaven, in contrast to the kingdoms of his world. Yes, there was a Caesar sitting on a throne, Jesus said, but the basileia of God is like yeast. Yes, Herod wielded a lot of power as king, but the basileia of heaven is like a mustard seed. Jesus was using the word for a kingdom, but he was talking about something different, something alternative, something set against the kingdoms of his time and place with all of their power. Jesus was talking about something God was doing that was bringing people into new relationships with each other and with God.
Since every translation is an interpretation and every translation is a choice, some people have begun to ask: What would happen if we paid attention to the ways Jesus was using basileia against the grain, the ways he was using it not to support earthly kingdoms but to resist them and to undermine people like Caesar, and what would happen if we translated the word basileia not as ‘kingdom’ but as ‘kindom?’ What would happen if we noticed that Jesus was calling for new forms of relating to one another? What would happen if we acknowledged that Jesus was drawing us toward new configurations of power, away from things like monarchs and armies and territory, and toward things like lost sheep and treasure hidden in a field? What would happen if we took seriously Jesus’ claim that basileia is about how we relate to one another? Over the next three nights we will have more opportunity to think about these questions, but for tonight I will leave you with just one last question: What would happen if we put belonging and kinship at the center, as Jesus seemed to do, and began to look for a kindom of God within us and among us?
Night 2
Last night we spent a few minutes thinking about one of the most common Greek words in the New Testament, basileia. That word is often translated into English as “kingdom” but for this General Assembly’s theme we are translating it “kindom.” We talked last night about how Jesus used that word and that concept against the grain, as a way of resisting the ways kings and kingdoms showed up in his own world, and as a way of talking about new kinds of power and belonging.
But Jesus’ skepticism about kings and kingdoms grew out of a long and deep tradition in ancient Israel. Jesus used basileia not to talk about pure political power, the way the word was usually used, but to reframe what it might mean to belong together, to think differently about what it means to be kin with one another. In doing that, Jesus was in line with what so many of ancient Israel’s texts say, including tonight’s reading from Genesis. From start to finish, the Hebrew Bible is deeply suspicious of kingdoms. The Hebrew Bible spends a lot of time asking us to think about the consequences of putting our faith in political power instead of in relationship; it asks us to count the cost of kingdoms and kings. Even when it’s telling us about kings and kingdoms that are supposed to be on God’s side, like the kingdom under David and Solomon and the monarchies in Israel and Judah, the bible is always doing it with a warning, reminding us that a kingdom is no substitute for a kindom—that political power is no substitute for recognizing the ways we belong to each other, and living in kinship.
The story of Babel might be the bible’s first cautionary tale about the dangers of a kingdom. The text doesn’t use the word kingdom exactly, but it’s a story about people building a tower, building a city, that consolidated power so completely that even God got nervous. In the story of Babel, it is the coalescing of power into something that looks like the beginnings of a kingdom that leads to the destruction of unity and kinship; it is the city and its tower that causes the people to be scattered and divided and confused. It was God who did the scattering and dividing and confusing in this story, but it’s clear that it was the hubris of human beings that brought it on.
So by the time Jesus was born into Caesar’s kingdom, by the time he started going around preaching and teaching and healing, Jesus’ own tradition had taught him that kingship often comes at the cost of kinship. Jesus’ sacred texts and traditions had helped him know that kingdoms were bound to disappoint, to exploit, to overreach, and to fail. So Jesus went around preaching a kindom come near, a kindom among the people, a kindom of God already present and growing—not growing like a city or a tower to the heavens but growing like a seed planted in good soil. Because his tradition had taught him well, Jesus knew to expect that just as God had scattered the people at Babel, we could come together again not in a kingdom but in a kindom of God, within us and among us.
Night 3
When Jesus went around talking about the kindom of God, he did not set up a lecture series. He didn’t start a podcast, he didn’t write a newsletter column, he did not get a book contract, and he certainly did not get himself hired into a professorship. Jesus did not even really explain what he meant when he talked about the kindom of God; he never really set out in any forthright or logical way what he intended when he said that the kindom was around us. Instead of doing those things, Jesus told stories.
Tonight, in a few moments, we will have the opportunity to hear a lot about stories, and to hear some stories, some narratives about how God is working among God’s people. I’m looking forward to hearing what the storytellers have to say. And as we listen to those stories, I hope we will remember that Jesus himself taught this way. When he taught about the kindom, when he went around preaching the kindom of God that was coming and was already here, Jesus did it by telling stories. He so often did it in narrative form. Presumably, Jesus was perfectly capable of speaking in something like a five-paragraph essay or sounding like a Wikipedia article, just giving facts as plainly as he could, one after another. But he didn’t do that. And I think it’s important to notice the kinds of choices Jesus made in talking about the kindom.
In Luke 14, Jesus hears someone say, “blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kindom of God.” And in response to that, Jesus tells a story—a parable—about a man who threw a great banquet and worked hard to ensure that the whole house was filled. He told a story about a banquet as a way to talk about the kindom. In Matthew 13, Jesus talks about the kindom by describing a man who sowed wheat, whose enemy came behind him and sowed weeds in the field. A story about treachery and sabotage as a way to talk about the kindom. In his next breath, there in Matthew, Jesus described the kindom by telling the story of the smallest of seeds that grew into a great plant. A story of triumph and big things from small beginnings, as a way to talk about the kindom. And then the next words out of his mouth were a story of a woman mixing flour and yeast to bake bread—a story of the unheralded labor upon which our very lives depend, as a way to talk about the kindom. And in the next breath, Matthew 13:34, it says that “Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables, and without a parable he told them nothing.” Jesus, in other words, knew the power of a good story. There are times, in fact, when scholars are not even sure where narrative ends and parable begins, where the line between parable and narrative lies, because some of the stories about Jesus seem to be parables acted out, and some of the parables seem to be stories from Jesus’ ministry, stories set aside and set apart in a way that suggest that Jesus was living his whole life as a form of storytelling.
There are times when I wish, and maybe you do too, there are times when I wish that Jesus had been a little more straightforward with his language. It certainly would have been helpful if he had just explained, as plainly as a Wikipedia article, what he thought about things, what he meant when he talked about the kindom of God. And undoubtedly Jesus could have chosen to do that, but he did not. When Jesus taught something, when Jesus taught about the kindom of God within us and among us, he didn’t let loose a lecture. Jesus told us stories.
Night 4
All the way back on Saturday night I said to this assembly that the word basileia, the one usually translated kingdom in English but translated for this general assembly as kindom, that word basileia is one of the 25 or so most common words in the New Testament. Jesus talks about it all the time. And on that night and on Sunday night, we talked about Jesus’ life in a kingdom, within the Roman Empire, and his formation within a Jewish tradition that held a deep suspicion of kingdoms and their tendency to oppress and extort the people. Last night we noted that when he talked about the basileia of God, Jesus often used stories and parables. He didn’t come out forthrightly and simply describe what he meant when he said that the basileia of God was coming; Jesus instead talked about a pearl of great price or a net thrown into the sea or seeds that were sown into the ground. So Jesus wasn’t talking about kingdoms in the same sense that they were known in his world, and he wasn’t talking about them in the way people normally talked about them.
So what was Jesus talking about?
If this were one of my New Testament classes, this would be where we would start throwing around big words like eschatology, and maybe even apocalypticism. We would talk about how Jesus and others like him might have expected that God was about to intervene in history against the powers and principalities of the earth. We would talk about messianic expectation, and how many people understood Jesus to have been precisely the kind of kingly figure who would lead a revolt against Rome and restore the glory of Israel. We would talk about these kingdom parables as subversive, as potentially revolutionary, as the kind of thing that might get someone nailed to a Roman cross.
But here’s where it helps to remember that every translation is an interpretation, and every word choice points us toward some unique understanding. When we translate Jesus’ wordbasileiaas kindom, rather than kingdom, we can begin to see another side of what he was proclaiming. We begin to see beyond the political realm. Pilate and Herod, they could only see that political realm, but Jesus, I think, meant more than that. Jesus meant a kingdom, but he also meant a kindom. He also meant something about the ways we belong together, the ways we are kin to each other, the ways we can align ourselves with each other not to serve a king and not to serve any kingdom, but to serve the purposes of unity. A kingdom is won by violence and force; a kindom is a thing that grows like yeast and sprouts like seeds, a kindom is a thing that begins in small and hidden places, a kindom might be ignored but it might be the most valuable thing of all. When Jesus went around proclaiming the kindom of God, he did it expecting that we would begin to relate to each other differently, that we would begin to belong to each other in a new way. Jesus trusted that we were ready to belong to each other, he knew that we could be one. And so he went about preaching: the kindom of God is within us and among us.