Within my generation, I've watched the world change, mostly for the worse. Anti-science woo-woo practitioners, a fringe subculture thirty years ago, have organized online on an unprecedented scale. While COVID-19 has become the malaria of our time, deadly but banal, antivax forces seemingly conspire to resurrect polio, measles, and tuberculosis. Pro-science rationalists can't counter this because they're fatigued from arguing against Flat Earthers and Seven-Day Creationists.
Nor are anti-science nuts alone. Historian Kathleen Belew writes that White Power insurrectionists organized online back in the 1980s. The January 6th, 2021, Capitol invasion was the culmination of years of preparation, for which progressives remain unready. We believers in civil rights for the downtrodden are stuck in the era of Mother Jones and Woody Guthrie, believing that marching will bring liberation. The bigots are organized, prepared to bring the high-tech hammer of empire down, hard.
Jesus Christ was born into similar circumstances, in an occupied nation in a globalized empire. While ordinary Jews sought leadership to resist, their actual leaders squabbled about what to do. Fight back (Zealots)? Comply in advance (Sadducees)? Focus on individual righteousness (Pharisees)? Flee the world (Essenes)? No option, taken alone, seems sufficient.
When Christ uses the term “The Kingdom of God” throughout his ministry, he means it literally. The Kingdom isn't a poetic metaphor, it's a nation we live in right now. When Jews lived as a conquered state with a puppet monarch, Jesus offered an alternate citizenship. Caesar’s terrestrial government of grandeur, gold, and military parades, isn't our homeland. We dwell in another Kingdom, right now.
How do we exercise this alternate citizenship? Keep the commandments. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the lost foreigner. Set the prisoners free.
The older I get, the further I grow from belief in an anthropomorphic God among the clouds. Yet paradoxically, this draws me closer to Christ's message. If this world's systems encourage distrust and bigotry, Christ offers alternate systems of love, mission, and mutuality. Christ's systems lift one another up, sustain a wounded earth, and restore justice to an unjust world.
And we call those systems “God.”
Remember, back during lockdown, when churches were reported as the largest vectors of infection? I believe this happened because people lost track of why church exists. Too many churchgoers saw worship as a moral goal in itself. Therefore, having sung and clapped and hugged and sat through the homily, they saw the process as complete. Then they went home, relaxed, and coughed on one another.
Instead, church should be the place we go to recommit ourselves to the systems Christ initiated. Singing the songs while ignoring the message is exactly what Jesus meant, in Matthew, in saying: “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of My Father who is in heaven.”
Equally important, church should be the place we organize. Because, as stated, the forces of ignorance and empire are organized, prepared to crush the already weak and kill the already marginalized. Our hymns should be protest marching songs, our sermons should be plans of action, and our prayers should be motivations to act. Church shouldn't be our refuge from the world, it should be where we find strength to face the world and say no.
People who know me might counter by pointing out how bad I am at fronting the resistance. That's true. When working alone, I'm easily discouraged by the workload and cowed by confrontation. But that's the point. I shouldn't have to work alone; supported by the systems of justice we call God, I should join arms with fellow believers and face the challenges together. When we bolster one another, that's when we become the church.
Monday, upon learning that I'd be quarantined on Christmas, a local friend and his wife offered to reserve part of their Christmas dinner and bring it to me. At that moment, I felt like part of the community. I realized that I wanted to feel that in the church. Earthly powers want us to feel alone, desperate, and in competition for scraps. The Kingdom reminds us we're never alone, we face all challenges together.
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