Kingdom Come
Growing communities of belonging in a divisive time
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to teach them, saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.”
- Matthew 5:1-3 -
Today (January 20, 2024), Donald Trump will be inaugurated for his second term as President of the United States. The world we knew before COVID has all but vanished, and I think we all feel like a new era is beginning. Some are welcoming this new era as a return to a “great America,” while others fear the United States is on the brink of a new fascism. Whatever the reality of the changes at hand are, there’s no denying that things are changing. As we enter this new era for the United States, with a businessman at the forefront who has surrounded himself with the billionaires and CEOs that influence the culture of the US, Christians are faced with the task of embracing the call of the Gospel and being prophetic witnesses of the Kingdom of God over against the kingdoms of the world, which includes the kingdom of the United States of America.
This call is not new. From the time St. John penned the book of Revelation, the Holy Spirit has been calling the people of God to proclaim God’s judgment against princes and powers of this world, to call people out of the pursuit of wealth and power, and to witness of the just and righteous reign of Jesus Christ. In Revelation, the powers are under God’s judgment because of their greed, their injustice, and their lust for power. These are typified in a tense binary between the market, personified as Babylon, and political power, personified as the Beast.1 When judgment is spoken over humanity, it’s because they participate in the Babylonian and Beast systems that govern the world. And God’s call to his people is, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! …Come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins, and so that you do not share in her plagues” (Rev. 18:2, 4).
In contrast to these systems of wealth and power stands the Kingdom of God. Instead of centering the powerful, the rich, and the privileged, Jesus centers the poor in spirit, the mourning, the meek, those in need of justice, the merciful, the pure, the peacemakers, the just, and the persecuted (see Matt. 5:3-11). Though it doesn’t seem at all possible, the Gospel asks us to take a leap of faith, believing that in the end only one of these kingdoms will stand, and it’s not Babylon, the Beast, or the United States. In the end, it’s the kingdom of God whose enthroned king is a slaughtered Lamb (see Rev. 5:6-8). The ethics and “culture” of the Lamb’s kingdom is typified for us in the Sermon on the Mount. As Christians, we are called to reject the ethics and principles of the Beast and Babylon, and to embrace and embody the teachings of Jesus.
As the United States is turning the page onto a new chapter of its history, while society rages, we have the unique opportunity to show the beautiful and peacemaking power of the way of Jesus.
Joining Jesus
The Sermon on the Mount is many things, and while on the surface it can read like a list of commands, it is also a prophetic image of the kinds of communities Jesus seeks to build through his people. The Sermon is Jesus’ pathway for growing communities that embody the kind of life that is fully manifest in that place where God’s will is not resisted. Hence, “Your kingdom come, and your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” We can imagine heaven as the place where everyone’s needs—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—are taken care of, where there is no injustice, where people live in harmony together, and where all things are in harmony with God. When we pray for God’s kingdom to come and will to be done, we are in one sense asking God to give us the grace and strength to embody the Sermon on the Mount.
While the Sermon deals with our whole lives, I want to examen it’s implications and call in light of our current political moment.2 If one takes a glance at social media, or even into one’s own heart, the boiling hostility in the social-ether is impossible to miss. We all know this by know, but this is on purpose. Social media algorithms are designed to feed us political content that will anger us or make us fearful and anxious. This is antithetical to the life Jesus imagines in the Sermon on the Mount. In his book, The Christian Imagination, Willie James Jennings discusses the call and miracle of joining, the reality that God desires to bring people together in a holy communion, a joining, around the person and body of his Son, Jesus.3 This joining, because it happens in and through Jesus, takes priority over all prior relationships, indeed, it must take priority. Jennings says of the Jesus’ followers, “To follow him, to even at times be seen with him required awkward, painful, and even dangerous negotiations with one’s primary alliances and allegiances, familial, cultural, and social.”4
This brings to mind Jesus’ shocking statement in Luke 16:26, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, and furthermore, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” Jesus statement is rooted, not primarily in dividing familial relationships, but in the joining of a disciple to himself. Jesus makes this statement in a discussion about the cost of being his disciple, and being his disciple could mean, as stated early in the Sermon on the Mount: “You are blessed when they insult you and persecute you and falsely say every kind of evil against you because of me” (Matt. 5:11). Jesus’ disciples can rejoice in the face of this persecution because they are joined to him. In their union with Jesus, they are not cut off from relationships, but are joined to all those who have joined themselves to him as well.
The Sermon, then, stands as Jesus teaching to those who’ve joined themselves to him, i.e. his disciples (see Matt. 5:1). From one vantage point, the Sermon is teaching Jesus’ disciples how to build and maintain this joining together in community around Jesus’ word and body. As we stand on the edges of a new era, embracing the Sermon on the Mount is paramount for those who call themselves Christians. The church is already being pulled apart at the seams, for several reasons, but not least because of the political divisions in which our whole nation exists. I’m writing this post in light of Trump’s second inauguration, but our call to the Sermon transcends this little moment. I don’t like Trump, that’s no secret, but what I’m saying here, what the Sermon calls us to, was the same when Biden was President, and it will be the same when Trump is gone. Perhaps one of our biggest problems as Christians in the US is that we forget we are first disciples of Jesus before we are citizens of the United States, before we’re liberals, leftists, or conservatives. Perhaps, if Jesus were speaking to us in our political moment, he would say, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate their president, their governor, their mayor, and their political-party, and furthermore, even their own life, they cannot be my disciple.”
I’ve said this many times, and I will say it repeatedly until I die, but the Christian who prioritizes the Sermon on the Mount will find themselves at odds, sometimes painfully, with their political party of choice. Indeed, it must be this way because as I pointed out at the beginning of this post, the kingdom of God is positioned against every other kingdom of this world, or at least any kingdom or political system that uses coercion, violence, injustice, oppression, and wealth to set itself up. Yet, our political home rests in Jesus, and the Gospels show us how to live in that light. The teachings of Jesus are our politics, and they are counterintuitive to the power-grasping methodologies of the powers that be. His teachings will have us guarding and serving the undocumented immigrant while decrying on-demand abortions. The Gospel will have us prophesying to Biden, Trump, and Musk, “Come now, you rich, weep and wail over the miseries that are coming to you. Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire!” (James 5:1-3), while simultaneously inviting them to become part of our communion by joining themselves to the body and blood of Jesus through repentance.5
Holy Communion
Certainly, there are spiritual and mystical elements to our union with Christ. What happens when a person has faith and is baptized has been the topic of much theological writing over the last two millennia. It’s not just to Jesus, though, that we are brought into union with when we believe and are baptized. We are also joined to his mystical body, the Church. Though faith, the transformation that happens in baptism, and our union with Jesus and his Body are all miracles, Jesus calls us to an act of obedience after we follow him. The narrative framing in Matthew lets us know that once we’ve become Jesus’ disciples, the Sermon on the Mount is the first thing to which Jesus calls us. He will give his disciples other teachings, other commands, but the Sermon is meant to shape the life of the disciple foundationally so that whatever comes after it grows according to that shape. The Sermon shapes not only the individual disciple, but the community of disciples that have joined themselves to Jesus and into which other people are invited.
Being shaped by the Sermon is what makes Jesus’ disciples salt and light. The “good works” that draw people to “glorify [the] Father in heaven” are not ambiguous ethics aimed at “the Good,” but the very things Jesus commands in his Sermon. The commitments to forgiveness, love, peace, service, chastity, justice, and honesty are the light that reveals the kingdom and character of our Father in heaven. Jesus is calling us as communities of his disciples to be a revelation of God in a way of life patterned on his own life. Is Jesus not the One who loves and forgives his enemies, who goes the “extra mile” with a cross on his shoulders, who serves vulnerable women instead of exploiting them, who feeds the five thousand because they’re hungry? Is he not the slain Lamb? When we became his disciples, we rejected the pursuit of worldly power and instead embraced a way of life that cultivates communities of belonging.
Simply by existing as this type of community, we become a prophetic witness against the powers and a witness to the beauty of God’s kingdom. We are called to reflect this reality and to inspire this imagination over against the imaginations of the DNC, the GOP, or any other political party that comes to the fore. The church in the United States will stand the test of time, not by gaining political offices, but by embracing and embodying the Sermon on the Mount. We will be witnesses of Jesus, not by outlawing abortion or instating national health care, but by being communities where single or reluctant mothers can come and receive financial and emotional support without judgment or strings. It’s not that I think Jesus didn’t call us to “evangelize,” in the sense of telling people about the goodness of God in the death and resurrection of Jesus, but his first method of evangelization is simply a call to action. He calls us, not to be good people, but to be people who do good for others.
This is what will set us apart. This is what will make us a holy people. I’m not calling for an abdication of the public political sphere.6 I am saying our allegiance must be above all to Jesus and that our commitments must be above all to the way of life he commands, even demands of us. Though I prefer one party over the other,7 it’s impossible to imagine either party embracing the teaching of Jesus whole-heartedly, but that whole-hearted embrace is what he demands of his people. “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). Regardless of what the current Administration does or is doing, whether we voted for them or not, we are not given the option of bending the Sermon on the Mount to either the party in power nor to the values of the United States more generally. If we confess Jesus as Lord, then our allegiance belongs to him and him alone, and if we do have any allegiances to our country, it must be with Jesus as mediator, for “we must obey God rather than people” (Acts 5:29).
A People of Peace
We live in an age of anxiety, and our election seasons doesn’t help with that. Society was on edge the entirety of Trump’s first presidency, and I don’t imagine it will be different during his second. It may very well be worse, but what Jesus calls us to in the Sermon on the Mount can create oases of peace in these times of unrest. In order for that to manifest, though, we must be committed to the Sermon and not to our parties. This is a fuzzy line that I am still learning to walk. Obviously, what we believe about Jesus’ teachings will impact our politics, but our commitment to them must be so much deeper than how we mark our ballots and that manifest in how we live our lives. The community that is joined to and around Jesus can provide solace and resources for the anxious.
Jesus’ teaching on anxiety is a perfect example of this. In Matthew 6:25-34, Jesus tells his disciples not to worry about their life, either about food or about clothing. Instead, they are to trust God who provides for the birds and the grass. At first, this seems like a passive trust that depends only on God for resources, but if we remember what Jesus has already said in the Sermon—“Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you” (5:42)—we can see how it is that God clothes the grass, as it were. The community that embodies Jesus’ teachings moves beyond the commands as they are written into a way of life that is prepared and willing to provide for those in need. We see this at work already in the book of Acts:
Now all the believers were together and had all things in common. They sold their possessions and property and distributed the proceeds to all, as any had need. Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple, and broke bread from house to house. They ate their food with joyful and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. Everyday the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.
Acts 2:44-47
Does God call every Christian community to exactly this? Maybe not, but I do think he calls every Christian community to provide for those in need. It’s also interesting to note that the only people who got in trouble in this early Christian community were not the “socialists,” but those who decided to lie about the money they withheld for themselves.
Food and clothing are the very minimum of provisions, and though these provisions are very real, I think they are symbolic of the way the community is supposed to hold the members of the community more generally. They are very real images of the kind of joining Jesus desires for his Church. The Church is supposed to be the place where people can belong, where they can feel like they belong. Republicans and Democrats, capitalists and socialists, leftists and libertarians all have categories of exclusion. The Church is the only place where we say—or at least should be saying—“It doesn’t matter that you see me as an enemy, come sit at the table and eat with me.”
Four More Years… and Beyond
I don’t know what the next four years hold in store for us, and I am gearing up for a hard and anxious four years. What I do know is that we, as disciples of Jesus Christ, have another opportunity to live into the Gospel to which Jesus called us, to show the world that the Good News actually is good news to those who believe. I don’t foresee the next several years being that easy, though, and while I am turning my hope and trust to God as best I can, I also understand that I need my community to support me, and I understand I need to be present as a support to my community.
As we embrace the Sermon on the Mount, we will inevitably find ourselves working against our political interests. In a way, this can be a telltale sign we are actually living the way of Jesus instead of the way of the United States and its principalities. I hate to use this word because of it’s overuse, but the Sermon actually is a radical way of being because it calls us to upend our common sense methods of making the world a better place and entrusting that transformation to God. How can we look at our neighbor, the political other, and say, “Let me take the splinter out of your eye,” while having the wood beam of our own party stuck in our own eyes? This isn’t to say we can’t or shouldn’t have political opinions, but it is to say we need to hold those opinions with humility and meekness, open to being wrong, open to change, and with open hearts to our neighbor.
Jesus never promised that his way of life would be easy, in fact he warned us from the very beginning that his teaching was a difficult way with a narrow gate (Matt. 7:13-14), but he did promise this was the way of life (7:14). To live in this life, we must let go of the pursuit of power, of “christianizing” the United States from the top down. That’s not how the Gospel works, at least not the Gospel of the Kingdom (cf. Matt. 24:14). Every Christian, no matter what their political leanings, has a responsibility and obligation to embrace the teaching of Jesus as he calls us to a sacred joining. It’s only in Jesus that we can transcend our divisions and be united in something higher than the political commitments we hold to so dearly. From the beginning, Jesus’ community of disciples was made up of the most unlikely of individuals.
In his sacred joining, he brought together the most extreme of political opposites. Simon the Zealot would be considered, in our terms, a domestic terrorist or liberation fighter, depending on where you stood, and Matthew the tax-collector worked for the oppressive Roman government and exploited his own people to do so. Without Jesus as mediator, they would have wanted to kill one another, but a miracle happens when Jesus is at the center of a community. Perhaps, if we can imagine it, if we can have faith in Jesus’ way of life enough to embody it, we can find Democrats and Republicans and socialists and libertarians and liberals and conservatives eating together, taking care of one another, and shining the light of God’s kingdom to the world.
I’m not saying Revelation doesn’t speak to a final age when these realities come to a head and confrontation with Jesus, but I think it’s a poor reading of the book to make it only about “the end times.” Revelation was written for the church in all ages, and it speaks to political, market, and spiritual realities of all times and places.
In the United States, specifically.
Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination : Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Accessed January 19, 2025. ProQuest Ebook Central. Cf. 267.
Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination : Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Accessed January 19, 2025. ProQuest Ebook Central. 264.
But alas, Jesus’ warnings and command of repentance doesn’t change. They will have to give up their pursuit of wealth in order to follow Jesus— “For what is highly admired by people is revolting in God’s sight” (Luke 16:15).
In the past, I have thought this is what God calls us to, and I do wonder if it would be a good detox for Christians to do so, seeing how dependent we are on our political parties.
It’s the Democratic Party, just to be clear.
You are so right, Joshua, about our hope not being in this world. Frankly I don't know how people who don't know Jesus maintain any sanity. Perhaps our high rates of anxiety and mental health issues are a result of declining knowledge of the hope that is within us Christ followers. Our moment in time is crowded with trouble: disasters natural and man made. Because our vision is limited to the here and now, we have only the timeless truth of the Bible (and to some extent reliable history) to catch a glimpse of God the Father and Creator's perspective on our human tragedy. What fools we mortals be, if we don't sell all that we have to obtain that pearl of greatest price. No lasting peace anywhere else. None. A sincere Christian can make a legitimate case for Party A or Party B. But every politician disappoints, probably sooner rather than later. Let's pray that God in his mercy keeps our eyes on Him, who never disappoints.
I am so thankful that Jesus has drawn our family into community with yours.
I’m feeling tension between wanting to focus on my local community where I can have observable impact, while not burying my head in the sand about suffering in the wider world where I don’t really know how to help beyond praying.