God’s Extravagant Love connects each of us as “kin” and to each part of the larger Kindom of God. That’s no typo – the Kindom of God – it’s a profound insight.
In the 37 times that Jesus describes the reign of God in the Gospels, not once is the kingdom of God like a kingdom of earth. Thirty-seven times Jesus reshapes the imaginations of his followers. Thirty-seven times Jesus tells them a story to help them remake the only world they know, to help them see how things could get better.
The world of the disciples was one of domination and violence. Their world was one in which the wealthy and powerful ruled over the weak, took advantage of that weakness, crushed it under the boot, and lashed it with the whip. It was a world in which Caesar is both king and god, a cruel, irrational tyrant who took vengeance against his enemies. Sounds like our world.
There have been benevolent kings and queens over time, but down to this day kingship is a word that signified inherited wealth and power, hierarchy, and the destruction of one’s enemies. We have to look no further than the nightly news.
Ada María Isasi-Díaz was visiting her friend, a Franciscan nun named Georgene Wilson, when she heard the word for the first time: kin-dom rather than kingdom. I imagine her sitting with that word, turning it over in her mind, when something clicked about her own life. She would go on to write, kin-dom offered a description of liberation that was “self-determining” within an interconnected community, seeing God’s movement emerge from one’s family from the family God makes.
Kin-dom became the language she used to describe the liberation of God at work among people, the good news for those who suffer at the hands of kings. This liberation emerges from opening up space where Extravagant Love invites us into kinship, invites us to join others at a table that grows. Liberation is found not in hope deferred to another world, to life after death, but what can be created now.
When folks at The Palms describe us as a “family,” I think they are alluding to the Kindom of God. Pastor Jim has used that phrase. I’m going to start using that phrase, too. Why? Because God’s Extravagant Love connects each of us as “kin” and to each part of the larger Kindom of God.
Shalom, Paul