Keeping the Faith: Kingdom in its Fullness
Jesus’ disciple asked, “Teach us to pray.” He responded with the Lord’s Prayer.
What does Jesus tell us to ask for first? What are we to ask for? “Thy kingdom come.” Ask with boldness and persistence for the arrival of the reign of God. This comes first. Then request what we need ourselves, personally and as God’s people. “Everything comes from you” David prays. (1 Chronicles 29:14)
For us to take our part in establishing God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven, we need: daily sustenance, for which we are dependent on God; reconciliation, for which we are dependent on God; and to be saved from “the time of trial”, for which we are dependent on God.
Only then can we be built into the eternal temple of praise which is the kingdom of God. When David said, “of thine own have we given thee” (1 Chronicles 29:14) he was offering the first fruits of the harvest, as the people would in the Temple. So his prayer was one of thanksgiving, and one of celebration.
Of course the “Temple not built with hands” – that is the eternal place of offering – is what Jesus is bringing into daily life. Incarnate in him is the word of God, and making real in the world the kingdom he proclaims is the duty and the invitation he gives his followers: us.
When we pray “thy kingdom come” we are participating in the coming of his kingdom. When we ask for what we need from the one on whom we are dependent for everything, we are saying he is Lord. And when we ask to be forgiven and freed from temptation, we are saying he is Savior.
And we are saying make us instruments of thy peace, thy salvation, thy shalom, thy reign of peace.
In a recent essay on the website of the Episcopal diocese of Arizona, Canon Pam Hyde invites us to rethink dominion - particularly our sense of “dominion over” the rest of creation. Of course this is part of our rethinking what “kingdom come” might look like.
Maybe it really is like the “peaceable kingdom” depicted in 19th Century American art, where lion and lamb lie down together and human beings, explorers and indigenous people, alike, are able to find a place for all beings. (Isaiah 11:6-9)
Don’t hold your breath, I hear you say. “What about–?” What about the travesty of settler lifestyles that tear apart the very fabric of the natural world, through mineral extraction and agricultural industrialization? What about the continuing and historic exploitation of one species by another, not to mention one set of people by another?
How are we to live without exerting our dominion, our “power over” others, as if it were by divine right, even divine mandate? Is not this our “manifest destiny” as Americans, indeed, as the human race?
What does it mean to have “dominion over” anything if God is really in charge? Ask Elizabeth II, queen of England: she has had 70 years to think this one over. She may be sovereign, in her realm, but it is only under God, under the blessing, under the mercy, and under obedience.
How do we play faithful to that mercy, how do we conform to that obedience, how do we share that blessing? The blessing that is the coming and immanent kingdom of God, the ‘dominion’ if you will, that is without end as it is indeed without beginning? The truth is, God reigns now.
If we could only see it. Sometimes it is hard to see. A traffic accident on the freeway, a senseless act of destruction, an unkindness where a helping hand is called for. Cruelty, gratuitous and severe. Capricious catastrophe.
So we ask for the kingdom to come, to become real. In the meantime, the between-time, between the asking and the fulfillment of the prayer, we are the ones who begin to make it real.
We do this in us-sized ways. We do it in small kindnesses, large life choices, common acts in common life, and unseen acts of small mercies.
We ask for the kingdom to come, and then we pray for what we need to live into its reality.
In Paul’s letter to the church in Colossus, we get a picture of a cosmic Christ, one “in whom the fullness of God is pleased to dwell” and one from whom we receive our own “fullness” as his creatures and his people. “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority.” (1:19, 2:9-10)
“Fullness” in Christ means a completion of being, a perfection in direction and in action. We sense moments of fullness already; in him our joy will be made complete.
So dominion and fullness meet in the presence of the Lord. God is the source of all being, therefore the one in whom all authority finally resides; our ‘dominion’ is partial and contingent. And yet our completion, the fulfillment of our calling and our gift as creatures, is already at work through Christ in us.
We have the challenge of living into that in-coming and already-here state of being.
How can we possibly do this by ourselves? As individuals, as a church, as a society, as the human race?
We don’t have to do it alone: for the one who creates us is the one who redeems us is the one who inspires and empowers us. By our side, along with us, God is present in the Spirit, and in each other.
We are not there yet, not yet in the kingdom to come, but we work to make it so, and we long for its arrival. In the grace of God and under the mercy. Amen.
The Rev. Dr. John Leech studied history and religion at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His professional education was through the Graduate Theological Union and Seattle University. He serves as a priest associate at the Episcopal Church of Saint Matthew in Tucson. An edited version of this essay appears in the Keeping the Faith section of the Arizona Daily Star, Sunday July 24th 2022 page E3.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor. Grand Rapids MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2014.
David L. Bartlett & Barbara Brown Taylor, eds. Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary. Year C, Volume 3. Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.
Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J. The Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV. The Anchor Bible, v. 28-28A. New York: Doubleday, 1985.
https://azdiocese.org/2022/06/rethinking-dominion/
https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.59908.html
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.
