Unity and the Kingdom of God
Dr. Elizabeth Conde-Frazier
(This message was delivered in Washington DC during the 2022 Annual Gathering of LCNN.)
What a fabulous gathering. Carlos thank you for your hard work of convincing, cajoling, arranging, and partnering. Here we are! A group of very talented people called by God. You have don de gente, you are networkers, you see possibilities, gente de imaginación- you bring people together to be healed and to do the works that have been prepared for us. What are those works?
Well, while we are gathered here, we hear in the news that as some are experiencing economic upheaval, Latinos are experiencing a better economic life and are generating up to 2 trillion into the economy. We are buying houses, getting more education, better jobs, and advancing on our jobs coming up through the ranks. Churches are part of the reason people can be in this place. We have been holding communities, we taught ESL and citizenship classes, we have encouraged the value of education and in some cases taught financial literacy or even helped people start their own business. We have ensured that Latinos are a public benefit. Latinos were on the bottom rung, and now, as the US ages, the population that is rising to become the workers who are going to maintain the economy.
At the same time, we continue to see the groups of Latin American and Caribbean immigrants both Latinos and non-Latinos who are clamoring at the southern border of the U.S. and being transported from city to city even without their knowledge and there are still children and parents who are separated. We continue to see how both, during and after the pandemic, our children are not faring well in school and are a part of school systems that are falling apart like the system in Florida that has had so many children disappear from their rolls. Social workers employed by the school system are now looking for them and finding them living in motels still unable to recover from the displacement that the pandemic caused. Programs to aid the unaccompanied minors are being shut down and made even more chaotic than they were before.
In light of this, our young adults are feeling passionate about doing biblical justice but the congregations they belong to are shut up into the traditional programming without the space for this type of ministry unless it means aiding with clothing or food. The young adults want to change the world. They want to do social engagement and advocacy. The pastors need discernment, critical thinking because too many voices are confusing their missional energies. In the meantime, young adults are leaving our churches at a rate of 25%. Some may not return at all to the church because they see the church as a place that doesn’t do justice.
What is biblical justice? It is an expression of discipleship that begins with compassion for those who are suffering. It sees Jesus in the least of these and hears the voices of their cries above any other voice. Compassion is a knowledge that doesn’t see red or blue, doesn’t look through the lens of conservative or liberal theology. It only sees suffering and is compelled by the love of Christ. This compelling love unites us beyond our differences.
Listen to what Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:
14 For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. We are all the same in the love of Christ
15 And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. We live for his kingdom values not our personal ideologies. There is only one loyalty and under that loyalty we see the world differently. Paul continues to say:
16 So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. In other words, we no longer see each other through categories of immigrants, women, men, conservatives, liberals, Pentecostals, Baptists, Catholics. No longer! Paul says: Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come:The old has gone, the new is here! We are new creatures my friends18 Vinculados en Cristo. All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:
Colossians tells us that in Christ all things are reconciled- gathered in under his reign which is a reign of compassion, of creation, of life.
Under the Spirit of Christ, of compassion, of being co-creators with him and the father for life more abundant- Something deep inside of us makes us to look at one another with humility, with mercy, with greater tenderness, humans not enemies or peoples of different races, or genders, or parties or theologies for God’s love is greater than our theologies. We look at one another now as just humans understanding our fragility. We look upon each other with sober judgement beyond our greed and self-interests. This brings about a creativity, a sense of just knowing how to be there with and for one another. It causes us to give each other dignity. Our priorities change, we look at truths we’ve known about all along- for examples, how our laws do not protect the weak, how they oppress, and we confess that they reveal not our best work. We therefore come to understand what really is most important. It becomes clear, no outside voices can befuddle the truth or distract us and we work towards a change that brings about the love of God in places where that love has been distorted and denied. Yes, this is biblical justice. But we have a problem, convincing those who profit from injustice and don’t want to change, those who have not seen through eyes of compassion but of self-interest. They exist even among the people of God.
We might find ourselves looking through the barriers of the ideologies of racism and the infrastructures of corruption that maintain them, and people vote for what they think is life but, it comes short of life abundant for all and we become complacent believing that it is the best we can do. The best we can do? God is a God of impossible things, and this lack of faith perpetuates suffering.
Then there are those who wish to create change so that we can create pathways of justice. But they feel alone, they burn out. They cry out in our midst and we don’t respond. Could they be prophets?
When Jesus began his ministry, the account of Luke tells us that:
16 He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”[f]
20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. 21 He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
Jesus, like John, preached the coming of the kingdom of God and repentance. He said the kingdom of God is in your midst, the kingdom of God is within you.
The basic premise of Jesus' mission and the central theme of his preaching is not the hope of the Kingdom's coming at some predictable date in the future, but the fact that in his own person and work the Kingdom is already present in great power among men and women. He affirms that the beginning of the last act of the drama ('the last days') has already begun in him. The Kingdom has to do with God's dynamic power here and now for us today.
Theologian René Padilla states that the kingdom of darkness which corresponds to 'this age' has been invaded; the 'strong man' has been disarmed, conquered, and plundered (Matt. 12:29; Luke 11:22). The hour announced by the prophets has arrived — the Anointed One has come to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor (Luke 4: 18, 19). In other words, Jesus' historical mission can only be understood in connection with the Kingdom of God. His mission here and now is the manifestation of the Kingdom as a reality present among men and women in his own person and action, in his preaching of the gospel and his works of justice and mercy.
Accordingly, the Kingdom of God is God's dynamic power made visible through concrete signs pointing to Jesus as the Messiah. It is a new reality which has entered the flow of history and affects human life not only morally and spiritually but also physically and psychologically, materially and socially.
The Kingdom and the Church
In the light of the New Testament, the Church is the community of the Kingdom, in which Jesus is acknowledged as Lord of the universe.
In God's purpose, after Pentecost, the Kingdom of God was to continue to be a present reality through the gift of the Holy Spirit in the church. The Kingdom of God that has broken into history in Jesus Christ continues to act through the people of God.
The Church is the result of God's action through his Spirit. The church body of Christ is the sphere where the life of the new era initiated in Jesus Christ operates; the Holy Spirit is the agent through whom that life is imparted to the believers (cf. 2 Cor. 3:6; Gal. 5:25; Rom. 8:2, 6). Likewise, the Spirit gives the Church the charismata which makes her existence as a missionary community possible (cf. 1 Cor. 12:4ff.). Lastly, the Spirit is the author of the communion which binds the members together (cf. Phil. 2: 1; 2 Cor. 13:4). Estamos juntos. This means that the Church is not primarily an organization but an organism whose members are united by the action of the Spirit. 'One body' corresponds to 'one Spirit' (cf. Eph. 4:3).
The Church is dependent on the Spirit for its very existence. As the community of the Kingdom, the Church confesses and proclaims the Lord Jesus Christ. She is the body of Christ that is to make present the work of the basileia in her own times. She also performs good works which God prepared in advance for her to do and for which God created her in Christ Jesus (Eph. 2: 10). Through the Church and her good works, the Kingdom becomes historically visible as a present reality. Good works are not, therefore, an optional addendum to mission; rather, they are an integral part of the present manifestation of the Kingdom.
The Church is the expression of the universal lordship of Jesus Christ — the concrete manifestation of the Kingdom of God. The fact that Jesus is 'Lord of all' means not only that he is sovereign over all men and women but also that at present he grants the blessings of the Kingdom of God to all who call upon his name (Rom. 10: 12). What are the blessings of the kingdom?- sustenance, sufficiency, thriving and joy. These are the things that make for life more abundant, for biblical justice. That Jesus is Lord means that the church, as the manifestation of the kingdom, plays a role in moving strategically, through its actions to work towards the fulfillment of these things in every realm. There is no realm into which the church is not called by Jesus to bring forth the blessings of the kingdom. There is no sacred or profane there is only Jesus Lord of all realms.
The fact that he is 'head over all things' is important because as such he has been granted dominion over the Church so that it may be filled with his fullness (cf. Eph. 1:22). This fullness is seen through the gifts that have been granted to her by the power of the Holy Spirit. As the exalted Lord whose authority extends to the whole universe, he has given his people gifts that enable them to grow into an organic unity so that we can imitate the model of humanity perfectly realized in his person (cf. Eph. 4: 10ff.). What does this mean?
It means that through the power of the Holy Spirit manifested in each of the gifts given to the church as one body, our unity in that body becomes the infrastructure of the mission of the church. It is not the projects. It is not the programs. It is not the gatherings, or the protest events we attend together. It is our unity that becomes the fabric that holds them together and that makes them happen. Unity is infrastructure!
In the midst of chaos, unity is the restoring element. Our unity begins with our unity with Christ- abiding.
We are capable of creating new realities through a realization of our union with Christ and the choice to co-create with Him. We need to remind ourselves of our oneness and union with the Ultimate creator! Jesus is one with the father and when we abide in Christ, we are one with Jesus and one with the father. The Holy Spirit makes this possible but then enhances this by distributing the gifts among us and calling us to oneness with one another so that through this unity we might have the ability to unleash the power of creation along with Christ through the HS in the work of the kingdom. When there is unity, the kingdom of God is in our midst.
Juntos, chaos out there then becomes a backdrop for redemptive creation. When several knowledgeable, passionate people of God are in the same room, they can have robust and dynamic discussions. Juntos, those conversations often spiral into unexpected areas, and they can spark bold ideas that no one group member would have thought of alone. Unity- juntos, brings a broad cross-section of worldviews, the kind that can kindle genuine innovation. This happens because unity- juntos, makes collaboration happen.
It is juntos, our unity- that can hold the enlivening, empowering, creation breath of the Spirit of God needed to make these things possible. Without our unity, there is no vessel that holds the power of the Spirit. Our unity produces the tissues, the ligaments necessary to make all the organs work in tandem, that creates the systems necessary for the full function of the body of Jesus for the fullness of her calling, for the mission of the kingdom in the world.
Juntos-unity, manifests the vision of the love of God through the lordship of Christ- to bring all things together, reconciled under himself. What does reconciliation look like if we can’t do juntos, coming together amongst each other? We don’t know! So, what are we supposedly preaching? Nonsense because we can only speak of broken images.
In light of the lordship of Christ, evangelism and social responsibility or biblical justice, both feature the dimensions of the kingdom for they announce that the kingdom comes to invade all arenas of our historical reality. Both word and deed are inextricably united in the mission of Jesus, and both must continue to be held together in the mission of the Church. The need of each context determines how these are ministered in each particular context. The church is called to 'share Jesus’ concern for justice and reconciliation throughout human society and for the liberation/salvation of (men) persons from every kind of oppression' (Lausanne Covenant, para 5).
Poverty, racism, patriarchy, classism conservative or liberal theologies and others, these cause our lack of unity for they distract us from the truth of who we are created to be in the image of Christ and they therefore bring out our disunity. Our theology is filtered through them, and we become exclusive, our doctrines only half truths, in times of great polarizations the Spirit beckons us to come to greater truths through the fellowship with one another which causes us to see what we could not on our own. Juntos!
AETH was begun in 1992. In 1991 we started our conversations. From the start we were a varied lot of people with different theologies, doctrines, with too many lawyers who made our meetings too long. But we learned to listen to one another, to love one another, to laugh with one another when the ideas of one seemed too crazy to fathom, to stay in the conversation when we critiqued each other maybe even too harshly because what you said was so out of my box. We learned to listen to our Catholic brother speak of the theology of la Guadalupe and to find something that had been missing in our understanding. Imagine a bunch of Pentecostal pastors asking questions of a Catholic theologian not to tell him he was wrong but to give consideration to his ideas. Imagine affirming women as part of the board when I do not believe that women should be in leadership. Imagine the respect it took over the years that after 25 years our young adults marveled at our witness of unity and they wanted to become a part of us and today they are contributors with us. This new generation has added to the diversity of our body. They don’t believe everything we believe and there are new emphases that they bring to our organization. They have forced us to look through their eyes. But they too belong and we need each other.
Unity says you belong and we are a part of one another no matter how alike or different we are. It says I believe in the Christ who is Lord of all and I submit to the “allness” of Christ and his kingdom so that we can work together to, among other things, become a people of biblical justice.
You are human and so am I, you are called and so am I, you are my brother and I your sister, we are called juntos to care for one another and to see the realities around us more clearly as well as the possibilities that the Spirit poses to us for bringing about transformation that gives expression to the values of the kingdom. Our koinonia, our fellowship, our juntos itself helps us to see more clearly, to see the images of the kingdom for our society. Juntos creates the spaces for us to come to know each other better, juntos is to contribute, juntos is to cooperate, juntos is to collaborate- juntos is to co-create as the people of God. Let us through the help of the HS strive towards this unity- juntos! Para eso vinimos aqui- Juntos- unity.