Ruth Greenaway-Robbins

The liturgucal year is drawing to a close, and these last few weeks we have turned our thoughts to the season the Church calls Kingdom Season, and this final Sunday we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King.

This season born out of the turmoil of the last century in a time when nationalism, fascism and secularism were demanding total loyalty from human hearts, the Church across the world responded by saying: No.
No earthly power, no ruler, no ideology can claim our souls.
Christ alone reigns – the one who rules, not with fear or domination, but with mercy, peace and justice.

And yet, the word Kingdom itself sits uneasily for some of us.
It’s a word weighted with monarchy, empire and patriarchy.
It conjures crowns, armies, hierarchies – images far removed from the carpenter from Nazareth hanging on a cross between two criminals.

I have been spending some time recently revisiting the work Abba Amma by Nicola Slee, the feminist theologian and poet, where she explores aspects of the Lord’s Prayer. In her chapter on “Your Kingdom come” She explores the risk of re-inscribing exactly the sort of domination Jesus came to overturn. She says when Jesus spoke of God’s Kingdom, he wasn’t dreaming of a palace.
He was announcing a revolution.
A political, spiritual, and relational upheaval in which the poor are lifted up,
the captives set free, and the mighty are humbled.

To pray “Your Kingdom come” is to say:
The world belongs to God, not to Caesar.
Power belongs to love, not to empire.

Nicola Slee and the Cuban theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz both invite us to take a small but seismic step and to pray instead for the coming of God’s Kindom:
K-I-N-D-O-M.

It’s a tiny shift in spelling but a vast shift in imagination.
From Kingdom to Kindom – from hierarchy to kinship,
from rule to relationship,
from domination to solidarity.

As Isasi-Díaz puts it, the Kindom is the community of kindred persons,
people bound together by mutual care and shared struggle.
It’s less like a throne room and more like a family kitchen,
or maybe a small mixed farm – messy, interdependent, alive.
Slee says that image of the household or the farm may in fact be truer to what Jesus meant:
a place of daily labour, where every creature is tended,
where survival depends on cooperation and care,
and where flourishing happens only when everyone has enough.

So, what does that mean for us as we celebrate – Christ the King – when we proclaim that Jesus reigns?

It means that Christ’s kingship looks utterly different from every model of power we’ve ever known.
In the all too familiar scene in Saint Luke’s Gospel 23:33-43 , Jesus is enthroned not on a seat of gold but on a cross of wood.
His crown is made of thorns.
His proclamation reads not “Glory and Empire,” but “This is the King of the Jews.”

The soldiers mock him.
The leaders sneer.
And yet in that moment; humiliated, wounded, dying 
he reveals the deepest truth about God’s rule:
that real power is love poured out,
real authority is reconciliation,
real glory is solidarity with the suffering.

One of the men crucified beside him sees it.
In desperation, he whispers, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
And Jesus replies, “Today you will be with me in paradise.”

The first citizen of the Kingdom – the Kindom – is a condemned man on a cross.
That is the shape of Christ’s divine rule.

Saint Paul’s letter to the Colossians 1:11-20 he gives us the theology behind that moment.
He writes that in Christ “all things hold together,”
and that God was pleased “through him to reconcile to himself all things –
things on earth and things in heaven – making peace through the blood of his cross.”

Notice those words: all things.
Not just souls, not just the righteous, not just the human.
All creation.
The whole household of God.
That’s the Kindom – the web of life bound together in Christ’s reconciling love.

It is as though Saint Paul is saying:
This world, in all its brokenness and beauty, already belongs to God.
The work of Christ is to mend the fractures,
to bring everything back into right relationship 
with God, with one another, with the earth itself.

And that, friends, is what Kingdom Season teaches us.
To be Kingdom People – or perhaps Kindom People –
is to live here and now as if that reconciliation were already true.
It means resisting the powers of domination and fear.
It means building communities where justice, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit are not slogans but lived realities.
It means safeguarding one another,
caring for the vulnerable,
refusing to worship anything or anyone but Christ.

In that sense, every small act of care is an act of Kindom-building.
Every choice for truth over comfort,
for listening over silencing,
for repair over reputation – these are the politics of the Kindom.

So when we gather around the altar,
we come not as subjects of a distant monarch,
but as kin –
siblings in the household of God.
We come to the table, not the throne.
We share food, not fear.
And we hear again the words of our crucified King:
“This is my body, given for you.”

That is what divine rule looks like: self-giving, life-sharing love.

As this Kingdom Season closes and Advent begins,
perhaps we can hold the old word and the new together –
Kingdom and Kindom.

The first reminds us that Christ’s authority is ultimate:
no ruler, party, or ideology can claim what belongs to God.
The second reminds us what that authority feels like:
not domination, but belonging;
not control, but communion;
not empire, but family.

So today we dare to proclaim both truths:
Christ is King – and Christ makes us kin.
Christ reigns – by reconciling, not by conquering.
Christ’s Kingdom is the Kindom – a household of justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.

And our calling, as ever, is to live like it’s true.
To be people of the Kindom:
honest, compassionate, courageous, hopeful –
working and praying for the day when every tear is wiped away,
and every creature can say, with joy,
“Christ reigns – and all creation is home.”

Amen.