If You Are Called to the Team of Seventy for 2025

by the Rev. Ted Thornton

In Luke 10:9, Jesus instructs the seventy missionaries he’s sending out to spread the gospel with these words, “...say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ “ 

Imagine you’re a member of an updated 21st century group of “Seventy” called to go out into today’s world this coming week to proclaim this message. How will you choose to describe the kingdom of God to those who don’t know or don’t like God-talk? 

Is this assignment crazy? Think of what the original Seventy might have thought, especially after listening to Jesus admonish them about the resistance they were likely to encounter in a Roman province infamous for its hostility to Jews and Judaism. Jesus could not have put the danger more bluntly: “I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves (Luke 10:3).” Failure is at least in part assumed. 

Now remember: Jesus, like some of his Jewish contemporaries, was an apocalyptic prophet who didn’t think the world had much time to get itself ready to meet God.

I don’t think many of us today really think that way or live that way. We more closely resemble Mark Twain, who said, “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Kentucky. They're always twenty years behind everything.” (Apologies to Kentucky!) 

In any case, most of us live our lives as if tomorrow will come and all too fast with its litany of first-of-the-work-week challenges. So, you should think about the words you will use in your preaching about the kingdom of God. 
For starters, is “kingdom” even the right word for our times? The evangelists after all didn’t take the Greek word basileia - “king” - literally to mean a person with a crown - so much as a realm or domain within us and between us [our Godly household or oikumene as depicted on the Whiteman window over the altar], the physical, emotional, and spiritual space we inhabit through which God’s love moves or tries to move if only we will let it. 
After all, haven’t we in our times had enough of kings actual and wannabe? “No Kings, no kings!,” shouted five million people across this country as they marched a few weeks ago on Flag Day, June 14, 2025. The “kingdom of God” is a communal attitude, an orientation, a sphere of action, a commitment to live a Godly life. 

And so, a growing number of Christians think a better translation of “kingdom of God” is “realm of God”: “realm” because that word conveys better the conviction that God’s presence is found in the way we conduct our everyday lives, not in the symbols of crown, scepter, and absolute power as we see them in history. 

This brings us to the most important question of all for how we might best proclaim the realm of God in our times: which is more important, proclaiming Jesus’ as our personal savior, or performing acts of loving kindness for others (what Jews call chesed)? 

Both themes are present in the New Testament: emphasis on right actions in the synoptic gospels and emphasis on belief in Jesus as savior in John. Have the meanings of love and belief changed since New Testament times?

Actually, members of the early Church drew no distinction between Godly love and belief. They regarded practicing loving kindness toward others as the primary way we express our belief or faith in God and God’s son Christ Jesus. They didn’t think you could separate belief in Jesus from doing what Jesus told us to do: to treat one another with loving kindness. A reading of the Sermon on the Mount [Matthew 5-7] makes this pretty clear. We express our belief and our faith in Jesus by behaving lovingly, compassionately, mercifully, and in the spirit of forgiveness toward one another. 
Martin Thielen, a retired Southern Baptist minister put it this way, “At its core, authentic spirituality is not about beliefs. It’s about behavior.” 

Rev. Thielen cites a scene from The Americans, a TV drama that aired from 2013 to 2018 in which one of the characters asks, “What if you don’t believe in God, or religion, or prayer? Her friend responds, “None of those things matter. All that matters is how we treat each other.” 

And, this corresponds to the dominant theme that unites both the synoptic gospels and John. The Great Commandment in Matthew 22:36-40 - “Love God and love your neighbor” - fits tongue and groove with John 13:34, where Jesus tells his disciples, "A new commandment I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another." Rev. Thielen concludes, “This ‘new’ commandment is a call to us to love each other in the same way that Jesus loved his disciples and the world. It emphasizes the importance of practical acts of love, kindness, and service within the Christian community and in the world at large.” 

This isn’t an easy fit for us in a world where zero sum thinking is the day to day “kingdom” we live in. Nevertheless, we Christians, the new Seventy, are called to challenge this plague of zero sum thinking that infects our relations with one another. 

Damien Cave wrote in a recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times (March 1, 2025, “Welcome to the Zero Sum Era. Now How Do We Get Out?“). Mr. Cave challenges the notion that the best outcome is winner takes all. How much saner and productive for all of us to work toward an outcome built upon collaboration and cooperation, where benefits and risks are shared across the board.The belief that life is a battle over finite rewards where gains for one mean losses for another has no place in the realm of God.

Here’s a final problem for the new Seventy. Does the realm of God within us expect us and others to be perfect? This obsessive and cruel pursuit has spawned more bloodshed than any other philosophical and political doctrine in history. Think of Robespierre in France (as many as 17,000 heads fell to the guillotine), Lenin and Stalin in Communist Russia (thirty million dead), Pol Pot in Cambodia (seven million dead), and the worst of them all, Mao in China where an estimated sixty-million starved to death during Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” sacrificed in the pursuit of a perfect society. 

Each of these leaders believed in the perfectibility of human behavior. Consider how at least one of these enterprises ended: the French Revolution finishes with Napoleon crowning himself emperor, a far more absolute ruler than the king whose head they cut off. It took France nearly a century, until the Third Republic came into being in 1870, to usher in a more stable form of democracy. 

We have badly misunderstood what Jesus meant when he says in Matthew 5:48, "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." I’m among those who think that translation is again the problem here, especially when taken out of context. In Matthew 5:48, the Greek word translated as "perfect" is τέλειος (teleios). Instead of perfect, a better translation is the goal of completeness, maturity, or wholeness, not faultlessness or sinlessness, and certainly not literal perfection. Jesus certainly didn’t think perfection was a reachable end. He dramatically illustrates this point when he tells the mob that’s about to stone the adulterous woman to death in John 8:7, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” 

What Jesus means is that we are to strive to love one another as God loves us, and here’s the important part: to love one another without prejudice or partiality, not favoring one religion or race over another, or one sexual orientation over another, and to do so even if we can’t do it perfectly. And, when we fail, as we’re bound to, to confess our failure and ask God and those we’ve offended to forgive us.This is how the realm of God works, folks. The expectation that we will fail or make mistakes along the way is built right in. It’s one of the fundamental articles in the Constitution of the realm of God.

The late poet and singer Leonard Cohen expressed this beautifully in his song, Anthem. 

“Ring the bells that still can ring, 
Forget your perfect offering, 
There is a crack, a crack in everything, 
That's how the light gets in.” 

Your light, my light, our light; we shine through our cracks, our shortcomings, our errors, our vulnerabilities, not through our vain and selfish fantasies of perfection. 

Good luck and Blessings as you go forth this coming week to proclaim and live in the realm of God. 
​
Amen.

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