This is the first of two videos issued last week and this by Quaker Speak. Apparently the big issue of the first one was the use of the term "Kingdom of God" which many people took offense to.
Here is the second one responding to the offense expressed.
Now, I won't take second place to anyone as an opponent of kings and royalty and class distinction but I really don't see why anyone should get into a swivet over the use of "Kingdom of God" which is certainly not the same thing. It was one of the things I found most irritating in the Jesus Seminar documents that they used the term "imperial rule" as in "God's imperial rule" or "heaven's imperial rule" which I thought was just silly and entirely beside the point. I was a one-time enthusiast for the Jesus Seminar but its work has aged really fast and not entirely well. I've come to see a lot of it as misguided and a product of fashion. You're not going to get what the authors of biblical texts meant without a lot of consideration of what they were talking about to start with and to pretend that people are going to mistake God for someone like a British or Spanish or some other monarch is just silly.
I heard a priest recently point out that when Jesus said that the Shema was the highest commandment, along with the commandment to love others as you love yourself he actively identified love of God with the love of the least among us, the dregs of society, those least exalted and loved, the unwanted and unsentimentalized and the most unworthy poor. There is nothing more radical in any human articulation than the identification of God with the least among us. That is the Kingdom of God, a society which takes that as its meaning and its practice and nothing could be more unlike any kingdom of this world.
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