Disciples in the Kingdom of Heaven
Disciples in the Kingdom of Heaven
June 28, 2026
Minister: Rev. Dr. Malcolm Himschoot
Text: Matthew 11:16 & Matthew 13:57
Download a printable PDF of this sermon here.
“To what shall I compare this generation?”
“Every scribe who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven brings out of their treasure what is new and what is old.”
Jesus the Healer has become a historian! Let us pray.
God, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in your sight – and may your Spirit use this moment to stir us in the direction of your hope. Amen.
Good morning! Hello and greetings. Thank you, Plymouth Church, for inviting me here. I was last at this pulpit just before my twin babies were born (whom I have just graduated from high school).
I’ve been getting really into time capsules. Here is one for you. 20 years ago, I remember Minneapolis Pride, more and more of downtown getting involved. Marriage equality wasn’t yet, but queer people were finding ways to make families. This congregation became formally Open and Affirming at that time. I remember talent shows among the congregation, proving even straight people could dance! Do you still do a talent show? I remember the mental health drop-in center, affordable and managed housing, artists of all ages, theatre and literary events by Plymouth. I remember aspects of social justice and outreach ministries. I remember taking my turn preaching in a rotation led by Jim Gertmenian. Jim never doubted that a transgender person like me could be in ordained ministry—though at that time, almost no one was doing that.
I live now in Maine. Still trans, happily. Still in ministry.
You’ve heard about my book Reading Secrets – A Queer Inheritance of Life and Scripture because it fits with this weekend’s Pride celebration. You could say it’s my memoir-manifesto as a trans man. My book also fits with next weekend’s struggle for the soul of a nation, because it is written in a theological and prophetic Christian tradition that doesn’t just honor queer lives, but commends a path of liberation/ repentance/discipleship to all who read the Good Book.
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This is a terrible time for anti-trans antipathy! And by anti-trans, I don’t know what they think they mean. Anti-gender variety, anti-woman, anti-children. Anti-drag. Anti-art. Anti-public toilets. Federal impositions and invasions, violations and discriminations too many to name: not just affecting veterans, but also inmates under state control, and trans people in the poverty system who need housing but find it denied. Over 700 state bills across this land aim to define gender in a way which subjects some people to other people’s scrutiny and control. I cannot remember in which states it’s legal or illegal for me to use the bathroom! Adults are now involved in body-policing for young people in sports. In Nebraska, driver’s licenses belonging to trans people were revoked one day, until the marker on the license got changed, and not by the bearer’s own choosing. In Tennessee there is now a public registry listing medical trans patients. In Texas, parents of trans kids may face criminal charges. Hospitals are being stripped of funds for offering care to the gender-expansive community, even if it’s the same care they offer to the gender-normative community.
Oh, so this is how violence and persecution work to create an atmosphere of political intimidation!
Have we heard this story somewhere before?
Somebody go down to the storeroom and bring up that time capsule from history.
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You know how miners tunneling down into rock used to know how deep not to go? They went walking down down down, into an airless lightless chamber that they hoped would not be their grave. They carried with them a little bird. When the bird died from low oxygen, the humans would know they were next. If the canary died, they could still turn around and get out while there was time.
In an era of rising fascism, are trans people the canaries in the coal mine?
Well. But lots of canaries have died, for generations and generations.
Canaries that are Black, Brown and Indigenous have been dying for some time. Palestinian Muslims in Gaza. Now Palestinian Christians in the West Bank! Which canaries will the rest of us canaries pay attention to?
I’m white and trans and there are some days I wake up scared. But there are no days I wake up Black in America.
We must ask: What will protect all of us? Build us up, fortify us, see us have long lives? We can’t all move from Missouri to Minnesota, or from Maine to Madrid.
Traumatic news this week was that Pete and Chasten, as a gay couple, were just threatened with losing their children. Where have we heard this trauma before? Families separated. Parents under a default assumption of criminalization. We know about the welfare system from Native and Indigenous children. We’ve heard about the carceral system from Black families. We’ve seen it with our own eyes at the border, at the detention center, outside the preschool during the ICE surge. Now from the Supreme Court, ending [temporary protected] status for Haitian families.
White supremacy keeps stripping families away from each other and taking away the means of well-being we all need to live!
White supremacy will happily use religion to do its dirty work, mask atrocity beneath palliative interpretations of theology—or worse, appropriate sacred tradition for cruel authoritarianism, disguised as masculinity, foisted on us as patriarchy and patriotism.
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To what shall we compare this generation?? When we face history, when we face ourselves, we can turn toward God’s invitation for wise action, learning lessons of discipleship. We can go into our storeroom, and draw out treasures both new and old. We don’t have to buy into whatever in the present comes to us and preys upon our fickle fevers of frenzied furor, consumption and possession and avoidance. We have more perspective than that.
Thank God for historians doing crucial work these days. Some of my favorite historians are Rob Shetterly, the artist behind Americans Who Tell the Truth, Heather Cox Richardson, and Colin Woodard. There’s a time capsule for you – from Maine!
Now a time capsule for you, that I received from Minnesota.
Since January, when I came to be part of the national moral witness during the ICE onslaught here, I read Sinclair Lewis, satirical novelist from last century. On an astounding level, early for his time and ours, Sinclair Lewis grasped that fascism and state violence go back to settler colonialism and the criminalization of race. American history is replete with violent suppression and force called out against the defenseless. Many people know Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here, written in the 1930s depicting Nazi-type fascism in the US. It’s never been out of print! Not as many people know Sinclair Lewis’ historical novel The God-Seeker.
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In The God-Seeker, the main character sets out from northern New England and gets to Minnesota before it was a US state. This is a time of moral combustion. Between the struggle for abolition in the eastern states, and western Anishinaabe and Dakota dispossession, big questions of faith and conscience were raised, at a time when a white young boy simply had a love of scripture and wanted to learn to read the Bible.
So the reader meets Aaron Gadd, devout son of a racist but abolitionist Yankee. He attends a revival in Massachusetts and gets recruited into going west as a missionary. There he keeps waiting for the promise of learning Hebrew and Greek in order to understand the Divine Word! But no. They have him growing potatoes and doing carpentry. He meets local people, and makes friends with Black Wolf, a next-generation Dakota man trained at Oberlin College, whose decolonial view of scripture presses the essence of the 21st century Palestinian question! Anyway, in the pages of the novel, Aaron Gadd the character resists publishing Black Wolf’s account of the Bible.
Black Wolf is murdered anyway, for resisting white settler power. So is the white friend closest to him. Murdered.
Fast forward. Aaron lives and becomes an adult man in the wake of the genocide, and makes a family in St. Paul with Selene Lanark, a bi-cultural Dakota woman. The Gadds go into the lumber business as the city develops. They prosper.
Aaron, erst-while “God-seeker,” only ever gives one sermon in the end!, in the closing pages of the novel. Coached by his wife, he gives a speech to his own unionized workers, a plea to accept into their multi-cultural white ranks one Henry Oldham, southern Black fugitive from enslavement. In Aaron’s apogee of a sermon, he mentions his life’s memorization of all the right words!: “righteousness” and “heavenly light.” It fails.
The men don’t just vote down integration, they laugh it down. As though the kingdom of heaven come on earth, is the furthest thing from what they want!
But then! Into this ordinary and quotidian scene of oppression, enter: slave patrol. A self-superior, unjust, conniving man with a weapon at his side struts into the room and expects the people to do his bidding. They will not. The workers are not deceived. He who would enslave a Black man would not hesitate to bind all of them, and put down their Labor alliances to do so! In this historical era of Fugitive Slave Laws which criminalized whites, they used their power. Rather than turn over the fugitive man, rather than submit to invasive overreach and corrupt collusion with the so-called Law, these unionized northerners together protect the one persecuted and show their antagonist the door. Then they promptly move to vote to admit the quote “foreigner” into their union after all!
It’s a devastating ending, because this moral victory is so thoroughly compromised. But there we are.
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Thank you for coming to my book talk today on Sinclair Lewis. I suppose I should get back to a sermon.
Discipleship in the kingdom of heaven asks something more than bearing the branding of the age. Every generation gets a chance to change our loyalty! Yet changing where we stand, shifting white supremacy to solidarity, is discouraged, disincentivized constantly, and punished by the powers that be.
Interpreting Scripture is at the heart of this historical struggle in America. Because it has to do with what our heart is set on. Where we keep our treasure—and where we hide our lies.
Me and my dad—we read the Bible in different ways. That’s what Reading Secrets is about. For my dad, me being trans was something bad enough—but on top of that, I went into ministry! He really thought I had some demons then! He had been taught to read scripture in authoritarian ways. I sought ways to look for healing and humanity in scripture, not control and fear.
We never reconciled, my dad and I. But after he died, I surveyed the words of this ancient library in both our lives. I had to publish something, to leave behind my part of an inter-generational spiritual legacy in this American landscape. May the next generation’s scribes find more to glean, in ongoing interpretive struggle, a process itself held in the light of God’s Love.
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Jesus said, when he was weary of disputes, “Wisdom will be proved right by her actions.”
Today we face a moment of moral and spiritual combustion. All that seemed solid is showing its brokenness. The SAVE Act is again in play, to disenfranchise voters. That’s authoritarianism. Meanwhile, new forms of belonging and solidarity are being grasped, precisely because everything and everyone is at risk! In our time, there is a Black Wolf, a Henry Oldham, a Selene Lanark who are leading the way. Economic justice is now part of conversations in the Senate—and at the Vatican.
In the wake of decades of decay and centuries of assault, these are tumultuous and excruciating, but important and exciting years. As history will show!
Someday, someone will open the time capsule of Open and Affirming work in our American churches, and they will look back and see the unsteadying of the bedrock of white supremacy.
May it be so. Amen.