Today on the last Sunday of the Christian calendar, I am with the good people at Christ Church in Fitchburg. As I said to them, it's fun from time to time to be invited to be a "supply priest" - meaning I'm there because the rector needed a substitute this weekend, and not there to talk about clergy transitions. This allows me to focus in more specifically on the readings of the day, which can be found here. They videotape their sermons at Christ Church, so you can watch my sermon above; or you can read the manuscript below if you prefer. (If you follow along while watching you will notice I have a tendency to deviate a bit from my script, from time to time!)
I’m grateful to be with
you today at Christ Church and also grateful to be here with no official
diocesan business. This parish is not one of those in the midst of a clergy
transition! Ben and Carolyn are just taking some much-deserved time away and I
got the call to pinch hit today. What that means is that I get to just focus in
on the texts for today, as we celebrate the Feast of “Christ the
King” – or we might say, “The Reign of Christ.” It has been 27 weeks since Pentecost. For over six
months we’ve been moving through “ordinary time,” methodically hearing bits of
Luke’s Gospel week after week. Next week the cycle begins anew and our
attention will turn to Matthew’s Gospel as we journey through Advent,
Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost – and then week after week of
ordinary time until we again come to Christ the King Sunday.
What exactly does it mean for us, as Christians, to
say that we worship a king? And not just any king, but one who was executed as
an enemy of the state between two criminals? In a nutshell, that is the great
paradox of our faith in full view today. We come here to worship the king, and perhaps looking for Jesus to set
things right in our world, or at least to calm our nerves. And then we get a
gospel reading that seems to be misplaced – a Good Friday text of crucifixion.
It’s powerlessness, not power. It’s about weakness and vulnerability, not yet
triumph.
And yet most of the images and language we use today,
including our hymns, point us toward the future, to the culmination of human
history. That focus that will continue next weekend as we enter once more the
Season of Advent. We look toward Christ’s victorious return, in glory, to set
things right: to the time when every knee shall bend and proclaim Jesus as Lord,
and the captives are free, and the powers of this world are subdued once and
for all. That is all about the power of God and peace on earth and good will to
all…
And yet this Good Friday gospel calls our attention
not to the Second Coming in triumph but to the end of the first coming on a
cross. We are at the place of a skull, Calvary, where this “king of the Jews”
is executed between two criminals, one to his right and another on his left.
Here the cry, “hail, king of the Jews” is not a cry of the faithful but an
abusive taunt from an angry mob. The crown of thorns on his head has been put
there to mock him, not worship him. And yet this plea from one of the
criminals: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Remember me.
So what can we say about this “kingdom?” There are two
very different responses when we think about how that kingdom connects to the
kingdoms of this world. Some—and versions can be found both on the left and on
the right—think it is their job to bring their version of Christian power to
bear on the world. The thing is that this has been tried in Christian history,
as in the Holy Roman Empire. Unfortunately when Christians had all the power,
they misused it as much as any other kings. The crusades and the inquisition
bear witness to the fact that power can corrupt Christians as much as it
corrupts anyone.
On the other end of the spectrum is an entirely
different approach that keeps “heaven” and “earth” far apart. Faith becomes
privatized and spiritualized, a matter only for an hour or so each week. A “wall
of separation” develops within us that leads to a kind of spiritual
schizophrenia. We can be pious in church, and “realists” in the workplace. Some
people would call that hypocrisy
I want to point to a
third way by way of quoting a German theologian by the name of Jürgen Moltmann,
from a book called The Crucified God.
I’ve been ordained long enough to know that this is usually not the way to lure
people into a sermon. Jokes, funny stories, personal antidotes usually work
much better than German theologians. But I pray that you’ll stay with me
anyway. Here goes:
The God of freedom, the true God, is... not
recognized by his power and glory in the history of the world, but through his
helplessness and his death on the scandal of the cross of Jesus.
Now hold that thought
for a minute or two…
National
elections come and go which means that presidents come and go. Even nations
come and go. But in the meantime, in the ordinary times of our lives (and in
extraordinary times, too) we are called to be the Church. We come here today to
worship the living God and we leave here to go back to our homes and our places
of work and play to follow Jesus the Christ, whose will it is (as we prayed
today in our opening collect) “to restore all things in your well-beloved Son.”
We surely need
this restoration! We know what it means to be peoples of the earth divided and
enslaved by sin. What’s hard to imagine is what freedom in Christ looks like –
what it means to be brought together under Christ’s most gracious rule. Not forced, but invited to come and see. I
think we come to a place like Christ Church to get a glimpse of it. We come
here to practice: Republicans and Democrats and Independents and even the 43%
of Americans who didn’t vote in the recent presidential election. All are welcome
at one table where there is one bread and one cup and one Lord.
We come here to
practice praying for our president week after week. For some among us it
may have been really challenging to pray for our president, Barack, over the
past eight years, while others were filled with joy. For some among us it will
be really challenging to pray for Donald, our president-elect, even as others
are filled with joy. But we are able to come together to do this because we
know that our true allegiance is not to party or president or even nation, which
all need our prayers. Our true allegiance is to the king of kings, and the lord
of lords. His gracious rule binds us together through Holy Baptism.
This brings me
back to Moltmann and The Crucified God and to those words I shared
earlier. If you hear nothing else I have said or will say today, I want to
commend his insights to you alongside this gospel reading from Golgatha, the
touchstone of our faith, at the place of the skull where our king and our lord
is executed on a tree between two criminals.
The God of freedom, the true God, is... not
recognized by his power and glory in the history of the world, but through his
helplessness and his death on the scandal of the cross of Jesus.
God is not a coercer.
The Church sometimes is. Pastors sometimes are and yes, even canons and bishops
and lay people sometimes are. We lord it over one another with our ideologies,
our certitudes. “It’s my way or the highway” we say or maybe we don’t say it
with words but our actions belie our intentions. “I’ve been a member here for my whole life; if you do that, I’ll take my
pledge and go somewhere else!”
But the God of freedom,
the true God, the God revealed to us in the life and death and resurrection of
Jesus, is not about that kind of kingdom or that way of lording it over one
another. The true God, is recognized through his weakness and helplessness and
his death on the cross. This is the scandal that binds us together regardless
of who we voted for: that we dare to see the face of the crucified God in the
face of this man from Galilee who was executed between two criminals.
Now here’s the thing:
while we know that is not the end of the story, while we know about the empty
tomb and all the rest – that doesn’t change Good Friday. It doesn’t change the
way Jesus died or how God is revealed in the world.
What I think this means
is that our work is first and foremost to pay attention to those places in this
world where there is weakness and helplessness and death. It’s not political to
say that we have an addiction problem in this nation, in this Commonwealth, in this county - and that opiods are killing our young people and we need to pay attention to that. It's not political to say that might be among migrant workers who may or may not have all of their
paperwork in order. It’s not political to say that it might be among refugees
fleeing persecution and violence in Syria. It’s not political to say that it’s
in visiting those who are in prison or those who are in a VA hospital. It’s
gospel work to care for those on the margins, because it is on the margins that
we find God and discover our shared vocation. That’s where we see the face of
Christ in our own world.
God has given us this
work to do in order to be the Church. Sometimes that will make us good citizens
and sometimes that work will cause us to protest. And here’s the thing – we may
not all agree on which is which on any given Sunday. That is why we need each
other and need to continue to be formed, daily, by the God who is revealed in
Jesus, who challenges all of our ideologies.
We come here to
remember that Jesus really is Lord and king of kings – and that our allegiance
to him helps us to do this work with gratitude and hope, until he comes again.
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