Sermon: Christ the King Sunday

November 22, 2009

Christ the King Sunday

John 18:33-38a

Holy Trinity Parish, Decatur, Georgia

The Reverend Allan Sandlin, associate rector

Late November has snuck up on us once again. The last leaves are falling from the trees in our back yard. Our suddenly very tall children are looking forward to one more family Thanksgiving before the oldest one heads off to college. (Tell me I’m not the only one thinking about that?) For Gretchen and me, our thoughts always turn to memories of our fathers, both of whom had late November birthdays. The fading memories of Thanksgivings past get added to the mix. And since we were both born in a certain decade, memories of an infamous November 22nd when our childhood innocence and the nation’s Camelot dreams were shattered.

That’s late November in our world. Late November in the church is all about endings and beginnings. T. S. Eliot poignantly reminds us that

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from.

And so on this last Sunday in the long season of Pentecost, the Church celebrates the Feast of Christ the King as an end where we start from. If you think about it, today’s sort of like New Year’s Eve in the Church, for next Sunday the church year begins again—the First Sunday of Advent is our New Year’s Day.

If you Googled images of Christ the King, you’d find pictures of Jesus with bright, shining crowns on his head, some of them pure gold, others crusted with jewels. And you’d see icons with muted colors, brilliant halo rays surrounding Jesus’ head. Sometimes he’s sitting on a throne, dressed in flowing red velvet robes. Royal Jesus, looking very much like an earthly king might look. Those images are very much in tune with this morning’s first three readings.

From the Hebrew Scriptures, the book of Daniel presents an apocalyptic vision of a throne engulfed in fiery flames, with an Ancient One seated on it and waited on by ten thousand times ten thousand servants. The king in Psalm 93 has put on his most splendid, beautiful clothes and is acclaimed as mightier than the sound of many waters, mightier than the breakers of the sea. And, of course, leave it to the book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible, the Omega of Holy Scripture to describe Jesus Christ, “the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead and the ruler of the kings on earth”, as the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end… It’s all so rich and wonderful, it’s almost too much to bear, isn’t it?

If we stopped right there, we could go on singing our triumphal hymns, crowning Jesus King of Kings and Lord of Lords, with all the glory and grandeur we can muster. It’s a fitting grand finale to the long season of Pentecost, the final hurrah before entering the quiet days of Advent. We’ve selected hymns this morning that sing of Christ’s reign and God’s glory and if we’d thought about it, we could have hired trumpet players for today. It’s entirely appropriate to celebrate the reign of Christ, the coming of God’s kingdom with pomp and circumstance.

But we can’t close our prayer books and go home just yet. We can’t leave without hearing this brief scene from Jesus’ trial as told in the gospel of John. Our glorious Christ the King stands in handcuffs before an earthly king named Pilate and we know where this will end. On this day of endings, the gospel lesson lands us right in the heart of the Passion of Christ. Standing in the courtroom of an earthly king, on trial for his refusal to play by the rules of an earthly kingdom. The end of our Lord’s life is just around the corner and the story doesn’t need to mention the cross for us to sense its shadow hanging over the scene. And it will be an ending that is also a beginning for if the crucifixion is coming soon, then resurrection is also near and once again, beginnings and endings are so close they almost touch each other…

In this scene, Pilate asks most of the questions, poking and prodding at Jesus. On the surface of things, Pilate’s the one in control. Jesus is in his courtroom, under guard of his soldiers and yet who do you think is the one in control?

Are you the King of the Jews?

Jesus answers Do you ask this on your own, or did someone put you up to it?

I am not a Jew, am I? Your own people handed you over to me. What have you done?

Jesus says My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my followers, my soldiers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to you. My kingdom is not from here.

So you are a king after all?

You say that.

And then Jesus gets to the heart of the matter: This is why I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.

In this very brief scene, two worlds, two kings, two kingdoms collide. Pilate’s questions make clear that this is not a religious conflict but a political one and he’s feeling the pressure of the mob just outside the palace doors, perhaps worried about losing his job if he makes the wrong choice.

When Pilate called Jesus king, according to John’s version of the story, it was as a term of derision. A few scenes further on in the story, Pilate will instruct his people to inscribe “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews” on a notice tacked to the cross in 3 languages.

Jesus, even with his hands tied behind his back, is calm and epitomizes what we today might call a “non-anxious presence”. His royalty permeates the air. My kingdom is not of this world he says. And with those words, Jesus separates himself from Pilate’s world of politics, military might and the banalities of life in the royal court. But Jesus is not taking himself or his followers out of this world. God’s kingdom is not some ethereal place up in the heavens, removed from contact with all the messiness, the pain, the corruption and disease and death of this world. The kingdom Jesus points toward is not on the other side of the cosmos. It is here and now.

John’s gospel from beginning to end, is all about the reality of the in-breaking Kingdom, it’s all about incarnation. And we hear it right away, in the first chapter of the book: And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

The Word became flesh and lives among us still and we catch glimpses of it if we are paying attention. But how and where do we see it?

Those of you who are in DOCC this fall, the Disciples of Christ in Community course here at Holy Trinity, will recognize this poem by R.S. Thomas entitled “The Kingdom”. It’s a long way off but inside it here are quite different things going on: Festivals at which the poor man is king and the consumptive is healed; mirrors in which the blind look at themselves and love looks at them back; and industry is for mending the bent bones and the minds fractured by life.

It’s a long way off, but to get there takes no time and admission is free, if you will purge yourself of desire, and present yourself with your need only and the simple offering of your faith, green as a leaf.

Can you imagine a festival, a Mardi Gras perhaps, where the poor man is king and the sick are healed? Where blind people look at themselves in the mirror and love looks back at them? Can you imagine a time when our resources, our intelligence, our systems are focused not on war or making more money than we need but on mending bent bones and minds fractured by life? The kingdom of God is like that.

Author and theologian, Daniel Clendenin, sees another way of envisioning the Kingdom of God embodied by Jesus. Imagine what life would be like on earth, here and now if God were king and the rulers of this world were not. Imagine if God ruled the nations, and not Obama, Kim Jong-il, Mugabe, or Ahmadinejad. Every aspect of personal and communal life would experience a radical reversal. The political, economic, and social subversions would be almost endless—peacemaking instead of war mongering, liberation not exploitation, sacrifice rather than subjugation, mercy not vengeance, care for the vulnerable instead of privileges for the powerful, generosity instead of greed, humility rather than hubris, embrace rather than exclusion. (from an on-line essay at www.journeywithjesus.net)

You’ve heard the Hebrew word shalom. We usually think it means peace. But a better translation of shalom is human well-being. And the kingdom of God is like that.

I wonder this morning as we end another year in the church and slow down long enough to consider all our endings and beginnings, can we pay close enough attention to recognize encounters with God’s kingdom happening in our lives every day? There’s definitely some kingdom work happening at the Fair Trade Sale in Tisdale Hall today. If you think of this annual Holy Trinity event only as a great chance to do some early Christmas shopping, think again. More significant is the help we are able to give people all over the world. We are supporting artists and craftspeople whose faces we’ll never see, whose voices we’ll never hear. And they are not artists living and working in Buckhead or on the Upper West Side of New York. They are from Haiti and Bangladesh, from South Africa, Honduras, Vietnam and the Philippines …the dollars we spend go directly to help lift them a little ways out of the poverty engulfing them.

This year, we have some new friends with us, friends who live and work in Clarkston, Stone Mountain and Decatur. They are part of a community of refugees, Bhutanese people who fled their homeland because of ethnic cleansing. Many of them lived in a United Nations refugee camp in Nepal for 18 years before coming to the United States. Here in Georgia, they’ve been making stunning baskets, woven from kudzu and bamboo.

Yesterday at our Fair Trade Sale, they had the best day of sales they’ve ever had, selling over $1,300 worth of baskets. That will pay for 3 month’s rent.

Who would have imagined that our ubiquitous Southern vine could be turned into something so useful and so beautiful? Supporting these Bhutanese people, who left their homes in Asia, came to the United States and discovered a use for kudzu we’d never thought of, gives us the opportunity not only to glimpse the kingdom but perhaps to have a small part in opening up a new corner of that kingdom.

The Kingdom of God is like that.

In a few minutes, we’ll pray the prayer Jesus taught us how to pray, the Lord’s Prayer, the Our Father. It’s a prayer that I suspect we find comforting most days. But I wonder about one petition, in particular, that may be less comfortable for us to say. It might even be a little disturbing. When we look at the way the world really is, in light of what Jesus was saying and doing as he ushered in the Kingdom, do we mean it when we pray Thy kingdom come, thy will be done?