Scripture: Luke 23:33-43 and Jeremiah 23:1-6

Note for Christ the King Sunday:

In response to recent headlines in the Miami Herald and the NY Times that detail actions of the Presbyterian Church, USA and suggest, not without reason, that Presbyterian Christians, responding to events in the Middle East with somewhat careless disregard for our status as neighbors and strangers in a conflict not our own; and supporting ”Messianic Jewish” congregations here at home a question was referred by the local head of the NCCJ regarding the concern of Jewish colleagues that Presbyterian Christians might be anti-Semitic. Would I, a Presbyterian Christian community leader and clergy, be willing to take the risk to dialogue with my colleagues on these matters? He would try to find someone to speak with me who would be gentle and respectful in dialogue….as if I might be affronted, or anxious, at the possibility of sharing hard conversation with a neighboring religious tradition.

It reminded me of the comment of a rabbi friend, when asked by some interns, what is the NCCJ? It used to be a Christian-Jewish dialogue group, but they changed the name because we don’t really have dialogue anymore—

Next, a sermon heard at a local Presbyterian gathering, by a respected colleague who is “coming out” as an evangelical, and shared his unapologetic perspective: “we take a cautious view of interfaith relationships. We do not affirm that other paths are equally valid ways to God.”

Thus we come to the final Sunday of the church year, the conclusion of the story which began with Advent, the season of anticipation of the coming of Jesus: the Sunday called Christ the King.  Christ the King? Oh, we’ve just done away with that, averred a most progressive clergy friend of mine when we spoke on the phone yesterday, I just can’t believe in it anymore. My friend is not alone, I think: indeed, the Church itself, sensing this discomfort with the notion of absolute power that rides piggyback on the shoulders of the word “King,” has with immense sensitivity and political correctness renamed this Sunday The Reign of Christ. Which, I guess, is supposed to make us look less supremacist when we celebrate what is, baldly put, a Sunday designed to celebrate the eventual triumph of the Christian faith over the entire world. A quick survey of the hymns penned for this illustrious occasion remind us what it’s still, really, all about: Crown Him with many crowns, the Lamb upon his throne: hark, how the heavenly anthem drowns all music but its own. All hail the power of Jesus’ name, let angels prostrate fall. Bring forth the royal diadem, and crown him Lord of All. Jesus shall reign where’er the sun does its successive journeys run. Hail to the Lord’s anointed. Rejoice, the Lord is king…Christ the King? The Reign of Christ? By any other name, it still says this: we don’t want to end up losers, footnotes in a history book, a forgotten dream, crumbling into dust and ruins.

Christ the King. I get why my friend wants to pretend it doesn’t exist…but the fact is, it does. Like the elephant in the living room we politely ignore, the idea of Christ the King has dominated the church’s silent reveries, sustained its will in times of oppression , undergirded its self-justification in countless wars of religion—and in the end, shaped and distorted our believing and the practice of our faith in ways we can only hope to address if we begin to admit how much we really want to be God’s winners.

Each year, the scripture texts dished up for the Sunday of Christ the King trot out a smorgasbord of images designed to remind the church that, although the church of Jesus may be weak now, someday, we’ll get ours, and everybody will see things our way. Readings from the Hebrew Scriptures caress the royal ideology of the dynasty of David: the dream that it was God, not human beings, who selected the boy David, put him on the throne, and perpetuated the dynasty founded in his blood. Pairing these texts with scriptures from the gospels, we are meant to understand that the reign of the risen Christ is the true successor to David’s divinely mandated rule. We are intended to see that although Jesus himself said my kingdom is not of this world, (and refused to entertain the notion that he was in any way to be considered a king) that God himself will, in the end, subject everything and everyone in the world to the Lordship of this long-dead Palestinian Jewish teacher whom we call Jesus the Christ.

From such theologies—unexamined and unremarked—come the questions I still receive from every confirmation class, even in this pluralistic, post-Christian place and time: will people who have never heard of Christ still go to hell? Are Jews going to get to heaven? What about Buddhists? Muslims? Pagans? Does God love them? Or just us?

From such theologies comes the Holocaust. The endless, hurtful stumbling among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim middle eastern neighbors over whose ideology, whose God, claims the right to dominate the destiny of the others’, and their worshippers. The smug assurances that Christmas, Easter, even Sunday—ought to be protected holidays, sacrosanct, because they’re our holy days.

What we want to believe about our faith, about our lives, about our people—shapes the way we look at others, and the way we live in the world. A man I respected as a great amateur historian specializing in the period of the United States’ westward expansion shocked me one day with his impassioned defense of Manifest Destiny and the American Way of Life which, as he said, made our decimation of the Native American population of this country justifiable: we offered them a better way of life, and they refused to accept it. Christ the King.

Our vision of ourselves—however idealized—determines our relationships, and controls what we do, what we see, and how much we are able to change and grow. If you’ll pardon the militaristic metaphor, our faith in Christ the King is a double-edged sword. If our comprehension that Christ—and his Way—is OUR way, we might live in a manner that causes us to be in the world reflecting the path of Christ: the path of loving neighbors and enemies, seeking justice and mercy, following the teachings of Jesus and a way that recognizes God’s interest and God’s judgment and mercy over the world and the world’s creatures. We might enact a faith practice that believes in engagement, not withdrawal, from the worries and the ways of the world: and our faith, thus practiced, might genuinely cause the name of Christ to be a Light to all peoples…as we reflect it, not dominating, but serving the human family. But the opposite edge of that sword is a way of believing in Christ, the Only Way, that blinds us to the possibility that there are other ways besides ours, other answers; and that our way of walking in the world with others is not to be triumphal, but rather, neighborly. From these assumptions of a Triumphant Global Savior come political ideologies that propel a people, even a nation, into wars of cultural dominance; presumptions of pre-emptive engagement in the affairs of nations that assume, that presume without question that our way, our God, should be and must be everyone’s way.  We are seeing the tragic payoff of this way of believing not only in the subtle assumptions that undergird our own engagement in the world’s affairs, but in the mighty struggles between like religious ideologies of all three of the worlds’ great monotheistic traditions, traditions that should be brother and sister expressions, but are increasingly manifesting as deadly opponents. We who see the crucified One as yielded King, whose kingdom is not of this world, must begin to find ways to open a conversation, speak a different way, articulate a faith that lives in communion, not in conflict, with others.

How many of you have been to a funeral where the officiating clergy and eulogists described a person so perfect, so astounding in every way that the image being created of the dearly departed bore no resemblance whatsoever to the living, breathing, deeply flawed human being whose life you had come to honor? Hearing such a eulogy, did you feel surprised? Cheated of your more complicated, nuanced memories?  Robbed of the chance to grieve what had been left unfinished, unsaid, and imperfect, and feeling slightly guilty that your own view was so, well, ambivalent? Christ the King thinking wants us to practice a faith that is wrapped up, finished, triumphant—if not now, then, well, someday soon, darn it.

Christ the King thinking doesn’t want us to remember that Jesus died, a criminal on a Roman cross, and his followers all ran away and hid, because they were terrified. Christ the King thinking doesn’t want us to look too closely at the Jesus who made a vocation of his association with losers, whores, dishonest professionals, invisible people and failures. And who demanded that his followers do the same. Christ the King thinking would have us believe that a little sacrifice, a tiny bit of time in the trenches, a nod and a wink at the cross, will entitle us to glory evermore in the sweet by-and-by.

Would have us believe that it will all turn out for our side in the end…when we have no reason, really, to believe that that’s the way God will write it. Christ the King presumes the triumphant ending of a story that we have scarcely begun, ourselves, to write with our hearts and our lives. We need to remember the Sunday of Christ the King, if only to admit to ourselves once in a while, that we are ever prone to want our ends neatly tied up, our answers firmly in place, and the successful end of the story understood before we undertake to write it with our lives.

I read a book recently—a story set near the turn of the last century featuring a strong, educated, unmarried woman as its central character. As the story unwound itself, she held romantic interest in two intelligent, successful, professional men. Women of that era were supposed to get married. She was a strong, a likeable, a desirable woman. Whom would she choose? Which one would make her happy? First one man, then the other loomed preeminent. As the final pages turned, the murder was resolved, the supporting characters took their hats and handbags and departed the scene—and still we were not told: where would Louisa’s heart find a home? Astonished, I learned of the departure of her beaux and their continued unmarried status—turned the final pages of the book and read: one last time I breathe deep the sweet scents of fresh-cut grass and thickly laden trees. Then I turn toward home and school—an unassuming, unremarkable woman in a high-collared navy blue dress, a blank slate upon which anyone might write anything whatsoever. ^[1] How much of her “blank slate” had I overwritten with my unexamined expectation that this love story must end with a formula? How much character, what intricate details, what fascinating pathways did I skim right past, because of the formulaic assumptions I made?

It is Christ the King. How many assumptions does our faith in the stories of Jesus cause us to make about the way things will all come out, in the end? How many opportunities are we missing, hurtling past chances with our eyes firmly fixed on a predetermined, glorious destination? How much are we willing to lose of ourselves, in our relationships, by relying on what we know to be true about them, about us, using all our energy to ignore or explain away evidence that does not support our presumed verdict?

How much more satisfying, in the end, to view our lives as an Advent—a time of coming and becoming—in which, in company with the humble mystery that was Jesus of Nazareth, we walk a path toward God as blank slates upon which the Spirit of God, and we, God’s children, might write anything whatsoever. Amen.

^[1] City of Lights