November 22, 2009            Christ the King Sunday

Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14
Psalm 93
Rev. 1:4b-8
Jn. 18:33-37 [38b]
Next Sunday we begin a new church year with the season of Advent.   Today, this
last Sunday in the church year, we celebrate the kingship of Christ, the sovereignty of our Lord over all other rulers and over time itself.  And we also look with expectation and active waiting for the coming of Christ, that he may be all in all.

This large, expansive way of thinking requires us to step into a different realm of reality,  a place where using language like “the one who is and was and is to come, all in all, glory and dominion, forever and ever” doesn’t feel strange, but necessary.  We live most of our lives in a much more time-bound place.  In fact, many of us are already anxious about our Thanksgiving and Christmas schedules, or the coming end of the semester, so right now we’re particularly conscious of the constraints of time. And we’re especially conscious that time is passing quickly — that there’s not enough of it to get everything done.
So I ask you to quiet your souls and listen again to the greeting we heard in our second lesson from John of Patmos.  “Grace to you and peace from the one who is and who was and who is to come . . . . to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.”  I ask you for during this brief moment in the presence of God and of one another to acknowledge how limited our usual ideas of time and power and ruling influence really are.

This last Sunday is not the apex of the church year  — Easter rightly takes that honored place — but it does offer us a chance to ponder the events of the past year and our own lives in light of the sovereignty of Christ.  We are offered the chance to notice what actually rules our lives.  And to ask what would change if Christ was indeed our sovereign, was all-in-all for us.

One last word about this festival of Christ the King.  By the standards of church history this festival Sunday is quite recent, dating back only to 1925 when Pius XI instituted it in order for the church to bear stronger witness to the sovereignty of Christ against the destructive powers that already had been unleashed in the first quarter of the 20th century.  At least part of its purpose was to remind Christians who their true Lord is.  The Festival was inaugurated after a terrible and tragic world war, a war that was supposed to end all war.  We can’t help but note how much blood has been spilled since 1925, how power in its most murderous form has been visited upon God’s children everywhere, and how much we as the church of Jesus Christ have failed in our fealty to Christ, who was, is, and will be a king like no other.

It may be that we stand with Pilate 364 out of 365 days a year rather than with Jesus.  That we most often stand with the powers of earth rather than with the powers of heaven.  That we live as if we trust the way of this world much more than we trust the way of Jesus.  That we ask along with Pilate (when we even bother to think about who Jesus is and what he means for us), “Are you actually a king?”
And that Jesus levels his gaze at us and steadily responds, “Are you saying that  on your own or are you just repeating what somebody told you?  Is that a question you really want an answer to or are you using that question to discount me, to twist what I say when you meet your cohorts over coffee or host a talk show or run for higher office or step out of here to confront that mob waiting for a judgment?
Do you care about the truth or do you care more about what people want to hear?
Does doing what is right rule you or does doing what seems politically expedient rule you?”

Of course, Jesus didn’t say all of that to Pilate or to us, at least in words,
but what he did say troubled Pilate greatly and should also trouble us.

Because Jesus is a king like no other king.  A power like no worldly power — who entered this world so that things might be right “on earth as they are in heaven.”  He cast his lot with this world, for the sake of the world, even as he witnessed to such a different kind of power than the world understood, even when he was subjected to and condemned by those who had such earthly power.  In his powerlessness before them, he unnerved them.  With his nonviolence rather than with his violent revolutionaries or mighty armies, he unsettled them.  With his steady gaze and questions that went to the heart of the matter, he turned the tables on the powerful and their expectations — perhaps not immediately, but as his words rolled around in the caverns of their hearts, as well as in the hearts of the poor, and would not be stilled.

In John’s gospel, rich in drama and crafted with great skill, we have Jesus,
always aware that he came from the Father and will return, intent to act according to the will of God.  Jesus is always in control, yet somehow not a controlling person.  All is done according to God’s purpose, yet always through the ordinary events of history.  In the trial of Jesus, in which we overhear the short but key exchange between Jesus and Pilate, it becomes clear who is in charge and in fact who is on trial.  Jesus is the centering, anchoring image, while all others seem to be pushed off their course, as if from some buffeting wind.

The earthly purpose of power is to overcome resistance and to dominate.  To have an irresistible effect upon others so that they will bend to your will.  To have the power to determine the circumstances of  others’ life and death. Pilate surely saw that, despite the fact that his political office gave him power over Jesus’ life and death, he himself was being dominated by the will of those calling for Jesus’ execution.  And against his better judgment as a ruler empowered to make such decisions, he gave into the demands of the crowd.

Now here’s the good news:  Jesus was not overcome and was never dominated by such earthly power.  His power resided in something else, something deeper, something stronger.  That power was and is and ever shall be.  It was at our beginning and will be at our ending.  It was before us and will be after us.  It is what lasts beyond the earthly empires, their armies and their and rulers that rise and fall, beyond the company that tries to suck every last breath of life from you, beyond the criminal or terrorist that overcomes you by force, beyond the autocratic boss or parent or teacher who discounts you or takes advantage of you in order to feel more powerful,  beyond the oppression of peers who tell you in subtle and not so subtle ways that you are nothing, beyond every way that people try to hold power OVER others.

There is nothing clearer about Jesus than that this dominating kind of power was not what he was about.  We slip into the language of might on days like Christ the King Sunday, when we want to lift up the reality of God in Christ ruling over all of time and creation, but that’s because we are simply trying to say that God’s overwhelming love trumps the world’s overwhelming force and we don’t quite know how to say that without relying on images of earthly power and ascribing them instead to Christ.  Our desire is to say to Christ, “You rule!”– You, and not any other king or queen, not any other caesar, any other president, any other prime minister, and surely not any dictator.

And so, as limited as our language is, we may best proclaim this not with words but by our actions.  By our freedom from dominating powers and helping others also to resist them without resorting to violence.  By trusting in persuasive non-coercive love that can still be firm and honest.  By being wise as serpents and innocent as doves — that is, knowing the way the world works, but not succumbing to the temptation to use dominance to get to our goal.  By trusting and living as if we believe Bishop Desmond Tutu’s apt understanding in the midst of an oppressive South African government: “Goodness is stronger than evil; love is stronger than hate.  Light is stronger than darkness; life is stronger than death.  Victory is ours through God who loves us.”

May it be so for us.  Amen.