Tag Archives: King

Love complicates things (3rd Sunday after Pentecost)

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Readings (Track 1)

In the middle of Jesus’ argument with the scribes he tells this short parable: “But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.” Plunder: that’s an intriguing image for what Jesus is about. For what God’s about, for that matter. The Exodus: plunder on a national scale. The mob stirred up by Paul and Silas’ presence in Thessalonica didn’t get it entirely wrong: “These people who have been turning the world upside down have come here also” (Acts 17:6). No wonder Paul’s regularly in trouble—as we heard in our second reading.

But it’s not plunder for the sake of plunder (“My pile of loot’s bigger than yours!”), but, whether at the Exodus or in Galilee, for human freedom, restoring it so that it can be used well. Pulling back the camera to take in all of Mark’s Gospel, whether in the exorcisms, the healings, the conversations or the proclamation, that plundering is about restoring human freedom and encouraging us humans to use it well. The first thing out of Jesus’ mouth in that Gospel: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (1:15).

The kingdom/reign of God, with two divine desires in play: that we be free, that we choose well. Either one of these would be easy to fulfill; both—that quickly gets complicated. Consider our first reading from Samuel’s time, a few centuries after the Exodus. The people have repeatedly used their freedom badly, and now they want a human king. A king: they’d celebrated the Lord as their king back at the Exodus (Exodus 15:18). But now, no, a human king “so that we also may be like other nations.” If God’s desire were simply that the people choose well, well, so much for freedom: no human king. But God desires both that they be free and that they choose well. So God tells Samuel to give the people what they want; we’ll do it the hard way.

That’s a pretty good illustration of God’s love. God loves us too much either to compromise our freedom or to stop caring about our choices. Love—as any parent knows—complicates things. God can bring good out of our bad choices (the king is the template for the Messiah), but the price is high (“King of the Jews” was the sign on Jesus’ cross).

Does God always get what God wants? Since what God wants is that we be free and that we choose well, the answer is pretty clearly no. (That’s one of the main reasons why the Bible is a lengthy book!) And one of the recurrent challenges in worshipping this God is to respect both of these divine desires. If we think the people are choosing badly is their freedom really all that important?

Bad choices bring death. Adam and Eve choose badly in Genesis chapter 3; only one of their sons (Cain and Abel) is alive by the end of chapter 4. Death ends the story; death ends all stories. In the psalms one of the most frequent arguments the psalmists make for deliverance: rescue me, because in Hades no one praises you; that’s the lose-lose option. Shakespeare nails it in MacBeth:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

So if there were ever a game-changer, it’s Jesus’ resurrection (the motor for Paul’s reflections in our second reading). Death isn’t the end. Jesus’ transformed body grounds our hope for a similarly transformed body, “an eternal weight of glory,” as Paul put it.

How to tie this together? At least three ways come to mind. “God desires our freedom and that we use it well.” That, of course, is only one of many ways we might summarize what God’s up to. But play with it; wonder how it might serve to guide our outreach budget and activities.

Second. God desires our freedom and that we use it well. Because neither desire is negotiable God’s history with us is as messy as it is (recall, again, Holy Week) and Mick Jagger’s “You can’t always get what you want” turns out to apply to God as well. So we don’t know how all this will play out in the end. Will all be saved? We do know that it comes down to a fairly simple question: is my character such that I’d enjoy spending eternity with this God who keeps making hard choices and who loves my enemies as much as me?

In this respect heaven and hell reflect who we are. Recall that old analogy: a large banquet hall, the tables loaded. The complication is that our arms no longer bend at the elbows. At some tables, despair: despite increasingly acrobatic strategies no one can feed themselves. At other tables, delight: everyone feeding their neighbor.

A third way of tying this together: C. S. Lewis’ luminous sermon “The Weight of Glory” that draws on our second reading. After imagining what this weight of glory might mean, he pivots:

…it may be asked what practical use there is in the speculations which I have been indulging. I can think of at least one such use. It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour.… It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.…There are no ordinary people.

God, in love, desires our freedom and that we use it well, for our choices really matter. That doesn’t make it easy for God or for us. Easy, apparently, is not the point.

Christ the King: A Sermon

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Readings (Track 1)

Today is the Sunday before Advent, now known as the Feast of Christ the King. This feast is a recent addition to the Church Year: in 1925 Pope Pius XI proclaimed it for the last Sunday in October, and the calendar reforms of Vatican II moved it to the last Sunday before Advent. So we’re just following a Roman innovation?

Not entirely. In both the English Book of Common Prayer (1662) and our 1928 edition the texts assigned for the Sunday before Advent were Jeremiah 23.5-8, a prophecy regarding the coming Messiah (King), and John 6.5-14, Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand, which ends with the crowd wanting to make Jesus king on the spot. So already our lessons were pointing in the direction of Christ the King. Nudged by the Romans we’re naming an already-existing reality.

But just what are we doing when we celebrate Christ the King? Pope Pius XI is quite clear about his intentions in 1925. The feast will remind Christians and non-Christians alike of Christ’s spiritual and civil authority, and, specifically, check rising anti-clericalism: “The right which the Church has from Christ himself, to teach mankind, to make laws, to govern peoples in all that pertains to their eternal salvation, that right was denied.” The Pope is probably in part responding to the then current crisis in Mexico, in which President Callas is enforcing the provisions of the 1917 Constitution, which among other things outlawed monastic orders, prohibited religious organizations from owning property, and took away the right to vote from clergy. In this context “Christ the King” is a clear shot across the bow of secular governments —probably Mexico’s in particular. Certainly many Mexican priests, monks and nuns went to their martyrdom with Viva Cristo Rey on their lips. So “Christ the King” is not a bad moment to remember the many Christians who suffer for their confession of Christ the King around the world and in this country.

As a cleric, any effort to combat anti-clericalism sounds like a Good Thing. Nevertheless, there is more than a whiff of Madison Avenue in the Pius’ encyclical: promote Christ, and some of the glory will rub off on the clergy. Just how this fits with Jesus’ “My kingdom is not from this world” isn’t obvious!

So, let’s go back to the texts we heard this morning and wonder what they might want to tell us, whatever we call this Sunday.

Our first reading, David’s oracle, does sound like a self-serving bit of political propaganda: God has made an everlasting covenant with my dynasty. Nevertheless, David gets at least one thing right in the third verse: “One who rules over people justly, ruling in the fear of God…” The king, no less than the most humble commoner, is accountable to justice and the fear of God.

What justice and the fear of God mean comes through more clearly in our psalm: “If your children keep my covenant / and my testimonies that I shall teach them, / their children will sit upon your throne for evermore.” What is required of David’s children above all is obedience. Without that, “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” won’t be of much use.

As we begin to see a trajectory in these texts that leads us to Jesus before Pilate in the Gospel, there’s an additional text from the prophet Isaiah that’s important. Speaking to the people the prophet says “Incline your ear, and come to me; / listen, so that you may live. / I will make with you an everlasting covenant, / my steadfast, sure love for David. / See, I made him a witness to the peoples, / a leader and commander for the peoples” (55:3-4). Of all the ways Isaiah could have described David—king, poet, shepherd, etc.—he calls him a witness. And perhaps because he is a witness, he is fit to be leader and commander. Recall that as Israel passed from one pagan empire to another there were periodically times when all that faithful Israelites could do was bear witness, testify to their faith, even when it meant certain martyrdom.

And it is Jesus as witness, as martyr—it is the same word in Greek—that we meet in the lessons from Revelation and John. Jesus Christ “the faithful witness” in the first, “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth” in the second.

The psalm promises an eternal throne to David’s children if they keep the covenant and testimonies; Isaiah and the New Testament texts focus this obligation in terms of the obligation to the truth.

The first thing these texts tell us about Christ the King then is that Christ is the King because Christ himself—in the language of the psalm—keeps the covenant and the testimonies. Christ is obedient. He is fit to be our king because he lives as we are called to live.

Second, these texts remind us that Christ the King was and is Christ the witness to the truth. “Honest” and “politician” are not mutually exclusive categories; one might almost say that Jesus died because he held the two together. Jesus and Pilate typify the alternatives: truth as something that can seriously challenge us, or truth post-“spin.”

Third, Christ’s Kingdom is not defended by the sword. Recall Jesus’ words to Pilate: “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting…” These are words we have had trouble hearing. Early in the fifth century St. Augustine used the words from one of Jesus’ parables (“Compel them to come in”) to mobilize the Empire against those whom the bishops identified as heretics. (Muhammad was born into this world about two hundred years latter, and we are still dealing with the fallout.) Only in the middle of the 17th Century did an exhausted Western Christendom relinquish the sword, and reasonable and enlightened men have insured unbroken peace in Europe since then.

What does it mean for us to celebrate this feast? (This is almost a matter of connecting the dots and then sitting down.) As Jesus’ followers, we’re renewing our commitment to keep the covenant and the testimonies. Since we can’t very well keep what we don’t know, in the middle of busy schedules we make time to read the Bible and to talk to God about what we find there. There are lots of different ways we may do that, but twenty centuries of Christian experience is pretty unanimous in identifying this rhythm (read and pray) as the foundation for any sustainable friendship with God.

And, as Jesus’ followers, we’re renewing our commitment to offer our witness to the truth, both when it is easy and when it is hard. Not too long ago it was easy: society assumed that good people were in church on Sunday morning; all we had to do was open the doors. Today it’s not so easy. Nevertheless, it’s a safe bet that each of us rub shoulders with folk—whether friends, neighbors, acquaintances, strangers with whom we strike up a conversation—for whom it’s true that if they’re going to hear that Jesus brings life, it’ll be us through whom they hear it.

Finally, there’s this business of the sword. We’re in literal compliance with Jesus’ words. Even if we talk of evangelistic crusades, we don’t outfit the ushers with brass knuckles. But here strict literalism is not going to help us: our temptation is not the sword, but the tongue, an even more lethal instrument. Confessing Christ as our King, praying daily for Christ’s Kingdom to come, means scrupulous use of that member, whatever the disagreement.

Before the lessons we prayed “Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule.” We prayed that for all the peoples of the earth; we prayed that for us. As God answers our prayer, may we recognize the answer, and respond with joy.