Christ the King Sunday 21 November 2021
((Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14 Psalm 93 Revelation 1:48 John 18:33-37)
“Provoking One another To Love!”
In the South there is a saying that, when a sermon hits home with particular power, you’ve gone from “preaching” to “meddling;” or another word to use is “interfering.” In the Letter to the Hebrews (which the Wednesday Bible study just finished), Chapter 10:24, the writer says, “Let us consider how to provoke one another to love.”
Today, on Christ the King Sunday, I guess what I’m saying is that I’d like to meddle in your lives this morning. I’d like to interfere a tad. I’d like to irritate you a bit. I want to go from mere preaching to prolific provoking—all about love!
Let me begin! Once upon a time, we all believed in God, and it was really easy to do so! Even if the God we believed in was slightly different from someone else’s, we still all believed. We believed in God, and it didn’t take much effort.
Today that has all changed! Today it is harder to believe, I think, more difficult to hold on to faith, and nearly impossible to embrace religion with un-jaded simplicity. We live in a time when it can feel as if everything religious is in a food processor, churning together—and I am aware how the faith of many individuals has become endangered.
In 1882 Friedrich Nietzsche published a parable called The Madman. In this parable, a man comes into a village on a bright, sunny morning crying out, “I seek God! I want to find God!” The villagers begin to laugh and mock him; and then he finally screams out, “God is dead! We have killed God!”
Although Nietzsche is often looked upon with distain, the reality is that at that time he was simply reflecting what he saw as hypocrisy from the vast majority of people in Europe who saw themselves as Christian, attended church each weekend, but were not living the lives they professed they were living. It was a kind of sedated belief in Jesus.
Only in 1966, when Time magazine put this controversial question on what is now it most famous cover—Is God dead?—did what seemed like the ravings of a madman in the 1880s became a legitimate question in the 1960s.
But let’s jump backward to 1925. It was in that year when Pope Pius XI, recognizing that secularism was becoming a destructive force in the modern world, established this festival of Christ the King. The initial purpose of this festival was simple and clear: to redirect what seemed to be the mis-guided direction of humankind at that time, specifically when Christianity seemed sedated, numb and asleep!
On this Christ the King Sunday, I want us to hear the cry, not that “God is dead,” but that Christ is very much alive, his power coming from his throne of the cross.
In today’s Gospel, we hear Pilate asking two questions of Jesus. Most often the first question gets the most attention, “Are you the King of the Jews?” That certainly is one way to ask the central question of today’s Gospel. But for me, Pilate’s second question, “What have you done?” I believe, gets to the heart of what today is all about.
This second question invites us to recall the whole of the Gospel story: the disciples walking to Emmaus; Peter baptizing 5000, preaching to Cornelius; how God was with Jesus as Jesus walked among the people healing all those oppressed.
It is just that simple. What have you done? Jesus had simply gone about doing good, and the only way Jesus could explain it to Pilate was to say, “My Kingdom is not of this world!”
Jesus didn’t try to get Pilate to understand what it meant to have a Kingdom like a mustard seed, a treasure hidden in a field, a fine pearl, a net thrown into the sea. Jesus didn’t try to get Pilate to understand a Kingdom where a master hands his fortune over to the care of his servants, or a farmer plagued by enemies so jealous that they sow weeds among the wheat.
None of this could make sense to Pilate. Its driving power is metanoia, the Greek word describing how people are turned inside out, pushing us toward the Kingdom Jesus brought to earth.
In Christ’s Kingdom, people trust the insight of widowed mothers and beggars to explain how the financial system really works! In Christ’s Kingdom, people look to migrants and refugees to understand the true character of nations! In Christ’s Kingdom, we learn from the wounded and the outcast to understand what true religion is!
Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, when describing her work for justice, wrote, “We are still trying to create a new heaven and a new earth wherein justice will dwell; and how a revolution of love, instead of an insurrection of hate will make this happen!” This community which Dorothy Day founded and in which she worked tirelessly, she called a laboratory of love. It ‘s the place where we learn what love is all about and where we keep trying to live Christian love in our life together.
I love that image! I love to think of this congregation, this faith community, as a laboratory of love, a place where we are still perfecting the outcome, a placethat displaces hate, creating a world “where justice will dwell.”
I want to believe today that weak, watered-down Christianity can become rich and robust.
I want to believe that we will soon be able to let go of the anti-intellectual, doom-oriented, ticket-to-heaven, and hyper-individualized understanding of who we are that too often becomes our mis-guided version of Christianity.
I believe when we work at it together, we are able to let go of political agendas, cultural assumptions, distorted doctrines, cheap cynicism and crude mockery that only meet our own desires, but distort the Biblical image of Christ.
I want us to believe that God is not dead—and that our faith, which has been challenged and severely tested these past two years, is ready to be enlivened with delicate determination and gentle patience.
So . . . . . I hope I’ve meddled a bit in your faith this morning;because, I believe, right here, together we can create a laboratory of love!
If you believe it too, then let’s hear an “Amen.” Thanks be to God!
Sermons at St. James Gettysburg 