November 21, 2010

Jeremiah 23:1-6
Psalm 46
Colossians 1:11-20
Luke 23:33-43

The year is 1925, and Pius XI, Bishop of Rome, is deeply alarmed. World War I, the supposed war to end all wars, has been over for only seven-and-a-half years but in the estimation of Pope Pius the seeds of another, even worse conflict are already being sown. Dark and bitter nationalism is rising in country after country. Leaders pander to the increasing desires of their peoples for wealth, power, and world supremacy. And the philosophical moment has crowned the individual person with the imagined right to assert her- or him-self as sovereign over all others. Pius, as the world shall too soon learn, is correct in his assessment of the situation: the lust after earthly power will soon drag the whole world into an unprecedented state of war and chaos. What the Bishop of Rome desires is that all nations and people see in Christ a different sort of power – a different way of being in the world, and so he establishes the Feast of Christ the King, an observance eventually adopted by the Lutheran and Anglican communions as well as by the United Methodist, Presbyterian, and Moravian churches.

In some communities of faith and in some traditions of the Church, this feast day is called, “The Reign of Christ” rather than “Christ the King.” In part, this name change is the result of some discomfort with the term king – a term that for some comes with overtones of macho, sexist power, and with the none-too-subtle odors of privilege, earthly wealth, and hierarchy. But to entirely jettison all king language may be to lose how both Pius and the Christ story offer a radical commentary, a radical reframing of our every notion of glory, power, dominion, and might.

If you found the Gospel reading for the Solemnity – the Feast – of Christ the King totally ironic, you are correct. You would be correct too in observing that the emblem that leads our parades and processions here is neither a national flag nor a cross of triumph – not golden, the color gold denoting earthly wealth, nor bearing a Christ crowned with jewels and wearing the trappings of a mighty monarchy. Instead, simple wood bearing a tortured, dying body. All this – it’s meant to mess with all our ideas of power, honor, glory, wisdom, and might. It’s meant to mess with our notions of kingship.

One of the charisms of Lutheran spirituality, that is to say, one of the gifts the Lutheran tradition brings to the Church Catholic, is our emphasis upon what Martin Luther called the theology of the cross. Martin Luther in his Heidelberg Disputations noted that we cannot behold God in God’s true glory and might apart from the humiliation of Christ’s crucified body hanging upon the cross. It is clear from Scripture, Luther reminds us, that what we hanker after in a God, what we want in a messiah, in a heavenly king is a deity that we can use to assert our own power and might over other people. We each want a deity who will reward the good – you know, us – and who will punish the bad – preferably in this world so that we can see them suffer, but will surely punish those people in the next world and for all eternity. We want a deity who blesses our nation and our way of life above all others – never mind who else suffers in the process. We want a god who grants free will unto us and all creation but who, at the same time, if the right people or enough people say the right prayers in the right fashion, will not only steer hurricanes, tornadoes, and inconvenient snow storms away from us but who will also be powerfully in charge of all the minutiae of life from the functioning of our mitochondria and DNA to whether the car skids on a patch of black ice. That’s what we want in a god – but it’s not the God whom Christ, the true image of the invisible God, reveals. Instead we get a God who refuses to make one group of people victorious over another group of people. We get not a punishing god, but the God who, dying upon the cross forgives those who murder him – the God who promises an insurrectionist, not eternal damnation, nor a time of purgatorial punishment, but Paradise and that very day. We do not get a god who in a last minute special effects tour-de-force flies off the cross and zaps the bad guys – instead we get the God who in a pain-wracked voice pronounces forgiveness upon a world insanely bent on its own destruction. In Christ, we do not get a god who works through the survival of the fittest, but a God who promises that instead the ridiculous impracticality of turning the other cheek is indeed the true way to life beyond the grave.

More than a few of you who are regulars in this community have spoken to me of your discomfort over some of the words in the Nicene Creed, traditionally used with the Eucharistic liturgy; you speak the discomfort than many others also feel when saying he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end. “Creepy. Frightening. Devoid of grace,” you say to me. And if we say those words in any other context than from beneath the cross – you are right. It is catholic teaching – that is, the church’s teaching from scripture that transcends particular times, places, and every trendiness of thought and culture – a teaching emphasized by Luther – that the glory in which Christ comes again in judgment – cannot be known apart from the Cross. The throne from which Christ reigns and rules in judgment – it is not made of gold – but of blood-stained wood. In Christ’s hand, neither a sword nor a scepter covered in priceless gems, but a palm branch, the ancient near-eastern symbol of peace. And Christ’s crown? Of thorns, of course. And the judgment of that monarch, that king, from that throne? You know what it is: Forgive them – all of them – even the most murderous of thugs. No hell, no fire, no brimstone, no vengeance, no lightning, no thunder – only the declaration made by Christ on Calvary to the insurrectionist – the symbol for us all whose enduring sin is that each of us is always trying to be God, to usurp God’s will and in its place establish our will, our power, our own righteousness. But from Christ’s throne we get only the promise spoken to the insurrectionist: Today, you are with me in Paradise.

Pius XI hoped a yearly remembrance of Christ’s odd kingship – in which true power is in the surrender of power, in which the judgment is forgiveness, in which the only vengeance is the promise of peace – Pius hoped such a remembrance would interrupt the world’s headlong rush into tragedy. We know it did not and has not – and we suspect it never will. But that will not deter us. We who follow a different sort of flag, we who bow to the one whose true throne is the cross, we who follow the one whose idea of kingly power is to turn the other cheek and to forgive – we will not be deterred either by history or by our fears of what others will do in the future. Baptized and fed with Christ, we will live already as one day we yet shall fully live – in that Paradise where the lion and lamb and the child will live and play together in peace, where there shall be no more death, where there shall be no more war, where none shall ever again hurt or destroy. And of that peculiar and peaceable kingdom that turns upside down all our notions of kingdom – there shall be no end. Be not deterred from following Christ, your King, for I tell you, all your sins are forgiven and this very day you are already with Him in Paradise forever. AMEN.