Is This Your King?—A Sermon on the Reign of Christ

Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

It is good to see you. The return after Thanksgiving usually feels like we’ve been apart a while, but this time it’s particularly odd. I was away a few weeks ago, and then the fire and the smoke closed campus and kept us indoors and apart. It is always good to see you, but tonight, it is especially good to see you.

I have been thinking for the last several weeks now about the gift of community, and how precious it is to be able to gather. People all over California have lost their homes, workplaces, and places of worship in these fires. We are blessed to be gathered here tonight, and it’s important to acknowledge that fragility.

Before Thanksgiving, I traveled to El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico with other pastors from around the southwest. We met people on both sides of the border whose lives are perched so precariously. Families with mixed documentation statuses, where some are US citizens and some are not, are so vulnerable.

As I listened to their stories, I thought about all of you, and whether you’re able to celebrate holidays with your families or not, for whatever reasons. I know that none of you have the same story, all of you come from different families and have different capacity to be with those families in the flesh. I pray for the reunification of your families in this life, as much as possible, and most certainly in the next.

On Sunday, US Customs and Border Patrol agents in San Ysidro, CA, fired tear gas across the border at families attempting to present for asylum. The “migrant caravan” you’ve perhaps heard about? Many of them have arrived in Tijuana and are hoping to make their way into California, soon.

My heart breaks for these people, who have survived horrific conditions with their children, decided to make the dangerous trek toward the mere hope of a safer future, and are met with violence. I am not sure, right now, what we’ll do about this, as a community. But I want to know what you want to do about it. How do you want to counteract that violence? Let’s wonder about that.

The celebration in the church this week is of “Christ the King” or the “Reign of Christ.” It’s the final week of the church year. Next week, when the season of Advent begins, we start again. The feast of Christ the King is officially known as the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. It came about in 1925 during the rise of Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator in Italy. Pope Pius XI insisted that supremacy over the universe belonged to Christ alone, not to any earthly leader. Contrary to popular belief in 1925 and in this year of our Lord 2018, no human being deserves our unwavering allegiance—no political leader, no church leader, no celebrity, no king.

The idea of Christ the King is to subvert the idea of kings. No king wields as much power as the God who created the universe. Powerful people should take a look at themselves, have some perspective. It can be all too easy for us, these days, with our incredible technological advancement and our global communications, to think that we are truly the masters of this planet and its inhabitants. Let me be clear—our actions on this earth can have ramifications on a global scale. But we are not all-powerful. We are not God.

When I first had to preach on “Christ the King” during seminary, I was angsty about it. I didn’t know the history of the feast, and I assumed that this was a day to celebrate Jesus as a king, and to glorify earthly kings as being Christlike in their kingliness. That sounds gross, and, fortunately, I was wrong. I did some googles, and found out the truth about this feast. Rather than ascribe Christ-like-ness to kings and rulers and dictators and autocrats and despots, Christ the King reminds us what true leadership looks like. In response to the sin that so easily entangles us in our earthly kingdoms, the feast of Christ the King proclaims that the only, true way to wield power is to wield it like Jesus. To preach good news to the poor, to free the captive, to liberate the oppressed.

Our scripture tonight from 2 Samuel tells us, straight up: “One who rules over people justly, ruling in the fear of God, is like the light of morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land. Is not my house like this with God? For he has made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things and secure” (2 Samuel 23:3-5).

Do any of you watch The Good Place? Okay, so, I just started watching season 1, because I am uncool and late to every party, but there is a totally excellent spoiler-free piece of the show that I find so, so, excellent. Eleanor goes into one of her neighborhood’s many fro-yo shops, and there are a bunch of new flavors. One of them, which she tries, is called “full phone battery,” and tasting it makes her feel relaxed and free. Another patron orders “folded laundry” which I presume tastes like accomplishment, comfort, and readiness. This is what I think we’re being invited to imagine in this Samuel text.

Imagine fro-yo, I suppose, that tastes like the light of morning, the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land. What does that feel like? Peace, comfort, rest, tranquility, security, safety. These are the feelings we have when we remember that we are in the care of God. Good leadership, true kingship, does not make us afraid, or anxious, or hateful, or spiteful of others.

We have seen, in the world around us at present and in our history, the ease with which “good people” ignore the growing terribleness around us, because it feels too big to topple. We have to remember what we do have control over. What are our own little “kingdoms” made of?

When you are in a position of leadership and power, notice how you use that. Notice how you engage with your peers, your classmates, your coworkers, your roommates, your partners, your neighbors. Notice how you engage with people who work in the service industry; notice how you engage with children; notice how you engage with people you are supervising, organizing, teaching, or otherwise leading. Who do you take your cues from? Kings of this earth, or Christ the King?

We do not have the immense power of our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. But as children of God, as the baptized, as the priesthood of all believers, we are co-conspirators in the work of the gospel. We are able to recognize the kingship of Jesus over any earthly leader, and to hold every leader—our family members, our employers, our teachers, our pastors—accountable for how we speak about the powerful and the powerless, for how we act as power-brokers.

I hope that this feels freeing to you. You are free, as a child of God, from the compulsion to capitulate to earthly powers. You know the truth, and the truth has set you free. You know that true power and true glory is not of this world. You know that Christ is King. Any person who tries to convince you that they bear the real truth, that they wield the real power, that they have the real control, is wrong. You do not need to be seduced by empty earthly promises. You know that no leader can save the world, no matter how they boast. No matter how many people shout their support for that person in an arena.

As we transition into the Advent season next week, we’ll remember that a light shines in the darkness, and that the darkness has not overcome it. We’ll anticipate the birth of the Christ child and the return of Christ as King. Our world will get whipped into a capitalist frenzy in the coming weeks, and we will have the opportunity to speak into that void. Just like Christ the King is not about what the world might think it is about it, Christmas, too, is a subversion of power.

The season of Advent is a time for peace and quiet, for hopeful expectation, for joyful recognition of a changing world. We don’t get to spend as much of Advent together as I would design, but we’ll be here as long as you’re here, waiting patiently for the world to change.

Jesus the Christ, King of the Universe, will come into the world as a tiny and vulnerable baby. The child of refugees, fleeing one oppressive regime for another. From the absolute humblest of beginnings, God will enter into our world to show us what true power and true glory look like. Stay tuned.

Who's Got the Power?—A Sermon on Servants and Tyrants

Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

This week’s scripture has some big picture things going on. The text from Job is such a powerful one, but it is a little bit confusing. To make a very long and interesting story fairly short, Job is deeply upset, because his whole life and livelihood have been torn to pieces. He has some friends that are trying to help him reason out this situation, but mostly they are not helping, because they keep talking about how great God is, and how Job must have done something terrible to deserve this. There are several chapters in a row of Job’s friends telling Job to get it together, because God is so great, and there is no way that all the bad things that have happened to Job are a coincidence. Thanks, friends.

So then, in our text for tonight, we hear from God, who is, shall we say, perturbed, that Job and his friends seem to know so much about how the world works and what God does and why. Essentially, God is calling them out. “If you’re so smart, tell me, how does it all work? How was the earth created?” I don’t often imagine God making snide remarks, but this is just so egregious.

You’re familiar with the concept of mansplaining or whitesplaining—when men explain things to women about women that women already know, or when white folks explain race-related things to people of color that they already know—Job’s friends are, shall we say, humansplaining? They’re putting words in God’s mouth and ascribing motive to God’s actions. And God is over it. God goes on for two more chapters after this, listing all of God’s accomplishments that Job and his friends should have to answer for. In chapter 40 God finishes with, “Anyone who argues with God must respond.” Which is basically God-speak for “How do you like them apples?”

God, in this story, reminds Job and his friends of the awesome power that God wields. The power of God is far more than the power of any individual human, no matter what we might think.

We had a jam-packed day of work today, and last night I imagined running out of time to finish this sermon. I thought about what I would say if it came down to not being prepared to preach. And then I thought, if there’s such an obvious important message to blurt out, why don’t I just say that in the first place? Pastors get in our own way sometimes.

So here it is: The world is full of people fighting for power, and we are called as Christians to hold powerful people accountable.

Power, definitionally, is the ability to act or to influence the action of others. As children, we learn that we have the power to make choices, and that our choices affect other people. We go to school to learn what we’ll need to know to be equipped to work in our chosen field, in order to have more ability to choose. We apply for jobs that will allow us to better wield the power we have, and perhaps provide us new power.

For as long as people have lived in community, we have struggled to order those communities and decide who gets to make what choices. As you make your way in the world, you exercise power every day, making choices and interacting with people who have more power than you do or less power than you do. It is very easy for us to be lured into holding power over other people, because we enjoy having control over ourselves and our environments. We can, and do, get carried away.

Jesus’ disciples paved that way for us. James and John, in this story, are thinking ahead to when Jesus eventually sits on the throne of Israel. This is what they anticipate will happen, though we who know the story know that his “glory” is the way of the cross, not the way of kings. So they come to Jesus with the audacity to say, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” And then they ask, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory” (Mark 10:35, 37).

Henry H. Mitchell, a preaching professor, wrote that James and John want Jesus “to promise them a special seat of honor at the end of their services as his faithful followers. They wanted to choose and guarantee their reward in advance. Jesus’ response makes it plain that we were given this life for the purpose of engaging in service, for which there would be no immediate or predictable recompense.” [1]

Jesus says, “whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant” (Mark 10:43).  James and John were asking to be made the next-most-important people after Jesus (...👀…) and instead, Jesus says that true greatness comes from service. This was as countercultural then as it is now.

Beloved siblings in Christ: pay attention to who holds power, who is grasping for power, and how power is transferred.

Next Wednesday, we’ll celebrate the 501st anniversary of Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation. The Reformation exposed abuse of power and hoped for a diffusion of power. We’ll also commemorate All Saints Day and All Souls Day, the Church’s annual remembrances of all those we love who have died. The following week, our nation will head to the polls for the General Election. All of these events in succession should invite us to reflect on human community and power, generation after generation, and how we use the power we have to do good in the world.

We are called, as the Body of Christ, to serve, rather than to be served. What does that call us to do, here and now? Who does that call us to serve? Are the people who lead us—on campus, in our community, at our jobs, in elected office—are the people who lead us Servant Leaders? Or are they tyrants? When we hold power—on campus, in our community, at our jobs, in elected office—are we Servant Leaders? Or are we tyrants?

Taking it all the way back to our good friend Job, let us remember that God is our greatest example of power. God the Creator called life into being. God came among us as one of us in the person of Jesus, speaking truth to earthly power. God the Holy Spirit breathes in us, empowering us.

The same God who laid the foundation of the earth and determined its measurements laid the foundation for your life. The same God whose voice brings forth lightning, who calls forth floods, brought you into being and calls you forth into life. The same God who has the wisdom to number the clouds has the wisdom to number the hairs on your head. The same God who provides for all of creation provides for you.

Over the weekend, a memo from the United States Department of Health and Human Services made national news. This memo explained their effort to “adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined ‘on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.’ The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with.” This is not Servant Leadership. This is abuse of power.

The God who created you—your body, your heart, your mind, your spirit—created you perfectly.  God created you male or female or nonbinary or trans in God’s own image. Your gender identity and expression are good and wonderful, whatever they are. Your way of moving through the world in the body you have is good. If you need to change your body in order to more fully live in it, do that. If you feel pressured to change your body by the expectations of the powerful in this world, know that I am praying for your strength to stay true to yourself. If part of the way God created you is with chronic pain, or mental illness, or a disability, you are already holy and whole just as you are.

As members of the Body of Christ, diversity is our strength. The family of God is not complete without all our siblings.

It is not the vulnerable among us but the powerful among us who need to change. James and John asked Jesus to “save them a seat” close to the powerful. They were asking the wrong question. What they really needed was a seat at the table. Here, at God’s table, there’s always a seat for you. In a few minutes, I’ll tell you “come to the table, for all is now ready, and it is Christ who does the inviting.” You maybe don’t even notice that I say that, because I say it every time and it’s just part of the thing. But I say it as a reminder not only to you but to myself. It is not up to me to exclude people from this table. It is God, who created the universe and each of us in it, who invites you into relationship. God invites you to be who you are, whoever you are, here. Amen.

____

[1] Henry H. Mitchell, “Proper 24” in Preaching God’s Transforming Justice: Year B, 453.

Dust and Stardust—A Sermon on John 3:16 and Dr. Stephen Hawking

Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you always.

Every once in a while, I have most of a sermon written—or even am totally done—and then something happens in the world and it just has to get put into my sermon, because I would be remiss to ignore its importance, or it just slides right into place with the texts, even better than what I had written before. Today, that happened twice.

This morning, students all across the United States walked out of their classrooms to protest a whole host of things. Many of them, inspired by the work of their peers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, FL, were raising their voices about gun violence in their schools. There were organized walkouts on university campuses, high schools, middle schools, and even elementary schools. I saw images and video of fifth graders who organized themselves in orange t-shirts.

These kids—truly, children—are out here, trying to change the world. I am so impressed by them. And I don’t know which of them believe what about politics or about God or anything else, but I know that God hears them. I know that God sees their pain and their fear, and hears their cries for justice. The next steps will revolve around if we—the adults who love them—do our part, too. These kids did small things, and they did big things. Just like we all do, day in and day out. We show the world who we are by how we live our lives.

It may not seem as important, especially because I don’t think any of you are studying physics...but you probably heard that renowned physicist Stephen Hawking died early this morning at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76 years old, and lived with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—ALS—diagnosed when he was 21. His doctors gave him a prognosis of about two years, and he lived for 55, instead. He lived an incredible life, and it is important to note that he did not achieve scientific greatness “in spite of” his physical abilities. He was a genius, and his body couldn’t do the things he wanted it to. But his mind could.

According to his BBC obituary, Dr. Hawking was “renowned for his extraordinary capacity to visualise scientific solutions without calculation or experiment. But it was perhaps his ‘theory of everything’, suggesting that the universe evolves according to well-defined laws, that attracted most attention. ‘This complete set of laws can give us the answers to questions like how did the universe begin,’ he said. ‘Where is it going and will it have an end? If so, how will it end?’”

Dr. Hawking asked big questions. And he is not the only one. You wonder about things like this every once in a while, I’d imagine. Humans have wondered about the origins of the universe from our very beginning—it’s why all of cultures have creation myths, including the stories in our own scripture. His commitment to investigating as widely and deeply as he could is admirable, and even we aren’t physicists, Dr. Hawking taught us a lot.

Sometimes, when famous people die, we want to celebrate them and gloss over anything unseemly in their life story, because they’re not around to defend themselves. But we know that, just like every other human person, Stephen Hawking was a saint and a sinner. Dr. Hawking himself might have resented that classification, because he was a devout atheist. His studies into the expanses of the universe did not lead him to believe in a gracious Creator. And not that anybody asked, but that’s okay with me. I don’t use physics to determine if God exists, either.

One of my favorite authors, a different kind of genius, is John Green. Do you know him? He wrote The Fault in Our Stars, most famously, and a ton of other Young Adult fiction. He is also an Episcopalian! He considered becoming a priest, and did a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, like Pastor Jocelynn and I both did in seminary, where potential future ministers serve as hospital chaplains for a summer or a semester. During his unit of CPE, he met a young girl with cancer who inspired the character of Hazel Grace Lancaster from TFIOS. I digress.

One of my favorite things that John Green has ever said—and he has said a lot of things—is that whether or not God exists is perhaps the least interesting question you can ask about God. [I tried to find the source for this but couldn’t because he has made like 700 videos about approximately this and I could not weed through them all in a remotely timely manner.]

It’s a yes or no question, and it doesn’t take you anywhere. It’s just yes, or no. So, instead of asking that question, I prefer to talk more about who we are and what we do because we believe that God exists—or we’re pretty sure, or we don’t really know but we’re not comfortable saying for sure no, because we can’t for sure know that God doesn’t exist either.

We’re here in this chapel together tonight because we are wondering, at some level, about who we are and whose we are and why. It is my duty and my joy to remind you that you are a beloved child of the God who created you. If you’re not confident about that all day every day, that’s okay. I am, on your behalf.

Why have we gone down this particular path today? Because the Gospel assigned for this week contains the most famous line in perhaps the whole Bible, but certainly the New Testament—John 3:16. Did you recognize it when I was reading? “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” You’ve seen it everywhere, right? On a bookmark, tattooed on someone, on a t shirt, on a poster at a professional sports game, on the sign that one of the yelling street preacher guys by the MU is carrying...it’s out there.

Sometimes it can be difficult to preach a sermon on something that has so much popular use. We all sort of have an idea about what the meaning of these words are, and that contributes a lot to how we hear them in this context. My friend and colleague Kim Gonia mentioned that in the sermon she preached on Sunday. She said that “The popular understanding” of this verse “revolves around our need to believe, and specifically our need to believe that God sent Jesus, [God’s] only and loved Son, to the world as a sacrifice so that we might have eternal life, which to most people means, go to heaven.”

But just like any other cherry-picked Bible verse, “The reality is that John 3:16 does not stand alone. It is part of the longer, more nuanced story of a people wondering what the accounts and memories of Jesus’ ministry meant for them. What they revealed about God, and about their hope for the future.” [Pastor Kim again]

Just like you and like me and like everyone who has lived since then—including Dr. Hawking—the person (or people) who wrote this Gospel had questions about the meaning of life and death and the universe. They had heard the stories of this man, Jesus, and his work to bring about the kingdom of God. They had seen God active in their own communities, through the people they knew and loved. They had not seen Jesus’ life and death and resurrection with their own eyes—just like we have not—but they knew there was something true there.

When we focus on John 3:16 as an admonishment to “believe—or else” we miss the whole part about what God did and does. Our reading from the letter to the Ephesians tells us exactly what’s up! “By grace you have been saved, through faith; and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works” (Eph 2:8-9). That makes my little Lutheran heart sing.

And then John 3:17—the significantly less popular verse that follows the famous one—tells us that God did not come into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world. And do not skip over the part where God came into our world! God created the galaxies, the stars, the asteroids, the nebulas, the planets, the moons, and even the black holes that Dr. Hawking demystified. That very same God lived a whole human life, here in the dust with us.

Online this morning, folks were noting the cosmic nature of this date of Dr. Hawkings’ death. It’s “pi day” 3.14, the first three digits of pi, March 14th, haha. And 300 years ago, today, famous astronomer Galileo Galilei also died. And on this date in 1879, famous physicist Albert Einstein was born. Perhaps life and death in this universe is slightly more intentional than we think. It is worth noting, to me, that Dr. Hawking died during the season of Lent. Do you remember on Ash Wednesday, just four weeks ago, when I reminded you that you are made of dust, and to dust you shall return? And that I blessed you with words from my colleague Emily, who says that we are dust and stardust, and to the cosmos we shall return. Dr. Hawking didn’t believe that there was a heaven to go to, but, atomically, he is certainly returning to the cosmos from whence he came.

The universe is immense, and so is the God who created it. Our lives on this fragile earth, our island home, are very small. But God loves this world. God loves you. God loves Dr. Hawking, and Galileo, and Einstein, too. God loves. Amen.