I first had the opportunity to preach on Christ the King Sunday during my seminary internship at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Littleton, Colorado, in 2012. It is the Sunday that precedes the season of Advent and is an important commemoration in the life of the Church. In the time since, I have had very few opportunities to preach on this feast, because The Belfry did not have our midweek service the week of Thanksgiving, which is when we often would have observed it.
When I first sat down in 2012 to write that sermon, I was angsty. I didn’t really know what this day meant, and I presumed that it meant that we should see Jesus as a king in the way that we have had kings here on earth for millennia—as power-hungry, imperialist, colonizing, grossly wealthy, disconnected from the reality of the people they tower over. This doesn’t sound like who we know Jesus to be. So I typed out a bunch of stuff about how this was the opposite of the case and that Jesus was unlike any king ever before seen or seen since!
And then I did a few googles about Christ the King Sunday and wouldn’t you know, that is actually the premise.
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 2021, no earthly power deserves our unwavering allegiance—no political leader, no church leader, no celebrity, no king, no idol.
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.
To be clear—our actions on this earth can have ramifications on a global scale. But we are not all-powerful. We are not gods. We are not even kings.
Rather than ascribe Christ-like-ness to kings and rulers and dictators and autocrats and despots, the feast of Christ the King reminds us what true leadership looks like. In response to the sin that so easily entangles us in our earthly kingdoms, on this day the Church 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.
The Solemnity of our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe did not come about because Pope Pius XI thought the Sunday before Advent begins needed a little zhuzhing. This feast was declared in response to the real threat of fascism in the governments of Europe and in the hearts of each of us. A threat that has not diminished.
Some of you have not known me for very long, but those of you who do are perhaps not surprised that I was delighted to be the preacher on this anti-fascist feast.
But the sermon I began to prepare earlier this week is not the sermon I finished writing yesterday.
On Friday morning, a jury in Kenosha, Wisconsin found Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty of the reckless homicide of Joseph Rosenbaum, the intentional homicide of Anthony Huber, nor the reckless endangerment or attempted intentional homicide of three others. [1] I wrote and deleted and wrote and deleted several sentences about this.
Simultaneously, Travis and Gregory McMichael are on trial in Georgia for the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who was out for a run in their neighborhood. There was an altercation, they followed him, and they killed him.
A similar conversation will be had in that jury deliberation, about whether this homicide was justifiable. I wrote and deleted and wrote and deleted several sentences about this.
In slightly better news, Julius Jones’ death sentence was commuted by the governor of Oklahoma at the eleventh hour, after several appeals based on the likelihood of Mr. Jones’ innocence in a 1999 murder, for which he has been imprisoned for half his life.
There is plenty to read and watch about these incidents and these trials, and we shan’t re-litigate them this morning. I wrote and deleted several sentences about these events yesterday because I was processing my own grief. My own weary, unsurprised devastation that, time after time, justice is not truly served.
And there are plenty of sermons and adult forums in me about the abolition of the prison-industrial complex and the idolatry of whiteness and of guns, and we’ll get to those, but it turns out that today is not that day.
Today is a day to remember that when it is injustice that rolls down like water, when we cannot bring ourselves to mourn and rage and grieve and cry again this week, this month, this year about the same thing...our God joins in our weeping. Our God who lived and died among us in a callous world, understands what it is to suffer, and to bear witness to the suffering of others.
On this day when we commemorate the ultimate power of Jesus the Christ, we do the counterintuitive Christian thing of acknowledging the insufficiency of our own power. On another Sunday, I will remind you of all that you have the power to change in the world around you and implore you to take bold action in the name of Christ. But at some point, we do have to grieve.
Feminist author bell hooks wrote that “to be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending.” [2] Our interaction with the world, as people who strive to love God and love our neighbors, will lead us to grief and to sorrow. It will lead us to joy as well, we are assured, but the more we are open to love, the more we are open to grief.
We cannot continue to absorb all of this terror and pretend it is having no effect on us. We have to engage with the world around us in a way that preserves our energy for responding, when we’re able. I am not recommending a head-in-the-sand willful ignorance; neither am I recommending a non-stop doom-scroll through your news apps and social media. Tuning it out does not actually make it go away.
An artist that I love, Nicole Manganelli, says that grief is tidal. [3] It ebbs and it flows and it sometimes feels that we are far from being swept away by it but then suddenly our sandcastle is overwhelmed and everything is soaked and we’re trying to laugh it off but it’s going to be pretty uncomfortable for a while.
We have to notice in our minds and feel in our bodies when we are grieving. That may seem obvious to you, because you’re thinking about mourning and grieving an isolated event, like the death of a loved one. But what about when the grief is not singular, but unending? Over and over and over, it crashes on our shores.
Under normal circumstances, we might share our grief with a friend or a therapist or a clergy person. But what about when they, too, are experiencing grief? What about when everyone is grieving, everything all at once? And it doesn’t stop?
How do we respond to a tidal wave of grief?
You may have heard of the Talmud, which is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism, outside the Torah itself, and predates Jesus by a few centuries. It expounds on the Hebrew Bible and is a source of great, great wisdom. There is a passage in it that I learned in seminary and it comforts me greatly, and I want to share that with you. It’s in reference to famous verses from the prophet Micah. It lacks concrete attribution, but a wise Rabbi once said:
"Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now. Love mercy now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it."
I am going to read it again just in case you missed part of it because I want you to really feel it.
"Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now. Love mercy now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it."
It is not the responsibility of this morning's sermon to wrap up the enormity of the world’s grief with a bow and tell you that it is all going to be okay. I am not in the business of toxic optimism, and neither is the Torah or the Talmud or the Gospel. This week, dear ones, I am daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Many weeks, over the last uh, several years, I have been daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.
The daily grief of living and loving—job loss, death, breakups, diagnoses, struggles, fears—those continue apace in the midst of our national and global crises. We have tried to go about our regular human business while also trying to navigate the dueling traumas of rising sea levels and white supremacy and mass gun violence and political unrest and wildfires and wars and and and…
It is not imperatives to pick up the pace of your personal anti-fascist practice that you require from the pulpit this morning. It is rest. And it is not me who grants you that rest, of course, but it is Jesus the Christ, King of the Universe. In the Gospel According to Matthew, not remotely this morning’s assigned text, Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”
This offer is personal and this offer is collective. Unshoulder your burdens in prayer to your God, unshoulder your burdens in community, work together to unshoulder the enormity of the world’s grief.
Do not expect the powers and principalities of this earth to easily give up their grip. But do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly, in your small corner of the enormous world, knowing that it is Jesus the Christ, King of the Universe, to whom you pledge true allegiance.
I hope that in the midst of all this that you feel the freedom of it. 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 solve all the problems, no matter how they boast. No matter how many people shout their support for that person in an arena. No matter how many vigilantes rise up in their name.
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. There is no promise that there will not be grief, but that God will show up in the midst of 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, 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. 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 once again what true power and true glory look like. Stay tuned.