Follow the Leader—A Sermon on Christ the King

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.

As American Christians, celebration of the feast of “Christ the King” can feel a little odd. Our historical connection to the British monarchy is really only relevant to us now in these exciting times of Prince Harry’s engagement to Meghan Markle, an American. When we’re not watching royal weddings on television, we’re mostly not thinking about kings and queens. Right?

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 2017, no human being deserves our unwavering allegiance—no political leader, no church leader, no celebrity, no king.

We say so, each time we pray the Lord’s prayer—”for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory.” True leadership and true power belong to God.

At LEVN night this week, we talked about feeling kind of uncomfy about ascribing Kingship to Jesus the Christ. It feels...patriarchal, and oppressive, and corrupt. The way Jesus wielded power was truly the opposite of the way the Roman Empire wielded power, and so it is very reasonable to feel some type of way about equating the two. But perhaps that’s just it. Perhaps we’re not equating the two, or putting Jesus in the shoes of Caesar. Perhaps, 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.

The lectionary texts assigned to this day should tell us all we need to know.

Did you notice that Jesus has this whole conversation with himself? He anticipates that it will be difficult for his hearers to understand what he is talking about. The disciples have been with him for a couple of years, at least, and they are often confused. Layers of storytelling often confuse them further, so Jesus leaves pretty much no room for error. He plays both sides of the story and gives out all the possible scenarios. This king that he speaks of has never been hungry or imprisoned, just as Jesus himself has not been, while in the company of his disciples. But he knows that they have not made the connection between their lives and the lives of the least among them.

What might this sound like if Jesus was telling it to us, today?

Someone would ask: “When did we see you hungry and not feed you?” And Jesus would pointedly reply: “When you perpetuated the economic and agricultural system in which 795 million people go hungry around the world each day.”

We’d be a little confused, because Jesus is not currently a starving person, and we cannot feed a billion people out of a soup kitchen. But someone would ask another: “Okay, but when did we see you sick and not care for you?” Jesus would look at us and say, “When you elected a congress who declared that healthcare is a privilege, not a human right.”

We’d start to understand, and avert our eyes. Except for the one person who would ask:  “Okay, but when did we see you in prison and not visit you?” Jesus would not mince words on this one: “When you did not dismantle the prison-industrial complex and the mass incarceration of people of color in the United States.”

In the lives and deaths of the marginalized and minoritized, we are averting our eyes from the face of God. We fail to see Jesus in the bodies that surround us in our everyday lives. We fail to treat each other with the dignity and respect and appreciation that we’re certain we’d treat Jesus with.  

We talked at bible study this week about the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. It was easy for us to place ourselves as the rich man in that story, because we are much closer to his life than we are to the poor man, who lay dying at the rich man’s gate. We may not be the richest people we know, wear the nicest clothes, drive the newest car, or eat the fanciest food—but we are, by the world’s standard, among the wealthiest people to ever live.

We have power. As Americans with good educations (and in the process of receiving good educations) and the right to vote and the freedom to travel and the many choices we make each and every day about the trajectory of our lives, we are powerful. We have varying degrees of power, sure. We understand that there are differences in power between men and women and people of all genders; we understand that white people wield much more power than black people and other people of color; we understand that US citizens have power that residents and immigrants and those in the citizenship process do not have.

And y’all are young, starting out in your adult lives, and you still have a lot of rules governing you and hurdles to make it through before you can feel fully independent and autonomous. But in the grand scheme of things, you have great freedom and great power. Which, as we all know, comes with great responsibility.

Now, church tonight is not meant to add to the laundry list of awful things you’ve been worrying about in the world. You’re not on the hook for solving all of the world’s most humungous problems. You may feel inspired by a particular issue of justice and want to go out full speed ahead and right that wrong. Do it! Go for it! God bless you on your way!

And. Think even closer to home than that. 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?

When you look for role models in leadership, notice who you admire. Are they dominating and domineering? Or are they servants?

In our Christian life, as we follow the teachings of Jesus, we are going run into a lot of things that don’t match what we hear from other sources. We are going to feel backwards, sometimes. We are going to feel countercultural, sometimes. We are going to feel like the only ones who see a problem with what’s happening, sometimes. We live in a world full of people who see no problem with stepping on others to get more for themselves. We confess that we have sometimes gone along with that way of living, and even benefited from the exploitation of others.

But as we close this church year, and look toward the season of Advent, we are reminded that there is another way. 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.

The Gift that Keeps on Giving—A Snarky and Heartfelt Sermon on Gratitude

I preached this sermon to the good people of St. Mark's Lutheran Church in Fairfield, CA on the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

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.

As was said at the start of the service, I’m Pastor Casey Kloehn Dunsworth, your Lutheran campus pastor to UC Davis, and Program Director for LEVN, the Lutheran Episcopal Volunteer Network. I spend my days, and evenings, and weekends with young adults—undergraduates, graduate students, and recent graduates. It is a privilege to serve in this capacity, accompanying students and service corps members through some of the most formative years of their young adult lives.

With my students, I gather for worship and dinner each week, and meet for Bible Study and to engage in different spiritual practices. The rhythms of the quarter system take some getting used to; students revel in the deep breaths and slowed down time we spend together. I am grateful for the opportunity to guide them through the challenges they face, praying for them, celebrating with them, and grieving with them.

The LEVN program, too, gathers weekly for worship and dinner, as our seven young adults navigate life in intentional Christian community and 40 hours per week of service in a local non-profit organization. Throughout their year with us, we provide formation—theological and educational resources that can help frame their work in the world, appreciation of the natural beauty God has created here in Northern California, strategies for living together harmoniously, practices they can carry with them in their life after LEVN.

One of my favorite practices that we do together is an annual Thanksgiving-ish evening of gratitude and affirmations.  We read some scripture and some other inspirational words around gratitude, from sages like ee cummings and Oprah Winfrey. And then we spend several minutes reflecting on all of the people and things for which we are grateful. And then we write each other words of affirmation that we can hold on to for those moments where our own assurance of our belovedness falters.

I love this practice, because it reframes our relationships and our community as one of gratitude and abundance. The close quarters of young adult life do not always lend themselves to such feelings, as the day-to-day messes of shared kitchens and shared experiences become heavy.

Though I am sure you encounter your fair share of messiness, I doubt that you all live with six or seven other adults, sharing one kitchen and 2 showers. Or that you came across the country to do so in a city you’d never seen, on a small stipend, while serving full-time in a busy non-profit.

Our LEVN volunteers have been invited to live counter-culturally for their year of service, and this shows in so many ways. We talk often about the difference between “scarcity” and “abundance” and how for people of faith, they can be two sides of the same coin.

It is not hard to reflect on our lives from a position of scarcity. There is never enough time, or enough money, or enough sleep, or enough energy, or enough...whatever just popped into your mind to fill in that blank.

The countercultural practice we invite our LEVN volunteers into is to reflect on their lives from a position of abundance. If this is not something you occasionally, deliberately take part in, I wholeheartedly encourage you to give it a try.

What, in your life, is abundant?

For what, in your life, are you grateful?

Because our annual national day of Thanksgiving is fast approaching, these themes are fresh in our minds and hearts. In celebration of this thanks, what happens if we approach the lectionary texts for this week with gratitude and abundance in mind?

The text this morning from the Gospel according to Matthew, another parable about slaves and money, is a classic head-scratcher. Which character did the right thing?

Which character is Jesus saying we are like? Which character is Jesus hoping we will strive to be more like? Which character is acting as God acts? How do we know? How do we translate this scenario into the world we live in? Should we?

The dissection and interpretation of the intricate math of this parable is less important to our story today than the question it leaves us with: what have we done with what we have been given?

Maybe we even have to start earlier than that: what have we been given? What have you received, throughout your life, from God?

This can be a tough one, because as we are Christians we are also Americans and we are very convinced that we have worked hard and earned everything that we have. You have worked hard, and you have earned so much.

As your guest preacher this morning I am excited to let you in on a very freeing truth: everything comes to us from God, who created us in their image and loves us unconditionally. There is no such thing as a self-made man.

The nation of our birthright citizenship, the families into which we are born, the socio-economic factors that shape our upbringing, the schools we attend, and the employment opportunities available to us are largely outside our control or influence.

Yes, within a set of parameters we make choices about our lives, but the gift of our life comes from God. The gifts of our intellect, our interests, our passions, and our vocations come from God. The gifts of our talents, abilities, and skills come from God. Our bodies are gifts, within our wide spectrum of ability and capacity. Some of us are all too familiar with the deterioration or sudden loss of those abilities or capacities; how precious those gifts have been.

Everywhere we have been, God has been with us. God has been accompanying us, and providing us all of the other people and institutions that carried us on our way.

That one family member or dear friend who has always been your greatest champion; that school teacher who really encouraged you; that mentor that showed you the ropes; that teammate who always had your back; that supervisor who gave you a chance; that doctor who walked with you every step of the way—gifts from God, each and every one of them. Our entire social fabric has been laid out for us by God and entrusted to us. This good earth, in its vastness and its fragility, was created by God and entrusted to us.

What have we done with what we have been given?

In our Gospel story, one slave is given 5 talents, another 2, another 1. The 5- and 2-talent-having-ones double the money. The single-talented-one squanders his. Buries it in the ground.

I have to admit that this slave’s behavior is most like mine; out of fear of the risk of losing the money entrusted to me, I’d likely just sock it away until the master returned, too. But this ignores the purpose of handing the money over in the first place. The goal was not to have the same money in hand when he returned; if he wanted that, he likely would have just kept his coins to himself.

Now, I’m making huge interpretive leaps here, because we know nothing of this scenario other than that it entailed a master and some slaves, and we know that masters never gave gifts to their slaves or treated them with dignity and kindness—this is a human rights violation, not a friendship.

But if we are the analogy-making types, we might wonder about how the story would play out of it were God doling out gifts and us standing to receive them.

Does God provide us every good gift and expect that we will squander that which we have been given? Does God provide us every good gift and expect that we will hoard it all to ourselves?

No, dear ones, of course not. God has provided us every good gift in the hope that we will use those gifts for the sake of the world. In gratitude to God for all that we have received, it is obvious that our next move is to give, too.

To which family member or dear friend are you the greatest champion? Which children in your community are you encouraging? Who do you mentor in your professional field or vocational sector? Whose team are you always on? Who are you giving a chance? Who do you walk alongside?

Our gospel text closes with this cryptic sentence: “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away” (Matthew 25:29).

In this time of holiday preparation, it can be easy to assume that our gratitude is supposed to be for our things. Our homes, our prized possessions, our earthly treasures. It is a good practice to be grateful for things, but it is dangerous to stop there. When our gratitude is only for things, we can end up leaving the Thanksgiving table to get in line for Black Friday sales, elbowing other customers for the last big screen TV. Those who have much and those who have little can be equally guilty of this mentality of scarcity.

When our gratitude extends to all that we have, all that we are, all that we will be—no matter how much others may judge us to be—it is in this depth of gratitude that we truly know abundance.

If we believe that there is not enough, there will never be enough. If we believe that we are not enough, we will never be enough. You are enough. You are more than enough. And for that, thanks be to God. Amen.

A Sermon on the Reformation, All Saints, and All Souls

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.

One of the particularities of life together at the Belfry that I enjoy especially is our good fortune to gather for worship on Wednesdays. Yesterday was Reformation Day (officially) and today is All Saints Day (officially) and tomorrow is All Souls Day (officially) and our friends who worship on Sundays had to rearrange those two or three to fit on either last Sunday or this coming Sunday or some combination therein, or maybe even skip one. But we, dear Belfry Lutherpalians extraordinaire, we get to co-celebrate all of it, today.

We get to see the beautiful overlap and influence of these days on each other. We get to sit right in the thick of the paradoxes of life and death, old and new, past and future, saint and sinner, orthodoxy and heresy, retention and reformation. What luck!

I bet someone has mentioned this to you in the past several months, but: this year is the 500th Anniversary of Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation. It’s finally here! I’m not going to rattle off that information all the time, anymore. And that’s great. What’s even greater is that we are now officially, as of today, in the second 500 years of reformation. Think of the possibilities!

In the past 500 years, people have made sweeping changes in the Church that bears Luther’s name—we know that we are saved by God’s grace and not by our own works; the Bible has been translated into every language on the planet, and probably Klingon, because, nerds; people other than cisgender heterosexual white men serve as clergy (though of course we’re still working on the enforcement of that); celibacy is no longer considered the highest Christian calling (though of course we’re still working out our sexual ethics); we pray and confess directly to God, without the requirement of a priest; our liturgies are in the language of our hearts (though sometimes full of fancy church words).

And that is just the beginning! What will we do with our next 500 years, dear ones!? Where will we go? What will we do? Who will we be? Ugh, that’s so thrilling.

It’s important to me that we think about it this way—looking forward to our next 500 years—because our last 500 years have not been all sunshine and rainbows. The Church as an institution has been responsible for centuries of oppression, and has held back progress in the public sphere in a number of ways. We do not get to give ourselves a pat on the back without also acknowledging our faults. We are, after all, simultaneously saints and sinners.

Our gospel story for today underscores this. Jesus says, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:31-32). And the people listening to him are confused because they think they already are free. I can just see their confused faces. “Uh, we are not enslaved,” they reply, ish. And they’re right. They are not enslaved in the way that they think Jesus must mean.

But they are not free of their own sin. They are not free of the temptations of the world to hold power over one another, to control every little thing that happens, to be sure that they do not end up losing everything they have. They are not free of the systems in which they participate as members of their society. They are not free of the little voice in the back of their heads that says, “you deserve to be at the top of the food chain forever.” They are not free of the history of their people, for better and for worse. They are not as free as they believe.

When we hear this, in the United States of America in 2017, we may feel much like these friends of Jesus. “Uh, we are not enslaved.” We are not. And. We may not be entirely free, either. We are not, by our own power, free of the sin that so easily entangles us. We are not, by our own power, free of all the things we have done and the things we have left undone. We can, if we’re not careful, let this very fact trap us further. Or, as Jesus tells us and Martin Luther reminds us, the truth will make us free. The truth is that we are saved by grace through faith.

Yes, there will be real, human consequences for our actions. We will get in trouble. We will have to apologize to one another. We will have to practice humility. But in the midst of all this mess we are making, we are still beloved of God. You, precious creation, are known and claimed by the one who created you.

There is nothing that renders that untrue. Nothing you do—or fail to do—separates you from the love of God in Jesus the Christ. 500 years of Reformation hasn’t changed that, nor will 500 more.

For as far back as anyone can remember, the truth has set us free. As far ahead as anyone can dream, the truth will set us free. Which brings us to the saints. As they lived, they were beloved of God. Tonight, we are bittersweetly remembering them.

This practice, on days like today, alerts us that we have entered into a thin place. “There are places where the veil between worlds becomes thin. It’s not that God is somehow more present in [these] places, as if God could be more there than elsewhere; rather, something in [these] places and times invites us to be more present to the God who is always with us.”[1]

Look at the beautiful ofrenda Leo set up for us back there, and look at the things that remind us of the saints who have gone before us. We get to look at those faces and recognize each other in them. My family is over there, and you can probably see my face in my grandma’s face.

As I look at all the photos gathered there, I wonder about the stories that you hold close to your heart about the people in them. And the objects you brought to remember them with, I wonder why you brought those things, and what they mean to you and meant to your loved ones.

These moments, here together in remembrance, these are so holy. This is the communion of saints. The generations that precede us show us what it means to be humans, to be members of our families, to be people of faith, perhaps.

We carry our histories in our hearts; we wear them on our bodies; we hear them in our songs and in our laughter and in our tears; we eat them when we cook our family recipes; we embody them when we maintain our family traditions. These people, smiling up at us from the table—or radiating from within our memories—they raised us in faith, shaped us in doubt and discovery. As we live into our present realities, we go about the lives they dreamed we’d lead. The examples set for us by generations of our families are combined together with the generations of all the saints, back to those who walked with Jesus, those who were descended of Abraham.

Jesus told his friends, ages ago, to continue in his word. To keep telling the stories about the truths they knew. To keep gathering for meals, and to remember him when they did. As we gather at these tables today, we are bringing our whole histories and our entire futures together in one beautiful, thin place. We look back, we look around, we look forward. God is with us, and the saints are with us, in each and every place.

Thanks be to God!