Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Proper 29 C - Christ the King - November 20, 2022
Today being a named feast—Christ the King—should make the preacher’s task easy. The three-year lectionary cycle gives us three different images of Christ as King. This year is particularly juicy, if you will, especially given our current political, social, and environmental chaos.
As I was preparing for this sermon, I kept wanting to tell you about how Christ is not a worldly king. His crown is a crown of thorns. His throne the Cross. In a world in which our leaders set themselves up as demagogues, this is model of kingship we need. I kept wanting to tell you that God’s power is made perfect in weakness, as Paul reminds us. That the kings and potentates and dictators of this world will have their end, that their power goes only so far as the bullet and the bomb, but that God’s power outlasts even the sharpest bullet or the biggest bomb.
I wanted to tell you all these things. I even believe them. But instead, I heard the Holy Spirit whispering to me, “tell them about Love.” Today is a celebration of the triumph of God’s love. And not at some distant time we call the future, or in some far-off place we call heaven, but right here and right now.
Julian of Norwich reminds us that all God does for us in Christ is Love and for the sake of Love. Christ’s crown is Love, and Christ’s glory is Love. His death was for Love, and his rising for Love. He sustains us with his Love, and he clothes us with his Love. When the rags of this world fall away from us, only Love remains.
The feast we celebrate today, the feast of Christ as King, is the celebration of God’s all-powerful love for us and the whole world. It’s also the promise that, after the bullets and the bombs and the heartache, God’s love wins.
The wisdom of our lectionary reminds us this morning that Christ’s self-giving love is the love of the Cross. Any parent can tell you that deep love is a crucifixion. Because true love reveals our powerlessness. Love takes us to the edge of our being, where we see our own inability to save our beloved, and at that edge, love impels us to pour ourselves out anyway. That’s the love Christ shows for us, pouring out his life for us and offering himself for our healing and redemption.
We don’t need complex theologies of atonement to understand this movement of love. We only need to move down into our hearts. There we find Christ, enthroned on his Cross, planted in the soil of our hearts. There we learn that love is never about building up or throwing down. It isn’t about conquering or triumphing. Love breaks us down and breaks us open. It softens us, slows us, empties us. And in that emptiness—miracle of miracles—Christ’s love fills us full again with a life we could never have imagined.
Christ’s way of love is the way of smallness, powerlessness, and failure. And it’s also the way into the kingdom of God.
Fr. Jermonde Taylor, one of the candidates for bishop in this diocese, said the other night that the major problem facing the Church and Christians today is that we are trying to live whole lives. Instead, God calls us to live fractured lives. Like the host, broken into pieces, we are to live lives broken open to the love of God. And as God stitches us together into the Body of Christ through our participation in the Paschal Mystery, we who were many are made one and whole in Christ.
The problem with trying to live whole lives is that we shut God out of the process. Wholeness is not ours to make. Salvation is not ours to grant. We cannot create life or flourishing or grace. Actually, quite the opposite. It is our smallness, our frailty, our dying, and our weakness that allow God’s power to move through us to remake and restore us and God’s beloved world.
The beginning and the end of that work is Love: our love for God, but most particularly God’s love for us.
Whenever we sing St. Patrick’s Breastplate, I choke up at the line “Christ in hearts of those who love me.” There is some deep truth in those words that shatters me. And if Christ lives in the heart of those who love me, then Christ also lives in my heart, loving the people that fill my life.
Luke is constantly reminding us that the Kingdom of God is within us. Right here. Our own hearts are Christ’s throne of glory. And, fractured though our lives may be, Christ reigns within us, loving us and the world with a love that reconciles all things.
It isn’t just that Christ’s love within us outlasts earthly kingdoms. It’s that right here, and right now, that love ties us to eternity and to the fullness of God within us and among us. We are already in Christ’s kingdom, and if we had the eyes to see, we would see this church filled full of saints and angels and all the chorus of heaven, surrounding us, cheering us, loving us.
To quote Dame Julian again, all will indeed be well, because at deepest level, all is already profoundly well, even here, even now. Christ is already seated on his throne of glory in heaven, on the Cross, and in our own human hearts.
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