Christ the King - November 20, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

Proper 29 C - Christ the King - November 20, 2022

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

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen. 

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.

Feast of Christ the King A - November 22, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Luc Thuku, OHC

Proper 29 A  - Sunday, November 22, 2020

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24
Psalm 100
Ephesians 1:15-23
Matthew 25:31-46

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

I don't believe in Kings! I don't believe in Presidents either! I don't believe in any kind of leadership… and if Rob and Bernard would close their ears, I don't believe in superiors either! What, you may ask, led me to this distaste?  Well, my country was colonized by a Kingdom that committed attrocities left, right and centre and the pain is still felt to this day. 

If you are hooked into the current craze on Netflix, The Crown, you also may have encountered some facts that show how dysfunctional, entiltled and ‘bordering evil’ this particular mornachy’s family is. 

We then fought for independence  and we got a president…our own man as we love to say. He was a corrupt, ruthless dictator and his successors in office have followed in his footsteps in ensuring that corruption, exploitation and intimidation are the order of the day even though we claim to be and are regarded as one of the best examples of democacy in Africa, but I believe we are a perfect example of democracy gone bad anywhere! 

As I entered early adulthood, I joined religious life seeking a home and Community, but mostly to belong, and all I got until I encountered Holy Cross, was misunderstandings, wrongful judgements and hatred that I did not deserve. In midlife, I moved to an adoptive country that I loved and at some point that country chose a president who was racist, divisive, mysygonistic, sexist, corrupt, the list goes on…things the devil himself would be ashamed of being associated with! Thankfully the worst of that era will soon be in the past and the future looks a bit promising but a lot of work is needed. 

You are justified to ask if I don’t believe in any form of leadership, why then Am I standing infront of you on the feast of a King, the Feast of Jesus Christ the King of the Universe? The answer to that is as simple as it is complex.  This is because Leadership is as inevitable as it is necessary and the choice is what kind of leadership do I want to have and not whether I should have leadership or not!…plus here and there I have encountered very pleasant leadership although it is sadly an exception and not the norm. 

A few years back in Kenya slighlty before a tighly contested presidential poll,  similar to what we just had here this month or in 2016, a meme was circulated in the internet containing a picture of Jesus Christ the King  and it said..”no matter who is elected president, Jesus Christ is still the King!” Never in America and in the entire world have we needed to hear those words than this present moment! Today’s feast is suggesting to us and celebrating a different kind of leadership than we are used to, Servant leadership! Today’s feast also celebrates intergrity in leadership, honesty, maturity and selflessness, qualities that are almost extinct in our contemporary leaders. I would, therefore, love to invite you to explore this style of leadership with me and hopefully you will be converted with me into moving from not believing or rather from tolerating kingship/Leadership into craving kingship/ Leadersip!

 

In today’s first reading that we heard from the prophesy of  Ezekiel Chapter 34 verses 11 to 16, God assures us that He himself will seek his sheep, meaning us, and rescue them from where they are scattered, gather them together and feed them, and he himself will be the shepherd. He promises to  seek the lost, bring back the strayed, bind up the crippled, strengthen the weak, and the fat and strong watch over…in other words, none would be neglected! God declares at the end of verse 16 that “I will feed them in justice”! All of us or at least most of us have lived through different campaign periods by the same politicians. We have heard different promises and pledges of what and how much they will do for us but I don't remember any of them promising to feed us in justice. Although most pretend that they will serve all equally they, and we, know that the major beneficiaries of their rule are their closed circles and those who think like them, not to mention their families and cronies. 

Therefore, God promising a reign of justice for all must have been like music to the ears of the oppressed of the day…. and is still music to my ears and I hope to your ears as well. God goes further in verses 20 - 24 to declare that he himself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. We are mostly used to hearing from the scriptures about the judgement or separation being between sheep and goats, wheat and chaff, good and evil and our minds got accustomed to thinking of “us” versus “them”. Today's first reading is telling us that God will judge sheep against sheep. The strong sheep that pushes the weak sheep around with side and shoulder, thrusting with horns and by so doing take advantage of the weaknesses of the other which more or less we are responsible for. This judgment of God will therefore touch all of us because in God’s vocabulary, ‘’THEM’' does not exist. It is just ‘’US’'! 

The Gospel passage we read today continues where the first reading left to explain to us how this judgement and justice will be dished out. It will be simple and not as elaborate and graphic as some of us would want, or were promised …remember those Sunday school teachers and preachers who say our lives will be displayed as in a video/movie for everyone to see..?

  

It will simply be based on what we did or failed to do to the least of our brethren, our fellow human beings, hence we will be, or are already, judging ourselves. It will be according to the simple tasks that we carry out on daily basis. Feeding others, visiting others, comforting others, being there for others, welcoming others, loving others…is that too difficult to understand? Then I will make it simpler…

”I was a Mexican kid in a cage but you kept quiet, I was turned back at the Southern border sent back to be murdered by dictators and drug cartels but you never championed for me, I was murdered in numerous black men but you kept mum, I suffered ill health for lack of insurance but you said nothing to the policy makers,  I was jobless and called lazy when I sought social security but you breathed out no word about the system that creates inequality, I was a homosexual jailed in Uganda and elsewhere but you said nothing because out of sight out of mind was your approch to issues, I was earning less than my colleagues because I was a woman but you were okey with that, my name was blasphemed by rabid prosperity gospel pastors and ultra conservative priests who distorted my words and misquoted me but you said nothing because you didn't want to risk being seen as judmental, I was denied justice as a person of color but you never came to my rescue”…

The sad thing is that most of us will judge ourselves to damnation because we ignore the simple things and go for huge things while scripture and saints, especially Teresa of Calcutta, keep reminding us that God never asks us to do extraordinary things but to do ordinary things in an extraordinary manner.

 

In the Sundays and many of the weekdays leading up to this feastday, if you have been following the readings, be it from the liturgy of the Eucharist or the Offices, you know that many of the passages are eschatological or apocalyptic in nature. The Church does this not to scare us to submission but to remind us  that all things come to an end! We are coming to the end of this toughest of liturgical years in recent history at the end of this week. We will end what is called Ordinary time as well as begin Advent being reminded that Christ has died, Christ is risen and Christ will come again. This great truth is the reason why we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King on the last day of the liturgical year. It is a reminder to us that while we do not know the day or the hour of Our Lord's retrurn, the day is coming when time will be no more. But even when that day comes, the Lordship of Christ will continue to reign supreme because he is trully the firstborn of all creation and in every way the primacy is his. 

As we celebrate Christ’s kingship over the universe, his Divinity and his Lordship over all that is seen and unseen, it is fitting that we ask ourselves some most important questions. If we know him to be the king of the universe, the second person of the Trinity and our Divine Lord, have we trully made him the Lord over our own lives? Do we through obeying his words treat him each and every day as though he is our King and Lord? Do we serve him as King and worship him as Lord in the way that he deserves to be worshipped and served, and as the gospel reminded us we serve him by serving others especially the less fortunate? Is he the center of our lives as he ought to be if he is truly our King? 

Let us pray as Paul urges us in the second reading this morning from (Ephesians 1:15-23) that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ may give us a Spirit of wisdom and revelation of Him, having the eyes of our hearts enlightened so that we know the Hope to which we have been called to, and the immeasurable  greatness of power in us who believe , all stemming from the power of Christ’s resurrection. 

My brothers and sisters, the message today is simple; and it is this… regardless of who is in Washington or who rules in the capitals of the world, there is only one true King, Jesus Christ! As we celebrate his Kingship on this last Sunday of the liturgical year, let us recall what we said or heard as the Easter candle was lit at the Easter vigil….”Jesus Christ yesterday, today, the beginning and end, the Alpha and the Omega, all times  belongs to him, and all the ages. To him be glory and power through every age forever”!  Christ Conquers! Christ Reigns! Christ Rules! Amen 

Christ the King - Nov 25, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Brother James Michael Dowd, OHC
Christ the King - Year B- Sunday, November 25, 2012

Daniel 7:9-10,13-14
Revelation 1:4b-8
John 18:33-37

Listen to my Voice

My paternal ancestors, who came to be known as the O'Dowd clan, ruled one-fifth of Ireland, that area then known as Connaught, from the early-300's in the Common Era and for the next, approximately 1,300 years.  These same ancestors were often elected the High King and crowned at Tara, and wielded great power throughout the land and especially in the western part of that country.  King Laoghaire, of this same line, having been converted by St. Patrick himself, united the power of the clan with the true faith and thus, they were unstoppable.

Now in the early middle ages, the O'Dowd's were challenged by the O'Donnell's and the Burke's and to hold them off, the O'Dowd's erected a circle of twenty-four castles known as the O'Dowd Castles, in their seat of power, which is, today, known as the Counties Mayo and Sligo.  The ruins of twenty of these castles can still be visited today in some of the most beautiful scenery in all Ireland.

This ring of castles held off invaders from both land and sea and those O'Donnell's and Burke's were handily defeated – pushed out of Mayo and Sligo, the Holy Land of Ireland, and allowed an O'Dowd reign for several hundred more years before that nasty Cromwell, and later, that even worse potato famine either killed off or drove off into the Irish Diaspora so many of the O'Dowd clan.

And inherent in that wee tale of my ancestors is the struggle that I have with this feast, the feast of Christ the King.  My struggle is perhaps semantic, but I really do wonder about putting so much emphasis on the idea of Christ the King because I believe that there are not one, but two dangers, in a spirituality that is centered on what is, lets face it, a human understanding of kingship.

O'Dowd Castle at Easkey Pier, County Sligo, Ireland
Picture by Stefan Schnebelt

The O'Dowd tale is ultimately the story of power lost, of crumbling castles left in ruins, of a people fleeing a hideous foreign dictator and the scourge of potato blight.  You see Kingdoms collapse – always.  Kings lose their power – sooner or later – and the people are left to fend for themselves, often unable to escape brutality, torture, starvation and death.  And so that is the first problem I see with celebrating the Kingship of Christ.  As I said, it might just be a matter of semantics - though I think it is something more – but kingdoms collapse in on themselves or fall at the hand of others.  It just does not seem enough to me to say that Christ's Kingdom is different from all the rest.

The second problem for me with the Kingship analogy is not when the king has lost power, but when he has it.  Go back to that ring of O'Dowd castles.  In order to hold on to power, a king must build a ring of castles, or an iron dome, or a missile defense system, in order to keep the O'Donnell's and the Burke's, or whomever, out.  The goal of such fortification is to keep others – lots of others – out.

And then we have Jesus before Pilate.  One who will not even claim kingship, though his disciples begged him to do so, though Jewish leadership accused him of doing so, though a Roman governor inquired of him whether it was so, he just stood there and told Pilate – and us – that it is we who need to think of him as a king, but that his kingdom is not something of this world, that it is not something we will easily understand, if at all.  Jesus tells us that he just did not come to be crowned king.  He did come, he makes quite clear, for truth.  And I sometimes wonder if this feast would better serve if entitled Christ the Truth.

You see, the Incarnation turns everything, even the truth, on its head.  And the first thing it turned on its head was the nature of revelation.  The people had long been expecting a Messiah that was a warrior-king.  Generation after generation, century after century, the Jews had longed for a king that would lead them into a battle that would ultimately defeat their enemies and act as a kind of war to end all wars.  The prophets told them that this was so, at least, that's what they believed the prophets told them; and the people interpreted these revelations as just what they needed to have peace, prosperity and to live in God's presence forever.

But when God decided to incarnate Godself and to become, in the being of Christ, both God and human, the very nature of revelation – and the particular revelations of what it means to have a God who is king is thrust upside down, shaken up and then turned inside out.  In fact, most all revelations before and since the Incarnation simply have to be interpreted in a different way, because God has called us to something very different: God has called us to become part of Godself.  And to become part of God, is to at least attempt to leave behind our human ways of understanding things, and to begin looking at a new reality.  A reality – the only actual reality – from the point of view of God.

And the first thing that this new reality teaches us, I think, as I struggle with this, is that we must strip ourselves of worldly power by not calling on our army of followers, whoever they may be, to defend our little kingdoms, our little ideas, our little selves, and simply listen to Christ's voice.

As a benedictine monk, it is that last verse of today's Gospel that so grabbed my attention: “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”  Benedictine spirituality is centered on the practice of listening.  Every time we pray the Office, or worship at the Eucharist, or practice Lectio Divina, or engage in meditative prayer, we are attempting to listen to Christ's voice, to belong to the truth.  It is that, and that alone, which enables us to stand before our own Pilate and reject the lure of power, of armies, of kingship – and to accept the idea of selfless love, a love that is willing to lay down our lives for our friends.

This practice of listening enables us to open the ear of our heart, in that famous Benedictine phrase, showing us that the revelation to Daniel was correct.  Listen again to part of that first reading:

I saw one like a human being
coming with the clouds of heaven.
And he came to the Ancient One
and was presented before him.
To give him dominion
and glory and kingship,
that all people, nations, and languages
should serve him.

This revelation was correct, that is, if interpreted through the lens of the Incarnation.  In many places throughout the Gospels, Christ tells us where we could find him.  He told us to find him in the poor, the sick, the lonely, the mourning, in those who seek peace, in those who are imprisoned, in those who are lost.  What he never told us was to find him on a throne, sitting up there in heaven.  Now, go ahead, look around this church – please, look around at each other.

Do not look up to the sky, waiting for some glory to be revealed.  Find that glory, find Christ, find your King; find him in the person in this room who is most broken, sickest, poorest, loneliest, the one who is so broken-hearted over the loss of a loved one.  Find Christ your King and understand that no army, no loyal band of followers, will come rescue that person unless you do it.  Tear down your ring of castles and welcome the stranger, love the enemy, forgive the sinner.

Know that a king worth fighting for is a king worth loving for.  Know that a King worth loving for is a king worth listening to.  Listen to the truth of the Incarnation.  When God joined Godself to humanity, God did not so much lower Godself as elevate humanity.  By this elevation, God makes us an intimate part of Godself and that act, changes the nature of humanity forever.  It changes us in such a way that allows us to rise above our own sinfulness, selfishness and narcissistic tendencies so that we can see Christ our King in the O'Donnell's and in the Burke's and stand before our own Pilate, our own Chief Priest, and say to them: “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. I belong to Christ the King, and I have listened to his voice.”

BCP - Proper 29 B - 26 Nov 2006 - Christ the King

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Brother Scott Wesley Borden, OHC
BCP – Proper 29 B - Sunday 26 November 2006
Christ the King

Daniel 7:9-14
Revelation 1:1-8
John 18:33-37

I bid you a joyful feast of Christ the King... though to be honest, I have never been too keen on this feast. Christ as King is not the image of Jesus I relate to.

That’s where I start. I also want to confess that I thought perhaps I’d coast a bit this Sunday. I thought maybe I could just “borrow” a bit from someone who is more comfortable with the feast... So I Googled up some examples of how other people approach this day...

One reflection caught my eye. The writer, I’ll call him “the other guy”, noted that while Americans may place a very high value on democracy, God does not. God has no need of democracy. Christ is King... period... end of story.

The other guy goes on that in God’s kingdom - the place where Christ the King is king - we will need to know everything about obedience and nothing about thinking. Moreover, the other guy concludes that the time to start getting ready for the kingdom is now... stop thinking and start obeying!

I can’t say that the other guy’s reflection really opens up this particular feast for me... But it does help me focus my discomfort.

And as I look at Jesus interaction with Pilate reported in this morning’s Gospel, I can’t help but think Jesus is also a bit uncomfortable with the assumptions we make about kingship and power.

“So you are king?” Pilate asks. “You say that I am king” Jesus answers. I hear Jesus saying: “That’s your language... That’s your projection...”

Jesus has already told us his Kingdom is not from this world - not an earthly kingdom. The rules of our world don’t apply. All our wonderful metaphors based on crowns and diadems, thrones, orbs, and scepters, all our glorious pomp and circumstance are not going to tell us much about the Kingdom of where Christ is King.

And yet we try to understand by amplifying our world. Jesus, and by extension God, is the most extreme... We might have powerful leaders here on earth - but Christ the King is mighty in the extreme. We might have loving parents here on earth, but God is the most extremely loving father. We might have great riches here on earth, but heaven is extremely rich, rich beyond imagining - its very streets are paved with gold. But why do we think heaven’s streets need to be paved at all? Or that gold makes better pavement than concrete or asphalt. Or that heaven even has anything that resembles streets?

Sigmund Freud said “God is the human father, writ large, and projected against the sky.” Of course Dr. Freud is not telling us anything about God, but he is telling us a great deal about the way we think about God. We take our human ideals, blow them out of proportion and look to find them in the heavens.

This is where my discomfort with the Feast of Christ the King has its toes. This Sunday, at its worst, gives us permission to project away. Whatever we know or imagine about earthly kings, we can blow it up really big and project it against the sky. When God starts to resemble a very big, very powerful version of us, we are in trouble.

Curiously - I don’t think this is a problem. Not for me, not for you, not even for the other guy who wants Christ the King to be the most absolute dictator that could ever possibly be.

Its not a problem if I’m self aware enough to understand that I (and everyone) always have and always will project my stuff on God. It is a problem when I kid myself into believing that I don’t project my stuff on God - or that someone else has a vision of God free of their own projections.

As long as I can hold in mind that my image of God always contains a substantial dose of my own projection, that image can help me grow in knowledge of God and self. But I have to be ready to encounter my own projections and face them.

All this projection on God is also not a problem in that God is truly not affected by my projections, or, for that matter, by the other guy’s projections. God is God. There is a Buddhist saying that it doesn’t matter what we think about Nirvana, because Nirvana will be what Nirvana is. Likewise, God will be what God is - whether I choose to think about Christ the most glorious kingly figure, or the most meekly suffering servant.

Its not that what I think doesn’t matter - it matters a great deal in how I live my life. But God will be what God is, regardless of my thoughts. That gives me cause to be very humble, and, as the other guy demands, obedient.

I think the other guy is on to something when he says that in the kingdom where Christ is King, democracy has no place. But I think he needs to go further. In the kingdom where Christ is King, earthly monarchs are also out of place.

The other guy is right that obedience will be of great importance in the kingdom where Christ is King, but I think he is stuck with an earthly notion of obedience as the mindless carrying out of orders with relentless precision. Jesus leads the way in terms of obedience, and it is not mindless, not thoughtless.

Where I agree fully with the other guy is in the idea that now is when we start getting ready for the kingdom where Christ is King. We start by looking to the life of Jesus.

Based on the way Jesus lived his life on this earth, we can be certain that economic injustice, for example, has no place in the kingdom. Getting ready for the kingdom where Christ is King means coming to terms with our tolerance of economic injustice - our society celebrates the extremely rich while paying little mind to the extremely poor.

Based on the way Jesus lived his life on this earth, we can know that in the kingdom where Christ is King the homeless mentally ill will be of greater importance than Sam Walton, or Bill Gates, or you, or me... Can we honestly defend our present way of serving our homeless, or mentally ill, or other vulnerable brothers and sisters.

In the kingdom where Christ is King swords are beaten into plow shares and justice flows like a mighty river watering all the earth. What are we doing with our swords? And isn’t our river of justice leaving a few spots high and dry?

In the kingdom where Christ is King the meek inherit everything, the sorrowful are comforted, those who’s spirits are broken are made whole, those who hunger for justice are satisfied, and those who make peace are closest to the King. The Gospels never stop telling us about the kingdom where Christ is King.

On this feast of Christ the King we are invited to journey away from earthly concepts of power and might and open our hearts to the Kingdom of Jesus.

We see glimpses of this kingdom breaking into our world. ...not in the rich and powerful, but in the homeless person we are able to help... in the shut-in we are able to visit... in the child we are able to nurture... in the purring of a cat or the wagging tail of a dog... in the simple joy we will share as we hug each other and exchange the peace just a few moments from now.

I started out highly suspicious of this feast of Christ the King and I find that I have fallen in love...

For we all see the kingdom where Christ is King - not fully in focus... not completely in view... not in vibrant technicolor... but we see it nonetheless.

These glimpses of the Kingdom are a gift and a challenge - a call. What better way to celebrate this feast of Christ the King than by focusing on these glimpses and growing in the direction of the Kingdom.