Christ the King - 11/17/11 Grace St. Paul s Bless me congregation, for I have sinned. Here I am, keeper of the sacred tradition, preserver of the Episcopal flame, but today, I am about to let the candle burn out. As your Rector, it is my sworn duty to share with you the wonders and beauty of our lectionary and liturgical calendar. I am called to point out the relevance and deep significance of all of the feast days that make up the church year. And here we are on the last Sunday of that church calendar, and also one of the great feasts of the year...and I just can t do it. I must confess to you the ugly truth. I don t like today. I don t like it a bit. I don t like the name of this feast day. I don t like the way it makes me image Christ in my own mind. I don t like envisioning Christ as a king...period. As an American, it seems to me that all of us rejected this whole king thing a long time ago. I am frankly very proud to be a citizen of a country that went to war so it didn t have to answer to a king. I am proud to be celebrating a holiday this Thursday where we have an opportunity to express our thanks for all of our freedoms, most especially the one about not being ruled by a king. 1
As an American Episcopalian, I find the feast day of Christ the King to stand in direct contradiction to what we profess as a church. To make my point, I want to ask all of you to do something that you will hear come from my lips on only the rarest of occasions. Are you ready? Will all of you please open your Prayer Books. For those of you have never done this before, it is that red book in front of you. Right after the founders of our country framed our Constitution and system of government, half of them literally walked across the street in Philadelphia to another Convention, the first General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Their first order of business was to change parts of the English Book of Common Prayer. We can still see that in the Ratification statement on page 8 and the Preface that begins on page 9. Let s begin by looking at the beginning of the last paragraph on page 10. The attention of this... What we were doing as a church was just as radical as what we had just done as a nation, and all of this becomes clear with the first sentence in our book on page 8. By the Bishops, the Clergy, and the Laity of... First and foremost, we revised this book to eliminate every single reference to a monarchy. Our church would be governed 2
and run not by a king, not by a Bishop, not by the Clergy, but all of us together. And this has become the Episcopal church s great gift to the entire Anglican communion. This past Monday was another important day in our calendar. It is the feast of Samuel Seabury, the first American Bishop. As our own Peter Foley reminds us, we need to also remember this morning that our first Bishop was consecrated not by British Bishops, who had taken an oath to the king or queen, but by non-juring Scottish Bishops, that is those Bishops who had refused to take an oath of allegiance to William and Mary. From the moment of our inception, we have worked as a church to separate ourselves from leadership by royalty. So why do we persist on comparing Christ to a symbol we find abhorrent? As sociologist Bruce Malina has put it, For most U.S. readers of the Bible, the words king and lord are perhaps the most difficult words to appreciate. Most people today simply have no experience of persons embodying these social roles, much less of the social system that supports such roles. 3
But despite all that, in the world outside GSP, Lord and King remain the most common metaphors for God throughout our prayers and liturgies. Why would we choose to utilize Lord and King in every other prayer while virtually never referring to God or Christ as builder, gardener, shepherd, potter, doctor, architect, healer, mother, eagle, lion, hen, shield, or housewife? All of these are straight out of the Bible. Here,of course, we are making some headway on this front. For the most part, we stopped using the monarchical word Lord years ago. With all of this in mind, I think all of you should rightly ask, why are we doing this? Why are we singing all these hymns with all the royal language and reciting all these kingly biblical texts? Two reasons, I would suggest. First, we are a liturgical church for a reason. By following the assigned lectionary for each Sunday, you will hear 90% of the Bible in three years. That is reason enough for me to not arbitrarily wander from the chosen readings, regardless of my personal theology. But even more importantly, I think people who preach on whatever the heck they feel like each Sunday are weenies. It s funny, but ministers who choose their own lessons, never 4
seem to quite get around to those Biblical texts with which they disagree. They are never challenged and neither is the congregation. But here at Grace St. Paul s, we are fearless people. We will face every text so that we can wrestle with it and, ideally grow from it. The second reason is even more important. I know that for some of you, the feast of Christ the King is near and dear to your heart. Who in the world am I to take that away? And even if I wanted to, I wouldn t, because while I believe it is unfaithful to our biblical heritage to constantly use royal language for Christ, it would be just as unfaithful to eliminate it. It is part and parcel of the social context in which our sacred text resides. For these reasons, we have no intention of banning Handel s Messiah from your Advent and Christmas experience. The challenge however, is how we make this archaic language hold meaning for us today. The words king and lord are offensive to many of us because of our American context, because we do not hear the same thing when they are spoken as our ancient Hebrew bible folks did. After all, what Jesus fulfills for many Jews of the day is their vision of the perfect king. Christ, of course, is not Jesus last name, it is a title bestowed 5
upon the post-easter experience of him. Christ is a Greek translation of the Hebrew word Messiah, which means anointed king. Our term today then, is actually redundant. Christ already means king. The most important thing for us to understand is what the Jewish people meant when they called Jesus; Christ. There are two answers in the Hebrew Scriptures. The first is found in the Covenant that Yahweh makes with Moses. Yahweh says to the people in Exodus, I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. The Hebrew word used here that we translate God is go el, meaning protector. I will be your clan leader, your King, your Godfather, if you will, and you will be my people. They are, in fact, instructed not to choose a human king, because that is Yahweh s job. That is what all the Psalms of praise about Yahweh s kingship are all about. The important part of the Mosaic Covenant as it relates to the Hebrew understanding of kingship, is that in this theology, the king, Yahweh, comes down to the level of the people and saves them. Unlike all the other religions of the time, Yahweh is a personal God that interacts with the people and protects them. That is why Yahweh is the only king they need. A king 6
for an early Israelite meant someone who was willing to come down to their level and be one of them. The second understanding of king comes during the time of David, when the people realize that they want or need a human king. In this very different theology, God does not come down and save us, but God works through human beings. Being human means sharing in God s kingship. It is perhaps captured best in Psalm 72. Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to a king s son...may he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor. Just as God creates peace and makes justice, a human king is called to make this happen. In Davidic theology, we are all pulled up to the level of the king. In both cases, the king serves the needs of the people, most especially the poor and the needy. But in one, the king comes down to meet the people where they are, in the streets of despair and suffering. In the other, all of us are pulled up to the level of God. There is this constant tension going on in the Hebrew text. Is God a hands on savior, the king who personally protects us, or is God the one who appoints us to care for those in need? Does the kingdom 7
of God come about as a result of God or from our actions? You see this tension in our first reading from Ezekiel. The people are supposed to have their own king that pulls everyone up to live in kingship. But they have failed miserably. So Ezekiel suggests that Yahweh is going back to the Mosaic Covenant. All right, Yahweh says, I myself will search for my sheep...i will rescue them from all the places...i will seek the lost...i will feed them...i will take care of them. But then at the end of the reading Yahweh relents and sets up David to do this work of a king. David, he says, will pull the people up to be kings, as Yahweh puts it, a prince among you. The Ezekiel reading is a great example of the struggle we continue to have to this day between a theology of God as king or people as kings. All of us more readily accept one or the other. You hear God as king theology in churches that see Christ exclusively as the savior, through his act we are all saved forever. And you hear the people as kings theology from folks like me, who stress the need for us to bring about the realm of God here on earth. The Bible however, is not one or the other. And that is what I believe is the most important thing about continuing to celebrate Christ the King Sunday. 8
When people like me espouse people as kings theology, we are neglecting half of our Biblical heritage. This is one of the reasons why Biblical texts often directly contradict each other. People keep picking one or the other. But then comes today s Gospel. For the first and last time in history, Jesus shows us that there is a way to live into both theologies simultaneously. Of all the amazing things we learn from Jesus, this is for me, the most important. He lives his belief in the saving theology of the Mosaic Covenant by taking his kingdom down into the streets. He is the king that goes incognito among his suffering people, saving the destitute, the hungry, the person that no one associates with, the prisoner, the outcast. But at the same time, Jesus pulls all of us up to be kings by telling us that it is our job to care for those in need. Yes, Jesus saves, but he never says that because of him, everything is solved. All of us must also be kings ourselves, saving those around us who are in need. Jesus is Christ the anointed king. The last story he tells us before being killed, is today s Gospel, where he makes it very clear that all of us are also called to be Christ. All of us are called to be king. And it s good to be king. 9
An analogy that may be helpful is the story of the young woman who is being wooed by two persistent suitors. Each of them asks her to marry him. Talking it over with one of her girlfriends she says, When I m with Charles, I feel like he s the best guy in the whole world. Her friend responds, so then you are going to marry Charles? No, she answers, I m going to marry Harry. For heaven s sake, why? Because when I am with Harry, I feel like I am the best person in the whole world. That is what a king was to do in Hebrew culture, change the focus from him to us...help us to realize that we are all called to be kings. And that is exactly what Jesus did for the world, take the focus away from himself and instead put it on us. That is why never once in the Gospels does Jesus refer to himself as a king. To do so would be to put the focus back on him, which is the opposite of what he wants to convey. And that s what concerns me about the misuse of kingly images. If we focus on the power of Christ, we are actually taken further away from Jesus message. 10
Instead, let us strive to live out both theologies that Jesus merges for us today. We do so by lifting everyone in need up to the level of king. But we also do it by knocking people off the pedestal who think they should be king by themselves. We pull everyone into the middle. The kingdom of God, in today s vision, is a place where there can be no upper and lower class, where everyone can live in full dignity and in total abundance. In its ideal form, that is exactly what the Occupy movement is all about in this country right now. When America becomes a place where the rich get richer and the poor lose what they have, as in last week s Gospel, then we are drifting away from Jesus vision. But when we strive to create a gigantic middle class, where there is no one left on either end, we are creating the kingdom he envisioned. Living into both theologies in today s world will also mean that we continue to protest obscenely high salaries, pulling down corporate kings above us. But at the same time it means fighting for a living wage and health care for all, pulling up all those who struggle to make ends meet. And if we do that, if we work to bring about that kingdom that Jesus envisioned for us, then we will capture the true vision of Christ 11
the King, a king who makes all of us kings and queens. And it really is good to be that kind of king, isn t it? Amen. 12