A Curious Kind of King
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the last Sunday after Pentecost, Christ the King, by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.
To understand Jesus’ pronouncement that, “My kingdom is not from this world... my kingdom is not from here,” we have to go back to that passage in John 8 that we would all rather pretend isn’t actually in Holy Scripture. It goes like this:
You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. (John 8:44-45)
The Church, because it doesn’t like looking in the mirror (because it is composed of human beings who don’t like looking in the mirror either), has taken this devastating diagnosis of the human condition by God incarnate and parlayed it into a statement about, “the Jews.” Centuries of anti-semitism, reaching its horrifyingly frenzied mad heights in the Holocaust, resulted from not being able to see that the “you” in “you are from the devil” is us.
The kingdoms of this world--what we see displayed in technicolor goriness on television each night--operate on accusation, condemnation, expulsion, and execution of the Other. The Kingdoms of this world even figure out how to extract as much profit as they can from the expelled and executed Other. Pulling gold teeth from corpses, fashioning lampshades out of their cast-out skin--these are extreme, but devastatingly logical outcomes of what it means to live as a children of the father of lies, of what happens when we are blind and deaf to the truth of love revealed, unveiled, and apocalypsed to us in the person and work of Christ Jesus.
That’s another way of saying that Jesus is the end of my world. Jesus is the end of the world with my wants, desires, requirements, demands, my avoidance of the inevitable pain of being human and clinging to comfort. Jesus is the end of my world of easy prejudices, serene stinginess, and always gracious callousness. Jesus is the end of the world of I, me, mine, of grasping, clinging, holding on and storing it all up in a big new barn built by underpaid children of God the Father of Lies calls “illegals.”
The Good News of the Gospel is premised on the history-pivoting declaration that our usual way of navigating the world with ourselves at the center (our power, possessions, and prestige seated kingishly on the throne) is a death-dealing enterprise that brings only suffering for ourselves, others, and God’s good creation. The Good News of the Gospel is that there is another way to live--a life of abundance, peace, freedom, ease, happiness, individual and communal flourishing with no one left behind--gifted to us by God in the person of his only son. All we have to do is accept the gift, and practice living from and for this gift each day.
That’s what it means for Christ to be King, for Christ to be the center of my life. The world’s way of doing business--casting out, building bigger barns, storing up--goes under the baptismal waters. Coming up for air we gulp down the Holy Spirit and learn to live, and give sacrificially for the building up of the Kingdom of God. We blithely rattle off “Thy Kingdom come” in the Lord’s Prayer a couple of times each day in the Daily Offices. Do we understand what that “Kingdom that is not of this world” actually entails? How the Temples of fear and tight-fisted scarcity at the center of our lives need to fall down in order that all things might be made new, might come to resemble more closely God’s dream for the world rather than our human-created nightmare?
The Father of Lies tells you you are alone. He tells you that it’s all up to you and your frantic efforts. The Father of Lies tell you are not enough--that you’re slow, that you smell, that the color of your skin is wrong. The Father of Lies tells you to be afraid, be very afraid--especially of that Other who is different from you. Cast them out. Expel them. And if you really want to be at peace--kill them. The Father of Lies tells you that God is a bean-counting, hard-of-hearing Judge difficult to appease. The Father of Lies tells us that creation is a playground for personal profit consisting of limitless resources. The Father of lies tells us that the great chasm between rich and poor is just how it is. The Father of Lies whispers not enough, sings a siren song of scarcity, and lack. The Father of Lies tells you there’s something wrong with you if you happen to love the “wrong” of person, or identify as a gender other than the sex assigned to you at birth.
The Feast of Christ the King shows all that up for the sham con-job it truly is. But, don’t be fooled into thinking that the thrones we hear proclaimed in Daniel and Revelation are “out there” and that the King sitting in grace and peace is seated anywhere but in the depths of the heart, in the ground of your being. When we practice, daily, touching and being touched by that peace--those Lies we imbibe without even recognizing them as lies begin to come to light--”so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed” as St. Luke puts it. Revealed so as to be healed, and healed so as to give, forgive, and serve.
The Feast of Christ the King--opening as it does onto the season of Advent where we watch and wait and come undone in order to remade in and as love--is the beginning of the end of my world and the coming into being of a new creation. It is the birthpangs of the New Jerusalem. We hail this foot-washing, wound-dressing servant of all who shows us who we truly are.We give ourselves away calling on what we can’t see in order to become what neither we nor the kingdoms of the world can imagine, but so desperately need.
This curious King whose kingdom is not of this world (thank God) shows us a new way to see and be that promises to save us from ourselves. For casting out he opposes the warm embrace. For huddled up fear--neighbor love. For unworthiness, shame, and not being enough--the proclamation ringing out through all eternity that you are beloved for who you are, just as you are. For smug, clubbish tribalism--the wide-open arms of welcome where each person is seen, heard, celebrated as an integral member of the one body. For any gap, division, chasm or gulf between rich and poor he tells us--whatever you do to the least of these you do to me. For a dead world he illumines instead the sacramental tapestry of singing waters, skipping hills, the sparrow, and the lily--the stones themselves crying out. For holding on--letting go and letting be. For storing up in bigger barns--giving away and pouring ourselves out for others in sacrificial living and giving.
For this to be anything other than poetry, or another ideology in a world of competing ideologies and “isms,” it needs to be practiced, experienced, encountered--in daily prayer, in dwelling receptively on God’s word in Holy Scripture, in weekly worship in community, in witnessing to the way of justice and peace, in service to the least of these. And if we proclaim Christ as King with our lips and our bank account proclaims someone, or something else--we’ve got a split, a gap, a division between what we profess in our faith and what we do with our money. Everything but our wallet has gone under the water. We’ve got an unexamined and unintegrated private fiefdom where Christ isn’t yet King. How we order and portion our days, the shape our lives take, reveals who is really King, who is really getting our glory and honor and praise. Who’s King in your life? Does your stewardship reflect that?
The blather of the Father of Lies needs to be seen through by each and every one of us that in union and communion with the one seated on the throne of the heart we might be his living water, his bread of life, for the world. The Church marks the way out from under the sway of the Father of Lies--a world of war and rumors of wars, of hunger, poverty, suicidal despair, us and them, and unbreathable air. The Church patterns in us--day by day, week by week, year by year--a different way to be: open-handed, open-hearted children of the promise. Declaring Christ the King is the end of my world and the world God has made is better for it every second.