God of Possibility - Christ the King 2022
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the last Sunday of Pentecost, Christ the King, November 20, 2022 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.
Rather than stand here and announce that Christ is King, or explain (again) how to hear the word ‘King’ (Kingship as suffering servanthood, as feeding rather than feasting, forgiving rather than fighting) in a way that doesn’t simply trigger our bad associations with worldly kingship, I’d rather ask a question–what does it mean for Christ to be King? What does it mean for Christ to have first place in everything? What does this actually look like in our daily lives? And I’ll start with something the Irish Catholic philospher and theologian Richard Kearney proposes in his book The God Who May Be.
Kearney does a lovely little exegesis on Moses’ encounter with God at the Burning Bush where lured aside from the day-to-day business of minding his father-in-law’s flock (“takin’ care of business” as Bachman Turner Overdrive would have it), he takes off his shoes (the thick protective skins of his preconceptions) and encounters the leaping, dancing, speaking presence of God in the bush that burns, but is not consumed. And when tongue-tied Moses–having been given his marching orders–asks “Who shall I say sent me?” God’s reply is– “I AM THAT I AM. Tell ‘em I AM sent you.” Kearney, teasing out the meaning of the Hebrew phrase, reminds us that this rather odd appellation (not exactly what you might put on your business card) can perhaps be better read, heard, and understood as a promise of a alternate future–an inexhaustible source of new ways of seeing and being for and with each other:
My ultimate suggestion is that we might do better to reinterpret the Transfiguring God of Exodus 3… as "I am who may be"—that is, as the possibility to be…. EHYEH ASHER EHYEH might thus be read as the signature of the God of the possible, a God who refuses to impose on us or abandon us, traversing the present moment while opening onto an ever-coming future.
Christ the King, in Kearney’s figuring of it, points to the possibility of love made actual in this place, through these hands, and feet, and lips. Never as Divine fiat–one-way unilateral top-down imposition of God’s Will–but as co-operation with grace, with our ‘yes” to God’s invitation to relationship, to the healing work of God’s presence and action in our lives and in our communities. Jeremiah points us towards this “ever ancient, ever new” coming-towardness of God–“The days are surely coming, says the Lord…” New ways of seeing and being. New ways of ordering our lives and our societies. Hearts of flesh singing the ancient-new song of Christ’s love offered as gift to be accepted, consented to, received from the One traversing the sacred-ordinary geography of the present moment.
That’s a way of saying Christ is King whenever we take a break from the stories of fear, scarcity, lack and open to, allow, make a little space for the always coming one who cannot to contained, who bursts out of every container–religious, social, political–that God, that love, actually, might be manifest in this place. Ezra Pound used to chide poets with the twin injunctions–“Go in fear of abstraction!” and “Give me a for instance!” So here are some “for instances” of what love, actually, looks like–how the God of possibility might be realized in these hands and feets and minds and hearts–always and everywhere, not just for an hour on Sunday.
Stuck in traffic. We can worry, rant, rage, complain, plan…. Or simply come home to the one who has made his home in us and simply be there–empty-handed with no agenda. Chiaroscuro clouds. Hands on the steering wheel. Frost fractalling the windscreen. Problem shifts to fullness and provision with nothing lacking.
Walking to get your lunch. You’ve done it a thousand times. Same old same old. There’s nothing new under the sun. Except this walk has never been this way ever before! Never will it be this way again. We take off our shoes. Turn aside from our stale stories and see with Elizabeth Barret Browning that every common bush is a burning bush when we’re not talking to ourselves. “The miracle is not to walk on water, but to walk on earth… The Kingdom of heaven now or never.”
Stuck in a rehab facility. It kind of smells. The food’s not great. You’re sore. But you’re alive. God is with you. How will you respond? Present just on the other side of how things could be better, is God traversing the present moment hidden in plain sight as how things actually are. The tender compassion of our God, the dawn from on high breaking upon us as an underpaid nurse with a big fluffy pillow: This is another day, O Lord. I know not what it will bring forth, but make me ready, Lord, for whatever it may be. If I am to stand up, help me to stand bravely. If I am to sit still, help me to sit quietly. If I am to lie low, help me to do it patiently. And if I am to do nothing, let me do it gallantly. Make these words more than words, and give me the Spirit of Jesus. Amen (BCP 832).
At work. You get a thorough dressing down from your boss and promptly nosedive in the shame-spiral of I’m a failure, and some version of not enough. Christ the King means seeing those thoughts as thoughts and knowing that you are not your thoughts. Lay them gently aside–leave that place of darkness and deathly shadow–and rest in the only true thing we can ever say about ourselves and others–you are beloved. Let your belovedness and the belovedness of the stranger take first place in everything.
Hanging on the Cross. Not good. How do you use your last moments on earth? You can join the crowd in hurling abuse upon the stranger next to you as a way to avoid the direness of the situation and your culpability. Or with dear Dismas the repentant thief, you can turn around from that nightmare. You can open your eyes, lay aside the siren song of derision, and look, see, who’s next to you beyond the sloganeering of the madding crowd. In that open-handed place of encounter–”Today you are with me in Paradise.” Really, this depiction of the crucifixion in Luke is our life in each and every moment. Who’s king? Christ or something/someone else? Who will we be? Love, actually, in all its come-toward us newness, or some deathly already-known with ourselves at the center?
God’s presence, of course, is free, always available–behind and before: when we’re over the moon or down in the dumps. It’s our availability to God’s eternal availability that’s at issue. Saying Christ is King means that in every situation we notice all the different ways we subtly avoid contact with what is–this moment just as it is–and learn to see (or inhabit as Mother Hollys says) each moment, each encounter, as the gate of heaven. We practice saying yes to our life as it is (even the hard parts) in the faith, hope, and trust that as children of the promise something other than ourselves, our efforts, and our stories about how things should be, can come toward us, be born in us. Cue Advent Lessons and Carols.
No wonder then, that the alternate psalm appointed for today is Psalm 46 that begins with those lines– “God is our refuge and our strength a very present help in trouble…” and ends “Be still, then, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations; I will be exalted in the earth.” It’s in stopping, in opening to the deep well of peace and stillness that is always “with us” that new possibilities of seeing and being, new social arrangements, new ways to welcome the stranger and cross the road towards that left-for-dead in the ditch “other” are born in us. We stop. We come home. We rest in and as the Presence and start to see with God’s eyes however dimly. Somehow, someway all things hold together in Christ.
Kearney’s God of possibility, the God Who May Be, can be rather discomforting because it foregrounds our responsiveness to God’s presence and action. It is we who are off on errands, not God. God’s hidden traverse of the present moment demands an attentiveness to the way we talk ourselves out of Presence with our requirements and demands: my will be done (the world according to Tyler), rather than God’s will be done, the way the world is in truth and actuality. “Teach me my God and King/In all things thee to see,/And what I do in any thing to do it as for thee” as Herbert writes. Do what you’re doing while you're doing it for no other reason than to do it wholeheartedly: each activity all aflame in a burning bush of presence. Christ the King doing the dishes, serving a meal, polishing the candlesticks, changing a bandage, doing the laundry. “A servant with this clause/Makes drugerie divine:/Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,/Makes that and th’ action fine.” We glimpse, are immersed in, the liturgy of daily life. Whether on heaven or on earth I know not which. Dustpan and broom, windex and papertowel, the celebrant’s arms in orans at the altar–no difference.
St. Mark’s, too, exists in the place of possibility–we are the church that may be, provided we give of our time, talent, and treasure. Each year in stewardship season we get to find out who we will be in the coming year. What a gift! God knows the Spirit is on the move here. Whether we’re able to keep up with her–one welcomed stranger, one transformed heart at a time–is up to us. In how we order our days. In who we pronounce King in any moment. And in how generously we support God’s saving, healing, work in this place and beyond. Some folks find it rather terrifying. It’s a little scary to be sure. Never knowing how we’ll be, who we’ll be, if we’ll be. But possibility is where the Church dwells along with St. Emily Dickinson. Dependent on that daily manna. Walking by faith with no bag and no staff. What’ll it be? Who’ll we be? Who will we call King and how will God be expressed through us for others? Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus.