“Flight Into Egypt 1923 Henry Ossawa Tanner” by Henry Ossawa Tanner – Metropolitan Museum of Art, online collection (accession number 2001.402a). Licensed under Public Domain via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flight_Into_Egypt_1923_Henry_Ossawa_Tanner.jpg#/media/File:Flight_Into_Egypt_1923_Henry_Ossawa_Tanner.jpg
Picture attribution: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giorgione_010.jpg#/media/File:Giorgione_010.jpg
Picture attribution: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMenologion_of_Basil_037.jpg
Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley
LAST SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, “CHRIST THE KING”
November 22, 2015
Proper B: 2 Samuel 23:1-7; Psalm 132; Revelation 1:4b-8; John 18:33-37
There’s something a little odd about celebrating a “Feast of Christ the King” in an American church We had a revolution, after all, and got rid of this king business a couple of centuries ago. And, having no kings or queens of our own, we find that the language doesn’t mean anything too exact for us. We therefore tend either to romanticize the institution of monarchy or to demonize it.
Many of us here at Good Shepherd, at least in our recent history, have been among the demonizers. In fact, we worked at ridding our worship of such language because it suggested a kind of hierarchical—indeed patriarchal—vision of society that we opposed.
At the same time, one has to admit that several of the most open and democratic societies on earth are in fact monarchies. Think of Sweden, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom. They’re constitutional monarchies, to be sure, just as we are a constitutional democracy—and thank God for that, as the majority of the moment can be as tyrannical as any monarch.
And, truth to tell, we have a strong monarchical element in our own constitution. Our monarch is called a “president” and serves only for a limited time—but has considerably more power and authority than, say, the Queen of the United Kingdom or the King of Sweden.
So, the language of kingship isn’t native to us in the US. And yet, we certainly have some instincts about it. Right now, in the midst of our seemingly endless presidential race, we find ourselves looking for someone who has a clear enough vision and a strong enough determination to lead the nation through challenging times—just what people of a thousand years ago were concerned about when a new monarch came to the throne.
A king or queen isn’t just a person who gives orders. A queen or king is the person who represents the whole people in a way that a parliament or congress is too diffuse and conflicted to do. When Elizabeth II came to the throne after the grueling days of World War II, it gave the British a tremendous shot in the arm, a new kind of courage. It fostered a sense of hope for the future and a real cultural renaissance. People hoped for the beginning of a new “Elizabethan Era,” and they got it. We’re still listening to the music, reading the poetry, going to the plays of that era. In some sense, monarchy may be something we human beings can’t really do without.
So when we talk about Jesus as king, we’re talking about much more than politics We’re talking about Jesus as the embodiment of the kind of human community that we long for. A passage in our first reading today summed it up:
One who rules over the people justly,
ruling in the fear of God,
is like the light of morning,
like the sun rising on a cloudless morning,
gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.
No historical monarch has ever lived up to that billing, even David, to whom these lines are credited. But that doesn’t take away their truth. A good king, a good president, a good governor, a good leader of any kind is given the power, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning after life-giving rain, to bring hope and new life.
This ideal is what makes politics a Christian vocation. It’s what makes voting and other aspects of citizenship a Christian vocation. Government isn’t just about the self-interest of a nation or the self-interest of individuals. It’s about moving toward the kind of world in which all people can thrive.
The lack of good rulers and leaders in so many parts of the world today is a big part of what lies behind the present horrors of the Islamic State. Bad government produces anger. Anger that is left to feed on itself and fester becomes hatred. Hatred deceives itself into thinking that if I can destroy what I hate, a new and better world will automatically take its place. But no, hatred can’t make a good king. In the long run, it leaves us with nothing but a barren desert all around us.
The good king is the opposite, is one who creates shalom—peace, well-being. The good king is “like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.”
When we say that Christ is king, we are proclaiming him as this kind of leader and looking forward to what God has always had in mind for us: that we should live together in shalom. We know that, here and now, we have only moments of it. We know that even the best passages of human history have done no more than approximate it. But we also know that this kind of world—and only this kind of world—will allow us to become truly and fully human, will allow us to fulfill the gifts and graces with which God has blessed each of us.
One may say that such a world is a dream, and that would be true. But this dream is what makes truly human life possible in this less than perfect world. This is the hope that calls us onward, the goal toward which we make such contributions as we can, the consummation that will make sense eventually of our best aspirations and our most generous actions.
And Jesus is the king who has already lived this life in full and lives it still. And therefore he shows us how to live here and now, in an age that falls short, so that we can help prepare for a more truly humane world. This is the dream that St. Benedict saw and created islands of prayer and learning that carried the hope through the Dark Ages. And it is the dream that Martin Luther King, Jr., saw and led the great movement of our own time toward a better world. By the hopes and sacrifices of our forebears, we have come this far toward the realm where Jesus will be truly seen to rule. By our own hopes and sacrifices, our successors may yet inherit something better.
May Christ indeed come as king, then, in our own lives and, step by step in the life of the larger world. May our transformation contribute to the transformation of the larger world. These are our prayers in this Feast of Christ the King.
Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.
A sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, CA
22nd Sunday After Pentecost, October 25, 2015
Proper 25B: Job 42:1-6, 10-17; Psalm 34:1-8 (19-22); Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 10:46-52
We’ve heard two strange and difficult stories in our readings this morning, both centering around an encounter with the power of God. It’s a good thing we have stories like this because there’s really no other good way of talking about our encounters with God. As soon as the great mystics start trying to find other language, they start sounding, well, mystical and, for most of us, confusing.
These two stories are very different in some ways—and very much alike in others. And they both deserve closer examination.
The first, from the Book of Job, is really just the tail end of a very long story. Some of you will have heard Bill Trego say more about it last Sunday. In very brief summary, Job is God’s devoted friend. But Satan, the celestial Attorney General, challenges Job’s sincerity and God allows Satan to inflict terrible suffering on him to test him. Job’s old friends gather around. They intend to comfort him, but they wind up in a theological argument about what he must have done to deserve such suffering. They want him to ‘fess up. He insists that he’s done nothing wrong. But he has no explanation for what has happened to him. The one thing he keeps insisting on is that he wants to meet the God who used to be his friend and now seems to be acting like an enemy.
At the end of the book, Job finally gets the meeting he asked for. God unveils for him something of God’s inexhaustible creative power and says, in effect, “Do you really want to go head to head with me?” Then, in today’s reading, we heard Job’s response:
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees you;
therefore I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes.
This overwhelming encounter with God leaves no room for questions and theological arguments. Job understands who he’s up against and gives in. And yet . . . and yet, he still dares to speak: to address God, the God whom he has known both as friend and, so it seemed, enemy. His words are filled with awe. But they have the ring of authentic faith. God and Job are divided by absolute difference—the distance between the One who is all-powerful and the mortal two-legged creature that is humanity. And still, they speak here to one another; they commune with one another. The Job who can say, in effect, “I see now that I am, by comparison, nothing,” still knows that he has been given the privilege of speaking with God as friend, face to face.
Our other story comes from the Gospel of Mark, at the time when Jesus is on his way up to Jerusalem. Jericho was the last city on the pilgrim road that led there, the last real chance to turn back and avoid the authorities in Jerusalem. There is a sense of gathering danger even in the opening words of the story: “As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho. . .” Aah! that large crowd that will play such a big part in the events to come, sometimes cheering him on, sometimes calling for his death. Events are taking on a momentum of their own. Room for maneuver is shrinking.
And then Jesus hears a lone voice calling for him—as persistent and obnoxious as the voice of Job demanding an interview with God. Many other voices, like the voices of Job’s comforters, “sternly ordered [the man] to be quiet, but he cried out” ever more loudly. And Jesus halts the whole unwieldy parade to respond: “What do you want me to do for you?” “Rabboni, let me see again.” “Go, your faith has made you well.” This brief conversation with the blind man seems almost incidental. But it was, for the blind beggar, just as unpredictable, just as improbable, just as overwhelming as God’s much longer conversation with Job.
There’s something odd in the way Mark tells the story—a signal to us to pay attention. We learn the blind beggar’s name: Bartimaeus. (Mark seldom gives a name to any of the people who have brief interactions with Jesus in his Gospel.) And then Mark explains the name for us: Bartimaeus means “Son of Timaeus.” Well that doesn’t help much, does it? Let’s put it all into into English: “Son of Worthyman.” (For that is what timaeus means in Greek.) This man didn’t deserve to be blind any more than Job deserved his sufferings. Like Job, he is suffering without cause. Like Job, he utters an insistent demand for God’s attention. And like Job, he gets it.
It seems we have two figures here who are both worthy people, whose sufferings in this world are undeserved. And both of them have a strong enough hope in God that they will go on calling out for some meeting, some understanding, some conversation. The people around them tell them they’ve been cast off, but that doesn’t stop them.
This is, I think, a widespread human experience. Maybe we don’t consider ourselves worthy, much less sinless. But what human being has deserved every last misfortune and difficulty that befalls us? Perhaps we have to be pushed pretty hard before we call God to account. But here, in these stories, are two figures who did that and who are held up to us as models. They are models of real, honest prayer: direct, straightforward, insistent.
And in both these cases, the people who called on God received good things. Bartimaeus received his sight. Job got his wealth back and received a new family in place of the old. Is that the point? Just pray the right way and God will take care of everything? No. There are too many examples to the contrary in scripture to think that it’s that simple. God does work miracles in our world—things that cause us to marvel and fill us with hope and new life. But God is not under contract. Miracles are not something guaranteed to follow on the correct execution of the right sort of prayer.
The real point of these stories comes in what follows—not in the miracles of healing and restoration, but in the change that comes over these human interlocutors with God. Bartimaeus, at Jesus’ word, “immediately regained his sight,” Mark tells us, “and followed him on the way.” He joined the disciples and the crowd going up to Jerusalem. If we had asked him before what he would do if he should regain his sight, he would probably have said, “I’ll go home and get back to work at my business—and maybe read a book.” Instead, he launched himself into a dangerous adventure—a new, bigger, more challenging kind of life than he had ever imagined. That can happen to us when we face up to God. He could tell that danger might lie ahead. He went anyway.
The change may be a little harder to see in Job because Job’s world was so different from ours. But you may have noticed how oddly the story ended. God restores Job to wealth and family. And then we’re told that Job does something new and different with what has been given to him:
He also had seven sons and three daughters. He named the first Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Keren-happuch. In all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job’s daughters; and their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers.
Seven sons and three daughters—the same kind of family as before. But two things have changed. First, we’re told the names of Job’s daughters—something that rarely happens in the Scriptures of Israel. It implies that Job’s perspective has changed. Before the disaster, he valued his sons. Now, it is his children he values. The daughters are specifically noted, even though the sons are never named.
And, a further step, Job makes his daughters heirs alongside their brothers. This goes far beyond the norm of familial justice assumed in the rest of the Old Testament. Sons inherit; daughters get married off. But Job, after his encounter with God, is actually building a new kind of world. Having seen the splendor of God face to face and confronted his own human weakness and mortality, he responds with a kind of humanity and generosity he never conceived before.
Job saw and conversed with God and then gave up trying to figure things out. Instead of explanations, he chose a new life of generosity. Bartimaeus received his sight from Jesus. Instead of going back to his old life, he embarked on a new life of uncertainty and daring, following the one who had communicated God’s power in healing him. There is the heart of both stories. To encounter God won’t give us any explanations, won’t settle any questions, won’t solve all our future problems. But it will give us a new and bigger life—one that we probably could not have imagined without it.
We could put it all in more theoretical terms. But the stories say it better. Meeting God makes the world new. And sooner or later, it will be given to those who seek it.