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Christ the King

WHAT SORT OF “KING” ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?

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One of the few things Americans can broadly agree on right now is that we are going through a crisis of legitimate government. We may be diametrically opposed to one another in how we describe the situation, but we agree that we’re in crisis. It’s a relatively new experience for us. We haven’t had this level of public suspicion and disaffection and anger in my lifetime, even during the Vietnam War. And it creates a new context this year for this feast of Christ the King. 

The whole business of “kingship” is, even in better times, a bit of a stumbling block for Americans—an institution we rejected centuries ago. It may help to think of it simply as “government.” Monarchy was the only form of government in use in the New Testament period in any context larger than a municipality. To tell the truth, our own presidency isn’t all that different from a modern constitutional monarchy, even if the monarch has to submit to an election every four years. And we know well what a difference a good president can make in comparison with a bad one. 

It’s the same reality that the prophet Ezekiel was talking about in our reading this morning. Earlier in the chapter we just read from, God says that the shepherds (meaning the kings—a metaphor used often in antiquity) have abandoned their sheep. “The shepherds have fed themselves,” God says, “and have not fed my sheep.” 

God continues, at the beginning of the part we just read: 

“I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness.”

Does that sound familiar somehow? Yes, God is the Good Shepherd, the one who seeks out the lost sheep, just as Jesus would later say of himself.

And this is what God demands of kings. God wants our government leaders to take care of the weak sheep. There will be fat sheep, at the same time, who want the king to favor only them. There’s a vivid image of them in the paragraph that was omitted from our reading this morning. God says to the fat sheep: 

“Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, but you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture? When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet? And must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet, and drink what you have fouled with your feet?”

The true king must not favor these bullies. The true king must take care of the weak.

But, alas! we don’t live in a world where God has taken direct charge. God refuses to do so, in fact, because God is unwilling to deprive us of our freedom, the freedom that Adam and Eve chose in the Garden of Eden, the freedom to experience both good and evil. Sometimes we wish God would interfere with this freedom a bit more—preferably to our benefit, of course. But God loves the wayward, unpredictable creatures we are. And God doesn’t make a habit of saving us from ourselves. 

Instead, God at least tries to inspire us and our leaders. God wants for us leaders of integrity and generosity:

“I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd. And I, the Lord, will be their God and my servant David shall be prince among them.”

It’s a beautiful vision! And it happens from time to time, with individual leaders. But the House of David was a mixed bag, like our own presidents. There is no one source or form of leadership in this world that is guaranteed always to do the right thing. 

When we speak of Christ as “king,” then, we don’t ignore the unfinished, imperfect state of the world we live in. Christ is our shepherd now in the same way God was shepherd of Israel in the time of Ezekiel when it was collapsing before the overwhelming power of rival world empires on either side of it. We pray for help—and sometimes receive it in unexpected ways. But there is no magic cure for what ails us, no voice from the clouds, no lightning bolts to put our enemies on notice and set things right again. 

Is God powerless, then? No. God is practicing restraint. God is giving humanity space to come to our senses. But God is still the supreme ruler of the universe. Our reading from Ephesians describes the Risen Christ very much in terms of royal authority and power:

[God] seated [the Christ] at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fulness of him who fills all in all.

The Jesus who himself became the weak sheep bullied by the fat ones, who submitted to every expression of human evil directed against himself without seeking to harm any one in return, who kept faith with God and with the power of love, is revealed here as embodying the deepest and most powerful reality of all. And what is that? It’s the power by which God created everything that exists, the power by which God shepherds us still, the power of love. 

And it is this love that will sit in judgement over humanity as we come to the end of our course, individually or collectively. We heard it a few minutes ago in the Parable of Sheep and Goats. This parable comes right at the critical turning point in Matthew’s Gospel! It is the last piece of Jesus’ teaching before his arrest and crucifixion. It always evokes a shudder, with its command to the accursed: “Depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” But set that aside for a moment. I’ll come back to it. 

For the center of the parable is the curious and unexpected nature of the judgement itself. The blessed are those who, touched by ordinary human consideration for others, have given food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, welcome to the stranger, clothing to the naked, who have visited the sick and those in prison. And, most astonishing of all, they don’t even remember doing it! They don’t think of themselves as particularly good. They just tried to be decent human beings. 

Jesus really seems to be lowering the bar here. Is that really all there is to it? He doesn’t even say, “You were champions at feeding the poor or visiting the sick.” He just says, “You did it. Remember that?”

And the accursed never did it at all. Busy as they were trampling the grass and muddying the water, they didn’t even notice that they were overlooking something. If they’d only known it was Jesus they would certainly have done the right thing by him. After all, he’s a powerful figure, seated “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion.” They would have been careful to stay on his right side. But, no, off they go to the eternal fire. 

But don’t confuse the metaphor for the thing itself, the fire for what it points to. God doesn’t suddenly turn into a tyrant in the Last Days, doesn’t become a sadist who enjoys the suffering of others. No, the condemned are their own eternal fire. Having abandoned all human generosity, they chose only to magnify and enrich themselves at the expense of others. And they are being left to what they have created for themselves: a life of strife, jealousy, vicious competition, failure and, ultimately, disgust. They have only one another to bully and rob. And it must be a nasty disappointment for them.

Does that mean that the Good Shepherd, gives up on them? I doubt that. I think that God is always waiting and hoping that love can still touch even the most callous person’s heart and reveal its power for good. We can and should pray for those who have fallen into the trap of selfish arrogance. Maybe our prayers will help them toward a different vision of themselves and this world. But we also proclaim the perfect kingship of Christ, paradoxically revealed in Jesus’ gentleness and love, as the true standard of human leadership. It’s a kingship that puts love and generosity toward all in the first place. Embrace it for yourself, by giving what you can to a world in need. And, by the grace of God, it can help us all move forward out of our present crisis. 

Preached at Good Shepherd, Berkeley

FEAST OF CHRIST THE KING, NOVEMBER 22, 2020

Proper B: Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24; Psalm 95:1-7a; Ephesians 1:15-23; Matthew 25:31-46

TRUE KINGSHIP

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Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley
Christ the King, November 25, 2018
Year B: 2 Samuel 23:1-7; Psalm 132:1-13; Revelation 1:4b-8; John 18:33-37

King of Glorie, King of Peace,
With the one make warre to cease;
With the other blesse thy sheep,
Thee to love, in thee to sleep.

Let not Sinne devoure thy fold,
Bragging that thy blood is cold,
That thy flesh hath lost his food,
And thy Crosse is common wood.

King of Glorie, King of Peace,
With the one make warre to cease;
With the other blesse thy sheep,
Thee to love, in thee to sleep.
George Herbert, “L’Envoy”
[The form of the poem as I give it here, isn’t the original, but Edward Bairstow’s adaptation of it in his “Five Songs of the Spirit” for baritone, which I sang to introduce the sermon—with the great help of Randy Benway as pianist.]

Today is the Feast of Christ the King—and that word “king” is one that many—maybe most—of us here at Good Shepherd are not too happy with. There are good reasons for that. What does “king” even mean to people in the US two hundred and some odd years after we got rid of the whole lot? And isn’t it hopelessly tainted with assumptions of patriarchy—not to mention hints of violence and arbitrariness?
But I want to say today that we need to rethink our suspicion. I”m not going to propose that the US should replace our elected president with a crowned monarch. But I can’t help noticing that many, many people in the world today seem to have a great hunger to have some one significant person to lead them, guide them, tell them what their lives mean and what to do about it—someone to protect them, to make them feel better about themselves.
It seems to be a fairly basic human longing. And it can take a bad turn. Some of it is as trivial as the worldwide fascination with celebrities. Some takes the form of giving too much credit to the self-proclaimed experts that tell us what to eat and how to decorate our homes and how to raise our children and . . . you name it. But some of it has become very political and has sweeping consequences.

We’re living right now in a new and unexpected era of “strong man” governments. For a long time, we thought this sort of thing was restricted to third-world countries. But Mr. Putin in Russia and Mr. Orbán in Hungary have been making quite a career of it in Europe. And they have lots of wannabes trying to follow in their footsteps—including our current president. But don’t, please, think that this disease is limited to political conservatives. Leftists like Mr. Maduro in Venezuela and Mr. Ortega in Nicaragua play it, too. And the Ortegas seem to have become increasingly hard to distinguish from their right-wing predecessors, the Somoza family. And the rest of us now find ourselves wringing our hands and being perplexed and appalled that people would actually vote such regimes into office.
Of course, these “strong men” aren’t literally kings. (The word “dictator” comes closer.) Traditional kings, even in their heyday, were typically surrounded by political and social checks and balances—and by sacred ideals, as in David’s poem about the true king in our first lesson this morning:

One who rules over 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.

Our current crop of strong men are nothing like this. They’re committed only to the narrow interests of their own factions. Their goal is not to unite people but to eradicate all opposition. They seek to dominate and reshape their communities with the tools of fear, suspicion, and hatred.

Against these developments, we can and do set the ideals of democracy, of justice, of human rights—ideals that match well with our Christian faith. But that may not be enough by itself. Abstract ideals aren’t always enough to sustain human beings, even the most rational of us. We need not just ideals but embodiment. We need to see ourselves and our hopes and our highest values embodied in a person.
The approaching seasons of Advent and Christmas should, in fact, remind us of that. Why? Because they proclaim how God’s boundless mercy and generosity have now come to us embodied in the person of the Christ—this person we celebrate today as our “King.” And Jesus is a king who presents the sharpest possible contrast to the strong men of our time. For our king rejects the strategies of fear, suspicion and hatred and founds this kingdom of which we are part on trust and hope and love.
Jesus makes all this clear in his audience with Pilate: “If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over. . . . But . . . my kingdom is not from here.” And this is the kingdom of which we are a part. This is the person we acclaim freely as our king. Say “monarch,” of course, if you prefer. I, too, like its ungendered character; I only fear that it summons up the image of a political office more than that of a concrete person who can help me know who I am and how I want to live in this world.

I know there is also a danger here—the danger of remaking Jesus in the image of the strong men around us. In fact, we Christians have done that again and again—invoking Jesus as our leader against heretics, against people of other religions, even against each other. Protestants and Catholics of the seventeenth century were mirror images of one another in their confidence that Jesus was on their side. And, as Abraham Lincoln ruefully observed, both North and South in the Civil War prayed to the same God and expected God’s favor for their cause.
So, yes, there’s danger in calling Jesus “king.” There is nothing so pure in our world that we humans can’t misuse it; we’re very good at that. And that’s why I began with that poem by George Herbert. “King of Glory, King of Peace.” We’re apt to think of “glory” as something military. But Herbert undercuts that idea and restores the truth of Jesus’ kingship. Jesus’ glory is shown in bringing peace, even at the cost of his own life
Herbert prays for Jesus’ kingship to become truly manifest among us and in us—prays that we will trust Jesus’ glory and power in a way that can make us, too, agents of peace. Otherwise, what good did it do to shed his blood, to let his body be hung up on the wood of the cross, to feed us again and again in this Holy Communion with his own life?
Sin would like to convince us that it was all for naught. Sin would like to convince us to take the way of the strong man, the one who deals in fear and suspicion and hatred. Sin would like us to believe that Jesus’ blood was wasted, that his life can no longer nourish us, that the cross was just ordinary wood.
But we are people of Jesus. We do not accept that. We belong to a kingdom of glory and peace, of love and mercy. We have a heritage that has again and again given life to true human community after times of destruction. And we will not dishonor our king. In fact, we will proclaim his kingship in our lives. Even if the word “king” may seem hopelessly tainted for many of us, let our lives continue to show the trust and hope and love—the allegiance—to which it points.

King of Glorie, King of Peace,
With the one make warre to cease;
With the other blesse thy sheep,
Thee to love, in thee to sleep.

Let not Sinne devoure thy fold,
Bragging that thy blood is cold,
That thy flesh hath lost his food,
And thy Crosse is common wood.

King of Glorie, King of Peace,
With the one make warre to cease;
With the other blesse thy sheep,
Thee to love, in thee to sleep.

AN ODD SORT OF KING

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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.