Church of the Holy Spirit, Vashon
November 21, 2021
The Rev. Jeffrey Gill
Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14
Psalm 93
Revelation 1:4b-8
John 18:33-37
Happy Feast of Christ the King! On this final Sunday of the church’s liturgical year we celebrate the consummation of all things and the ultimate goal of human history and experience, which is to live in the world we pray for each time we pray, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that it can be a bit of a stretch from our modern perspective to see through the patriarchal and monarchial and somewhat triumphal imagery of Christ the King to imagine what kind of a world it is that this day points us toward.
But context is everything – both the ancient context in which the image of Christ the King first comes into the Christian imagination, the context many centuries later in which this day was added to the church’s calendar, and our own contemporary context, and what this might mean for us today.
Last week Sarah talked about how in the weeks preceding the season of Advent we have an increasing sense of apocalypse – a time of anguish, as we heard last week in Daniel, and then, from Mark’s “little apocalypse” itself, Jesus talking with his disciples about when the end will come – themes that will be repeated particularly in the first Sunday of Advent next week.
But today, we hear something very different – eschatological (or, speaking of ultimate things), yes, but none of the sense of a violent apocalypse. Instead, we hear in Daniel of the coming of an eternal kingship:
As I watched in the night visions,
I saw one like a human being
coming with the clouds of heaven.
And he came to the Ancient One
and was presented before him.
To him was given dominion
and glory and kingship,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
that shall not pass away,
and his kingship is one
that shall never be destroyed.
And also today, the Psalmist says:
The LORD is King…
He has made the whole world so sure
that it cannot be moved…
Israel’s experience of kings – whether their own short-lived experience of unity and grandeur under David and Solomon, which then quickly turned to disunity and dishonor; or that of foreign kings in a foreign land, no matter how benevolent, such as they found under Cyrus of Persia – none could match their vision of an everlasting dominion of justice, peace, and love that could encompass all people equally and for all time.
And then we see in the Gospel of John a scene from inside the Headquarters of the Roman governor in Jerusalem. Asked if he is the king of the Jews, Jesus tells Pilate that his kingdom is not from here – no grand headquarters, no army, no soldiers to fight and kill. Rather, “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.”
This is the kind of king we celebrate today – one who is, above all, an embodiment of and a testimony to the truth, a living witness to God’s essential nature, which is love.
As with many things in our liturgical life, there is some history that is not always obvious or completely intuitive. (I’m sure you’ve probably noticed that!) And this is one of those moments. The Feast of Christ the King was a twentieth century innovation by Pope Pius XI, who added it to the Church’s calendar in 1925 to “counter what he regarded as the destructive forces of the modern world: secularism in the west and the rise of communism in Russia and fascism in Italy and Spain, harbingers of the Nazism soon to seize Germany.”1 Pope Pius wanted to set this day in opposition to the totalitarian claims of these ideologies. Following the Second Vatican Council in early 1960s the date of this feast was changed from October where it had been originally been placed as a “Counter-Reformation Day” celebration, to the last Sunday of the church year with its eschatological emphasis. It now proclaimed Christ as “the goal of human history, the focal point of the desires of history and civilization, the center of humankind, the joy of all hearts, and the fulfillment of all aspirations.”2
Today’s Feast of Christ the King comes at a time when some of these very concerns have arisen again – concerns about the increasing appeal of authoritarianism – not only in other countries
around the world, whether in Africa, Asia, South America, or Europe, but right here in our very own United States of America as well. We have believed in this country and exported the idea
around the world that democracy and the right of every individual to have a say in how they are governed is sacred, incontrovertible. And yet we see efforts across our country to undermine
those very rights, make it harder or impossible for many to vote at all, and with the impairment of those rights, our very system of government itself has come under threat.
This day comes also at a time when the very same concerns that Israel’s prophets had about inequality – the inequalities of wealth, opportunity, and of justice for all people are plaguing
our society. This past Friday’s not-guilty verdict in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse shines a bright light on just how far we are from a world of equal justice. Whatever the merits of the arguments in the case, we only have to ask ourselves if we can imagine a situation in which a BLACK teenager, crosses a state line with an automatic weapon that he is too young to purchase himself, walks around with his AR-15 looking for trouble, kills two unarmed people, wounds one other, and is acquitted on all counts. It just doesn’t happen that way for black people in America. Our bishop was right this week to observe that “if Rittenhouse had been Black, the verdict would have been drastically different. I would go further,” he writes, “– when you watch the videos of that night, I would say if Rittenhouse had been Black, he most likely would not have come out of that night alive. A young white man brazenly carrying an automatic weapon through city streets was virtually ignored by law enforcement. Had it been a Black man, I do believe the result would be drastically different.”
Our society is infected by the myth of redemptive violence, which is to say that while violence may not be good in itself, it can be used for good if it is in the hands of the right people and is
used for purposes that serve a greater good. We routinely think of the state as having the right to use force (as in the conduct of a so-called just war, or in the enforcement of the law). But as
the Rittenhouse verdict makes clearer than ever – “the right people” means white men. This myth of redemptive violence infects both our theology and our social contract. This myth “enshrines the belief that violence saves, that war brings peace, that might makes right. It is one of the oldest continuously repeated stories in the world.”3
For those of us in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the idea that “violence saves” come out of a theology of blood sacrifice, culminating in the idea that the violence of the cross is what saves us. And yet, it turns out that for the first millennium of the Christian era, the cross was not the predominant symbol for the church, much less a bloodied cross. Images of Jesus’ suffering and death were absent from early churches. They didn’t begin to appear in churches until the 10th century.
Rita Nakashima Brock is a Japanese-American theologian, and in her book, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of this World for Crucifixion and Empire4 , she shows that early Christian understandings of what it meant to be a Christian had to do NOT with being saved from this world so one could live eternally in heaven, but living in this present world in a state
of life at its best – paradise regained – a world of beauty, peace, joy, love, justice, equality, freedom… She described her search in ancient churches for signs of the crucified body of Jesus,
or other symbols pointing to the crucifixion. There were none. Instead, there were images such as those found still today in the apse of the century Church of St. Giovanni in Rome, of
a beautiful paradise in all its richness and glory. This is the world in which we are called to live. It is the state in which Christ is King, and the teachings of Jesus are the moral and ethical code
by which human beings live and thrive. It is the place of flourishing for the human family and indeed for all of creation.
Our prayer that “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” must become not our resignation to the dark realities of the present world or merely our hopes for another
world after we die; but, rather, the very longing of our hearts, the reality we anticipate and for which we strive in the here and now to realize, which is the paradise God created this world to
be.
There’s a delightful movie you might have seen titled The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, in which a group of British tourists find themselves in India staying in a place that didn’t quite measure up
to their standards. Things were broken and service was lacking. Their frustrations rose, and in one incident one of them says rather haughtily to Sonny, the hotel manager, “I’d like to go to
the hotel shown in the brochure!” Always doing his best to please, he replies to her, “In India we have a saying: ‘Everything will be alright in the end. If everything is not alright, it is not the
end.’”
This Feast of Christ the King is our assurance that “everything will be alright in the end. And if everything is not alright, it is not the end.” God is not done with us yet. We still have work to
do.
1 Frank C. Senn, ”The Not-So-Ancient Origins of Christ the King Sunday, in Lutheran Forum (Fall 2007).
2 Ibid.
3 Walter Wink, “The Myth of Redemptive Violence,” https://www2.goshen.edu/~joannab/women/wink99.pd
4 Brock, Rita Nakashima, and Rebecca Ann Parker. Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of this World for
Crucifixion and Empire. Beacon Press, 2008.