Sunday, Nov. 26 - Christ the King Sunday
You’re not from here, are you? Words like that let you know right off you don’t belong; you’re not “one of us.” You’re not in the club. You don’t fit in the gang. You’re an outsider.
I served a wonderful church in Mobile, Alabama, for four years before moving here. No matter how long I lived there, however, I knew I would always have been an outsider to some. One Martin Luther King weekend I preached a sermon quoting Dr. King. The next day a deacon came to see me explaining that a Yankee preacher shouldn’t talk about things he didn’t know nothing about. This man had been in Selma. He was from here. King had been a troublemaker, bringing all that stuff into Alabama.
It wasn’t just racial politics, though; it was also just downright provincialism in Mobile. Unlike many big cities that have people coming and going all the time, mixing and melting into the culture to make it what it is, Mobile had a hardened culture that came from true Mobilians. Everyone else was expected to kowtow to it, and I’m sure it’s changing for them now, but it wasn’t just Yankees like me who weren’t warmly welcomed; it was anybody not born there. People liked to say that if you were born in Pascagoula and moved to Mobile the day after and lived there to the age of 95, when you died the Mobile Press Register would call you a longtime Mobile resident. The joke was that to be a true Mobilian you had to be conceived during ,Mardi Gras under an azalea bush at Bienville Square.
If you have ever changed schools as a kid, you know how hard it is to break in when you’re not from here. If you have moved to a new neighborhood or a new church (I hope not this one), you know how hard it is when you’ve come to here but are not from here.
Jesus must have felt something of this when he stood before Pontius Pilate. Pilate asked him, Are you the King of the Jews? He does not answer directly at first but later acknowledges that he is a king and that his kingdom is not from here.
Consider the whole idea of Jesus being King of the Jews. This was the messianic hope, wasn’t it? That a king of the Jews would rise up and rally the people again as of old? He would be the chosen one. He would drive out the Romans just as David had driven out the Philistines. He would restore the kingdom to Israel and establish a lasting peace.
Of course, that peace would be the peace of Israel at the expense of the peace of Rome or any other nation. This is always the case with the kingdoms of this world. Peace is a zero-sum game for the kings of the earth: there isn’t enough of it to go around for everyone. If one group of people has it, it’s because they have the upper hand. Jesus doesn’t offer that kind of peace; he is not that kind of king.
Look at what’s happening in Iraq now. Sunni and Shi‘ite Muslims both believe that only if they have the upper hand can there be peace. The Shia majority lived under the iron fist of the Sunni “king,” Saddam Hussein. They understood that peace in Iraq was a Sunni peace that meant only oppression for them. The Kurds were treated the same way, even though they mostly just wanted to be left alone and have their own little oil state. So while we think we are there promoting democracy and a new, peaceful Iraq, we’re not getting much help from the people we’re trying to help. The sects are fighting it out in the streets to gain peace for themselves at the expense of others. And our soldiers are caught in the crossfire.
You don’t have to look far to see why you shouldn’t want to tie the kingship of Jesus to any political movement. We have lately seen a great shift in loyalties nationally, from one party to the other. Democrats have control over both houses of Congress now. For a long time it seemed that the GOP stood for God’s Own Party. They used the rhetoric of religion liberally to support their conservative agenda. And it worked, for a while. But like every attempt to enlist Jesus to one’s side in a power struggle, sooner or later you find out that Jesus will not be manipulated.
In David Kuo’s new book, Tempting Faith: The Inside Story of Political Seduction, the former assistant to the director of the Faith-Based Initiative program tells of how this administration played the religion card for its own purposes and with no intention of taking its promises seriously. The faithful were hopeful that if only we could get godly people into positions of power in politics, then all would be better, if not well. Many believed that this was the best way to help the poor. But they have become disillusioned by the way politicians use religion for their own ends, enlisting Jesus to their side.
This administration is not the first to do so and won’t be the last. Throughout history people have tried to make Jesus king of their own nation or faction, their own ethnic group or social agenda. Ever since Constantine the Great declared Christianity to be the religion of the empire in AD 323, the rulers of the earth have sought the favor of God and their subjects by declaring themselves servants of Jesus. Unfortunately, that has worked out badly for Jesus every time. When the Crusaders sewed red crosses on their cloaks and went out to slaughter the Muslims in the Holy Land, Jesus was made their king against his will. When Hitler monogrammed the uniforms of German soldiers with the words Gott mit Uns and then slaughtered Jews in the name of Christ, Jesus was made their king against his will. And anytime any of us tries to crown Jesus our king in order to gain advantage for ourselves over others, we make him king against his will. Jesus will no more accept OUR kingship than he would the kingship of the Jews in his day. Jesus will not be owned by any of us.
Notice what he says: My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. Of course his followers wanted to fight the Jews about that, but he restrained them. Unfortunately, time and time again Jesus’ followers have made the Jews a threat to be feared and have fought to keep him from being handed over to them by killing them first. And today, many Christians think it is their duty to fight to keep Jesus from being handed over to the Muslims. We hear claims from some parts of Christendom that Muslims have a worldwide master plan to take over all of our religions and deprive us of our worship of Jesus. Let me say this about that: Some Muslims probably do. And some Christians want to do the same to them. It is wrong to judge all Muslims by a few, and wrong to take the worst adherents of a faith and assume that is the real core of it. We hate it when others do that to us—rejecting Christianity because of certain idiot Christians who go ’round hating other people or bringing disrepute on Jesus by their actions. We must not do the same to others.
I think the greater threat, the more-subtle one, is that Jesus would be handed over to Christians. And that would be just as disastrous. We do not own Jesus. He is not OUR king. He is the king of a kingdom not from here. He is the king of the kingdom of God.
But having said that, I want you to beware of something else. Just as Jesus cannot rightly be made king of your high school football team so that you will be sure to get him on your sideline, and just as he cannot be made king of your love life so that you will get the girl (or guy) of your dreams, and just as he cannot be made king of your business so that you will become rich and say that it’s because Jesus is YOUR Lord, so also you cannot assume that a kingdom not from this world means nothing to this world.
The Jews handed him over to Pilate precisely because they didn’t want the kind of king he was. They wanted a king they could control—just as we all do. And Pilate ordered his execution precisely because he was afraid of the kind of king he could not defeat by the usual means. Jesus’ kinship is a constant threat to all political realms. He is not like some Christians who are so heavenly minded they are no earthly good. On the contrary, he is the king of heaven in order that by being free from the earth, he may be good to all the earth.
When the book of Revelation says he is the one who is, who was, and who is to come, that he is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, it means that he is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. It doesn’t mean that he is king of hearts and king of heaven but not king of the kings of the earth. He is all of those things. Which is also why Sandra Day O’Connor, former United States Supreme Court Justice, could say that the “under God” language of the Pledge of Allegiance does not mean that we are advocating a theocracy in America so much as recognizing that all governments, including our own, exist under the kingship of God. Which means we cannot do anything we wish, even if we have the majority. We are obligated to do what we believe God would want done for all.
“The kingdom of God that Jesus announced and embodied is what life would be like on earth, here and now, if God were king and the rulers of this world were not. Imagine if God ruled the nations, and not … [the names of those we hear in the news every day]. Every aspect of personal and communal life would experience a radical reversal. The political, economic, and social subversions would be almost endless—peace-making instead of war mongering, liberation not exploitation, sacrifice rather than subjugation, mercy not vengeance, care for the vulnerable instead of privileges for the powerful, generosity instead of greed, humility rather than hubris, embrace rather than exclusion, etc. The ancient Hebrews had a marvelous word for this, shalom, or human well-being.” [Daniel Clendenin (citing Marcus Borg and others) in The Clash of Two Kingdoms: Pilate the Prefect and Christ the King, http://www.journeywithjesus.net/.]
This is exactly what the church lives for. We are a political community in the midst of other political communities, seeking to offer an alternative vision of how the world can be organized and people treated. We realize that Jesus is Lord, not because we make him so but because God has made him so. And we live under his authority as one who comes to us, not from us—as one whose bidding we do, not as one who does our bidding.
Our church mate and my friend, Allen Walworth, was once pastor of the First Baptist Church of Huntsville, Alabama, as was our former Wilshire pastor, Ralph Langley. In the mid to late 1960s, the church employed a Fort Worth firm to design and execute a massive mosaic on the façade of the church that depicts the Cosmic Christ. The theme comes from the images of the first chapter of Revelation. Christ stands at the center of a sprawling and swirling galaxy. The symbols of the faith are present. He is clearly Christ the King. But it’s not coincidence that Huntsville is the home to many NASA engineers, lots of whom go to church there. And the art is very ’60s-looking—very, well, spacey, don’t you know?! So much so that Allen said they always had to explain why Jesus looked like a giant eggbeater.
All of this only goes to show that even our best attempts to crown Christ the king for our time and purposes always come up short of his being the king he actually is—a king for all times and for his purposes. And this is the one who calls us to worship him and listen to his voice as the voice of truth.
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under the chosen Sunday to hear audio of sermon (mp3 format) (beginning March 11, 2007).
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