Power: November 25, 2018

Year B, Christ the King                                                 

John 18:33-37                                                                                   

            Today is the Feast of Christ the King. It’s not one of our more well-known feast days. There are no greeting cards, no fun traditions and  no special decorations or cookies.  The feast itself is less than 100 years old.  It was 1925 when Pope Pius XI declared that this Sunday would be the Feast of Christ the King.  In 1925 Europe was still recovering from the devastating effects of World War I.   Italy was leaning much more secular than it previously had.  A church that had once experienced great power, saw their power and influence waning.

            Until 1870, the pope had authority and control over considerable geographic areas of Italy.  That changed in 1870 when the pope and The Roman Catholic Church lost power over all the land they previously held, which meant that while the pope retained spiritual authority, he had no political power.  This was a cause of consternation for the Roman Catholic Church.  After World War I, Italy was struggling to recover from the war.  Mussolini came to power and the Catholic Church found itself negotiating with this new fascist government attempting to retain some authority in Italy and the world.  The compromise was the creation of Vatican City as an independent city-state, and recognizing the pope as the head of state.  That final compromise came about in 1929, only 4 years after Christ the King feast day was inaugurated. 

            It’s interesting that this feast day, a day committed to recognizing the supreme authority of Jesus Christ, came in the midst of this political turmoil, a time when the Roman Catholic Church was struggling to hold on to their own authority.  Now, you could easily look at the timing and assume that the creation of this feast was a purely political move by the Church.  Many have come to that conclusion.  But I think it was more than that.  The Holy Spirit was in the midst of this.

I believe that the leadership of the church was genuinely scared about the future of Christianity.  They had just witnessed the First World War.  It was violence and death on a scale that no one had seen.  The Church that had once had a voice in the public and political sphere was now being virtually ignored.  The pope wanted to remind the people, anyone who was still listening, that God was still almighty, still all powerful.  Just because the church did not have an army behind it did not mean that it did not have power.  So they did what they knew how to do, they created liturgy to remind people of what real authority and power looked like.

            Now I have no idea who picked the readings that would be associated with this feast day.  It seems like choosing this reading from The Gospel of John would have been an odd choice for a church trying to reassert their authority.   If you asked me to choose a reading to display the power and authority of Jesus, I would have looked for something where Jesus looked impressive, perhaps the feeding of the 5000, or one of the many times he spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven, or even one of the resurrection accounts.  Those are feel good moments. 

But the trial scene?? We typically associate this trial scene with Holy Week.  We read it on Good Friday and feel sad because Jesus is about to die and instead of defending himself like any other self-respecting king, he asks questions and responds with confusing answers about where his kingdom is.  Jesus was a gifted orator. He was often besting the great theologians of his time.  He loved to put powerful people in their place.   What happened to that Jesus? That is the Jesus we need when we talk about authority and leadership.  We don’t need this slightly docile and evasive Jesus who seemed to cooperate with this Roman leader, who was widely perceived as an ineffective leader.

            Or maybe…this was exactly the kind of leader that the pope was trying to remind a beleaguered people after World War I-- who were searching for identity and hope in the rubble and ash of their pre-war existence.  And frankly, this might be exactly the kind of leader we need now, in a time when the church has virtually no political power and very little cultural influence.  We are even losing our authority as a moral guide.  Church attendance and participation is at an all-time low and sliding lower every single year.  Churches everywhere are scrambling for the perfect program, the cure all that will enable us to thrive again….to matter. 

            I remember when I was first learning about the Episcopal Church, I was told that there were more US presidents who were Episcopalian than any other denomination.  I was appropriately impressed.  We were the church of the establishment. If you were an important member of your community, odds were, you went to the Episcopal Church. Alas, what no one told me was that since 1945, only 2 presidents have been Episcopalians, only one in my lifetime.  We are no longer the church of the establishment.  There are a lot of people who mourn that loss.  There are many days when I do, even though I have never actually experienced the church as a powerful church.  It would be a lot easier to be part of church whose name people could actually pronounce. 

But you know what….I don’t think Jesus ever meant for it to be easy.  I think that if Jesus wanted his church to be a church that held worldly power, he probably would not have been born in a barn to a poor unmarried couple. He told Pilate, “If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep be from being handed over to the Jews.”  In saying that, he was not telling Pilate that his kingdom wasn’t this world.  Of course it is.  He was saying that he did not choose to wield his power in the same way that earthly kings did.  Could he have created an army and taken the Romans by force? Of course he could have.  He could have raised a dead army to fight. But he chose not to, because that was not what power looked like to him.  Power didn’t come from a weapon or a throne, it came from the heart.  It came from sacrifice. 

            Of course I wish that the church had more authority and that we could influence public opinion and behavior.  I would like that because we have some important truths to share.  In fact, that is one of the things that Jesus said to Pilate, that he came to testify to the truth and that everyone who belongs to the truth listens to his voice.  My friends, we might not belong to a powerful church, but that does not mean we don’t belong to something or someone powerful. We belong to the truth.  We belong to a King who wore a crown of thorns instead of a crown of gold. His throne was not a gilded chair with velvet cushions.  It was cross covered in his blood. That is the king who we belong to.  I truly believe that the more we can identify with that king, the more authority we will have.  It will not be authority given by worldly leaders whose power is fleeting.  It will be the authority of the King of kings and the Lord of lords. 

While I wish we could just create a new feast day and make that happen, we know that’s not going to work.  It didn’t work in 1925 and it won’t work now.  What we need to do is go back to our roots…not our 1610 roots, but our 33 AD roots.  If we actually follow God’s call to us, a call to sacrifice, a call to love the powerless, the abandoned, and the ignored, then we won’t need to claim authority.  We won’t need to sit in the highest positions of power, because then, we will be standing with the people who matter.  Then people will listen to us.  The world will notice. The world will change because we belong to the truth.

Christ the King & Flower Power: Nov. 22nd

John 18:33-37                                                                                                                

                Like many of you, I have been following the response of the French community to the recent attack in Paris.  As one might imagine, much of response has been grief and fear.  Yet there are also people speaking from a place of hope and faith.  Not all of them are calling it faith, but it sounds a lot like faith to me.  There is one interview that went viral.  It was viewed more than 15 million times on facebook alone.  In it a reporter is speaking to a man and his son who cannot be more than 4 years old.  The son is saying that he is afraid they will have to move because there are bad guys with guns.  The father, whose name his Angel, tells his son that it is ok, because they have flowers. The son wisely responds that flowers cannot do anything. The father says that they can and points to all the flowers and candles that people have placed in the midst of the rubble and ash of their city.  The child then asks, “So the flowers and the candles protect us?”  The father tells him they do.  Then the child smiles, not a big smile, but one that makes you think that maybe he understands something—something that even we as adults cannot.

                Today is Christ the King Sunday and it is a Sunday that many people approach with ambivalence.  On the one hand, we know that Jesus was referred to as a king in the scriptures.  But we are also a nation that was founded when we rebelled against the very notion of having a king.  We are a democracy because we didn’t trust monarchies.   God wasn’t a big fan of earthly kings either. In the Old Testament, God encouraged the people not to have a king.  He warned them that kings would not serve them.  A king would only take advantage of the people. They needed to rely on God, not some earthly power.  So it seems odd, that we have come to use this king language for Jesus.  He didn’t really act like a king.

                Pope Pius XI established Christ the King Sunday in 1925.  It was right after World War I and he felt that with the rise of nationalism and dictatorships, people needed to be reminded that regardless of the apparent power of our earthly leaders, there was only one king that mattered, the king of kings...Christ the King.   While I admire the effort, I am not sure it was the most effective strategy.  When we try to compare Jesus to our earthly understanding of kings, he will never really compare. Even in the time that Jesus lived, many of his followers wanted him to be a king, the kind of king that would help them overthrow the Roman government, the kind of king who would display his glory and power in battle.   He was never that king.

                Had that been his desire, Jesus could have been that king.  He could have done anything that he wanted.  He had the power to defeat the Romans, but he chose not to wield his power in that way.  Obviously, that had been done before.  The Israel people had some wonderful kings, like King David, who made them victors in war. But that kind of power was ephemeral. It did not last.  Jesus was the kind of king who would live amongst those who were suffering, who would insist that we love our enemies, even when they hate us and mean us harm.  He was the kind of king who would demand that his followers put down their swords when he was taken away by armed guards.  He was the kind of king who refused to wield his power over those who were weaker, even when those people were people like Pilate, who thought they had the power to kill him. 

                That is why we have this Gospel reading for Christ the King Sunday.  This is one of the scenes in the trial of Jesus.  He was being accused of blasphemy because he claimed to be God.  This was not a punishable offence according to the Romans, but claiming to be king was.  Claiming to be a king was an offense and threat to the Roman Emperor. Part of what Pilate was trying to determine was whether this man was really a threat.  It would appear that Pilate did not think he was much of a threat.  And how could he be? He had no army.  His own followers had betrayed him.  Even his people had turned against him.  There was no way that he was a threat to the Roman Emperor.  Despite all of this, Pilate decided that he needed to be crucified. 

What is interesting to me is that Pilate insisted on putting a sign on Jesus’ cross that proclaimed him as king of the Jews.  In many ways, it was one of the most profound acknowledgments of the power of Jesus.  A Roman leader officially acknowledged him as a king.   Jesus was a different kind of king.  He was a king who suffered for the sins of the world and that was never more evident than when he died on the cross under a sign that proclaimed him “King of the Jews.” 

                Many people felt that this was a defeat for Jesus and his followers. A real king, a powerful God would never allow himself to be crucified.  However, because we know the end of the story, we know that Jesus did in fact display ultimate power when he died on the cross.  He displayed power over death.  Once you have conquered death, no one can claim power over you. 

                I don’t know why this video of a father and his son has been viewed over 15 million times.  At first, it just seems like a display of innocence and hope in the midst of evil and suffering.  I think it is more than that.  Obviously, we know that any gun can destroy all the flowers and candles of this world.  What a gun cannot destroy is what the flowers and the candles represent.  It’s the hope that comes with people wanting to remember and honor those who have died.  It’s people who respond to hatred with love.  It is faith that evil cannot have the last word; that candles will always burn when we mourn those who we have lost; that flowers will bloom even in the most dismal of places.  It’s a king who conquers not with violent displays of power, but with sacrificial love and vulnerability.  When we celebrate Christ the King Sunday, we are not celebrating a king who sat on a throne with a crown of gold, but a king who was nailed to a cross with a crown of thorns.  This is the king we honor.   

During Holy Week, we have a bare cross that stands in our cemetery.  It has a sign that reads, “King of the Jews.”  On Easter Sunday we have another cross that we cover with flowers. A symbol of fear, hatred, and pain becomes a beautiful vision of joy and triumph.  We don’t just do that because it’s pretty.  We could just take the cross down and stick with the flowers if all we wanted was something pretty.  Instead we cover that hate with love.   We transform death into life because that was what Jesus did.   We stand here as a church…so that candles will always burn for the loved ones we have lost, flowers will always bloom even on the darkest and coldest of days, and the cross will always stand as a reminder that we have a king who refused to sit on a throne and instead lives among us.