King

Colossians 1:11-20 and Luke 23:33-43
November 21, 2010 (Christ the King)

1.  So did you hear the good news?  If you didn’t, you may be living under a rock!  Prince William is getting married to his long-time girlfriend, Kate Middleton!  Barring some unforeseen circumstance, William and his new wife will eventually ascend the throne of the United Kingdom.  William will be king, and his wife Kate will be Queen.  Our perennial interest in the British monarchy is fascinating—it would seem that our American democratic character cannot help but be intrigued with the romance and tradition of royalty.  We’ve all seen too many movies!  Biblical kings were more likely to be exploitative autocrats than ultra-suave, polo-playing dandies.  So what do we make of this strange Sunday at the end of the liturgical year?  What are we supposed to think about this idea that Christ is King?  Does he wear an ermine-lined cape and jeweled crown?  Does he live in a palace?  Does he rule with absolute authority, or does he leave most everything up to some celestial parliament?  And, perhaps the hardest question of all, can you accept/believe that you are subject to a monarch, no matter that it is Jesus?  Our scripture readings this morning can help us think some about what it means that Jesus Christ reigns as king.

2.  In the letter to the Colossians, our Savior Christ is described in terms of cosmic power.  The writer of this letter refers to Jesus as:

·         the image of the invisible God;

·         the firstborn of all creation;

·         head of the body, the church;

·         the beginning and the first born of the dead.

The passage declares that all things were created through Jesus Christ, meaning that you and I, the natural world around us, the air we breath, and the infinite expanse of the cosmos were all created in some mystical way through the person of Jesus.  Moreover, in this Jesus our King, the entire fullness of God has been pleased to dwell, and all of us can find reconciliation with God and with each other through him.

This vision of Christ is amazing, astounding, astonishing.  He is so far from the humble babe in the manger, far from the scruffy carpenter, far from the executed teacher and healer.  In my imagination, after reading this passage from Colossians, I imagine Jesus getting bigger and bigger until he fills my entire field of vision, until he fills the entire universe.  Even for a dyed-in-the-wool anti-authoritarian, it is not that difficult to feel like a subject of this larger-than-life Lord of Life.  It reminds me of another of my favorite New Testament passages: the hymn about Christ in the 2^nd chapter of Philippians:

“Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is the Lord”!

3.  But you may find yourself squirming with all this talk of an Almighty King.  Your relationship with Jesus isn’t like that maybe.  You don’t like the idea of bowing and scraping.  Jesus is your friend, your brother, your confidant.  Or, even if that’s not completely how you feel about him, he’s not some cosmic overlord!  If you feel this way, you are not alone.  Theologian Sallie McFague has been one of the  most trenchant critics of this way of thinking of Christ, or even God the Creator, as some Almighty Royal Figure.  She writes, “My criticism of [this monarchical model] focuses on its inability to serve as the imaginative framework for all of creation….

“The relationship of king to subject is necessarily a distant one: royalty is ‘untouchable.’  It is the distance, the difference, the otherness of God that is underscored in this imagery.  God as king in his kingdom—which is not of this earth—and we remain in another place, far from his dwelling.  In this picture God is wordless and the world is Godless: the world is empty of God’s presence, because it is too lowly to be the royal abode.”

Some of you have said something more or less like this to me, if not with McFague’s exact words.  You don’t like a king Jesus.  Thinking of Jesus as king makes him distant, out there, un-relatable. 

These criticisms suggest that Christ the King seems, at best, old-fashioned.  At worst, it takes away our own God-given human dignity and expects us to genuflect mindlessly as a way to keep us in our place.  As a lifelong Protestant, I remember how shocked I was the first time I saw news footage of the ordination service for a Catholic priest.  At one point in the service, he doesn’t merely kneel but rather complete prostrates himself face down on the floor before the altar at the front of the church.  I mean, in our churches, we don’t even have kneelers in the pews!  Our understanding of Christ simply does not call for this kind of self-abasement.  How can good democrats (lower-case “D”!) ever find any sort of comfort in a God who treats us like subjects of a king?

4.  The thing is, as our Gospel reading makes abundantly clear, Jesus is no ordinary king.  He is not far away and up above.  He is Jesus.  He died with criminals on the cross.  But even in his most agonizing moment, he was reaching out to them and inviting them into his kingdom, into his community.  This king is someone who, when confronted with earthly kings and powers, receives nothing but mocking.  They make fun of him!  “If you are the king of the Jews, then do something!  Save yourself!” 

When the author of the letter to the Colossians describes our Lord Christ as a Cosmic Lord, he must hold that vision of Jesus in tension with the King Jesus who rules from the throne of the cross with a crown of thorns.  We must also hold these two visions of king in tension.  One is the Lord to whom every knee must bow.  The other is the king who offers grace even to the criminal at the hour of his death.  If we bow to our King Jesus, we do so because he is with us and loves us.  He is not in some distant royal abode, but nor is he someone we can tuck away in our back pocket.  He is mighty, and he is kind.  He is merciful, and he is just.  All things were created through him, and he wants to know you personally.

5.  Perhaps the best wisdom I have heard concerning our celebration of Christ the King is from preaching professor David Lose.  Lose emphatically explains that when we make Christ our King, this is not just regime change.  We are not just replacing our worldly presidents and bosses and lords with Jesus.  Lose writes, “But the kingdom – or, maybe better, realm – of God that Jesus proclaims represents a whole new reality where nothing is the same – not our relationships or rules, not our view of self or others, not our priorities or principles – nothing. Everything we thought we knew about kings and kingdoms, in fact, gets turned right on its head.”  Lose continues, “If we believe that Christian faith isn't just allegiance to a different sovereign but rather is entrance into an entirely new realm, then who knows what God will expect from us. No longer can we keep our faith a private affair and ignore the need of our neighbor. No longer can we sing robust and rousing hymns about God's glory and majesty and ignore the plight of God's good earth. No longer can we pray that God's kingdom come and yet manage our wealth as if it actually belonged – rather than was entrusted – to us. And no longer can we relegate the realm of God to a comfortably distant – or for that matter frighteningly near – future. The realm and rule of God is all around us, beckoning us to live by its vision and values even now.”

6.  So, in this last week before we must absolutely get caught up in Advent and in Christmas, remember again that we exist in this church because Christ is our Head. He defines who we are and how we are to act. He welcomes us and sends us out.  He feeds us at this table, and calls us to feed others. 

I will conclude with words of praise from the book of Revelation:

Worthy is the Lamb who was slain,

to receive power and wealth

and wisdom and might

and honor and glory and blessing!  Amen.

Signs of the New Creation

Isaiah 65:17-25
November 14, 2005 (33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time)

1.  Hear again these words from the prophet Isaiah:  “For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.”  Isaiah was writing to a people recently returned from their exile in Babylon.  Jerusalem was a shambles, families and farms and trades were all in disarray, and the world crowded all around as a constant threat.  The people needed to hear God’s promise again that a new creation is on its way.  Last week, we talked about heaven, and that’s part of this new creation.  But today we need to remember, like the ancient Israelites, that God is with us now.  God is creating something new and something better in our world in our lives right now.  We believe in a God who is doing a new thing, a God who puts a new heart within us, a God who rules over a place called the New Jerusalem.  We believe in a God who makes all things new. 

2.  One of the remarkable features of this passage from Isaiah is how specific are God’s promises concerning the new creation.  To be honest, it’s probably so specific because the prophet Isaiah was responding to specific injustices, real cases of public nastiness, particular instances of mean and sorry limitation.  In other words, the vision of the new in this passage points to some very concrete problems with the old.  And if you are a realist, what some might call a pessimist, you might not be too shy about pointing out that the old and awful world of the ancient Israelites that emerges from this passage is all too similar to our own world.  You might wonder: if God is bringing newness, if new creation is on its way, it seems to have been delayed.  Just like the experience of the Israelites, the world still crowds around us, our lives are all too often a total mess.

But don’t take my word for it.  There is proof that our world still cries out for something new. 

Isaiah promises that the new creation will not have infants who live but a few days.  While rates of infant mortality have decreased radically in the modern world, especially in developed nations, in the third world, infant mortality remains tragically high.  The CIA World Factbook puts infant mortality in the United States at the relatively low rate of 0.6%, but this still means that the U.S. is in 46^th place in the world in terms of infant mortality.  Sadly, many nations in Africa still have infant mortality rates higher than 10%. 

Isaiah promises that all old people will live out a long life.  Again, in the industrialized world, this is basically true, with the exceptions we all can name resulting from accidents, murder, and disease.  But in other parts of the world, the average life expectancy is appallingly low, generally due to the AIDS epidemic.  Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa have a life expectancy hovering around 40 years. 

In the new creation in Isaiah, no one builds houses and then doesn’t live in them.  Nor does anyone plant crops and then not eat of them.  Of course, many today do not live in the houses they built.  National Geographic magazine says that in 2010 there are 35 million refugees in this world who have been forced from their homes by war and unrest.  Some agencies put that number much higher. 

And of course, in today’s global agricultural economy, few people eat the food that they plant in their fields.  Presbyterian mission co-worker Jed Koball explains that one of the key causes of hunger in the country of Peru today is the fact that many fields once used to provide food for the local population are now used to grow a cash crop, asparagus, for the North American market.  Examples like this one are unfortunately common. 

Finally, and perhaps most provocatively, in God’s new creation says Isaiah, no parents will “bear children for calamity.”  This is every parent’s most fervent hope for their children today, that they will never encounter calamity despite a world full of perils and traps.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if none of our children ever experienced calamity? 

No wonder that Isaiah’s prophecy for an ancient people still sounds fresh and attractive to us today!  So many conditions of the old world still plague our contemporary time.  We still need a new creation.  We still need a new heaven and a new earth. 

3.  Noted Christian speaker and preacher Tony Campolo makes the bold claim that when Jesus came into the world, God’s promises came to pass.  Despite all that I’ve just said about the world still being in dire need of a new creation, Campolo argues that in Jesus, we have been given new life.  Jesus, in all the gospels, proclaims that, in him, the kingdom of God is coming near to us, and this is the beginning of the new creation.  Campolo writes, “[Jesus] wants to change this world into the kind of world that it ought to be. That’s why Jesus came, to create transformed people who in turn will live in a transformed world.”  This is why Jesus teaches his disciples—and us—to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.  Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” 

In other words, Jesus among us is the turning point in history between the old world and the new, between the old life and the new life.  Ancient promises, like the one made in Isaiah to the Israelites, are answered in Jesus Christ.  And so now, even though the world can still feel awfully broken, it is on the mend.  Christ is with us, Emmanuel, in a whole new way, even in the trials and problems of modern life.

Campolo suggests that Hurricane Katrina was a good example of a new thing emerging even in the destruction of that storm.  Campolo writes, “When Katrina took place, [Jesus] was the first one who wept. He was the first one who cried. He was the one who was outraged because we didn’t build levees strong enough to hold back a hurricane force wind. He was the one who was outraged by the fact that there was so much poverty in New Orleans. To be Christian isn’t just to believe in Jesus, it’s to allow Jesus to invade you, to change your emotions, your feelings, your thinking.” 

4.  And when this transformation begins to take place, we start to be able to see signs of the new creation.  Life emerges where before there was none.  As Christians we need to remember that Jesus came to bring in the kingdom of God.  In him, the old world is being made new.  When you see new life emerge, you can be sure that is Christ at work.  When you see signs of the new creation, you are seeing the promises of God being fulfilled even now.  After the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington in 1980, scientists and other observers were astonished by how quickly the landscape regenerated.  A 1987 article from Time magazine reported that, “What they observe is nothing less than a landscape being reborn. Nature is laboring mightily to transform the scoured flanks of the mountain, its debris- filled river systems and chemically polluted ponds and lakes into a facsimile of the sylvan setting that existed before the eruption. To the untutored eye, the evidence of devastation still seems overwhelming. Scientists, however, see a glass filling itself up slowly but surely. Says James MacMahon, head of the biology department at Utah State University: ‘It's not a forest yet, but the rate of progress is amazing.’”  Maybe all of us can think of areas in our own lives where we have been surprised by the rate of growth.  Where has Jesus been making new life in you?

And sometimes, this work of new life, this constant move toward wholeness, comes in even less expected and more sudden ways.  I recently heard a radio interview with musician Sxip Shirey.  Shirey grew up in rural Ohio on 54 acres of woods.  He loved it in the country.  But to make it as a musician, he realized it was going to be necessary to move to New York City, a place he initially detested.  It was ugly and crowded and unfriendly.  But then one night, he found himself on the roof of a friend’s 36-storey apartment building overlooking downtown Manhattan.  It was a deeply foggy night, and as he looked out, he saw the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.  Their bases were covered in fog such that it looked like two enormous buildings floating in the clouds.  In the harbor, he could hear the foghorns of the boats, and to his right he could see the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges lit and floating above the mist.  To his left, he could see the Statue of Liberty, and he at once felt connected to his Albanian grandmother who had emigrated through Ellis Island.  Then and there, Shirey discovered the life and the beauty of the city.  He said, “I felt connected on a spiritual level to the city for the first time.”  What was ugly was beautiful.  What had hurt and felt like a strange land had become home. 

5.  For us too, a new world is on its way.  Even when we feel alienated and when this world feels old indeed, our God is at work.  When we see the world through the redemptive lens of Christ, we note new life springing up.  When forgiveness is extended, when beauty shines forth, when relationships flourish, it is then that “the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox.”  Open yourselves to Jesus and to what he is doing in you and in us to usher in a new creation.  Open yourselves to these promises and trust that our God is faithful.

Let us pray:  Almighty God, attune us to see your work in your world.  Open our hearts and minds to the many ways that you are bringing us new life.  May your kingdom so inspire us that we share your love and life with all.  In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Heaven

Luke 20:27-38
November 7, 2010 (32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time)

1. The genius American folk singer Woody Guthrie once wrote some extremely moving lyrics for a song called “Heaven.” Here are a few stanzas from that song:

It’s after my work tired and weary, I lay down to rest my eyes,

I see this world change in a whirlwind and heaven flies down from the skies;

I see rising up from the wreckage cities and mansions so bright

I see my friends’ eyes and their faces lit up with a bright shining light.

Every hand works in hand with the other and not for power nor greed;

Every hand works to its fullest ability and is paid in its deepest of need;

No cancer, no tuberculosis, no paralysis or asylums are here

No bowery nor skid row of homeless, no eye that is blinded by tears.

I know as you hear such a dream, friend, you will not pass it along;

I do not expect you to sing it as I do, nor to sing such a curious song;

I wrote down this song for my own self, and sing it now to my own soul.

But if you’ll sing songs of your dreamings, then you will reap treasures untold.

Guthrie captured a vision of heaven that was meaningful to him. It was a sort of workers’ paradise without disease or madness. But Guthrie realized that his vision may not be the best for everyone—his heaven may not be your heaven—but he encourages us all to reap the benefits of dreaming of a better future.
Is that what heaven is for us in the Christian Church? Is it just an imagined perfect place to comfort us through the misfortunes and sadness of this life? Is it somewhere that we actually go? Is it real? Do we fly around on angels’ wings strumming little harps?

2. These have been questions for Jews and Christians for thousands of years. Our gospel reading this morning shows Jesus in a tricky discussion with a group of economically powerful Jews known as the Sadducees. By Jesus’ day, most Jews believed in some sort of resurrection of the body and reunion with God in something like heaven after death, but the Sadducees stubbornly maintained a more ancient skepticism in Judaism about the reality of the resurrection. So they try to trip up Jesus, who had become famous for his preaching about the coming kingdom of God where all would be resurrected for eternal life. They try to trick him with a question about Jewish marriage customs in which a widow could marry her deceased husband’s brothers to try to conceive a child to carry on the deceased’s name. In the resurrection (that is to say, in heaven), to whom would the widow be married: the original husband or one of the later husbands? It’s a disingenuous questions since the Sadducees do not believe in the resurrection at all, and Jesus customarily reframes the question and reminds us all that God is the God of the living and that the resurrection is about living in God rather than about our human relationships in this life. But, the passage in some ways raises more questions about heaven than it answers.

3. If you even believe in heaven as a place, or a state of being, or whatever, what do you think it will be like? Through most of Christian history, Christians stuck pretty closely to Jesus’ words in this passage. They did not imagine heaven to be a place where human families or relationships really mattered all that much. They did not expect a reunion with deceased loved ones to be a highlight of the afterlife. Scholars refer to this view of heaven as “theocentric,” meaning that it was centered in every regard on God. The author of a book on heaven, Lisa Miller, has explained that this kind of heaven can be imagined like a giant crowded stadium or arena where everyone is facing the center. In the center sits God on God’s throne and all present praise God continuously having no desire to look either to the right or the left at those around them. God is their one focus. St. Augustine, writing in the early 5th century, said, “The praise of God should be the object of our meditation in this life, because in the life to come it will be for ever the object of our rejoicing.” Almost a thousand years later, St. Thomas Aquinas said that even if heaven had only one person living in it, this sole inhabitant “would be happy, though having no neighbor to love.” The idea, I gather, is that if you are focused on praising God eternally in heaven, you have no need of other people.

4. I won’t lie to you—I don’t find this classical Christian idea of heaven to be all that appealing. I affirm that praising God is our highest calling, but if I praise God better with my friends and loved ones now, why would that change in heaven? And moreover, we want to be consoled by the idea of heaven. We want it to be a place where our grief and loss is done away with because we are reunited with those we love. But, in the last few hundred years, Christians have embroidered more and more into our visions of heaven. As a result, our heaven can sometimes come to feel more like a perfect earth rather than a whole new experience of life. What would your perfect heaven be like? According to some passages in the book of Revelation, its streets will be made of gold and all things will be bedecked with jewels. And popular jokes have St. Peter at the pearly gates acting as heavenly bouncer. One thing I sometimes imagine is a great banquet, a feast, where the conversation is lovely, the food is delicious, the wine is fine, and it just goes on and on. Or I imagine a heaven of mountain meadows with cool breezes, snow-capped mountains, completely fresh air, and I am with my family. And when I am missing her, my mother is there with me. Perhaps your visions of heaven are similar. You are reunited with your dead, you are doing things you enjoy in places that are supernaturally beautiful. How radically different are these visions of heaven from those of the early and medieval Christians! In our modern heaven, where is God? Where is Jesus? Speaking for myself, I sometimes imagine Jesus as the host at the feast, or he is with me in the mountain meadow, or my mother introduces me to him. And God is little more than light or a feeling of well-being that permeates this heaven of mine. Despite this, I still like my heaven because it is so comforting to me now. Our modern visions of heaven encourage us, and console us in grief, and they remind us that things will get better when we are feeling down or scared or lonely or overwhelmed.

5. Of course, despite their ability to console, these visions of heaven, these modern visions that foreground reunions with loved ones and pleasant activities, run the danger of trivializing eternal life with God. They can problematically lessen our focus on resurrection to new life with Christ. Perhaps we have gone too far from Jesus’ own words about heaven wherein we will not be worried about to whom we are married but rather will be like angels and children of God. Perhaps we have lost our focus when, as author Lucy Bregman worries, our heaven resembles “a Florida retirement community, minus ill health and mortality.”
And then, of course, is the very real issue that in this modern scientific world, it has become utterly possible to be a faithful Christian who yet wonders if there even is a place called heaven. It can be hard to believe that Jesus will descend on a cloud and resurrect all the dead, bodies and all, from their resting places to move them to some kind of paradise in the sky. Never mind family reunions or beautiful sunsets over the ocean, can we really believe in the resurrection of the dead at all? Does it even help us to live with this kind of comforting vision of the afterlife, or does it just distract us from our real problems in the here and now? Are we merely drugging ourselves with “pie in the sky when we die by and by”?

6. A famous Baptist minister and preacher named Carlyle Marney once made some candid and self-revelatory remarks about heaven. “In some lectures at Southern Methodist University, Marney confessed there were days he didn’t know if he believed in the resurrection or not. Afterward his friend Albert Outler stopped him in the hall and said, ‘Marney, whoever told you that you had to believe in the resurrection every day?’ ‘Well, Albert,’ Marney responded, ‘if you know so much, when do I have to believe in the resurrection?’ Outler said, ‘On they day you die and the day you help someone else die; that’s when you believe in the resurrection.’” (Quote from The Christian Century, Nov. 2, 2010, Kyle Childress) I’m inclined to agree with Outler. We’ve heard Jesus speak on heaven, we’ve heard Augustine and Aquinas, and we’ve heard our own fantasies of heaven. But what we really need is an abiding belief in the resurrection that is there for us in our most delicate and important moments.

7. Ultimately, as Jesus teaches us, “Now [God] is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to [God] all of them are alive.” You get that? For God, you will never be dead—you will always be alive. That is what counts. When this earthly life is over for you and me, we will know the resurrection made possible for us in Christ. Golden streets, harps, reunions with loved ones—these things are all wonderful consolations, but the resurrection is ultimately an act of God on behalf of life, our life. Let us conclude with another teaching of Jesus. He was talking to his friend Martha after Martha’s brother Lazarus died. He said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” [Martha replied,] “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” Brothers and sisters here today gathered, Do you believe this? Believe it. Because of Jesus the Christ, you will never die. Amen.