Sunday, November 21, 2010
Christ the King Sunday
Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA
Colossians 1:9-20
9For this reason, since the day we heard it, we have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, 10so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God. 11May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully 12giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. 13He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, 14in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. 15He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; 16for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. 17He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. 19For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.
Today is the last Sunday of the year.
Seriously.
It is the last Sunday of the year – the traditional CHURCH year. Next Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent, and according to the traditional liturgical calendar, it is the first Sunday of the New Year. We will observe our New Year by celebrating our hanging of the green service, so please plan to come and participate in a beautiful service that sets the stage – literally – for our walk towards Christmas and the coming of the Christ Child.
But today we focus on the fact that this is the LAST Sunday – and we look to what this past liturgical year has brought us. This is known as Christ the King Sunday or The Reign of Christ Sunday, because it serves to remind us of Christ’s place, not simply in our lives and in our community, but on the whole broad stage of the Cosmos – the Universe.
Next Sunday we will begin the walk towards Bethlehem, and that will take us to the place where God became flesh and dwelt among us. We will begin his life where he did, as the newborn son of Mary and Joseph, with hands and feet and a nose and eyes and hair, everything that we each share as members of the human race was also shared by God in his incarnation, but while he was fully human, he was more. And in today’s passage, Paul underscores just how much more Jesus IS the Christ.
As I’ve shared with you before, the church year is a little different from the … for lack of a better term, the secular year. And that is as it should be. We NEED to be a little different from the rest of society – wherever that society happens to be. We read and hear about the Chinese New Year, and it is out of synchrony with our current calendar, and we can easily see and say “that is a different way of … being, a different way of counting, that is expressed in the fact that the Chinese have a traditional calendar that is maintained outside the … one that is more universally accepted and used.”
Being out of step with celebrating our ‘New Year’ reminds us that we DO march to the beat of a different drum, that we DO answer to a higher call, that we DO listen for another command than the rest of the world that surrounds us, that we ARE called to be different, to be distinct, to stand out.
That’s not to say that we are to be so far removed from it that we are unable to engage, to interact, and to enter into relationship with it. We DO have that responsibility, and it is more than a responsibility, it is … a calling.
When we use that word, ‘calling’, in our context, it needs to be understood that a calling is received from one who has authority over our lives. For us to even be able to invoke that terminology implies that we understand and accept that one’s position to be able to PLACE that call on our lives.
If I say, “I’ll call you”, what is the first thing that pops into your head … a phone call, right?
You don’t immediately jump to the conclusion that what I am talking about is a call on your LIFE – something that you’ll dedicate the rest of your life to – no. And that’s because it is me Kenny, saying, “I’ll call you”. In our context here, in Emmerton, on this next to the last Sunday of November, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, at a time when the majority of the adult population and a sizeable and sometimes troubling portion of the youth population has a mobile phone, “I’ll call you” has a very ordinary connotation. It simply means that I am saying that I would like to talk to you, so I’ll call you – from my phone to yours – and we’ll talk then. No major life-changing decision to be discussed, usually, nothing more than maybe planning a meeting at some point in the next couple of weeks.
Paul is writing to the Colossians to remind them of just who it is they serve – who they pledged to love and lives to, and from whom they might have been straying.
The language in this passage is … astounding in it’s scope. The ancient world was blatantly polytheistic. That is, there were multitudes of gods, with their accompanying temples, rituals and followers. We may think we’re an overchurched society, with a sanctuary every few miles, try every few yards.
In truth, I sometimes wonder if that hasn’t changed that much in the intervening centuries. We still tend to create our own gods, we just keep it on the ‘down low’… it’s a much more subtle presence through which these … contemporary and not-so-contemporary gods make themselves known. We still can find the god of the senses – in our hedonistic pursuits of immediate pleasures, regardless of consequences. We can still find the god of mammon, alive and well in the measure of our worth through the size of our bank accounts. We can still find the god of fear and power in our willingness to wield power over and against our fellow humans who speak, act, live and think differently from us.
To understand the radical notion that Paul is putting forth, we have to first understand that he is speaking in these terms about one who stood on NONE of those titles in order to make himself known.
Jesus did not descend in a fiery chariot from the sky and summon Caesar to an audience. He did not speak and strike down the power structure that was in place at the time – neither the Roman nor the Hebrew. He did not zap the fishermen from Galilee and make them follow him as he wandered around the countryside for those years of his ministry.
15He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; 16for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. 17He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. 19For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.
You would think that if someone was that powerful, that all-encompassing, that awesome, that it would only be RIGHT for that power to be exercised, to be wielded, to be USED.
Trouble is, that is the way the world uses power. Not God.
Think about it. God creates the universe, the world, everything; sets things in motion, designs, springs them into being out of nothing; however you want to understand it, God created. Then God, who having created, is OUTSIDE creation, chooses to come into creation, into the now broken and sometimes so wretched world that we live in and become subject to the vagaries of human existence, and does that up to and including being put to death.
What does that tell us about the power of God?
It tells us that God does not use power in the same way humanity uses it.
We COULD argue that God chose to not use God’s power at all, because if God had, the outcome would have been radically different.
But I think we miss the picture if we say that, because we’re still coming at this whole incarnation of the King of Creation from a human perspective.
Knowing and understanding power from a human perspective presupposes that power to be used … to be the motivator for a response that is desired from another – whether an opponent or a friend is not important. It is the fact that that power is there that prompts the response.
God’s example in Jesus Christ was to dispose of the coercive aspect of the human understanding of power completely, and come not in the form of a King, but a servant … a homeless preacher and teacher who spent no time building up his reputation, or a movement to fight the existing power structure on IT’S terms, but on God’s terms.
And those terms were these: through the blood of his cross
What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church, in downtown Emmerton?
Most of us have heard it since we were children, sometimes not so often, sometimes seemingly way too often. This whole business of the sacrifice doesn’t sit well with our current sensibilities. I agree wholeheartedly. It doesn’t. We struggle with the idea that, in order for there to be a reconciliation between the Creator and the creation, there had to be, on some level and in some way, a sacrifice made for that … atonement … to heal that broken relationship between God and humanity. I struggle with that, sometimes in more profound ways than I realize, when I see the state of the world around me, and wonder if there was any sense to it at all.
Ultimately, though, I keep coming back to this: in history – ALL of history, ALL of creation, EVERYTHING and EVERYONE that God has made; even with ALL the brokenness and ALL the turning away that has been the sad hallmark of humanity’s relationship with God, God has been the one to come back to us from a place of … love. Like a loving husband, who despite his wife’s flirtations and falls, keeps after her; like a foolish shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep and goes after the one that was lost; like the obsessive homemaker who turns her home upside down looking for a single coin, like the every-loving, every-welcoming father who misses his youngest son so much that he waits and watches for him every day after he leaves, and then runs to him and falls on his neck and welcomes him home with kisses ALL over his face …
THAT is the image of God that comes through.
In this season of Thanksgiving, may we find our hearts lifting hymns of gratitude for the one who will not, no, will not, no, will NEVER desert us.
Let’s pray.
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