I preached as a guest last week, November 25th, on the Reign of Christ. Text is below.
As I watched, thrones were set in place, and an Ancient One took his throne, his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and flowed out from his presence. A thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood attending him. The court sat in judgment, and the books were opened. 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. (Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14)
Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?” Jesus answered, “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. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” (John 18:33-37)
Good morning! It’s a pleasure to be with you this Sunday, as we are all looking down the barrel of a full week.
It can be a strange transition, into vacation and then back to the “real world”—especially for those of us who travel, for whom it can feel like moving between two literal different worlds, one of relative quiet and family and maybe a football game, and one of responsibility and stress and work, connected only by car or plane. I was back East with family this week, and sometimes it seems like the river and the pine trees there are physically tugging on me when I’m here. I imagine some of you might have felt that: a pull you can almost feel between your office, your bills, your errands on the one hand, and wherever you go on long-enough weekends, that other house or other room or other way of living where there is peace, and time, on the other. I don’t know about you, but I know that come about Wednesday lunchtime, I will be fantasizing about just… leaving, just ditching the one to go back to the other. It’s like just a little taste of holiday is enough to suggest that all of the stuff we do is not quite as total and as real as it pretends to be. We could just leave! But once you know there is another way you could be living, you can’t really put that knowledge back in the jar.
There is a sense, I think, in which Christians are always feeling this kind of pull. I don’t primarily mean between our responsibilities at church and obligations elsewhere, although God knows there’s enough of that, or between the rush of the week and the quiet of Sundays, although I hope Sunday mornings here can be a refuge. I mean between worlds. If you follow the liturgical calendar, with seasons like Advent and Lent dotted with feasts and celebrations and observances, today is the Reign of Christ, or Christ the King Sunday. Christ, the King. There is another world—another kingdom—that is pulling, always, at our loyalties.
I know it is not customary to do anything that even hints of interactivity in a Presbyterian sermon, but nonetheless I’d like for you all to take just a moment and turn over in your mind that phrase, “Christ the King.” King of what? There are all sorts of Biblical bon mots you might have heard before, King of Glory, King of Kings; but we, in 2018, in America, I mean you and I, the average American Christian, we don’t really have any experience with this kind of absolute monarch, aside from what was probably a bolded term in our social studies text books in middle school. An absolute monarch is an archaic, half-fairytale thing, maybe evil, probably a tyrant, something we need to throw boxes of tea into a harbor about. For three hundred years we have been moving away from the idea of a conglomeration of people under the thumb of some king and towards the idea of the free, politically responsible individual and a state that is beholden to its people. Kings now—if they exist at all (which they don’t here)—are sort of cute antiques that preside fancily over a functioning democracy—or people in fur who always look uncomfortable on prestige drama TV shows—or, maybe, dangerous old men who oppress their people. Kings do not have anything to do with us, because we have evolved past the need for them; Jesus is, if anything, the elected head, by consensus, of Christianity.
It is hard, I think, for us now to even begin to relate to the vision Daniel sees in the Old Testament passage for today. Daniel, the prophet, lately of the lion’s den, a man in exile far from his home, describes a strange and glorious sight: Throne rooms, chariot-thrones, rivers of fire, millions of attendants, and “one like a son of man” coming on a cloud into the presence of this great divine figure to be given the kind of dominion that seems almost absurd in this day and age. That all nations, all languages, all peoples should serve him! A kingship that will never end! Dominion, divinely granted! We might easily imagine how someone uprooted from the familiar and, he may even worry, from the very presence of his God would rejoice at the idea of a divinely-ordained king whose reign would not end, someone whose power and authority came directly from God, so no Babylonian sword or Assyrian spear could possibly challenge it. This vision of the Son of Man—the NRSV has “human being,” but the Hebrew has bar enash, Son of Man—this one like us being granted by God an endless kingship might be well and good for Daniel, but we, we are not in exile, we are not captive in a foreign land, we do not need saving.
Yet: this phrase, “Son of Man,” or sometimes “Human One,” may sound familiar to you, because it is often found in the mouth of Christ. “When the Son of Man returns in glory,” he says, or “When the Son of Man is lifted up.” Jesus speaks of himself as the Son of Man, the Human One, and he uses the same phrase Daniel used to describe his vision of the divinely-ordained, everlasting king. Jesus the meek, blesser of the poor and healer of the sick, irritator of religious authority, drew around himself like a robe the scriptural image of God-given dominion. Jesus is King; Christ is Lord. And in the end, even Pilate had heard about it. Pilate, himself a ruler, calls Jesus to him and asks him about all this king business.
“My kingdom is not from this world,” Jesus says, standing before Pilate with no finery, no army, not even any territory to call his, a handful of disciples shivering somewhere. The absurdity must not have been lost on the governor. And perhaps we see it, too: the Son of Man on the clouds in Daniel overlaid over top of this Jesus as though traced on onionskin paper, the divine king like a ghost over the suffering servant. It is absurd, yes. It is absurd because we don’t need a king, or want one, and because kings don’t die on crosses, and because either you have dominion over all nations and languages and peoples or you’re subject to the judiciary of an occupying force but not both.
It is absurd, and yet, haven’t you felt it? Some Sundays in church, some mornings alone, some afternoons frustrated by your labor, some moments when you get just the barest hint of something else, like the perfume of someone who walked by earlier or dinner cooking in a house down the street, don’t you feel that this, whatever this is, is not entirely where you belong, or where you really are?
We belong to Christ, and yet we are ruled by people. From the Apostle Paul to St. Augustine to Martin Luther and on, theologians have tried to make sense of Christ’s declared dominion and the earthly rulers we still find ourselves beholden to, the crisscross of divine law and the earthly laws whose transgression will get us thrown in jail, or worse. Jesus’ reign is said to be without border and without end; yet nations have borders, with soldiers stationed there, and rulers die and governments collapse. Jesus said, “Everyone who belongs to the truth hears my voice,” and hearing the truth cannot be contained to one people or one place; yet things go on as though Jesus had never come, and we do not know him, or each other. It is simpler, certainly, to reduce things to “two kingdoms,” as Luther’s version is often called, to say that temporal rulers have dominion over one kingdom, and God, maybe through the church, has dominion over the other, for now; that earthly rulers rule the world, and God rules our spirits, and never the twain shall meet.
But the twain do meet. In the past, Christians have become martyrs when rulers of earth have demanded even spiritual submission, and in places that are not here, Christian persecution continues. But it is not true that tension between our spiritual loyalty to God and temporal loyalty to whoever is ruling us at any given time arises only in times of persecution. There are times, not infrequently, when the things Christ commands us to do—to feed, to clothe, to welcome, to visit, to act with mercy—bring us into direct conflict with state authority. We belong to Christ: This is that pull, the tug at the soul, the whiff of a fragrance, the tantalizing possibility of peace, of something that is realer than everything else we are doing. This world, the one we inhabit, with cars and governments and jobs, is the one laid over the real world, the realest world, God’s world, like a drawing on onionskin paper. And we Christians are living in both at the same time and they both pull at us, and I think we can feel it. It is not true that this world is without meaning, like some of the old songs might teach, and that all we Christians are to do is to wait and long for the last day to come. No, my friends, as we live and move through this world, we are always, already, living and moving through the kingdom of Christ who came to us, who tore the curtain, who broke the power of fear and death, who united us in his own body with the God in whom we live, and move, and have our being. Christ’s kingdom is not from this world but we are in it, all of us who belong to the truth and hear his voice. Advent is coming, weeks of waiting and preparation for the time when, the old hymn tells us, “Christ our God to earth descendeth/Our whole homage to demand.”
This Sunday is the last Sunday of the church calendar. Advent, in one week, is the beginning, a new start. Imagine with me what might be possible if we leaned into the pull of the Kingdom of Christ, if the shape of our lives truly belonged first and foremost to the Son of God who loves us beyond telling and directs us only to see his face in every stranger. Imagine the strength we would have to embrace the world if we saw it as held inside of God’s world, if its censure could not touch us because our only King is Christ. Imagine, as we turn the corner into Advent, what this new year can bring you. Amen.
NOR ANY OTHER CREATED THING 