Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
DATE

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Today is another one of those, for us any way, relatively minor special Sundays on the church calendar that we don’t pay a lot of attention to. Recently we’ve had Reformation Sunday and All Saints Sunday. Today we have Reign of Christ Sunday. It used to be called, and in some quarters still is called, Christ the King Sunday, but we politically correct UCC types don’t like the term king. It is exclusively male, and it smacks of domination. So we’ve changed it to Reign of Christ, although, as you’ll notice, for my purposes this morning Christ the King works better, so I’ll use that older term despite its political incorrectness. By either term, this is the Sunday on which we specifically remember and acknowledge that Christ is King, or, put in the terms of the earliest Christian confession that means the same thing, Christ is Lord; and if we acknowledge today that Christ is King, that Jesus Christ is our ruler, then we are necessarily at the same time acknowledging that the powers of this earth are not. Not ultimately. This is the day when we specifically remember and acknowledge that our ultimate allegiance is not to any institution or power of this world but to Jesus Christ and to the God that we know in and through Jesus Christ.

Now, that’s pretty straight forward stuff. Christ is Lord. Christ is King. Christ reigns with God the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. That’s real basic stuff for us Christians. Yet as I worked on this sermon I found that I have a real problem with it. Is Christ really king? That’s a political term, and what does it mean to apply that political term to Jesus Christ? That’s the question I struggled with this week. I hope this morning to make at least some sense out of it; but don’t worry; this isn’t really a very political sermon. So bear with me.

We must begin, I think, with the notion of what a king is or, to update the language, what it means to say that someone reigns over us. As we’ve heard without ceasing in recent times, the primary responsibility of the one who reigns, or of those who reign in a system like our political system where no one person reigns alone, Presidential pretensions to the contrary notwithstanding, is to protect those over whom, or on behalf of whom, one rules. Our recent Presidential election was fought primarily over the issue of which major candidate could do a better job of protecting us from terrorists; and the visions of the two candidates on how to do that didn’t differ all that much. They both came down to: Kill ‘em. Use force. They both argued that our safety comes from the use of force. They only differed on how to wield that force and who could do it better. So that’s what we expect from our rulers, that they will protect us from our enemies, from those who would do us harm.

Our Scripture readings this morning, in part at least, reflect this view. They contain a vision of the ruler, of God, as one who protects us, by force even, from our enemies. The Call to Worship that we read comes from Psalm 46. That Psalm contains the lines "God makes wars to cease to the end of the earth; he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear; he burns the shield with fire." That is a vision of a God who can protect us because he (and this God is definitely a he) is the biggest, baddest warrior of them all. The Canticle (that means song) of Zechariah from the first chapter of Luke contains a similar vision. It refers to a God who has promised that "we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us." Zechariah doesn’t sing about how God does that, but the Hebrew Scriptures to which he refers certainly contain, among many other images, the image of Yahweh, the Lord God of Israel, as a warrior, mighty in battle, protecting the people by inflicting military defeat on Israel’s enemies. After all, the term "Lord of hosts" that we see in Psalm 46 and that appears to often in Hebrew Scripture means precisely the commander of armies. That was one of Israel’s principal images for God.

Now, I suppose I could get up here and tell you that Christ the King will somehow defeat our enemies, by violence even if necessary. I could tell you that nothing bad will happen to us or to our loved ones because Christ is in charge, and He won’t let that happen. Problem is, I don’t believe that. Oh, I believe that Christ is my, and our, ultimate ruler and that in some sense He is in charge; but I certainly don’t, I can’t believe that Christ’s Lordship means that bad things don’t happen to those who confess him as Lord. That isn’t my experience. It isn’t your experience. It isn’t the world’s experience. So, I can’t tell you that, since I won’t tell you anything that I don’t believe myself.

And so I struggle. What does it mean to celebrate Christ the King if, as near as I can tell, Christ doesn’t act in the world like any other king I’ve ever heard of? Does it mean anything? Is there a way in which we can confess Christ as King that is authentic to our understanding of the faith and to our experience of life?

Well, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, I think that there is; and I think that that alternative vision of what it means to confess Christ as King is contained in those same Scriptures that I just talked about, Psalm 46 and the Canticle of Zechariah. It’s also in our other scripture this morning from Colossians 1, so we’ll look briefly at that one too. Let’s look first at Psalm 46. As we just saw, that Psalm says that God stops wars by force, which doesn’t seem to be true. The Psalm also says, however: "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear." In these lines, the Psalmist is not promising that bad things won’t happen. Rather, the earth will change, and change violently. The mountains will shake in the heart of the sea. The sea will become so violently agitated that the mountains themselves will tremble. The promise is not that these and other bad things won’t happen. The promise is that, because God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble, we can, as the Psalm says, be still and know that God is God. It is precisely there, "in trouble," that God gives us peace, God gives us calm.

Then there’s Zechariah’s song from the first chapter of Luke. As I mentioned, Zechariah is the father of John the Baptist, and he is speaking on the occasion of the naming and circumcision of the infant John. Although his song does contain that language about God as warrior delivering us from our enemies, like Psalm 46 it contains a different vision as well. Zechariah begins: "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them." Then, at the end of his song, Zechariah tells us how to understand God’s favor and redemption in what are, for me, some of the most beautiful lines in all of Scripture:

By the tender mercy of our God,           the dawn from on high will break                     upon us, to give light to those who sit in           darkness and in the shadow of                     death,           to guide our feet into the way                     of peace.

Then there’s the passage from Colossians. It doesn’t have the language of Psalm 46 and the Canticle of Zechariah about the vision of God as the one who defeats enemies, but it in a way sums up and makes concrete for us the promise of the other vision in those passages that we just looked at. There the author, purportedly Paul but probably not really, tells us that we can "endure everything with patience" because God "has rescued us from darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins." That’s good, but what really ties all of this together is the last line of this passage, where the author that says that through Jesus Christ "God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross."

So. Where are we? Here’s where I think we are: Christ is indeed our ultimate King, our Lord and Savior. We rightly acknowledge that fact every year on this last Sunday of the Christian year, the last Sunday before Advent. Christ the King Sunday is the culmination of the Christian year, and rightly so. But we must rightly understand what that means. It most decidedly does not mean that God protects us from bad things in this life. Rather, it means that in Christ Jesus we are reconciled to God. Because we are thus reconciled to God, we have light in our darkness. We have a present help in trouble. Because we are reconciled to God in Christ we can indeed be still and know that God is God. In the midst of all the wars and tumults of this life, in illness, in grief, and even in death, we can be at peace because God never forsakes us, God never fails to hold us in the arms of love and grace. That’s all there is to know, really, and all we need to know. No matter what happens, no matter what ills befall us and our loved ones, we are safe with Christ as our King. Even though we die we are safe because God is our God and in Christ we are reconciled with our God in this life and beyond this life. So let us celebrate. Let us rejoice. Christ is our King. We have no other. We need no other. Thanks be to God. Amen.