The Sermons At Calvary
By The Reverend Richard H.
Humke
A DIFFERENT KIND OF KING
November 26, 2006, Last Pentecost B
Daniel 7:9-14
Psalm93
Revelation 1:1-8
John 18:33-37
Well,
here we are again on the verge of a new Advent Season. Advent begins next Sunday, and then it is
only a matter of a few weeks until Christmas arrives once again. There are
plenty of reminders “out there” that Christmas is near. If you were one of those people who just had
to shop last Friday, don’t look to me for sympathy. I have a question instead:
Why would you do it?
If
you know your Church Year, the readings of the past few weeks have been
reminders that Advent (and then Christmas) is just around the corner. They haven’t talked about Christmas
directly, by any means. In fact, the
Readings and the hymns have seemed to be as far from Christmas as possible with
their themes of judgment and the end of time, but anyone familiar with the
Church Year knows that those are themes that come with the Advent Season.
And
today is a Sunday with a dominant theme and a popular name, as well. We don’t have many of those kinds of Sundays
during the year – Sundays that have popular names but are not officially named
what the popular name calls them. I
think of Good Shepherd Sunday in the middle of the Easter Season as one of
them, a time when the readings are so obviously pointed toward Jesus as the
Good Shepherd and God as the Shepherd of Israel, that it would be foolish not
to sing hymns about Jesus, the Good Shepherd, as well. And so the whole liturgy is pointed in that
direction, and the day is called “Good Shepherd Sunday.”
Today
is commonly called “Christ the King Sunday,” though you will find nothing in
the Prayer Book that calls it that. It
is one of those popular ascriptions, which I just mentioned, that has taken
hold because the readings (and then the hymns) speak to it so forcefully. Let’s just see how obvious it is that we
call this Christ the King Sunday:
The
Collect of the Day says,
Almighty
and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in your
well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords…
The
First Reading is a difficult one, couched in images that are unfamiliar to us,
but certainly not impossible for us to understand. Toward the end of that Reading we hear that there comes to the
Ancient One seated on his throne (God, that is) someone “like a human being”
and “(t)o him was given dominion and glory and kingship…and his kingship
is one that shall never be destroyed.”
Christians read that passage, of course, as referring to Christ.
The
Psalm tells us “The LORD is king.”
The
Second Reading refers to Jesus as “the ruler of the kings of the earth,” that
is, the King of kings.
And
our Gospel has that question that Pilate raises as Jesus appears before him on
the night before his Crucifixion: “Are
you the King of the Jews?” And Jesus
replies, “My kingdom is not from this world…”
As
if this were not enough of a rich diet Margaret Dickinson comes along and has
us singing “Crown him with many crowns” and “Blest be the King whose
coming.” So all I can say to you, if
you don’t get the point today, is “Duh!”
The
day and the image that the day brings us are not without their critics,
however. “King” is a masculine term and
so is difficult for some people to use because they do not wish to restrict the
Christ to one gender. Others have a
problem with the metaphor of kingship itself because, they argue, it is
outdated. Kings (and queens) are passé,
they say, and even though we find them in a few countries still, they have
largely been shorn of any power and are nothing more than figureheads. And they would argue, is that how we want to
portray the Christ, as a figurehead.
I
find the imagery a powerful imagery still even though I have absolutely no
interest, as an American, in anything like a king. We got rid of all that fuss 225 years ago, and it was certainly
the right decision.
What
I find intriguing about the imagery of kingship is how it is changed and
enlarged by Jesus. “My kingdom is not
from this world,” Jesus tells Pilate in our Gospel, and one reading of those
words would be that Jesus’ kingship is different from the kingships of this
world. In that powerful act of Maundy
Thursday, when Jesus leaves the table of the Last Supper and kneels before his
Twelve with a towel and basin of water so that he might wash their feet – in
that powerful act we see how Jesus has transformed the meaning of
kingship. The King is humble. The King is a servant.
That
concept of Jesus as a Servant is one of the glories of our Christian
Faith. It is one of the great gifts we
bring to the world: the story of a
Savior who humbles himself. It is not
to be found in other religions, certainly not in Islam. Christ the servant King shows us that true
power is to be seen in service to others.
True power is to be seen in humility.
The
Church, as the Body of Christ, should, of course, show to the world these same
things, and that it mostly does not, and seldom has, should humble and concern
us. Our own ecclesiastical history is
filled with struggles for power and places of privilege, with arrogance and
lack of concern for the lowest. So many
of the problems of the Church today are struggles for power and prestige. And it is surely one of the great besetting
sins of the clergy.
One of the
joys of my retirement years has been a reading of Charles Dickens, starting
with Sketches by Boz right on up
through Dombey and Son where I am at
the moment. That’s a little bit more
than a foot of Dickens! There is very
little about religion in Dickens, except occasional trivial and saccharine
references, but Dickens is a critic of the mid-19th C.
self-satisfied society he finds in Victorian England where the Church – our
Church in a sense – still holds sway.
Not only is there that unattractive class system which still hangs on,
but there is little concern for the poor as a whole and often outright
hostility and disdain toward the individual who was on the lowest rung of the
ladder.
What was
the Church doing at that time? How
could it have lost its way so badly?
There were, of course, numerous exceptions, and their stories are well
worth reading. John Wesley and
Methodism, which began as a reform movement within our Church, brought the
Gospel to those whom the Established Church had largely abandoned. And later in the century Catholic reformers
in our Church went into the slums of the cities to serve the poor that the
Church had forgotten. But they all
struggled against an institutional Church that had largely lost its way and had
become a part of the oppression. It
chose not to understand that Christ as Servant-King was a model for his Church
to follow, not Christ as a king of power and privilege.
This will
always be a struggle for the Church which is both in the world and at
the same time above the world.
But this Sunday, with its theme of Christ the King, can be a yearly
reminder to us that servanthood is what it is all about. It’s not about who’s the biggest, or who has
the money, or who are best friends with the government, or who has the most
power, or who has the most influential people.
It’s about who shows what it really means for Christ to be King.
So we have
a long way to go.
Richard
H. Humke