Sunday
November 23
Christ the King
By Marsh Chapel
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Today is the Sunday known as “Christ the King”. It’s the last Sunday of the Christian Liturgical Year. Next Sunday begins a new church year. It’s the first Sunday in Advent, when we begin to wait for and celebrate the fact that Christ the King began with us as a baby. But today, Christ is with us in his full maturity as he comes into his own as King, with glory, with power, and with judgment.
Jesus was a Jew. His followers sometimes hailed him as “Son of David”, and both he and the lectionary compilers of today’s scriptures connected him to the tradition of the Shepherd/King. We are probably most familiar with this tradition through David’s 23rd Psalm. And in our Psalm today, God is our Creator, and our Shepherd, worthy of our praise and thanksgiving because God’s steadfast love and faithfulness endure forever. The Shepherd/King tradition is also here in Ezekiel, who portrays God the Shepherd as the true King, the King who rescues, reunites, cares for, and protects the people – the true King over against the false kings, who have scattered the people and brought them to ruin and captivity in the Babylonian exile. God the Shepherd is the one true King who judges not only those outside but those inside the flock. And God will set up a permanent Shepherd in David, one who will feed the people and be their leader under God. In today’s Gospel, Jesus is both King and Shepherd, as he separates and judges between those who have done what he has done and those who have not done what he has done. Judgment as well as care and protection are within the mandate of the Shepherd/King, and judgment can be very harsh indeed against those who are fat and strong at the expense of the weak and injured, against those who do not recognize the King in his people. It is a Last Judgment, in fact, with the choices we make today having eternal consequences.
Well, we who have been knocking around in the Christian faith for a while know all this. We know it well enough that we have no excuse not to escape the eternal fire; we know that we are not to take advantage of the weak and injured, we know we are to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, visit the sick and the prisoner. We know it all. And, quite frankly, it’s November, and it’s dark and it’s cold, and those of us with bears in the gene pool just want to sleep. Many folks have some kind of major deadline in the next two weeks, and midterm projects and papers are running right up to finals. And while “the holidays” can be fun, the fun can often be hard to get to in the crush of activities and expectations, in the trepidations about costs and housecleaning, in the unknown as to whether Aunt Sue the conservative and Uncle Joe the liberal will still speak to one another at dinner. To say nothing … to say nothing … of the upcoming Ferguson grand jury decision. It can be a challenge to promote peace and goodwill when our response to “How are you?” is automatically “I’m Fine.”, and “I’m Fine.” really means “I’m Freaked Out, Insecure, Neurotic, and Exhausted.” Right now there don’t seem to be many good pastures and certainly not any lying down in them.
Now I grew up in a British constitutional-monarchist family, and I still keep some track of Wills and Kate and Baby George. I appreciate sheep for the wool they provide my knitting and thus I appreciate the shepherds who take care of them. But I don’t see many hereditary rulers or shepherds on Commonwealth Avenue, and if I did it’s a pretty sure bet that most of the rulers would not consider the “least of these” the members of their family. And what Shepherd in his or her right mind would destroy the fat strong sheep and keep the weak and injured as the mainstays of the flock? Christ the King is a very strange monarch, and Christ the Shepherd makes no sense at all.
So what are we daylight-saving-timed, democratic, urban, living-in-New Englanders to make of all this? What are we as the congregation listening over the radio, webcast, and podcast to make of all this?
Well, we’re the sheep. We’re the people. We are (forgive me for this) the sheeple. That means we are the fat ones who batten on the scattered, lost, weak, and injured, even if only through the complexities and complicities of our lives — and, we are also the scattered, lost, weak, and injured ourselves. That means we are the ones who cry “Lord, Lord” and then do not do what the Lord does – and, we are also the ones who feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and the prisoner. How we end up in the Judgment depends on where the majority of our choices come down, and most of all to whom we finally give our allegiance. If we as members of the flock first trust in God’s provision of nourishment, rest, and healing, and then we choose to help the Shepherd strengthen all of the Flock; if we as disciples choose to help the Monarch care for all the members of the family as we have been cared for; if our allegiance is finally to God through Christ in whatever form God through Christ is found: Ruler, Shepherd, baby, teacher, then we move from being sheeple to become the Church.
And that, says the author of Ephesians, is where we have it all. We become a Spirit-anointed community in which we are not alone, where we have hope, a glorious inheritance, and the immeasurable greatness of Christ’s power at work in and through us. For as the Church we become Christ’s body, we become his fullness that fills everything, we become through the Spirit part of a cooperative interbeing between Christ the head and we the body, an interbeing that even in November can bring the presence of God, the provision of God, the steadfast love and faithfulness of God, to each other and to the world.
Christ the Shepherd. Christ the King. Maybe. But certainly the one to whom as Christians we pledge our allegiance, certainly the one who with the Godhead and the Spirit protects us, cares for us, provides for us at our deepest levels so that we are able to do the work we are called to do as his disciples – and maybe we can even be able to stay awake and move with peace and goodwill through deadlines, midterms and finals, and the holidays. We know it all. Even if some of the images are strange to our form of governance and where we live, the choice is always under the mercy and love of God, the choice is always ours. When we choose to pay attention to the wisdom, knowledge, and power for good we have in the Spirit as God’s Church, when we claim these gifts in faith, then we can begin to recover our courage, our creativity, our individual and communal energy, then we can begin to find ways that will help us to nurture peace and goodwill between us and God, between us and ourselves, between us and our neighbors, and between us and creation.
So how can we best pay attention and claim our wisdom, knowledge, and power for good? Well, in a few days it will be Thanksgiving. A secular Federal holiday, as it happens, but just as Charles Wesley asked, so to speak, “Why should the devil have all the good tunes?’, so he used secular tunes for Methodist hymns, we would not be the first to see the gifts of God in the secular turned to the purposes of worship. Thanksgiving is in fact a major traditional form of worship and praise: it’s found in many if not all faith traditions; and it is certainly a mainstay for Christians. To join in the spirit of this Thursday holiday/holyday, to look around us and acknowledge the gifts we have been given, to claim them in faith with gratitude — all this is to put ourselves in the middle of God’s love, abundance, and provisions for our need, whether they are the wisdom, knowledge, and power for good we have as the Church, or the smile of a loved one, a delicious meal, a favorite tree or an animal companion, even the slow but steadfast stirrings of justice and peace. In thanksgiving there is no fear, no anger, no discouragement; in thanksgiving there is no freaking out, insecurity, neuroticism, or exhaustion: in thanksgiving there is only the happiness and wonder of the world and its riches.
So this Thursday, we might be a bit more intentional about our attitude of gratitude, to God and to others: for instance, we could be very specific and detailed about the people and things for which we are grateful and why we are grateful for them; we could perhaps expand our notion of what we are grateful for; we might allow other people to be grateful for us; we might, greatly daring, speak aloud our gratitude to those people and about those things for which we are thankful; we might decide to make thanksgiving a more regular practice in our lives beyond this Thursday. For it is when we pay attention to and claim in faith the gifts of God with thanksgiving that we can truly say, when asked about how we are, “We’re fine.” Fine in the original senses of the word: high-quality, first-rate, magnificent, exceptional, splendid. Just fine.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
-Rev. Victoria Gaskell, Chapel Associate for Methodist Students
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