Thy Kingdom Come

 

November 24, 2024 – The Last Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 29B
2 Samuel 23:1-7; Revelation 1:4b-8; John 18:33-37

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon is available here. Video can be seen here.

Ninety-nine years ago, Pope Pius XI had had enough. On December 11, 1925, the Bishop of Rome issued the second encyclical (or church-wide letter) of his papacy. This encyclical took its name from its opening words, “Quas primas” or “In the first.” Those words were a reference to his first encyclical, which the pope had issued three years earlier as a way of urging the modern, increasingly secular world to return to its Christian roots. He was not impressed with the response. So he wrote a second letter, which began with a bit of finger-wagging at those who had ignored what he had written the first time:

In the first Encyclical Letter which We addressed at the beginning of Our Pontificate…We referred to the chief causes of the difficulties under which mankind was laboring. And We remember saying that these manifold evils in the world were due to the fact that the majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives; that these had no place either in private affairs or in politics: and we said further, that as long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations.[1] 

Between 1922 and 1925, things had not gotten better. Benito Mussolini, whose Fascist Party had come to power after his March on Rome in October 1922, had consolidated his control over the nation and begun to rule as a dictator in January 1925. Adolf Hitler, whose failed coup in 1923 had landed him in prison, was released in the spring of 1924, and his personal manifesto, Mein Kampf, was published a year later. As a sign that their movement wasn’t going away, in November 1925, on the second anniversary of the Nazis’ failed attempt to take over Bavaria, Hitler’s personal bodyguard, the SS, was founded. 

Lest we think that nationalistic tendencies were only manifest in Europe back then, over 30,000 people dressed in white hoods and robes marched on Washington, DC, in August 1925, as the KKK’s popularity continued to grow. And, in October of that year, the land that would become Mount Rushmore was set apart for the national monument—land that was illegally taken from the Sioux Nation—and the same sculptor who had created the “Shrine to the Confederacy” on Stone Mountain in Georgia was hired to oversee the massive project.

Pope Pius XI was tired of telling people that Jesus was the world’s true hope only to watch them choose leaders whose platforms and policies were antithetical to the reign of God. He believed that God’s vision for the world was something different and that the solution was not a further separation of church and state but a thorough enmeshing of the two. He was convinced, perhaps naively, that that remarriage would result in the re-subjection of human authority to the rule of God. As he wrote, “Once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony. Our Lord’s regal office invests the human authority of princes and rulers with a religious significance; it ennobles the citizen’s duty of obedience.”[2]

Words, Pius had learned, were not enough, so, in his encyclical, he instituted the feast of Christ the King, setting aside one Sunday in the church’s year to celebrate the reign of Jesus Christ. “Nations will be reminded by the annual celebration of this feast,” he wrote, “that not only private individuals but also rulers and princes are bound to give public honor and obedience to Christ.”[3]  

Today is Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday after Pentecost, the last Sunday before the season of Advent and the beginning of a new liturgical year. Normally, being a bit of a traditionalist, I don’t give much attention to recent liturgical innovations like Christ the King Sunday, which only took hold in our lectionary in the 1970s. But, given our collective need to remember who is really in charge, I’m starting to think that it might be a good idea.

“Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come.” That is how John the Divine, the author of the Book of Revelation, greets those who read his letter. If there’s any book in the Bible that we need to read and study right now, it’s Revelation. This book is God’s good news for a church that was beginning to forget how to believe in the authority of God and of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. 

It had been around seventy-five years since Jesus’ death and resurrection, and things had not gotten better during that time. Persecution was a way of life. One Roman Emperor succeeded another, and any moment of relief was quickly followed by another round of harsh suffering. The fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple in 70AD left the early church wondering whether the end had come, but, instead of Jesus’ promised return, all that his followers received was another quarter-century of hardship. Revelation was God’ vision for a new world, and it was given to John the Divine in the church’s darkest hour because that was precisely the moment when Christians needed to remember that God is still God no matter what happens.

The Book of Revelation is a story about the transformation of the world from a place ruled by emperors and kings into the kingdom of God. These days, readers of Revelation often get distracted by the strange images and symbols contained in the text, but those were God’s way of helping Christians believe that everything they had ever known about the way the world worked would not always last. It helped them believe that the suffering and hardship they endured were signs that God’s reign was taking hold and that the forces of evil, which had already been dealt a deathblow by Jesus’ death and resurrection, were merely thrashing about in one last age of terrible but futile power. In other words, the real hope contained in Revelation is the realization that, no matter what happens in the world around us, God is already in charge.

“‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come.” For most of my life, I heard those words—Alpha and Omega—as a statement about the beginning and the end. God was God in the beginning, and God will be God in the end. That’s good news. But our proclamation is far more radical than that. The vision God gave to John the Divine is not one of a God whose reign is manifest in the story of creation and then again at the end of time. Our God reigns in every moment of cosmic history—from Alpha to Omega—from the beginning until the end and through every moment in between—the one “who is and who was and who is to come.”

Remembering that in a world in which suffering and hardship seem to be in charge is an act of faith. Believing that in an age when the victory of God appears to be overshadowed by the triumphs of ungodly human endeavors takes hard work. But, if we don’t, we’ll never learn to recognize how Christ is coming among us as our savior. 

All Christians believe that Jesus will come again and make all things new. But most Christians seem to expect that to happen in a way that makes the cross an unfortunate accident of history instead of the source of salvation that it truly is. To put it simply, when Jesus finally reigns as the King of Kings, do we expect him to wear a crown of jewels or as crown of thorns?

Do we believe that Jesus will return in a show of military might in order to give earthly power and authority to his followers, or do we believe that the power of God is manifest chiefly through the suffering and sacrifice we see embodied by Jesus on the cross? If it’s the former, we’re in big trouble because that means the kingship of Christ is only manifest in moments of worldly success. It means that Jesus’ triumph over evil is not accomplished in the cross and empty tomb but remains unfinished until God decides that it’s time for God to retake the throne that God has lost. But, if we believe that the King of Kings was always supposed to wear a crown of thorns, our hope lies not in a wishful dream but in the one whose suffering, death, and resurrection have already opened for us the way of eternal life. 

The reign of God does not come into focus through the lenses of earthly kingdoms but only through the way of Jesus Christ. As Jesus said to Pilate, “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.” Jesus teaches us that there is no expression of violence or earthly might that can bring the reign of God any closer to us. In the same way, his death and resurrection show us that there is no manifestation of earthly power—no king or president or political movement—that can push the reign of God any further away from us. 

Pius XI hoped for a world in which the reign of Christ was manifest in and through all the nations of the world. As long as we’re standing around waiting for the right people to get elected so that God’s will can take over our palaces and state houses, that hope will be nothing more than a pipe dream. But, if we’re willing to look for it and nurture it in the hearts and minds and lives of Jesus’ followers, we’ll see that Christ’s reign is already here. 

____________________________

1. Quas Primas. 11 December 1925. https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_11121925_quas-primas.html.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

Observational Theology

 

November 10, 2024 – The 25th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 27B

Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

What does it look like when the reign of God breaks through into this world? What are the signs that God’s will is unfolding around us? Where do we look for evidence that God is still God when it feels like the ways of the world are squeezing God’s reign out of our lives?

One of my favorite things about Education for Ministry, the four-year, small-group formation program we offer at St. Paul’s, is its emphasis on theological reflection. Perhaps more than anything else, EfM teaches participants to think theologically—to identify situations for potential reflection, examine them for theological meaning, connect them with the broader Christian tradition, and apply the insights that are gained back into their lives. The part of EfM that usually gets the most attention is the reading—the really long weekly readings from the Bible, church history, or other theological texts—but those readings are designed to equip participants for the real goal of the program, which is to engage the world around us through the lens of our faith.

That practice of observational theology has its roots in biblical examples like today’s reading from Mark. In this gospel lesson, Jesus identifies a situation that has potential, examines it for theological meaning, connects it with the broader faith tradition, and then invites his disciples to apply the lessons it offers to their lives. But, as we see in the story of the widow’s mite, the insights we gain must sometimes be mined from deep beneath the surface of our experience.

One day, Jesus was hanging out with his friends in Jerusalem. This was during the series of events that we call Holy Week. Jesus had already made his triumphal entry into the holy city, when the crowds had hailed him as God’s anointed. Then, Jesus had gone up to the temple and overturned the tables of the currency exchangers, openly challenging the legitimacy of the religious operations taking place there. In response, the religious leaders had challenged his authority to carry out such a prophetic action. One by one, the different groups of leaders—the chief priests, scribes, elders, Pharisees, Herodians, and Sadducees—came up to test him with different questions about faithfulness, and each time Jesus turned them aside with an impressive interpretation of the Jewish tradition.

When no one else was left to ask him a question, Jesus offered a scathing critique of some of the most prominent religious figures of his day. “Beware of the scribes,” Jesus said in today’s reading, “who like to walk around in long robes and like greetings in the marketplaces and have the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts.” He was inviting the crowd to turn their expectations of who was truly faithful upside down. He invoked the sort of religious figures whom society praised for their generosity and sliced open the motivation behind their religiosity: “They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”

That’s a hefty criticism, but only later does the significance of that teaching become clear. Having finished his critique, Jesus sat down outside the temple proper, across from the place where people came and dropped their offerings into the treasury. Among those who placed money into the treasury was a widow, recognizable by her distinctive dress. Jesus noticed her and heard the subtle sound of the two small coins rattling in the treasury chute, and he recognized faithfulness at work. Before the woman could slip away, he called his disciples over and pointed her out. “Do you see that widow over there?” he asked them. “She has put more into the treasury than everyone else combined because she has given her last two pennies. Others gave out of their abundance, but she has given out of her poverty, everything she had left to live on.”

The prominent religious leaders, who were admired by everyone, had achieved their prominence by exploiting the weak and the vulnerable, even this widow. Yet this woman, whose livelihood had been stolen by the very religious authorities who get credit for being faithful and generous, gave all she has to God by contributing to a religious system that was governed by the same people who had robbed her. Jesus recognized that the Torah’s repeated command to protect vulnerable people, including widows, conflicted with the contemporary religious practice of putting money in the temple treasury. That’s not because contributing to the temple was a faithless act but because those contributions were being managed by self-interested religious authorities who had failed to alleviate this widow’s poverty. And only those who look carefully beneath the surface of success, piety, generosity, and status are able to see what real faithfulness looks like.

Interestingly, Jesus does not finish this theological reflection with an imperative. He never tells the disciples to go and do likewise or that it is to people like this widow that the kingdom of heaven belongs. In other words, he never tells his followers that they, too, should give their last penny to the temple treasury—the same religious institution whose legitimacy he challenged by overturning the moneychangers’ tables. Instead, he reinterprets the significance and size of the people’s offerings in a way that isn’t obvious to the casual onlooker but becomes clear to those who see in this episode what God sees. God knows that true faithfulness depends upon the heart, and only a heart that belongs to God can become a vessel of faithfulness.

Finding ways to contemporize this story is difficult. When we think of modern-day religious leaders whom Jesus would criticize, we naturally turn to the charlatans on television who swindle billions of dollars away from vulnerable people in order to fly around in private jets and live in luxurious mansions. And, while it’s true that Jesus would certainly have had some not-nice things to say about them, I think it’s hard for us to appreciate how universally respected the religious leaders whom he calls out were. Jesus wasn’t calling out the televangelists who make most Christians cringe. He was singling out faithful icons who were held in the highest esteem across the religious culture—the sort of people who get invited to banquets, palaces, and inaugurations—and not just the inaugurations you aren’t excited about. 

Only those who dare to peel back the curtain and look beneath the power and trace back the lines of success to their origins are able to see what God sees. No matter how faithful someone looks or sounds, if they got where they are by stepping on the backs of vulnerable people, they are not the paragons of faithfulness that they seem to be. No matter how good and generous and successful a congregation, organization, or denomination is, if it was built on the subjugation of human beings or achieved its status by excluding people from the community of faith, it cannot be an institution of faithfulness until it grapples with its sinful past. And, if you want to see what God sees, you have to learn to notice where real expressions of faithfulness are made—those little gestures that most of us don’t have time for—the kind of faithful actions that come from people whom the world has forgotten to value but whose hearts belong to God.

The work of theological reflection is as important now as it has ever been, not only for participants in EfM but for all of us. We need to learn where to look for God’s presence among us and to hone our skills at recognizing how God shows up in a sinful world. We need to engage in the work of observational theology, and, to do that, we must equip ourselves by reading the Bible, coming to church, saying our prayers, remaining in community, and serving those in need. Those practices shape us into a people who can recognize and respond to what God is doing all around us. Thus, we practice our faith not to look good in anyone else’s eyes but to learn how to look at the world through the eyes of Jesus Christ.

Comfort and Confidence

 

November 3, 2024 – The Feast of All Saints

Isaiah 25:6-9; Revelation 21:1-6a; John 11:32-44

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon is available here. Video can be seen here.

Not long ago, I was introduced to the term “emotional lability.” I was meeting with someone who started to tear up unexpectedly. As she reached for a tissue, she acknowledged that those tears had been a little closer to the surface of late, and she attributed it to being “emotionally labile.” 

Since I didn’t know anything about the clinical nature of that term, I initially heard it as something positive. The word “labile” means flexible, elastic, and malleable, which to me sounded like a good thing—as if it were a healthy way of being in touch with your emotions. Of course, the word “labile” also means unsteady and unstable, and it turns out that, in the clinical sense, that term is applied to people whose wild emotional swings have taken control of their lives. I don’t think the person I was with meant it in the clinical sense, but I wonder whether we might find a different way of talking about the nearness of emotional experience as a positive thing—maybe “emotional flexibility” or “accessibility.”

Standing outside the tomb of his friend Lazarus, Jesus wept. As a child, I learned that John 11:35 is the shortest verse in the bible, but it wasn’t until much later that I started to realize how profound and deep is the truth contained in those two little words: Jesus wept. We believe in a God who loves us and comes among us not as an invincible warrior who vanquishes our enemies but as tender companion who cries with us, suffers with us, and dies with us so that we might be raised with him to new life. That is the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 

Still, we wonder why Jesus wept. Lazarus, his friend, was dead. There’s no doubt about that. But, even from the beginning, there also seemed to be little doubt about how this story would end. From the opening verses of John 11, when Jesus first heard that his friend was sick, Jesus made it clear that Lazarus’ death would not have the final word. In his telling of the story, John stresses that, even though Jesus knew that Lazarus’ life was in danger, he stayed put for two more days in order to make sure that Lazarus had died before Jesus could get there to heal him. “For your sake I am glad I was not there,” Jesus told the disciples, “so that you may believe.” At every step, Jesus remained in control, as if he knew all along that his friend’s tragic death would be an opportunity to show his followers that he had the power to raise him from the dead. 

And, still, Jesus wept. He knew that he had the power to bring his friend back. He knew exactly what he would do. He knew that he would stand at that grave and cry out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” But, when Jesus saw Mary weeping, and when he saw the people who were with her also weeping, and when he came to the place where his friend had been buried, Jesus was overcome with emotion, and he joined them in their tears. 

God knows exactly how everything will work out. God knows that he will raise us from the dead and bring us to new and everlasting life. God knows that, because of Jesus Christ, death itself has been defeated and its sting has been robbed of all its power. And still God comes among us as one who weeps. Jesus loved Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus. Even though he had the power to overcome death and bring his friend back from the grave, he was not immune to the grief of his friends. He was not insulated from his own sense of loss. He felt it deeply, and he wept with his friends, real tears of pain and loss—the same tears we weep when our loved ones die.

I am comforted by Jesus’ tears—not only because his gesture of compassion provides me pastoral consolation but also because he shows us that, even though we know our loved ones will rise again, our grief is not a sign of faithlessness or defeat. Like Jesus, we are filled with sadness when someone we love dies, even though we know that God will bring them back, and that sadness does not displace our confidence in the power of God’s love. Like Jesus, we can experience both.

I am comforted by Jesus’ tears, but my confidence comes from something else. It has become fashionable in Christian preaching and teaching to talk about God as the one who suffers with us, who cries with us, who dies for us. And, while our faith is built upon the fact that God’s plan of salvation is accomplished through the death of God’s incarnate Son, who did suffer just as we do, it is God’s power that has triumphed over death once and for all. More than the mere companionship of a sympathetic friend, it is God’s victory over death that gives us hope, and we see that play out in Jesus’ exchange with Mary and Martha.

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” Mary said to Jesus, repeating words that her sister Martha had said only a few verses before our reading picks up. Kneeling at his feet, she offered these words as a confession of faith. We might instinctively hear them as an expression of angst and defeat, but her posture suggests that she was attributing to Jesus a profound confidence in his ability to heal the sick. Similarly, some in the crowd asked whether the one who had the power to give sight to the blind would not also have been able to keep Lazarus from dying. With this repeated theme, John, the gospel writer, wants us to see that the people around Jesus were ready to believe in him, but they didn’t realize how far that belief could go.

When Jesus told them to roll away the stone that sealed shut Lazarus’ tomb, Martha objected, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” But Jesus replied, drawing from her and the crowd a faith not only in a Jesus who had the power to cure the sick but in one who had the power to raise the dead: “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” John finishes this episode with a triumphant description worthy of a Halloween script: “The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’”

Do we believe in a savior who can heal the sick or one who can raise the dead? Do we believe in a God who comforts us in our sorrow or one who defeats the forces of evil, which are the source of that sorrow? In Jesus Christ, we see that the answer is both. We are comforted by the one who is with us in our struggles, who experiences our pain and suffering, and who loves us from a place of vulnerability and weakness. And we are emboldened by the one whose suffering and death are the means by which death itself is defeated—the one who, although immune to the power of death, endured death in order to defeat it once and for all. We are moved by Jesus’ tears, and we are saved by his death and resurrection—saved by a God whose love is vulnerable yet whose power is triumphant.

Today is the feast of all the saints—all the people of God who have been buried with Christ in his death and who have been raised with him to new life. That’s you and me and the children of God who are being baptized today. And what does it mean to be a saint of God except to be able to see the world through the eyes of Jesus Christ? Sometimes those eyes are filled with tears because we are moved deeply by the pain and hurt that are all around us. But through those tears we also see the new life that awaits us and the whole world. We may need to be emotionally and spiritually flexible to experience the joy and the pain of life all at once, but Jesus has shown us that that is possible, and it is by following him that we learn how.