|
Back to Sermon Archives
November 26, 2006
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: 2 Samuel 23:1-7, Revelation 1:4-8, John 18:33-37
“Year/Your/Our End: From Jesus to Christ to Jesus
Again”
Happy Last Sunday of the Church Year! Next Sunday is New Year’s Day for us
so to speak. Our theme for the Advent season will be, “Make Way for the Image
of God!” – in our own lives and in the life of the world – as we hold mirrors and
magnifiers (as in, “My soul magnifies the Lord!”) up to each other and to ourselves
– to see ourselves as clearly and as completely as we possibly can! Two quick
favors, please, to begin with today.
One, please fill in and return in the Offering the “Estimate of Giving” form if
you are at all inspired so to do. This church, this congregation, this mission
and ministry need our loving and generous support. Two, come to the annual
all-church meeting at 6:30 PM or when you can this Tuesday. We need all the
help we can get to carry on the life and mission of Jesus in our time and place!
We need leadership. We try to treat one another as brothers and sisters, colleagues
and friends. No one or few of us know what another or others may need or want
to do. It is up to each one of us to “take up our load” and speak for ourselves!
This is a critical time, represented by what we call Judgment Day, this Last
Sunday of the Church Year, this Sunday of Christ the King, or less imperially,
the Cosmic Christ – a critical time for the souls of all congregations,
denominations, faith traditions, nations, worlds, species, and creation herself!
I like to think we can make a choice of images and languages about the meaning
of this day. Just as we need alternative energy sources today to preserve
the rest of creation, so we need alternative power sources today to preserve the
human part of creation.
I call this sermon “From Jesus to Christ to Jesus Again” because for the first
300 years, the church actually lived out in the midst of death the unarmed,
nonviolent, peace-making approach of Jesus. Then the church got
“Christianized” and “Constantinized” and took sides and curried favor with
emperors and with kings. What we need is not so much the “Christ” back in
“Christianity,” or even in “Christmas” that gets marketed more grossly and
greedily early every year. What we need is the real “Jesus” to follow
again in our own lives and the world.
Left to our current devices, we are literally killing ourselves. We are clinging
to kingly powers that might makes right and heroic ideas and personages reign down
death and destruction from seats in high places. We need instead to be nurturing
cosmic powers, powers that rise from the roots of the earth, and from the grassroots
of all of the peoples of earth! We need not some hyped-up imperial one-great-surviving-superpower
way of doing things for us all. Rather we need the freest and fullest possible
proliferation of peoples and nations, of cultures and faiths, of languages and images,
of lifestyles and family values! We need to make room for every one!
Not only to give each hungry person a fish. Not only to teach hungry people
to fish for themselves. But to re-stock the pond and get out of the way so
the hungry can get there and find some fish left!
Jesus forces us – his followers and our Pilates as well – to choose between cosmic
and kingly powers, powers of God and powers of Rome. Jesus forces us to see
the “truth” about power. In the end – year end, your end, our end – the truth
is that power and courage even to die move the world much more deeply and lastingly
than the power and even courage to kill. John the Revelator claims the faithful
witness of Jesus to love and to free us from sin which is so often the fear of death
by pouring out his own blood for the world – the faithful witness of Jesus in the
end will be seen by every eye – “even those who pierced him.”
This is no abstract or rhetorical debate. In the end, powers of kings
persist only at the pleasure of the people. Especially in Tonga right now,
land of our brothers and sisters, with the passing of a longtime king, something
new wants to be born -- a balance between traditional powers of the king and
emerging powers of all the people. We pray for patience, compassion,
wisdom and nonviolence through this transition. We confess the same
questions have challenged us in the United States. We call our birth as a nation
freedom from imperial rule. But it has not always been so nor always for
everyone. Otherwise, we would not be filming the life of Jeanette Rankin,
or building memorials on the national mall to Dr. King! We suffer
recurrent abuses of “kingly powers” – as much as any nation does.
For it’s in the very nature of nations to think and to act territorially, protectively,
militarily and aggressively. It is why God argued through Samuel and the prophets
against the demand of the people of Israel that they become a nation with kingly
powers like any other! Even David, God’s model king, in these last words of
his life, begins with a tribute to ruling justly -- as cosmic, general and gentle
as rising of sun each day. Yet he ends with setting his house, his lineage,
and their prosperity, over against those whom he calls “godless.” Does it
not disclose our dilemma that this great king of God dismisses some peoples as throwaways?
Outcasts? Untouchables? Good only for burning on the spot?
Israel to this day remains stuck in that contradiction with all the rest of us
nations – How many nations? Just since the founding of the United Nations,
now 192 nations, and counting! Clearly the Palestinians will be a nation
one day. And it is conceivable that the nation of Iraq will become at
least three. We cannot stand above this struggle. People of faith in
Jesus have something to say and to do about and with powers – even kingly powers
– on the way to becoming cosmic!
From the beginning, again next week, we await to hear that a new kind of king --
and a threat to every traditional king! -- has been born in the most “unkingly”
of settings and circumstances! Jesus and family will be warned by the non-traditional
“three kings” to flee the traditional King Herod. Later, in his baptism, Jesus
will hear words of enthronement, “You are my Son, the Beloved!” -- alongside words
to the Suffering Servant, “With you I am well pleased.” Jesus’ first public
words of ministry will summon us to, “Repent! For the kingdom of God is at
hand!” What it means to receive and abide in the kingdom of God is what the
gospels are all about! The very origin of the term, “gospel” announces “good
news” of the coming of this new kind of king – of a new kind of governance brought
by this king. Comfort “kin-dom” relations, but confront “kingdom” rulers!
When Jesus first preaches his hometown of Nazareth, he will bring a new-kingly platform
of good news to the poor and oppressed, news of healing and liberation. At
least three times, the crowds -- attracted in part by Jesus’ kingly powers -- will
try to crown him and make him a worldly king! He will enter Jerusalem the
week of his death riding humbly as a king returning triumphant from battle.
From this confrontation with Pilate we know the charge against Jesus is treason,
a threat to imperial powers. He is mocked with robes of purple, with a crown
of thorns and a scepter of reeds, and a sign “King of the Jews” is nailed over him
on the cross.
Can there be any doubt that in Jesus we are dealing with kingly powers?
The questions remain, what kind of king? What kind of powers and how to
use them? We cannot escape, avoid or deny our own personal royalty!
In the eyes of heaven as Jesus sees us, each one of us is divinely touched with
the powers of king and queen! Nor can we escape, avoid, deny our own
divine callings -- with all the same costs as to Jesus! -- to live out our own
royal powers in most public and even political ways. We may not be of or
from this world, as Jesus says to Pilate. But we are very much in and for
this whole world! We are a people of dual-citizenship (at least dual –
maybe many more!), even a people of dual-discipleship. More of us all the
time find ourselves drawn to and grounded in more than one nation, more than one
language, culture, or faith tradition.
According to the program for the Interfaith Thanksgiving Eve Service at Sparks UMC
this week, we as community are made up at least – at least! – of parts that are
Protestant, Hindu, Native American, Jewish, Buddhist, Orthodox, Roman Catholic,
Muslim, Mormon, Baha’i! We could name others, including Wiccan. And we
will return to origins of women’s spirituality – in which men may share! -- in
the goddess tradition with a series of videos starting next Sunday, at 9 AM.
Is it any wonder we may find ourselves in dual-citizenships and discipleships?
The “old world” -- with all that means at any given time in God’s history – is passing
away! It is falling apart, often violently and spectacularly. That’s
what the Book of Revelation portrays throughout! Yet hear how this much-abused
book begins – with “grace and peace” from the “cosmic one,” source and creator of
all life and living – the one who gives our own lives in this moment, who
gave the loves of all who have gone before us, and who will (Pray God) give the
lives of all who are yet to come! The “faithful witness” of Jesus is not to
death but to life! And even to the defeat of death – defeat of the kingly
powers of death!
John with his seven spirits goes on to address the spirits of seven
congregations in Revelation 2 and 3 – congregations not unlike us, struggling in
our ways to embody the life of God in the midst all death in this world – by
discerning what is the spirit, the hope, the vision, the voice of our particular
congregation. That’s what we’ll be doing together on Tuesday evening.
I really implore us to be there.
One of the timeless images from Revelation further shows the ascendancy of the
cosmic powers of Jesus and life over death. It is the image of Jesus as
the Lamb of God -- slain for the well-being and hope for all in this world.
Now this same gentle, unarmed, nonviolent, peace-making Lamb pf God reigns
supreme over all kingly powers. According to John, the reality of that
reign is only a “veil” away from us. “Drawing back the veil” to see a
whole new vision, hear a whole new voice of the possible, the alternative – that
is what “apocalyptic” is all about.
One cosmic insight of the Lamb is (in Paul’s words) that the race is not always
to the string or the swift, but to those who endure to the end! Again, endurance
of the suffering remnant of the church in the world of death is the very purpose
of John’s Revelation! The Lamb holds the seal to the Book of Life, the very
scroll of history. In that book there are lovingly listed the names of those
who are faithful to their baptisms to the end -- those who resist all other worship
but that of God (not king) as source and creator of all – of the Lamb whose life
is given for all.
Of course, we may identify that Book with the saints of our lives whom we have been
lifting up all this month. Our brother Morton Wong, died Thanksgiving Day,
is the latest of us to endure in his faith to the end. We may identify that
Book with the writing of our sister Pat Smith paying tribute to her mother’s journey
through dementia to the end. We may identify that Book with those who died
in the Mizpah fire -- including those yet unnamed by us, but whose names surely
are known to the Lamb! And we may identify that Book with what we learned
in the news this week of the incomprehensively comprehensive records compiled
after World War II of all the deportation lists of all the camps where Jews and
others were transported for extermination. What is called the “ITS,” the
International Tracing Service (sounds like divine mission to me!), contains the
records of some 17.5 million displaced and deported.
That archive will be opened for the first time to survivors, relatives, and Holocaust
researchers. The files have been stored in a small town in central Germany
in sixteen miles of shelf space! The name of Anne Frank appears only once
among the 50 million pages of Nazi documents. The news story called it “electrifying
to scan the endless litany of doomed names and suddenly come across, Frank, Annelies
M. / 12.6.29 / A’stm, Merwedeplein 37 / 3.9.44 / . “The entry stands for
name, birth date, address in Amsterdam and the date she boarded the train to the
concentration camps. The final column, destination, is blank.”
But we may say with assurance this morning, there are no blanks in the Lamb’s Book
of Life. No one has been neglected, forgotten, displaced, or deported.
The work, the love, the care of the Lamb are cosmic. And now the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC this month projects on its huge outside
walls pictures of those who are dying in Darfur! – reminding the world what could
have been for the Jews and others deported in early in World War II. We knew
– but the creeds of our Christ came between us and the work of our Jesus.
That remains the challenge of the establishment church yet today – that nothing
separate us from the work of Jesus! Still -- like Anne Frank expressing faith
in essential human goodness -- the end of the Last Book of the Bible for this Last
Day of the Church Year trusts against all appearances – this world is in the hands
of a good and loving God who reaches out even now to say, “I will be their God and
they will be my children.” We all shall be God’s children, forever!
Amen.
top of page
Archives
|
