Remember Who You Are (A Sermon for Reign of Christ Sunday)

Scriptures:     Daniel 7:7-14    Psalm 93

Revelation 1:1-8        John 18:33-38

How many of us have read the Diary of Anne Frank?  Written by the teenage girl Anne Frank while in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam, and later in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, the diary not only chronicles her experiences, but also her relentless search for joy and hope in the midst of an increasingly grim and hopeless situation.   Perhaps the most famous and heart-wrenching quote from her diary, written while she was experiencing the worst misery that human hatred could devise, is, “Despite everything, I still believe people are good at heart.”

Today is Reign of Christ Sunday, otherwise known as Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday in the liturgical year when we proclaim the rule, the reign, of the Risen Christ not only over our individual lives, but over all things, over the universe, a cosmic reality that is hidden by our own brokenness and by the rebellion of those who claim authority without submitting to Christ who is the only true authority.  In our three-year cycle of readings, the Gospel reading for Reign of Christ Sunday portrays Jesus, basically, as a king who doesn’t look at all like our idea of a king.  Today’s Gospel reading is from the account of Jesus’ trial before Pilate in John’s Gospel.  Next year we’ll be reading Luke’s account of the crucified Jesus’ telling the crucified but penitent thief, “Today you will be with me in paradise.”  And two years from now, we’ll be reading from Matthew’s gospel in which Jesus describes himself, in essence, as a king who goes around in the disguise of the hungry, the thirsty, the homeless, the sick, and the imprisoned, so that whatsoever is done to the least in our society is done to the king.  Three accounts of a king who doesn’t look like a king, reminding us that God’s ways of exercising power in the world are very different from ours – that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and God’s ways not our ways.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus stands before Pilate, on trial for his life.  It would appear that since Pilate has the power to free Jesus or imprison Jesus or condemn Jesus to death, that it would therefore follow that it is Pilate who has the power in this story.  Nonetheless, both the portion of the story in our reading and the portions that follow before and after reveal that, indeed, it is Jesus who is in charge all the time.  The religious authorities arrest Jesus, but later admit that they have no power to put him to death.  Peter tries with his sword to rescue Jesus, but Jesus rebukes Peter, and affirms that he must drink the cup that the Father has given him.  It becomes evident that Pilate would like to release Jesus – and he certainly has the legal authority to do so – but triangulated as he is between the religious authorities who intimidate him and Jesus who doesn’t seem especially frantic about being released, Pilate eventually caves in to the religious authorities and gives them what they want.   Ultimately it comes down to the words of Jesus that I referenced earlier:  “Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?”

As I was reading this passage, it struck me that Jesus steadfastly refused to allow Pilate to define Jesus on Pilate’s terms.  Pilate asks Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews?”.  Clearly this is a setup for Jesus to declare himself as some sort of usurper or rebel leader – a political rebel seeking power.  Politics was Pilate’s world, and an admission on Jesus’ part of political rebellion would have given Pilate an easy excuse to have Jesus executed.  But Jesus isn’t going to allow Pilate to define Jesus on Pilate’s terms….Jesus asks, ”Where’s all this coming from?  Did you come up with this on your own, or are you listening to other peoples’ gossip?”  And Pilate says “Am I a Jew?  Your own priests and people brought you here.  What have you done?”  And Jesus responds, “My kingdom is not from this world.  If I had a worldly kingdom, my followers would be fighting tooth and nail to save me.  But I have no worldly kingdom.”  Pilate keeps wanting to draw Jesus back onto his turf, and asks, “So you’re a king?”  And Jesus insists on defining himself on his own terms:  "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice."  And Pilate pretty much gives away his political game by saying, “What is truth?”  Whatever truth is, at that moment, for Pilate, truth wasn’t a priority.

Despite Pilate’s repeated attempts to draw Jesus into Pilate’s frame of reference, Jesus resolutely insisted on defining  himself on his own terms, and more importantly, insisted on remembering why he had been sent, remembering that he had to drink the cup of suffering his father had given him.   In these chaotic days, I believe Jesus’ actions in our gospel reading are an important reminder to us, as Christians, to remember who we are, to remember whose we are, and to remember who we are to love and serve.

The events of the past weeks have been deeply upsetting.  Wall to wall coverage of bombings in Paris, for many of us, bring back memories of the days following 9-11 in our own country.  Similar attacks in Beirut, Lebanon, in Mali, and in Nigeria have been much less widely reported, but still give us a sense of widening chaos.  And as I wrote my sermon, Belgium was on high alert, vigilant against the possibilities of attacks there.  And there have been threats of an attack here in the US.  And at the same time all this is happening, Syrian refugees – fleeing the same kinds of attacks in their own land – are seeking asylum anywhere they can get it, including here. 

The message of the news media, of the talking head commentators, of many government officials, and of most of the candidates for president can be summarized roughly as follows:  Fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear, fear and more fear, wall to wall fear, all fear all the time, fear 24/7/365.    But the writer of John’s gospel also wrote, in a later letter to the churches, “Perfect love casts out fear.”  At a time like this, on this Reign of Christ Sunday, it is absolutely crucial to remember that, in the words of our first hymn, Jesus Shall Reign where’er the sun does its successive journeys run.  It is absolutely crucial to remember that despite human hatred and fear, God is still in charge.   And it is absolutely crucial to remember who we are as baptized Christians:  children of God, disciples of Christ, members of Christ’s church.  When I baptize someone, after I say, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost”, I anoint the candidate with oil, and these are words I pronounce:  “Receive the Holy Spirit, (candidate’s name) child of God, disciple of Christ, member of Christ’s church” – and as baptized Christians, indeed, that’s who we are, our core identity, trumping all other claims of nationality or race or ethnicity, or gender or sexual orientation.  Our core identity: “child of God, disciple of Christ, member of Christ’s church.”

Children of God:  at the beginning of this sermon, I mentioned Anne Frank and her diary.  What is less well known is that Anne Frank’s father, was among hundreds of Jews who sought sanctuary in America.  Had refuge been granted – who knows, Anne Frank could well have lived to a ripe old age here in the United States.  But the Frank family was refused, on the basis of the same arguments being used right now against admitting Syrian refugees – that the country, having struggled through a depression for more than ten years at that point, should take care of its own citizens first, that among the refugees there might be spies for Hitler.  And so asylum was refused, and the United States sent those Jewish refugees back to Hitler, and for many of them, to their deaths – Anne Frank among them.  And indeed, many of the refugees are themselves children. …children like Rana, the four year old Palestinian girl whose education I partly sponsor and to whom our own children have sent drawings.  Are we going to let the fearmongering on TV terrorize us to the point where we’re afraid of four-year-old children?  Or afraid of children like the two or so year old Jesus whose family fled as refugees to Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod?  Is that what we in the land of the free and the home of the brave have become?  Really?  As children of God, disciples of Christ, members of Christ’s church, I hope we can do better.

Disciples of Christ:  As Christians, we believe we are saved by grace through faith.  That is the bedrock of our faith, the reason we’re here.  But we are not saved so that God will baptize, bless, and sanctify our fears and prejudices, but rather that through the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit we may not be conformed to this world, but transformed through the renewing of our mind.  As followers of Jesus, we are called to be different from the world; in a word, we’re called to be Christlike, to be….Jesusy.  The world looks on us, to see if we will indeed follow in the way of Jesus, if we will be Jesusy.  And when they see that we are not Jesusy, they think we’re phonies, and rightly so.  The call to care for the stranger and the alien is embedded throughout Scripture, Old and New Testaments; from Leviticus 19:34:  “The alien who resides among you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God – to the beginning of Hebrews chapter 13: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing so some have entertained angels unawares.”  Truly being disciples of Jesus is not easy – Jesus said that the gate is narrow and the road is hard -  but it is the call we as Christians have received and committed to follow.  And again, the key is to resist the messages of fear that are out there, to heed the words that appear throughout Scripture time and again:  “Fear not.  Do not be afraid.”  Paul wrote to Timothy that “God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”  Fearful people can be led around by the nose and manipulated and stampeded to their own self-destruction.  After 9-11 in this country, people were terrified,  the media and the government did all they could to perpetuate and amplify their terror – remember the terror alerts, the government telling us on one day to be afraid and the next day to be really afraid, and the day after to be not so afraid, but still afraid - and people trusted what the government and the media told them, and we were stampeded into policies that have destabilized not only Afghanistan and Iraq but more recently Lebanon and Syria as well, turning them essentially into failed states, and the resulting power vacuum, in fact, contributed to both to the refugee crisis and to the formation of ISIS….the formation of ISIS was caused, in part, by Us-es, or at least by our political leaders.  Been there, done that! We’ve seen this movie before!  There’s no need for a sequel, and as children of God, disciples of Christ, members of Christ’s church, I hope we can point to a better way forward.

Members of Christ’s Church – There is an unusual level of consensus among Christian leaders against the fearmongering and bigotry perpetuated by the media and by political hacks across the spectrum.  Of course, the mainline Protestant churches are generally strong on peace and justice issues, and United Church of Christ in particular is known as a peace and justice church, and so everyone expects the UCC to advocate for peace and justice and against fearmongering and anti-Muslim bigotry, as we eat our granola bars and hold hands and sing kumbaya, because, in the words of the Geico commercial, it’s what we do – I’m joking a bit about stereotypes of UCC folk, of course.  But so is the Roman Catholic Church, itself with a strong and proud tradition of social teaching that Pope Francis is emphasizing in ways that haven’t been heard in decades, and so is the National Association of Evangelicals, generally on the conservative end of the Christian spectrum, normally the last people you’d ever expect to climb on board the peace train.  Left, right, and center, our Christian sisters and brothers are urging us to choose love instead of fear and hospitality instead of rejection.  As children of God, disciples of Christ, and members of Christ’s church, perhaps we should listen.

It’s not easy to be a Christian in these days.  It’s not easy to stand against the tide of fearmongering and hatred and say “no”.  But just as Jesus came to testify to the truth, so must we, even when our voice shakes.  And in the worst of times, we can draw comfort from the words of the first question of the old Heidelberg Catechism that our longtime members grew up with.  The first question goes, “What is your only comfort, in life and in death?”  And while the answer is a bit lengthy, it begins with the words, “That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.”   May we remember who we are and whose we are, and may this comfort carry us safely through the days ahead. Amen.