Held Together

Scriptures:      Jeremiah 23:1-6,                      Psalm 46

                        Colossians 1:11-20                  Luke 23:33-43

Today is Christ the King Sunday, also known in inclusive language as Reign of Christ Sunday.  Christ the King Sunday or Reign of Christ Sunday began as a feast within the Roman Catholic Church.  It is a relatively recent addition to the liturgical calendar, having been declared by Pope Pius XI in 1925.  Now, the Roman Catholic church observes many feasts that Protestant churches cheerfully ignore, but Anglican, Lutheran, and many mainline Protestant churches, including our own denomination, adopted it as well.  Protestant churches may have adopted this feast as a way of protesting – because that’s what we Protestants do, we protest, it’s how we roll – as a way of protesting against totalitarian political ideologies such as fascism, as practiced in Italy, German and Spain, and Communism, as practiced in the Soviet Union and the satellite countries it dominated.   Leaders who ruled under these totalitarian political ideologies demanded allegiance at a much deeper level than voting and paying taxes – they attempted to dominate and control virtually every action and even every thought of their citizens, demanding a level of devotion of which only God is worthy.  And so, in proclaiming Christ as King, Catholic and Protestant churches declared, at the same time, that Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin weren’t.  This was a return to the insights of the early Christians, for whom saying, “Jesus is Lord” also meant that Caesar was not.

On Reign of Christ Sunday, the Gospel depicts Jesus as a king who doesn’t act much like our idea of an earthly king, using his kingly power in unkingly ways.  Next year, on Reign of Christ Sunday, we’ll be reading from the account in Matthew’s gospel of Jesus as ruler presiding over the nations, and dividing the people as a shepherd would divide sheep from goats, telling some that whatsoever they had done for the least of Jesus’ sisters and brothers – feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, welcoming strangers, caring for the sick, visiting those in prison – they did for Jesus, and telling others that whenever they withheld all these things from Jesus’ sisters and brothers, they withheld them from Jesus.  Two years from now, we’ll read from John’s account of Christ before Pilate.  And today, of course,  we read about the crucified Jesus telling the penitent thief, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”  To the religious leadership and Roman guards who looked on, Jesus’ words must have seemed laughable, one dying criminal talking nonsense to another.  But seen through the eyes of faith, it is Jesus, not the religious leadership, not the Roman guards, who is in charge, and who can fulfill what he promised.  And this is the paradox of faith. On one hand, Christ on the cross had power that no earthly king on even the most magnificent throne could claim, power over time and eternity.  On the other hand, Christ seems to be a ruler who in his earthly ministry had little time for thrones, but whose power showed up among the last, the least, and the lost.  The message on the back of the bulletin cover describes this eloquently, and I’m half-tempted to tell you to just read the back of the bulletin cover and send you home early.  I’ll resist that temptation – but I do invite you; more than that, I implore you, to read the back of the bulletin cover when you get home, and read it again throughout the coming week, to be alert for the unlikely places in which Christ may be enthroned in our midst.

Our reading from Colossians invites us to consider even more deeply the paradox of Christ’s power manifesting itself through powerlessness.  Paul speaks in lofty terms about what Christ does – rescues us from the power of darkness, transfers us into his kingdom where there is redemption and forgiveness.  Paul speaks in lofty terms about who Christ is:  “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven”…  and by now this very heady language is either making our heads explode or putting us to sleep, because it’s so abstract…reading all this makes me feel a bit like I’m in a hot air balloon floating up and up and up……but then Paul goes on:  “by making peace through the blood of his cross.”   And those last words, “the blood of his cross” brings all that lofty language right back down to earth, right back down to our level.  Christ does all these incredible things almost too big for us to get our arms around – holding all things together, reconciling to himself all things – and he does it, not by demanding and decreeing and declaring, but by suffering and dying. 

Theologians speak of the historical Jesus and the cosmic Christ.  We meet the historical Jesus in the synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.  We know the story of Jesus of Nazareth – born of a virgin, born in a stable, refugee with his family for a time in Egypt, grew up, worked with Joseph as a carpenter, baptized by John the Baptist, tempted by Satan, began his ministry of teaching and healing and casting out demons, arrested, unjustly condemned to death, crucified, buried, rose again, ascended into heaven.  But John’s gospel and some of Paul’s writings – such as Colossians -  connect the historical, earthly Jesus to a mystical, cosmic dimension….similar to when we say that Jesus is both human and divine.  Remember that Christ is not Jesus’ last name, but a title, meaning “anointed one”.  Colossians says that all things in heaven and earth have been created through Christ and for Christ. (Colossians 1:16)  This may remind us of what we read in the beginning of John’s gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” (John 1:1-3)  Ephesians speaks of God having chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4), with a “plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” (Ephesians 1:10)  And we see, perhaps, a glimpse of this cosmic dimension, along with Peter, James, and John, in the gospel accounts of the transfiguration, in which the three disciples on the mountaintop saw their teacher in a new way, radiant, and in conversation with Moses and Elijah in a dimension in which past, present, and future were all one.

So what’s the point?  We need to connect both to the historical Jesus and to the cosmic Christ, the cross and the crown, Jesus as human and divine, to begin to sense what God is like.  Take away the divine, and you have Jesus as a human teacher who taught about love both in his words and his actions, who lived and died many a long year ago.  Take away the human, and you have God as an impersonal force, like the wind and the waves, terrifying power without love.  Jesus is the entry point – the door, the gate – to understanding God and the universe as being directed by and toward love.

So what’s the point?    Colossians and John’s Gospel say that all things in heaven and earth were created in Christ, and Ephesians speaks of an endpoint at which all things in heaven and earth are gathered back together in Christ.   All things.  All things matter to God.  All things count for something in God’s sight.  In Christ we are connected to all things, past, present, and future. 

This is not the message we get from our society.  We are taught to look out for number one, to look out for ourselves, and perhaps our families.  We’re taught that the goal of life is to accumulate more for ourselves – “he who dies with the most toys, wins” – regardless of what that means for those around us.  We’re taught to see some groups – those we connect to – as good, and those who are different as bad….and we may even come to the place where we think our world would be better if we could just get rid of some of the so-called bad people in it, as the Crusades tried to get rid of Muslims, and the Inquisition tried to get rid of non-Catholics, and Hitler tried to get ride of Jews and gypsies and gays and all sorts of people he deemed not fit to live.   And we’re not taught to see the creation as having any value at all in its own right, but only to see it as raw material for our getting and spending, as the canvass on which we paint our lives.  And then when we die, we’re taught only to care about our own salvation, or perhaps also that of our family, as we hope to see our departed loved ones again. 

Franciscan writer Fr Richard Rohr – and I’d invite you to look him up - calls this normal mode of operation “dualistic thinking”, as we divide the world into categories of us vs not us – black vs white, saint vs sinner, heaven vs hell, the world of boundaries and borders.  And we need all this as we begin our spiritual development.  But we need to let it all go if we are to mature into the fullness of God’s will for us – this is what is meant when we speak of “laying down our lives so we can find our true lives in Christ” and “dying to self, so that we can rise with Christ”.   And this “letting go” inevitably comes with pain, with sacrifice and suffering.  Christ holds all things together, and so we are connected not only to the persons and things that comfort us but to the persons and things that threaten us……until we come to the place where we no longer experience them as a threat. 

We live in a war-torn world, in a deeply divided country, in a violent city in which we can’t get through a week without blood on the sidewalk.   It may be a real stretch to know to the marrow of our bones that God loves us, deeply, passionately……and to know to the marrow of our bones that God loves the person we can’t stand, the one that makes my stomach heave every time I hear his or her voice, every bit as deeply and passionately, and loves the creation – the trees, a salamander, the deer that crossed the road in front of us, the tomato plant in our back yard,  deeply and passionately.  Love really does make the world go ‘round, make the universe go ‘round – not just the sappy infatuation of a silly love song, but God’s passionate care for all things, that passionately connects us to all things.  

Paul told the Colossians that Jesus reconciled to himself all things in heaven and earth through the blood of his cross – and he invited them into this work of reconciliation, as he encouraged them, “May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.”   While the world worships power that acts through force and coercion, the power of God that holds the universe together acts through patience, and endurance, and suffering, and sacrifice….like that of Jesus on the cross, as he invited the criminal next to him into Paradise.   May we walk together in the way of Jesus, walking the way of the cross, laying down our small, selfish lives, so that we can participate in the true life of Christ.  Amen.