November 20, 2016

Cate Thorn

Sunday before Advent     Jeremiah 23:1-6     Luke 23:33-43

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Today is the last Sunday of the church year, New Year’s Eve, I guess. The last Sunday of the liturgical year it’s often known as Christ the King, or the Reign of Christ Sunday. It kind of makes sense to end a year of telling the Christian faith story, of the unique influence of the man Jesus of Nazareth who lived on earth in historical time in whom divine presence was discerned, made startlingly real, to end the year saying things are changed. It makes different the way things are, it reveals a viable alternative way in how to be and order our life together in this same world. As we look around our world just now, it seems a most unlikely claim with little apparent evidence. But the story that makes this claim, the niggling, irritating, won’t ever quite go away faith story refuses to relinquish the claim that the world is indeed threaded through with divine presence. And ultimately it is beyond human capacity to unstitch that as real.

Whether it’s Christ the King or the Reign of Christ, each imply a geography of living, kingdom, sovereignty, there’s a location, and an acknowledged leadership, it’s not no-one over nowhere but someone over somewhere, it’s a concrete assertion. I suspect the notion of kingship or of reign over, even if it is Christ, sits uneasily with us. Raises spectres of patriarchy, of status and privilege acquired by birth rather than worth, misuse of power, corruption without censure. I wonder, though, how many of us have lived in a monarchy with a regent who actively rules, complete with a social stratum of support to know if it’s actually like this. I suspect most of us are accustomed to living in a democracy with its flattened class system where each adult has right of say in determining the leaders and laws of the nation.

The social system of monarchy may be outside our lived experience but I’d suggest we’re quite familiar with a top down power system. In our world, countries, rulers, people who’ve many resources do indeed exercise power over those made less by their fewer or no resources. Those with less are subject to, kept distanced, done to. It’s circumstance of birth, geography, race, religion or gender that renders them powerless. This is not new. It’s a common and kingly story of human life on earth, of systems of power and misuse of power, of injustice, abuse and careless disregard of the sanctity of life. Jesus’ crucifixion in today’s gospel is outcome of the power of such systems. Systems familiar to us and, uncomfortable as it may be to say, the way we often as not operate, it’s in us. Born into a society dominated by this paradigm we’re formed by it. Wired to survive, we strive to succeed, to have power, to gain for ourselves. Even if, for as long as we can remember we’ve resisted, spoken against, worked to unmask, to effect change, it’s hard to not ‘do our resistance’ by exact same way of operating, misusing our power to impose our alternative vision of the way things should be on those who differ.

It might be easier to simply not keep Christ the King Sunday, to avoid or dismiss its imagery, its location in our tradition. But before we discard it out of discomfort maybe there’s merit in considering why it has place. Is something being said through this, maybe being asked of us, to what system of living do we ally ourselves, what does it require of us and how do we live it out? Proposes it’s possible for us, or even more boldly, native to us to live in a way personified in the person of Jesus, as told in the stories passed down through time. As people who seek to live in honest transparency to divine presence, who value the gift that is life and seek for its flourishing, who name injustice, who refuse to participate in unjust systems, work for restoration, are willing to remain in the presence of suffering brokenness for in us is hope, a deep knowing that this is not the entire story.

Which all sounds rather ideal, does it not? Armed with such understanding, and the words of teaching attributed to Jesus that invert the established order, might it be that all we need do is apply this Christ as King, make it this Christ that Reigns and everything will be sorted! Let me think about that “the last shall be first and the first last, we’re to serve not to be served,” it’s an inversion, for sure, but it still operates within a ranked system. If we replace Christ as King, the ruler, the one in charge and claim Christ does things upside down so it’s actually different BUT don’t question the system itself, the fundamental underpinnings by which it operates then nothing really is changed. And it takes little time for Christ to become the power figure in a hierarchical system that we’re powerless in, for us to take the place given us and accept the inevitability of what will happen, without authority, mandate or right to make difference or change.

How might we disentangle ourselves? Well, I got to thinking about stories on my bus journeying this week. About stories with longevity, the ones that last, like our faith narrative stories and, funnily enough, like fairy stories and folk tales, which also include kings and queens and all number of other mythical beasties. They last, I believe, because they’re stories of life, by this I mean they are living stories. Such stories allow us to encounter real life, populated by characters we recognise, exerting influence in ways we know, even if events or characters in the story are mythically exaggerated, they inhabit the landscapes and engage in the activities of real life. Giving voice to our deeper truths, they name our fears, hopes, aspirations and dreams, let our best and maybe worst selves be revealed, unshackled from the chains of our ordinary day compromises and limitations. They allow us to stand face to face with what is, with what could be, to consider the consequence of choices without having to venture too dangerously there. Stories that’ve stood the test of time are adaptable, they relate to and resonate with real life, and their struggle is ours, mirroring the moving fluidity and flexibility of life as we grow and change. If they cease to resonate as truthful, to relate, to speak into or reflect our experience of life then I’m not sure we’d keep telling them. Might this be something of our uneasiness at having Christ the king included in our faith and liturgical narrative, has it become a story without life for it’s out of relationship with our life?

I wonder if there are questions that precede our judgement of this image. Might we first ask ourselves what we imagine our faith looks like in real life, ask ourselves what difference we imagine our faith makes to the life of the world, ask ourselves what the point is of faith bearing that we trust ourselves to? I think this influences how we create our image of Christ as king. It is after all we humans who’ve given this name to experience of the divine. It is after all a human claim of hope arising out of our divine indwelling, calling us to recognise and to be presence of divine life in the world. Does the faith that is in us call us to create edifices for God, concrete statements for God, certainties that mimic the grandness, grandeur of royal splendour, in service of a kingly God kept safe within religious walls? Or does the faith that is in us call us to risk treading trails of transformation that refuse to be converted by, become fixed certainties of power? Call us to trust that the integrity of our vulnerable imperfection is sufficient to make real the living, changing, ever revealing presence of divine life, to participate in transformation as we’re being transformed.

I want to share a model of kingship through a story of the incarnation told by 4th century Athanasius, slightly adapted and expanded by Brian McLaren.

“Once upon a time there was a good and kind king who had a great kingdom with many cities. In one distant city, some people took advantage of the freedom the king gave them and started doing evil. They profited by their evil and began to fear the king would interfere and throw them in jail. Eventually these rebels seethed with hatred for the king. They convinced the city that everyone would be better off without the king, and the city declared its independence from the kingdom.

But soon, with everyone doing whatever they wanted, disorder reigned in the city. There was violence, hatred, lying, oppression, murder, rape, slavery and fear. The king thought: What should I do? If I take my army and conquer the city by force, the people will fight against me, and I’ll have to kill so many of them, and the rest will only submit through fear or intimidation, which will make them hate me and all I stand for even more. How does that help them – to be either dead or imprisoned or secretly seething with rage? But if I leave them alone, they’ll destroy each other, and it breaks my heart to think of the pain they’re causing and experiencing.

So the king did something very surprising. He took off his robes and dressed in the rags of a homeless wanderer. Incognito, he entered the city and began living in a vacant lot near a garbage dump. He took up a trade – fixing broken pottery and furniture. Whenever people came to him, his kindness and goodness and fairness and respect were so striking that they would linger just to be in his presence. They would tell him their fears and questions, and ask his advice. He told them that the rebels had fooled them, and that the true king had a better way to live, which he exemplified and taught. One by one, then two by two and then by hundreds, people began to have confidence in him and live in his way.

Their influence spread to others, and the movement grew and grew until the whole city regretted its rebellion and wanted to return to the kingdom again. But, ashamed of their horrible mistake, they were afraid to approach the king, believing he would certainly destroy them for their rebellion. But the king-in-disguise told them the good news: he was himself the king, and he loved them. He held nothing against them, and he welcomed them back into his kingdom, having accomplished by a gentle, subtle presence what never could have been accomplished through brute force.” [1]

[1] Brian D. McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy, (Zondervan; Grand Rapids), 2004, 64,65.