“The Election of God”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, November 21, 2010 at Church of the Ascension, Rochester, New York
He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise. (Luke 23:35)
Today we come to the last Sunday of the liturgical year, which is commonly known as “Christ the King” Sunday. This is the feast day when we lift up and celebrate the image of Christ as King. The imagery of our hymnody is triumphalistic and full of monarchical imagery. We celebrate Christ’s reign over everything in this world and the next. There are some tensions embedded in this feast day, however, that we cannot gloss over or ignore if we are to truly understand what it means for us to say that Christ is King. One tension comes from our historical perspective as human beings who live in this time and place in history, some 2000+ years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. On the one hand, we affirm that Christ is King and that we glorify and honor him as such, yet on the other we live in a world that so often feels as though no one is in charge, no one is reigning over everything, or, if someone is, this ruler is some kind of crazy or simply negligent monarch who allows evil to continue to create chaos in the world. In a world where terrorism and war continue to shake the very foundations of our sense of well-being and safety, and where economic uncertainty continues to eat away at the fabric of our sense of security, the idea of a divine king who will bring order out of the chaos of the world is appealing. Given the inability of human kings and rulers to do so, we yearn for a divine monarch even as we observe that nothing much is changing in human affairs despite our claim to be living under the kingship of Christ.
Secondly, for we Americans, the image of a king is one that is hard for us to resonate with. We founded this country, after all, revolting against a form of government that had a king as the head of state. We value highly the idea of leaders being elected by the governed. We don’t like the idea of being ruled over by someone we did not choose, whose values we haven’t had a chance to evaluate and scrutinize. We want to choose those whom we will look to as leaders and we do not feel comfortable with the notion of obedience to an authority figure who is given to us rather than chosen by us. So what does it mean for us to say that Christ is King?
Note that on this day that we celebrate the kingship of Christ, we hear a gospel where Jesus is being hanged on a cross, dying between two common criminals. His death is ignominious and humiliating, painful and ugly. What kind of king is this, this man hanging on a cross in pain and agony, helpless and unable to get himself down or to prevent the horrible things that are happening to him? The words of the crowd to him, “he saved others, let him save himself…If you are King of the Jews, save yourself!” are probably, if we were brutally honest with ourselves, the very questions we might have asked if we were standing by watching this event unfold. What kind of King is this? What kind of God is this that stands by and does not intervene when something horrible, like the crucifixion, is happening in the human world?
In the novel, The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, the protagonist is a young boy, who is raised Hindu but becomes both Christian and Muslim in the course of the story. As he is first exploring Christianity he struggles with just this tension as he learns about the crucifixion and juxtaposes the scene on Golgotha with the idea of a divine king. He muses:
That a god should put up with adversity, I could understand. The gods of Hinduism face their fair share of thieves, bullies, kidnappers and usurpers. What is the Ramayana but the account of one long, bad day for Rama? Adversity, yes. Reversals of fortune, yes. Treachery, yes. But humiliation? Death? I couldn’t imagine Lord Krishna consenting to be stripped naked, whipped, mocked, dragged through the streets and, to top it off, crucified – and at the hands of mere humans, to boot. I’d never heard of a Hindu god dying. Brahman Revealed did not go for death. Devils and monsters did, as did mortals, by the thousands and millions-that’s what they were there for. Matter, too, fell away. But divinity should not be blighted by death. (p. 54)
As the young boy continues to explore the Christian story, he asks the Roman Catholic priest about this peculiar fact of the god dying, and asks why Christians believe God would allow such a thing. The answer he gets is one word: Love.
If the crucifixion story is meant to illustrate what kingship means then it certainly turns on its head any ordinary human notion about what makes a king. Human notions of kingship are rewritten in the Christ story. Instead of involving power over others and the right to act arbitrarily and completely in accord with the King’s will and desire, this kind of king wields his power in a completely different way. This king uses love as the predominant weapon of force, not supernatural powers or extravagant displays of might and brute strength. This king serves others instead of being served by them. He heals and forgives instead of punishing and exacting retribution. As he hangs on a cross dying between two thieves, he says to God, “Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.” Mercy, forgiveness, humility, love…all of these characteristics redefine kingship as God understands it. Just as the first century Jews struggled with the concept of Jesus as Messiah because he did not look like what they expected a Messiah to look like, we struggle with the concept of Christ as King because this Christ doesn’t seem to fit the image of king that we have learned about through human history and experience.
Spiritually, we struggle with the image of Christ as King because to be the subject of a king means that we must be obedient to the authority of that king. Obedience is a hard concept for us to swallow, rugged individualists that we are. As products of a culture that values highly individual autonomy and freedom, we bristle at the notion of obedience. If we live under a king, our will suddenly doesn’t amount to much anymore. As subjects of the king, we are not in charge. We are simply required to do the will of the king without question. What would it be like if we elected Christ as King, instead of being given him as our ruler and lord? Would we have elected him?
Imagine that we were to hold an election and vote for the deity of our choice. Would we elect Christ as we know him through the scriptures and the teachings about him as handed down in our Christian tradition? He was born of a poor family, in a stable and raised as a Jewish carpenter. Somewhere in his early adulthood, he began a preaching and teaching and healing ministry, wandering around the countryside trying to bring people into right relationship with the God he called Father. He was always on the wrong side of established religious and civil governmental authorities, always getting into arguments and scrapes with influential and wealthy people. He was infamous for hanging around with people no one else wanted to associate with, like thieves, tax collectors, women of the street, foreigners, unclean people, the blind, the lame, the deaf, the homeless. He was ridden out of town on more than one occasion for offending the upright, good citizens of that town. He was known to take to the mountains to pray alone for long periods of time and was certainly something of a mystic. If he were to run for office in this country today, lots of folks would take pot-shots at him and I wonder how likely we would be to elect him. The public relations folks who prepare politicians for their public appearances would find him difficult if not impossible to work with. No, Christ probably wouldn’t be elected President of this country and I’ll bet he would have a hard time being called as rector of most churches too.
Once again, we are confronted with the reality that God’s values, God’s way of doing and being is so very different from our human ways. When God created us, the world and all that is in the world God poured out God’s love into that creation and has spent all the millennia since calling us to grow towards God and to help God to bring about the kingdom that God wants to see both in this world and in the next. Long, long ago God elected us, not the other way around and that is a really good thing. God’s wisdom is beyond our human comprehension but God’s love is something we can feel and internalize. As we live into that love and learn to live our lives in such a way as to express that love to God and to each other we become grateful that we have Christ as King over us. We don’t even mind being subjects of such a king.
The kind of king whose reign we celebrate today is one whose entire being is love. That love brought everything into being and sustains everything that is in this world. When the two thieves were hanging on their crosses next to Jesus, one of them acknowledged his own sinfulness, his own imperfection. He took responsibility for his actions and told Jesus to “remember me when you come into your kingdom.” At his lowest and most wretched point in life, he recognized God in the most unusual circumstance, he saw the divine where others saw a dying man. He received the comfort and assurance that “today you will be with me in paradise.” He is an example for all of us. He could see a king that no-one else could recognize. He hoped that God would elect him, even though he feared he might have lost his chance to be elected. The good news is that this God who sent Christ the King never says never to God’s beloved people. God elected us long, long ago and all God asks of us is the insight of that thief who recognized a king in Jesus hanging on the cross.
Today you will be with me in paradise. That’s the election that counts. We don’t elect this Christ King. He elects us, even when we don’t deserve it. God’s kingdom is not a democracy, which is a darned good thing. There are no losers in the divine election process. God’s kingdom is paradise, where love reigns supreme.
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