Christ the King - Christ the Way

The Rev. Jeffrey A. Geary

CHRIST THE KING SUNDAY

Psalm 132: 1-12 Revelation 1: 4b-8

November 26, 2006

What would you do if you could be king for a day?

I’ve been asking folks this questions for the last several days.

Most people tended to speak very quickly to things like ending war, declaring peace, providing food, at least for the day, to everyone. One eight-year-old and her mother broke into a rendition of “Jeremiah was A Bullfrog,” You know how it goes,

If I were the king of the world, Tell you what I'd do

                          I'd throw away the cars and the bars and the war

                          Make sweet love to you, Sing it now...

                                       Joy to the World, All the boys and girls,

                                       Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea, Joy to you and me.

Which I think may have been my favorite answer. A very few described more structural changes, changes in values, such as removing basic needs like food and shelter from the economy of profit, redistributing power, and instituting sustainable lifestyles.

What would you do if you were king for a day? It’s a common enough question, a source of endless daydreaming. I thought of the song by Tom Petty that came out a few years ago.

It's good to be king, if just for a while

             To be there in velvet, yeah, to give 'em a smile

             It's good to be king and have your own way

             Get a feeling of peace at the end of the day

             It's good to be king and have your own world

             It helps to make friends, it's good to meet girls

             Yeah, the world would swing if I were king

             Yeah I'll be king when dogs get wings

             Can I help it if I still dream (from) time to time

And who can forget the simplicity of Mel Brooks’ famous line from A History of World, Part I, spoken with a nod and a wink: “It’s good to be the king.”

I started considering this question two weeks ago when I was attending the Annual Interfaith Worship Service and Peace Conference at Princeton University with our high school students. We had spent the entire day at the conference discussing SMART Security legislation, SMART standing for Sensible Multilateral American Response to Terrorism, an alternative to our current “War on Terror.” Over dinner after the conference, we continued discussing several of the other challenges we face in the work for peace, and I brought up the violence of video games and other toys. During the next 30 days until Christmas, a phenomenal amount of war toys will be bought and sold as part of a national celebration we associate with the Prince of Peace. I was trying to introduce and challenge the kids to a new computer simulation game I have just discovered that applies nonviolent strategies to international conflicts, but what they wanted me to try was a game in which I get to play God. I haven’t gotten a copy of the game yet (and I don’t want it for Christmas), but it gave me the idea for this question: what would you do if you were king for a day?

I actually asked the kids what they would do if they could be God for the day. The high school students immediately began looking for loopholes. Why not stop time so you would never have to give up being God. But then again, if you stopped time, nothing would happen, and what fun would being God be then? One confirmation student suggested that being God, of course, and without limits, the one day meant nothing to him because he could do everything he might want to do in one day, being all powerful. But he never answered the question about what he would do.

What interested me the most was that in almost every case, among both youth and adults, the offer of a chance to be either king of the world, or God for a day, was taken as an offer of unlimited, or at least ultimate power, a chance to rule by fiat, to make things so by declaring them so. It invited dreaming, yes, about the way the world should be, but it was simultaneously a dream of power, which the high school kids illustrated nicely by looking for ways to secure their power indefinitely. So it’s time for me to come clean: Basically, the question is a set up.

During one of the interfaith programs last spring sponsored by the Three Village Clergy, Cliff Swartz asked the following question “Christians declare that Christ is Lord. But a simple look around the world today, or a perusal of the newspaper should be sufficient to conclude that we are either wrong or that Christ is a poor sovereign. What does it mean to say Christ is Lord?”

The earliest Christian confession, “Jesus is Lord” was intended as a direct contrast to the very real rule of the caesars in Rome. If Jesus was Lord, than Caesar was not, even if every birth announcement, civil ceremony, coin, plaque, and mile marker from Britain to Egypt declared the lordship of Caesar. Kurios Caesar, Caesar is Lord, was Roman propaganda and civil religion. Christians, on the other hand, refused the promises and violence of the pax romana, the peace of Rome, with its privileged few and subject many, and instead practiced the pax christi, the peace of Christ, which formed congregations and reconciled communities. For Christians, to say Jesus was Lord, was rhetorical and critical. It was a refusal to play for power, privilege, and payment. Jesus said, “You know that among the Gentiles, those whom they recognize as rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you: but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.” (Mark 10)

Christ, not Caesar. God’s ways, not the way of the world. Service, not power. This is what it means to confess Jesus as Lord. It is rhetoric. And throughout Christian history, it has been powerful rhetoric, used to criticize the emperor, king, feudal lord, elected leader or dictator who claims too much.

But it is also dangerous rhetoric, because it is not itself free from imperial dreaming. Its power comes from projecting worldly power onto God. (This is good rhetoric, but bad theology). “If Christ were king . . .” you can hear the lure of my original question. But all sorts of problems follow from this. What would Christ do? Why hasn’t he done it? What kind of Lord is he, to stand back while the world goes to hell? (This is another way of asking Cliff’s question.) Iraq, Darfur, Katrina, that school bus accident last week, a diagnosis of cancer? Or “someday, when Christ comes again, he’ll set things right.” Or worse, “someday, when Christ comes again, he’ll punish those who have it coming.” This kind of dreaming is not wholly absent from our own scripture.

It’s the kind of thinking about God and power that prompted two people to ask me “If God is all powerful could ‘he’ make a stone so large he cannot move it?” or “. . . a puzzle so hard he cannot solve it?”

Rather than a puzzle, or an imperial dream, what the Gospels offer us is the life of Jesus presented as a parable of the life of God, a God who chooses to join us rather than power, to enter into living with us, who prefers to gather together his friends and a few enemies to establish what trust he can, to do what good he can, and to struggle against enormous forces for change, praying all the while, on earth as it is in heaven. And in the end to die.

Is this lordship or leadership, kingship or companionship? It appears to be a kingdom without kings, a reign without rulers. It’s a kingdom where God’s reign happens, again and again, here and there, when faith, hope and love triumph over the lure of power, prestige and profit. Jesus described it as a pearl of great price, like treasure found in a field, as small as a mustard seed but growing like a weed. He spoke of sowers going out to sow, of the poor being invited to a party, of a prodigal son returning home.

It is the kingdom of a way, not the kingdom of a person. A way of life that ushers in God’s purpose for the world on a daily basis. It is a kingdom we inhabit by intending it, living into it.

Is Christ the King? Don’t look at the world - look at the people. The person sitting beside you right now has a story to share about the coming of this kingdom. You have a story to share, if you will share it.

Confessing Christ as Lord, Christ the King, means that Christ is the one who guides us, Christ’s world is the one we see, we intend, we are living into. This question, this confession, is the culmination of our liturgical year. We celebrate the reign of Christ. And we are ready again for advent, to look forward to the God who comes to us in Christ praying, “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Further Reflections on God and Power

In this moment of American Empire, and what many are calling a Pax Americana, I think the equation of God and ultimate power is deadly, not only for our theological reflection as faithful people, but in the real world where the doctrine of God’s omnipotence offers legitimacy to empire. As theologian Catherine Keller writes, “Eerily, Reinhold Niebuhr warned half a century ago that the peculiar Protestantism of the United States, which invests our power with innocence, might undermine democracy and threaten the planet with “defensive war.” These were his words:

We might be tempted to bring the whole of modern history to a tragic conclusion by one final and mighty effort to overcome its frustrations. The political term for such an effort is ‘preventative war.’

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, 1952

I agree with Keller that a fascination with the apocalypse of John is lodged deep in our nation’s subconscious. We have a long infatuation with absolute power, final solutions (calls to “rid the world of evil-doers,” and to “call evil by its name” are just the most recent examples), and for an imperial messiah who will once and for all set things right. Religiously, we celebrate God because of God’s power, Jesus because of his miracles, and the early church because it so quickly ‘conquered’ the world. But, as Keller writes, “The biblical Messiah comes to beat the empire, not to join it! The empire in the Book of Revelation is the evil.”

For some provocative reflections on God and Power appropriate to our moment in history, see Catherine Keller, God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006; and Mark Lewis Taylor, Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right: Post 9/11 Powers and American Empire, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005.