LAST SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST C

THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

​ It might seem odd to hear today’s lessons in the context of Christ the King Sunday. It is odd. But it’s not the lectionary that’s odd. It’s our understanding of what it means to proclaim Christ as King. 

Today’s title goes back to a century ago. In 1925, Pope Pius XI thought the world was becoming too secular, with the rise of atheism after World War I and the dissolution of most of Europe’s monarchies. So he declared that the church would observe a Sunday as Christ the King. At first, it was in October. Later on, it was moved to the last Sunday of the liturgical year. 

It’s a bit ironic that Pius XI also entered into an agreement with Benito Mussolini that exchanged the Roman Catholic Church’s voice in political affairs with the establishment of Vatican City as a separate state. The institutional church’s silence helped lead to the atrocities of World War II, assisted by the same inaction of the Protestant institutional church in Germany as Adolph Hitler rose to power. Both decisions illustrate a vast misunderstanding of Christ as King that make today’s lessons seem out of place. Both decisions point to an understanding of church as empire, or as some call it, Christendom. 

We’re used to seeing coronations as events of pomp and ceremony. Well-orchestrated rituals occur, including the wearing of rich garments, the placing of jeweled crowns on heads, and other pageantry. In most places, it is a religious figure of the institutional church who places the crown on the head of the monarch. There are those who have said that cannot occur in our country because we don’t have a nationally-recognized religion. I’ll refer you back to Napoleon Bonaparte for that, who took the crown and placed it on his own head after no Archbishop or Cardinal would do it for him. Then there’s the prevalence of our best-known oxymoron, christian nationalism. You can’t have one of those if it’s aligned with the other without making both words a lie. 

The institutional church, particularly in the western world, established itself not with a vision of the Christ given in scripture, but instead in the image of political empire. When the Roman Empire fell in the sixth century, the western religious authorities found a void they wanted to fill with themselves. The Pope took the place of the Emperor, and for nearly a millennium western emperors bowed to the pope’s authority. That began to change on October 31, 1517, when a priest named Martin Luther took hammer and nail in hand and said, “I disagree.” Of course, the rise of civil government, separate from religious authority, was happening at the same time. 

Okay. Enough of today’s history lesson. Take a look at today’s Gospel and learn again just what it means to say Christ is king. We heard the whole story on Palm Sunday when we read Luke’s version of the Passion.

Now, imagine Jesus, stripped naked, nailed to a rough piece of wood and left hanging in the hot mid-day sun to die. Juxtapose that with a monarch in rich flowing robes, head adorned with a golden crown and priceless jewels, orb and scepter in hand. You might even compare the image in today’s scripture with the one at the center of the window on our northern wall. Our window is a representation of the status of empire. Our Gospel lesson is the stark reminder of what we have actually received.

The two birth narratives and all four Passion stories give us the image of God who sets aside all the trappings of glory in order to take on human flesh. We have an eternal, life-giving One who sets aside immortality to redeem mortals. We have a man from a backwoods town who wanders around without a set place to call home, but who desires to take up residence in our hearts. We have a healer who shows us how to offer our hands, our tables and all that is on them, to proclaim a healing love along with real food and bread to satisfy not only human need, but eternal hunger.


And even in the painful throes of death, we have a heart that rises to proclaim forgiveness and reconciliation. We have all that because that’s who God is for us. That’s who Jesus of Nazareth came to reveal to us. And, as the Body of Christ, that’s who we are called to be as we bear his name into the world he came to save from the despair and futility of expecting salvation to come in the trappings of wealth and power, two of the very real traps evil sets for us in so many ways.
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Perhaps one day we will find the Christ of God’s empire—an empire of service and sacrifice founded and given life by an eternal love. When we do, we’re also likely to still find a cross, words of forgiveness, and the stark reality of real grace. And with that, we’re also going to find an empty tomb—not the one Jesus left behind, but the one meant to be our own. After all, you can’t find that until you’ve accepted as your own the community of humanity that Jesus became one with, and the cross and all that comes before it. That is the road to the reign of Christ, and our path to eternal life.

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