Saturday, November 21, 2015


Sermon for the Solemnity of Christ the King
The Last Sunday after Pentecost B  ~  November 22, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
                                                                 
King is what you call me.
For this I was born, and for this I came into the world,
to testify to the truth.

+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
Pilate goes on to ask “What is truth.” A very modern question, isn’t it? In our world in which everything is relative – including the most obvious of facts, our own perception. Reality is not as it seems. And yet, in a wonderful way this very relativity can open the way to the Truth to which the Godman testifies.
The Collect says the nations of the world are “divided and enslaved by sin” which is a redundancy, because sin is the very condition of division and enslavement itself. To say that we are divided by sin is like saying “I will be killed by mortality.” It is just two ways of saying the same thing. Sin is our sense of division and everything we do as a result. It is a failure to apprehend the Truth of Jesus’ testimony. To be freed is to be brought togetherrestored, in the Collect’s words, to a life of communion as opposed to the death of division. That is what it means by the gracious rule of Christ the King.
Here is another paradox, since rule by a king is pretty much the opposite of freedom. I you are brought under somebody’s rule, you are their subject, and insofar as you are somebody else’s subject, you are not free. Yet the gracious rule of Christ the King is the definition of real freedom. To serve you is perfect freedom, as our morning collect has it. Division is slavery; Communion is freedom and we call it the Kingdom of God.
Christianity – and other ancient religious traditions – teach that Communion is actual reality – the Truth in our Lord’s expression. Sin is our preference for division, based on the illusion of separation. There is US and there is THEM and we will love the people like us, and kill – or dominate – the others. But the truth we thus deny is that we all share a single life, a life of interconnected being. Pilate has no clue about that. He is an imperialist, which means that he sees the world as a collection of separate nations or ethnic groups, which his own nation, Rome, gets to rule and exploit. The first Cæsar (as every first-term Latin student knows) advised conquerors to divide in order to rule (divide ut regnes.) The subject nations oppose that rule. They would rather go their own way – separately – or do the dominating themselves. That is what is behind Pilate’s skeptical question, which follows immediately on the passage we just heard: What is Truth? That’s just a way of saying that each nation has its own idea of what’s right; truth is relative and the strongest will get its way. History will be written by the victors. The truth is what Rome says it is.
Force is one way to achieve unity; division into local ethnic groups is another. When imperial force abates, there comes ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Feast of Christ the King celebrates the dissolution of empire and nation alike. XP RX celebrates God’s way – love – that frees us from both imperial dominion and national separation. Pilate, the imperialist, called Jesus King of the Jews and so wrote in his own hand in three languages. Jesus points out that king –  the only word that Pilate understands – does not name His authority. Still, our Collect uses the Apocalyptic title, King of kings and Lord of lords. These are not just superlatives; they are negations. King means someone with absolute authority – the Sovereign, the lawgiver who is himself above the law. The King of kings implies a lawgiver above such sovereigns, a King who effectively destroys the sovereignty of all kings, making them His subjects. So a King of kings actually negates kingship – “King is your word…my Kingdom is not the kind you mean.”
Nor is XP RX a worldly emperor – a new Cæsar, subjugating local kings by force. XP RX is neither a super-king nor a local ethnic champion of a particular people. He is the Witness to the Truth – and the Truth itself – the Ultimate Reality that underlies all being: Love. Awareness of this Reality is the Holy Spirit, elsewhere  called Buddhahood, being awake. Reality is not division but relationship, now sometimes called inter-being. Relativity (not to be confused with relativism) means that we are all inter-related. Insofar as we are at all, we are part of one another, we participate in one another, we are united, we are one. That is the Truth, the Logos, the Word, the Dharma, the Kingdom that is not of this world, the Kingdom of God and of His Christ. And He shall reign for ever and ever. Amen.

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