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 together
– restored, 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.
