Christ the King

Luke 23 33-42
November 24, 2013
Christ the King

King Midas is a story about a King who loves gold,
He is already rich beyond anyone else, but he wishes
that everything he touched would turn to gold.
He gets his wish, but he finds that this is not a good thing.
Everything he touched did turn to gold:
flowers, furniture, he couldn't sleep because his bed was gold,
he couldn't eat because his food turned to gold.
Then he touched his daughter and she turned into solid gold.
He got everything he wanted, but he was miserable.

Shakespear's Richard the Third is the story about a King
As a prince he stopped at nothing to get to be King it was all he wanted.
He puts his relatives in jail, has some killed, and tells lies about others.
He finally becomes King, but he is so frightened and suspicious
because of everything he did that he eventually
kills one of his brothers and his wife.
His kingdom rebels against him and
and on the night before a great battle,
the ghosts of everyone who he has killed come to visit Richard.
They tell him that he will die.
And the next day, Richard is killed in a battle against his own brother.

King David was the great King of Israel,
the chosen one, the anointed one.
He has everything he wants, wealth luxury, many wives, many concubines, but one day he sees Bathsheba bathing on a roof top.
Even though she is married and he has eight wives of his own,
he decides that he wants her. They have an affair, and
she becomes pregnant with his child.
So David sends her husband into a dangerous battle and he is killed.
God is not pleased with David for this, and David’s relationships
with his children are cursed for the rest of his life.

These are all familiar stories about Kings.
Kings in the typical sense of the word are people who have absolute power.
Who are answerable to almost no one.
Who have the lives of other people in the palms of their hands.
These stories look at how that absolute power can corrupt a person.
Many stories about kings are about how they use their vast power
for their own means and these stories usually have tragic endings.

Today is Christ the King Sunday,
when we remember that Christ is the true King.
Today we remember Christ as the leader above all others.
But to imagine Christ the King as a typical King
on a throne, in a far off castle living a life of luxury
would be a mistake that many people have made.

Today in the gospel, we get the real picture of Christ the King:
Jesus on a cross, crucified between two common thieves.
Not controlling the government, but a victim of it
not using his power to even save himself

While he is on the cross, the people taunt Jesus saying,
“If you are a real king, why don't you come down
from that cross and save yourself?”
It’s a legitimate question.
If Jesus was King, was the Messiah, why didn’t he save himself?

Luther and other theologians have said it’s because
God wanted to be revealed on the cross.
God wants us to see him there.
The all-powerful creator of everything
wanted us to know him in the lowliest of places,
arrested, beaten, crucified, in pain, given the death penalty,
utterly controlled, not even able to scratch his own nose.
Jesus on the cross is not a mistake – it is a message.

Through Jesus’ crucifixion and death
God is showing us the horrible ways the world often uses power:
to control and punish others, to get our objectives met, often
at the expense of the poor and the vulnerable and the rejected.

And through the cross, God is also showing us what true power is.
It is not the ability to get whatever you desire,
and to acquire many possessions, and to have control over others.
True power is the power to give yourself for the good of other people
And we, as the body of Christ are asked use that power in the world.
Lots of churches get this wrong.
There are big churches who
acquire lots of power and people and money, but they use it
only to get more power and more people and more money.
Their pastors have the best of everything and they want,
and their message is that their members should
succeed and should be wealthy, God wants it for them.
(Oh yeah, and then you can help others somewhere down the line.)
They don’t get Christ the King’s idea of power right.

But neither do churches who shy away
from the power of the Holy Spirit can bring.
Those churches who keep to themselves
and stay meek and quiet and cautious
Not wanting to bring other people in,
Not wanting to bother anyone,
keeping their faith and their convictions to themselves.
letting the world do what it will without comment.
Those churches don’t get the example of Christ the King either.

Having power in itself is not bad.
Power is something that the Holy Spirit gives us as believers,
But Jesus came to be a model for a new kind of power.
For churches, the question is always
“what are we doing with our power?”

Glide Memorial Church
www.glide.org

Glide Memorial church is a Methodist Church in San Francisco.
In 1963 it was a dying church in a rough neighborhood.
Now it has over 10,000 members.
It has a prestigious and world renowned choir,
people listen to what the church and its leaders have to say.
People like Leonard Bernstein, Quincy Jones, Billy Graham,
Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, have come to their worship services.
They auction off a dinner with Warren Buffet each year to benefit
the Glide Memorial foundation, last year it went for $600,000.

They are a powerful church,
they have the ear of religious leaders, celebrities and politicians.
They are strong with many members and lots of money.
They have relationships with benevolent foundations and
multi-million dollar corporations.
And they got their power by welcoming and serving
people of all colors and races, all sexual identities
and stations of life at a time when no one else would.

They are a powerful congregation.
They are prosperous and numerous and well known.
They have power to do whatever they want.

And Glide Memorial is the largest social service organization in SF
They serve the community with three meals a day for the hungry.
they do ministry and drug counseling inside drug houses
They have provided space for prostitutes to meet,
They have been active in fighting AIDS,
offering HIV testing after Sunday services.

The pastor that grew this church, Cecil Williams could easily
have used this to his own advantage to get a name and wealth
and prestige for himself, to get planes and
multi-million dollar homes and marble toilet seats
for himself and for his family.
But the church and the pastor use their copious power
intentionally to benefit the people around them.
The people who are most vulnerable, the poor, the immigrant,
the sinner, the addicts, the ones who are rejected,
those who have been abandoned by society
and even by many religions.

Glide Memorial is a church that is modeled after Christ the King.
They give their life and their power for the sake of others.
It is a model for other churches to follow too.

As followers of Christ, we are asked to be powerful
to not shy away from being prominent and prosperous
and to use that power to be serve people in need.

Because we follow the story of another kind of King -
A king who was lived as a peasant.
Who was more powerful than anyone could even imagine.
But who used his power to gather all people around him.
who shared his table with commoners,
poor people, sinners and lepers and prostitutes.
Who called his subjects to love, forgive and serve one another.

And even though he was all-powerful,
he gave his own life for the sake of the whole world -
for the sake us – to save our lives.
So that we could be reconciled to God forever.

The End Is Not Here Yet

Luke 21:5-19
November 17, 2013

As a kid in the 70’s and 80’s
I remember watching a lot of shows on TV about Nostradamus.
They stick out in my mind because
I would watch them with both interest and dread.

Remember Nostradamus? They have some current shows about him,
But he was all the rage in the 70’s and 80’s/
He was a  man who lived in the 16th century
who wrote predictions that some people felt
had come true in history.
Experts said that he gave some dates and pretty specific
details for disastrous world events that would happen
like the rise of Napoleon and Hitler.
It was pretty convincing stuff –
especially if you’re an impressionable young kid.

And in these shows, they would inevitably read some of his predictions
for our lifetime and try to interpret them,
this is the part that filled me with dread.
They talked about what his vague poetry could mean,
Was the beacon of the new world New York City?
Does his line eaten by the dragon mean that
it would be engulfed in a tornado?
And they would show pictures of
Cataclysmic events: earthquakes, natural disasters
the rise of terrible leaders that would
throw the world into war, things that would change the world.

I would watch these in fear
wondering what the future would hold for our world.
I don’t think I was afraid of my own death.
I was afraid of the end - the end of everything
with or without me there to see it.

Of course, many of those type of events have happened.
Maybe not quite the way Nostradamus and the
TV shows described, but we have seen awful events
that have changed the world to some extent.
There was 9-11, terrible wars that don’t seem to end, AIDS,
Hurricane Katrina, Sandy, the earthquake and Tsunami in Japan,
and the nuclear disaster there that is still going on now.

Church in Tacloban, Philippines

And just last week, the typhoon that hit the Philippines.
Thousands and thousands are dead, more missing,
11 million people displaced, no food, water,
no relief for those who have survived.
I know we all have been praying for the desperate situation
those people are in now, and we have to continue to pray for them.

And through all these events, the world has changed.
and natural and human disasters are just one part of those changes.
Technology, attitudes, the way we behave, sexuality,
racial relations, economic situations,
things that Nostradamus didn’t even touch on have changed the world.
It is not the same place that it was in the 80’s

And yet, when you think about it,
there is still so much that has remained the same.
The end of everything that I feared would happen
when I was watching the shows about Nostradamus never really materialized.

Jesus seems to be doing a little Nostradamus
in today’s gospel. He’s talking about the future in frightening terms.
Earthquakes, wars, famine, disease, and persecution.
It’s a hard message to hear from Jesus,
one that has thrown many people into a sleepless frenzy, I know.
But I don’t think Jesus is saying these things
to make people frightened,
he’s saying them so we won’t jump to the end
like I did when I was a kid.
 
Jesus is saying: These things will happen,
these things happen all the time.
You will see plenty of pain and destruction, violence,
and death, maybe even your own death.
But when you see and hear these things: don’t be afraid.
Because the end is not here yet.
Jesus wants us to put things like this in perspective.
Things may seem disastrous, unrecoverable, hopeless.
But don’t believe what you see. It is not the end.

This temple that they were sitting by
when Jesus said this was amazing.
Many of the stones that were used to build it weighed 28 tons.
Some were bigger than that.
the outer court could hold 400,000 people
it was a marvel of architecture and ingenuity
It was beautiful and impressive,
It still would be today if it were still standing.

So when Jesus to talked about the destruction of this place
The disciples’ imagination must have been racing:
what kind of force would make that happen?
What kind of violence and destruction would our people see?
And this was God’s house, where God’s people came to worship.
If the temple was destroyed, would all our people be destroyed?
And what would become of God? Would the world lose trust in God
if God’s house and God’s people were gone?

And at the same time, even though it was God’s temple
and where the people of God worshipped,
the disciples and other Jewish people knew how
King Herod had built it:
He levied brutal taxes on the people.
He worked in collusion with the Romans who oppressed Jewish citizens.
He built it abusing thousands of slaves and low paid workers.

And they also knew why King Herod built it to be so big and so impressive.
He built it so he could out-do the pagan temples built by pagan rulers.
It was a statement by Herod to show off his choice of gods
and to show his own power and glory off before others.
In a world of many Gods, the ruler with the biggest temple wins.
Herod believed he won. The temple was proof of God’s greatness.
And Herod’s glory was solidified in those 28 ton stones.
Herod’s faith rested on his achievement,
it rested on the grandeur of the building,
it’s strength, it’s ability to stand, it’s beauty.
To many people the temple itself had become an idol.
And Jesus said it would come down.
So the end of the temple would also
mean the end of Jewish dominance in the area.
It would be the end of the Jewish place and rule in Jerusalem.
It would be an end to the life they knew.
Jesus says, you will see many frightening things,
but don’t be terrified – it won’t be the end.
The end of the temple is not the end of God.
It is not the end of Christ, it’s not the end of
God’s relationship with God’s people.
 
Of course we know now,
the temple would be destroyed less than 50 years after Jesus lived.
The people who read or heard the gospel of Luke for the first time
would have remembered it first-hand.
Many people died, many things were destroyed
and life would never be exactly the same for any of them.

But like we have seen happen in so many other places,
the remnants stood up in the midst of the devastation
and doctored their wounds and helped one another and
bravely went on to the next day adjusting their lives around the calamities,
with renewed faith and stronger dependence on God
because of what they’ve been through.

As a priest who serves at a church in Tacloban,
the hardest hit city in the Philippines said:
"Despite what happened, we still believe in God.
The church may have been destroyed, but our faith is intact,
as believers, as a people of God, our faith has not been destroyed."

God does not stand or fall with buildings or
governments, or economies, or cities, or churches, or leaders.
God does not depend on things being the same.
And God’s relationship with God’s people does not depend
on the outward signs of peace or prosperity or beauty
so we shouldn’t look to them for our security.

This world is flawed and fragile and volatile
but our trust is not in the world or what it holds.
Jesus is telling his friends and us:
Don’t anchor your faith in the strength of a temple,
Or in success, or in beauty, or your good fortune.
Rest your faith in God and God alone through all things.
Then you will be able to see strength
and beauty and fortune in the midst of hell
because you know that God will there with us.

Thinking Bigger

Luke 20:27-38
November 10, 2013

So Jesus has been talking about the Kingdom of God and resurrection
and new life and hope quite enough lately.
and the Saducees are trying to trick him
They don’t believe in the resurrection,
so they’re trying to mock Jesus
and show how silly and unworkable the idea is.

They present this woman who couldn’t have children
so by Jewish law if her husband dies, she’s now
his brother’s wife, then if he dies she would
be passed on to the next brother and then next and the next.

They ask Jesus “Who’s wife would she be in this
resurrection you’re talking about, Jesus, they would all be there.
Basically they’re saying, “Who will she keep house for?
She can’t keep the house of seven men.
See how silly Jesus is? this eternal life would be an eternal mess.”

But Jesus doesn’t give into their petty arguments.
When Jesus talks about the resurrection, Jesus is not talking
about spending eternity in a place where all our laws and constraints
and prejudices and shortcomings and status are still in place.
Where one person still keeps house for another.
Jesus is talking about something completely new.
Jesus is talking about new life.
Jesus talking about heaven.

The promise of eternal life with God is central to Jesus message.
Jesus gives us the promise of eternal life.
Salvation, justification, eternal righteousness.
And that promise is a gift to us.
that no matter what happens in this life
we know we will be safe with God.

This gift allows us to face even the worst trials in life with hope.
No matter how bad things get, even if our life ends,
we know there is still hope for our future.
With this gift we are comforted when a loved one dies
we know they are safe with God and out of pain.

It’s not just a duplicate of this world.
For many people that would be no gift at all.

Jesus promises a time where fears and doubts and pain
and sadness will be a thing of the past.
A place where God’s will is always done
Where no one is hungry, where there is no prejudice,
no injustice, no illness, no pain.

And this vision, this future that we hope for and imagine,
we use it today and add bits of it to our present.
The kingdom of God is like that.
It’s like that yeast which the woman folds into the flour
It’s like the mustard seed which grows into
a great bush and takes over the whole field
Our job as Christians is to add bits of Gods kingdom here and now,
We put our anticipated future into our present

And this vision of the future after death doesn’t just belong to Christians
it belongs to most religions in one form or another.
Most of the world holds onto this vision of
a time when everything will be made right.

One of my favorite parables about heaven is actually not from the bible
Some say it’s a Jewish story, some say it’s Chinese
it’s probably from Readers Digest, but I like it anyway.
 
An old man was about to die
and he asked a wise woman what heaven was like
The wise woman led him to a large house with a large table and
an incredible amount of food in the middle,
but the people were all thin and pale and hungry.
All the people at the table
had their arms in casts and they couldn’t bend them.
They couldn’t get the food in their mouths and they were starving
with all the food in front of them.
The old man said, “Okay, I’ve seen hell, now show me heaven.”

They went to the next room and there was the same exact scene.
The same table, the same food, the same people with casts,
but they were full and happy and smiling.
The old man said, I don’t get it.
The wise woman said, “In heaven, they feed each other.”

Jesus has promised a time when all that is wrong with the world will be right again,
where all we will know is care and love and joy.
We get tastes of heaven now, moments of kindness and love and grace
we get stories and promises and images
and we just know in our hearts,
“yes absolutely - that’s what it will be like.”
we resonate with images like that
because heaven is our true home, that is where we belong
eternally at home, eternally alive, with God and feeding one another.

The problem with the Saducees is that they were thinking too small.
God was too small for them. They underestimated God.
Jesus is talking about heaven, eternal life, paradise,
and they are worried about which man’s floor
this poor woman would be sweeping every day.
Jesus tells them, don’t be small -don’t think so small.
God is big. And God’s love for us is strong
and God will not leave us alone.
God is God of the living
and God means to live with us forever.

Blessed are You

Luke 6:20-31
All Saints Day

Jesus was a good public speaker, wasn’t he?
He really knew how to draw people in with his words.

Now some people think that Jesus had everything all thought out
or it was dictated to him from God.
Or maybe because that’s how it looks whenever
we see Jesus in movies, like there’s no spontinaity.

Like he’s Laurence Oliver
standing up and reciting a Shakespeare soliloquy.
“Blessed are the poor. For theirs is the kingdom of God.”
As if he’s moved by hearing his own voice
and dramatics more than anything else.

But I like to think of this sermon of Jesus–
and all of Jesus sermons -- in a different way.
I like to think that Jesus spoke from his heart and
emotions much more than he seems to in movies.
I like to think that what he said
was changed by the people he was talking to.

This Gospel today is called the “sermon on the plain”
or the sermon on the mount in Matthew, or the beatitudes
and it’s one of Jesus most familiar sermons.

Now just previous to giving this sermon,
it says that Jesus chose his twelve apostles and they were with him
and that a huge crowd was gathered around him
wanting Jesus to heal them and get rid of their bad spirits.
It says that Jesus healed all of them that were gathered there that day
and that they could feel the power coming out of him.

After it was over, Jesus must have been exhausted,
his 12 new apostles must have been excited and a
little scared with their new role.
And the people there probably would have been poor,
and desperate and disheveled
but more hopeful than they had been in a long time.
All those faces in need looking up at Jesus
He knows they need to hear something. Something to sum up
this experience, something to help them understand what it meant.

Maybe he planned on giving them some instructions, like
“Go and be kind to your enemies”
which he does eventually get to later.

But right now, he looks at his disciples --
which in Luke means the whole crowd of followers --
he looks at them and he knows that they need something more than instruction.
He looks at them and his heart is filled with love for them.
and he says this instead:
“Blessed are you who are poor.
For yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you, and exclude you,
and revile you. Blessed are you. You poor and hungry and hated.

And woe to those who can still laugh while you cry,
who can feel rich when you go to bed hungry.
Woe to those who just see you as lazy or stupid
And woe to those who roll up their windows
when they see you standing on the street corner,
Woe to those who don’t look at you in the eye,
because if they did, they would see what I see:
God’s beloved children” 
I like to think of this sermon
as an unplanned, un-rehearsed verbal hug to the
people that were drawn to Jesus and who Jesus was drawn to.
The saints of God.

In the church before the Reformation,
saints were only seen as someone who did something special.
Someone who were stellar examples of the faith,
who performed a certain amount of wonderous tasks
who had spiritual depth.
God’s special class of blessed people.

But Martin Luther helped us see that
people are not blessed by God because they do wonderful things.
People are blessed by God just because
God is wonderful.

And Jesus did not love that crowd of people
because they had some splendid achievements
or they had done some great miracle
or even because they had extraordinary compassion for others.
They were loved by Jesus only because they needed to be.
These poor, unlucky people needed God.
It shone on their faces, in their voices,
in the way they approached Jesus.

Unlike the rich,
they had not figured out other ways to get their needs met,
They didn’t think they could do it all alone,
And they were not above asking Jesus for help.
And Jesus was happy to give it.

So this crowd’s lack, was actually their biggest asset.
They didn’t have their own blessings,
so they had room in their life for God’s.
People, God is waiting. Just waiting for us.
For those times in our lives when we know how hopeless we are.
How we’ve failed, when we feel rejected or overwhelmed.
Not so God can wag the divine finger at us
and tell us where we’ve gone wrong
or give us a sermon about what we should have done.
God is waiting for the moment when we will
stop depending on our own blessings
and make room for God.

So blessed are the poor. Blessed are the hungry.
Blessed are the failures, the rejected,
the heart broken, the insecure, broken and inept.
Blessed is anyone who finds the courage to call out in desperation.
Living or dead --  we are all God’s beloved.
We are all the saints of
God.