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 |
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment