"Ruling from the Cross"  Luke 23:33-43

A Sermon Preached By

Rev. Peter W. Shidemantle

Christ the King Sunday, November 21, 2004

PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

5299 Jamesville Rd., Dewitt, NY  13214 

Phone:  315-446-0960

phillchu@twcny.rr.com

          “Behold, the days are coming. . .”  The word of the prophet, the word of God.  These words, or words like them, are used throughout the Old Testament, especially by the prophets, but in the New Testament as well, to point to a time, either of judgment or a time of fulfillment of a promised day of justice and peace - sometimes both together - a time when things will be different that how they are now.  It will be a time when God will bring about, through God’s servants, what humanity has never been able to bring about on their own.

          The faith of Jews and Christians alike looks ahead by looking back.  Both are faiths that are rooted in how we believe and have been taught that God has acted in history in decisive ways to choose us, to save us, to bless us.  We draw meaning for the present both from the past that has formed us and from the future that is promised. 

          The “days (that) are coming” are described in different ways by different prophets, by different figures in the scriptures - but they are days that will be arrived at in history, among the nations of the world, not in eternity.  That promise is there too, of course, but this doesn’t refer to a world beyond time, but in it.  Jeremiah’s vision from the Lord is one of the reign of a righteous king who will deal wisely with the people and who will execute justice and righteousness in the land.  Judah will be saved.  Israel will dwell securely.  The Christian tradition has read Jesus as that king, whose reign of justice has begun as a spiritual, though not yet a political, reality, and that through Christ, this is not for Israel alone, but for the whole world.

          This day in our church year is called Christ the King Sunday.  It is the last Sunday of the Christian year.  Our gospel reading, which seems more appropriate for Lent than for these days approaching Advent and Christmas (via Thanksgiving), says something about the kind of king we have - one who rules dying on a cross of execution.  In the church we don’t exactly ring out the old year on a high note, but with the suffering and death of a king who seems nothing like a king, and a promise that describes a world that is very little like the one we know.

          In the mean time, as the old hymn puts it, “we walk by faith and not by sight.”  But holding on to faith in the face of experience - by what we see and know - has never been an easy thing to do.  For the last several hundred years, especially, as scientific knowledge of our world and its workings has increased, the church has often, and often reluctantly, had to modify its beliefs, some would say, to avoid abandoning them altogether.  Before Galileo’s time, I understand, it was already apparent that the sun did not make a perfectly circular course around the earth - as Ptolemy and Aristotle claimed.  But instead of abandoning that theory, astronomers continually modified it by trying to explain in increasingly complex ways why in fact the sun did travel around the earth.  Eventually the whole theory became so weighed down with these modifications that it crashed into dust, to be replaced by the elegant alternative put forward by Galileo.  The church at the time, as we know, fought this tooth and nail.

          This seems like such a backward, unenlightened reaction now, but it is not an unfamiliar reaction to us.  It is always tempting to lead by “sight” - by what we see, and know, and experience - modifying faith along the way, perhaps to the point where the whole thing crumbles away.  This happens not just in the face of scientific advancements that some would say continue to chip away at the foundations of religion, but perhaps even more the experience of suffering and loss, of (as we used to say)“man’s inhumanity to man.”     (I can’t believe in a God who...)

            But yet we can’t just close off our faith from experience, as if faith is not affected by what happens to us or what goes on in the world.  We’ve seen a lot of that, too.  Faith that gets hardened into dogma, faith that chooses ignorance as its companion, faith that is closed and cannot learn from other ways.  At its extreme, faith that is closed to experience reduces us to being allies of the terrorists whose faith is unaffected even by reason, let alone by love for strangers.  There are plenty of what might be called “theological terrorists” in all traditions.

          We’ve got a kind of dilemma here.  On the one hand, the traditional Christian reading of Jeremiah’s vision is that the “righteous branch” of the house of David is Jesus himself - but we do not yet see his righteous reign in the social or political realities of the world.  We have deferred this until some vague time of the Second Coming, something that is even further from our experience.  There are those who claim to see the signs, who claim to know what God has planned - claiming more than Jesus himself ever claimed in this regard.  There are those believe that you can legislate God’s will into reality, bring “righteousness” to a nation through majority vote.  On the other hand there is this strong temptation toward allowing our faith to be so modified by what we see and know of the world that it seems nearly inevitable that eventually it has to collapse of its own weight.

          But if this is a dilemma, we don’t need to be trapped in it.  There is Christ on the cross, Christ who reigns there, as the one criminal who hung with him acknowledged when he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”  What is the truth there, the truth of his reign, that God would have us see?  It is not apparent.  What was apparent was that Jesus was defeated, that the world had defeated him.  This is where the gospel starts.  Not with the fulfillment of the ancient hopes of the people.  It starts with the crucifixion, with defeat.  The human hopes of God have always been overturned by history.  Certainly the human hopes expressed in scripture have been that way.  God never fulfilled the expectations of the Jewish people that God would make them forever safe within the promised land.  God has never responded finally and decisively to the earnest prayers to establish justice on earth.  God has never appeared under the expected form, never worked dependably through human political institutions.  And despite his love for us, God has not kept us consistently from harm.

          If these were just harsh disappointments, the better part of wisdom would be to give up the struggle to believe.  Who needs it?  But they aren’t just that, not just disappointments.  We know the truth of how the most enduring lessons of life come to us - not primarily through victory or success, but mostly through struggle and even loss.  It’s not the way we would choose, but it is the way that God has chosen to be with us.  Into that hard place, between our expectations of God and the reality of history, stands the cross. 

          I had a long conversation with our son in college a few weeks ago.  (These usually happen at about midnight when he feels like talking and I feel like going to bed.)  We were talking about a couple of moral issues they were discussing in one of his classes, the different positions that are taken by people of faith on the same issue, about how confusing this can be.  He said he wished there could be another bible written today that would clear all these things up.  I told him I thought there was enough in the one we have to guide us, but as long as people are involved there will be different readings.  We seem to be much more interested in drawing lines than God is.

          As much as anything else, scripture teaches us that our expectations of God are seldom met.  It is the way of God to meet our hopes with silence and absence.  But our hopes do not disappoint us, because it is in that breach between our expectation of God and the reality of history that the wound of grace is inflicted.  It is not God who is judged by disappointing us, but we who are judged in who we think God should be for us.  We tend to confuse our images of God with the true God.  It’s one of the oldest idolatries of all.  We tend to think our expressions of God - ideas, doctrines - which are very important - are God, but they are not, and we must never pretend that they are.  “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture” the prophet declares as God’s word to those who have replaced God with their images of God.  These shepherds have confused and scattered the people, not brought them together as one.  It is only the Good Shepherd who can gather us as one.  He is the one who has shown us the path on which we may safely walk - the path that tells us that the most important thing about us is not our religion, our nationality, our sex - but our basic, frail, limited and often wrong humanity - that we share with everyone else in the world.

          He is the one who shows us that no matter how bad things look, unconditional love for people is the only way to true life, because it is the means through which God finally claims us all.  Jesus is our redeemer and ruler not because of some bargain with God that Jesus agrees to suffer so I don’t have to - but because through his own death Christ has given us the grace to suffer for the sake of love - and so to discover the spirit of God within me.

          Things are not just as they seem, and faith gives us the heart to understand that, the desire to walk in his way, and the strength to sustain us along the way.  We’ll never have it all figured out, but God has graced our lives with the love that makes all things new - and by that knowledge we are saved.

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