Christ the King – By Another Road

Trailer Park: A Sermon for Christ the King

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 26, 2023 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 25:31-46.

I think the holiday season, more so than any time of year, inspires within us the desire to catch a glimpse of a kinder and more compassionate world. There is so much harshness, so much sorrow, and yet right about now we bring out the lights and the wreaths and the inflatable lawn decorations as though to remind ourselves and others—or maybe, to insist to ourselves and others—that suspicion and gloom are not the whole story. That there is still beauty. There is still hope. And there is still a general posture of friendliness that we can assume towards our neighbor, despite everything else.

But I have to say, the friendliest neighborhood I ever lived in—both in the holidays and throughout the whole year—was a trailer park in Santa Rosa, California. Yes, for about two or three years, when I was an adolescent, I lived in a small travel trailer on the outskirts of town, due to a complex set of family circumstances that are a whole other story. But the thing that’s on my mind this week is not so much about my reasons for ending up in the trailer park, but instead the extraordinary hospitality and kindness that I witnessed there among people who were, for various reasons, going through seasons of challenge and transition in their lives.

This was not a vacation-destination sort of place, but the kind of community you go to when money is tight and you don’t have any other options. Most of our neighbors were either paycheck-to-paycheck or getting by on even less than a paycheck.

But the remarkable thing—the thing that I have carried with me ever since—was that the people there were friendlier, more approachable, and more open to the stranger in their midst than any other place I’ve lived. These were folks who couldn’t even afford to put up Christmas decorations in their yard, but a mysterious light illuminated the place nonetheless.

People would, without hesitation, invite you over to share some food, or would stop to have a chat while passing by your trailer, or check in on someone when they were sick or hadn’t been seen in a couple of days. The kind of attentiveness and care that feels almost quaint in this day and age.

Our neighbor, an older woman named Pearl, would peer out of her screen window, chain smoking cigarettes and eating Burger King, observing the neighborhood and dispensing her thoughtful insights about life in between puffs of cigarette smoke. Her eyes looked like they had seen more than their fair share of hardship, but they were gentle eyes.

“I’m tiiiiired, man, I’m tiiiiired,” she would say in her Oklahoma drawl, but she was never so tired as to not invite me in for a visit, to ask how I was doing, to really listen to me, which meant a lot to an awkward 13 year old who had a lot of emotional baggage and who felt unseen much of the time.

I can’t say that I loved living in the trailer park, or that everything was easy there. And I don’t want to romanticize the desperate circumstances faced by so many of the folks who were living there. But I can’t deny that overall, my memory is one of kindness, of welcome, and of compassion.

And it’s that final quality, compassion, that I think was the key distinction between that neighborhood and the other, more typical places that I have lived. Whether they thought about it in this way or not, the people in the trailer park lived with an almost instinctive sense of compassion towards their neighbors, because they knew that, no matter the reason someone found themselves there, they probably needed a little understanding, a little care.

And they knew this because they, too, needed the same thing. There was a sense that, though we might be living in cramped quarters, making a home on cracked pavement, we were all in this together. And though yes, we were tiiiired, we were not alone.

You know, it’s funny, this is Christ the King Sunday, and we expend a lot of energy in the Church pondering the mysteries of the Kingdom and what it’s like and who is part of it and how to get in, but I think in the end, it’s not as complicated as some make it out to be.

To put it simply, I think the Kingdom of God is like that trailer park I lived in. Because the Kingdom of God, more than anything else, is a place shaped by compassion. And it glows with a light that is not dependent upon any season.

It has nothing to do with your material resources, this Kingdom of God. It has nothing to do with your nationality or your sexuality or your gender or your political party. It has nothing to do with the mistakes you’ve made or the wrong turns you’ve taken. If we are to take this morning’s gospel passage seriously, truly seriously, then the only criteria of the Kingdom prepared before the foundation of the world is that it is a place of compassion.

Compassion for everyone we meet, including those whom the world tends to forget. Compassion for our enemies. Compassion for creation. Compassion for ourselves.

And the thing about compassion is that it is not the same as benign goodwill or charity. It is not someone sitting in a lofty place dispensing a favor to someone less fortunate. Compassion, the Latin root of which means “to suffer with,” is about experiencing the solidarity of human existence, of realizing that we all need each other, that we are all blessed by one another, and that perhaps those who have struggled, those who have experienced life’s challenges the most, will be the ones to bless us with a particular depth of wisdom. I have often found that to be true.

Compassion, in other words, is not saying “there but for the grace of God go I,” it is saying “by God’s grace, we are in this together. Let’s care for each other.” It is what Jesus embodied in his ministry and in his own passion, and it’s what he asks us to embody as well, if we would know what life is truly about, if we would enter the Kingdom where true life is found.

So when we ponder the Kingship of Christ, and the Kingdom over which he reigns, and how we might seek it here and now so that we might be its inheritors in the age to come, then I will tell you this: it’s right in front of us. It is not reserved for the morally perfect or the privileged. To take part in God’s reign, simply look to cultivate a life of compassion.

And the simplest way to do this? Look for the places in your own story, in your own heart, where there is a wound, a vulnerability, a hard lesson learned, that moment when you were hungry, or sick, or felt imprisoned by circumstance. In other words, recall a time when you needed compassion, and let that memory guide your actions.

Find those who are doing their best to get by, who are tired, or who are struggling in a particular way that you understand, because you’ve been there yourself. And go be with them. Literally, go be with them at least once this holiday season. See how your own life is blessed and illuminated by doing so.

And if you are the one struggling to get by this morning, if you are feeling unseen or lost, then simply imagine the God of the universe looking at you the same way Pearl looked at me all those years ago: with gentle, infinitely compassionate eyes, asking nothing of you other than to do your best, to not give up, to keep that beautiful light burning within you.

The giving and receiving of compassion. That’s it. That’s the Kingdom. Poor or rich, virtuous or broken, sheep or goat, in the end, compassion is the only thing that will show us what heaven looks like, what salvation feels like.

And compassion is the only thing that will endure and live on when our selfishness and indifference and judgment—the stubborn goat that lives inside all of us—has been separated out from our long and complicated history and is burned up in the regenerating fire of God’s justice and love. And even then, yes, even then, on the other side of judgment, I believe that compassion will win out, and that something new will grow from the ashes of our failures, up from the cramped quarters and the cracks in the pavement where we’ve been trying to make a home.

So, I don’t know what it looks like when you close your eyes and imagine the Kingdom of Heaven. Maybe it is a beautiful place, a perfect place, a place of twinkling lights and evergreen and streets gleaming like freshly fallen snow.

But I will confess, for me, it looks a little bit like that trailer park, a place of open doors and broken hearts still beating, a place of no illusions and of deep strength. A place where everyone is welcomed, where every wayward soul has a place to call home.

Like Pearl said, some days I’m tiiiired, man, I’m tiiiiired, and maybe you are too, but I think we’ll get there someday, and when we do, to be part of God’s reign forever, to meet Christ our King, to meet Jesus our friend, compassion will be the crown upon his head, and the whole earth will glow with its radiance. And so will we.

Take Me Back: A Sermon for Christ the King

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 20, 2022, the Feast of Christ the King. The lectionary texts cited are Jeremiah 23:1-6 and Luke 23:33-43.

Maybe it’s the holidays, or the winter setting in, or maybe it’s the fact that we have arrived at the final Sunday of the Church’s liturgical year, but around this time each November I get a little bit nostalgic. The smell of familiar foods and the melody of old songs and the sight of candles glowing in the darkness behind icy windows—it takes me back.

Maybe it takes you back, too. Back to memories of childhood, or to when you were first in love, or maybe even just a few years ago; nostalgia connects us to those periods of our lives that contained some measure of simplicity, a special sweetness. And while we know that “the good old days” were never actually as simple or perfect as we might recall them to be, it remains true that the pull of the past is powerful, and the longing we experience for it is real: longing for the faces and the places we once knew and even the versions of our selves that we used to be.

Every so often a certain memory wells up in us and we feel the gap between then and now and we cry out “Take me back!” Though we always say with a bit of irony, for we know that it’s not possible: we can’t go back, because time unfolds in only one direction, and our memories are windows into a land we can’t reenter.

If I ever get a bit self-conscious, though, about my tendency towards this November nostalgia, I remind myself that it’s simply part of the human condition. People have been haunted by their memories in every age. In Scripture we encounter generations of people caught between the past and the future, strugglng to make sense of both. Think of Israel in exile, longing for Jerusalem. Think of Jesus’ contemporaries, agitating to overthow the Empire and restore the political glory of their nation. Think of how such impulses both console and plague us, even now.

Going back in time—or at least wanting to—has been written upon the human heart since Adam and Eve stumbled out of Eden and the gates were closed to them. From that day, it seems, we have been looking over our shoulders, longing for the time “before”, longing for the people we were back then. You might even say that nostalgia is one of the most prevalent themes throughout the Bible, and while it doesn’t always serve people especially well in those stories (I am reminded of Lot’s wife), I find some reassurance in the fact that it is not just our generation that feels like it’s a long way from where it started.

But what struck me for the very first time, as I was reflecting on the passages for this Christ the King Sunday, is that we humans aren’t the only ones who feel nostalgia, why cry out “take me back.” God, too, seems to long for the time before. The time before kings and conquests. The time before we and God lost sight of one another on the long road through the centuries.

Now it’s true that the words of the Lord spoken through the prophet Jeremiah, which we heard this morning, like most prophetic writings, are all future tense—I will do this, and this will happen, and the days are surely coming, but implicit in them is God’s desire that things should return back to the way they were supposed to be—namely, to when God was the shepherd, the provider, the one who would not abandon his people or exploit them or lead them astray. God wants to go back to when there were no mortal kings of Israel, back to when God was their only sovereign, when God’s heart spoke directly to theirs.

God longs for unmediated intimacy with his people. He remembers how he walked alongside them, leading them in a pillar of flame through the deep night of the desert wilderness. God remembers how he made his dwelling place in their midst, how they sang hymns of liberation to him on the other side of the Red sea, how he fed them from his own hands with manna. And God remembers even farther back still, back to Paradise, when he walked among the trees in the cool of the evening and his creation knew the sound of his voice and the fruit still trembled, unpicked, upon the branch. Yes, God remembers it all: the smell of the familiar foods and the old songs and the fire glowing in the darkness. And he longs for it as much as we do.

Take me back, he says, without any irony. Take me back. Take me back.

How humbling that the King of Glory, the Creator of the Cosmos, would ask such a thing. That he would ask us such a thing.

Of course, we could not go back—neither back in time, nor back to him, for it seems that we are made only to tumble forward into the future. Gone, the food and song and fire. We could not recover it. We could not undo what had been done. We could not pry open the gates to Paradise. At least, not by ourselves. Not without help.

But we are here this morning, on Christ the King Sunday, because help did arrive. God determined, in the end, how to move beyond nostalgia, his own and ours, how to finally reclaim the past. He did the only thing, perhaps, that was left to do: he brought all that we had lost directly to us, in the flesh. In Jesus.

He showed up with the food in his own hands and the song on his own lips and the fire in his own eyes. He came as a different sort of king—a king who would not engage any power except the powers of love and mercy and justice. A king who would die rather than compromise his commitment to those things. One who would rise again to show us that these are the only things that are truly powerful.

And so he was born into the margins and stood at the margins, and he broke down the thin margin between heaven and earth with the force of his love, and he died, this image of the Invisible God, with a name affixed above him: The King of the Jews.

And whatever the authorities intended for him, there was no irony in that title.

For this is what he was and is: the one true King—the last king of his people, and the first king of all people. The Alpha and the Omega. The one who, from his throne on the cross, forgives us for all that has been lost, and who promises that nothing, and no one, ever need be lost. The king reopening the gates into Paradise, which is really just the gate into his heart.

Take me back, says Christ, our King.

Take me back, we reply.

And for once, maybe for the first time, it is possible.

Feast: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 21, 2021, Christ the King Sunday, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is John 18:33-37.

One of my happiest holiday memories is when I would wake up on Thanksgiving day to the smells of an already-busy kitchen: sage and onion and baking pies and brewing coffee. It was almost as delicious as the meal itself, that long moment of awakening, warm and half-dreaming in the morning light, knowing that there was a feast being prepared, that everyone I love would be gathered in one place, and that, even though the world outside was complicated and so were we, for this one day, at least, there was no need for anything else. There was enough, and we were enough, here, now, together.

And while for some of us, perhaps, Thanksgiving was never quite so happy an occasion, I do think each of us understands the potency of the idea itself: a time of rest and reunion, a world in which no one goes hungry, where everyone is welcome at the table, where being known and seen and loved is a gift available to all.

As we grapple with some of the entrenched realities and the challenges facing our country and our world—racism, violence, economic inequality, and ecological crisis, to name but a few—I acknowledge that for many the observance of America’s Thanksgiving holiday is fraught with complexity, and I also acknowledge that its celebration can bring up feelings of ambivalence for those among us whose families are fractured or scattered or simply gone.

But the principle of gratitude that underlies the day is something that must be reclaimed and reinvigorated anew by each generation, so that this is not just the passive reception of an unexamined history or a private lament over a broken family system, but a courageous choice to believe in what is still possible—to believe that there might yet remain much for which we can give thanks. Because even as we face what is ugly and messy about the human condition, we must also hold fast to what is beautiful and hopeful—those simple, good gifts that make life not just bitter, but sweet, that make the struggle worth it, the things that tell a story of hope, not just disillusionment. The things glimpsed around the bountiful table of the present moment—a feast of memory, but also of determination and of expectation of a better tomorrow.

That’s why I love that after this service we will go upstairs and pack bags with food supplies and encouraging notes for our neighbors so that they, too, might enjoy a Thanksgiving meal. It’s our congregation’s own small gesture of gratitude for the blessings in our own lives, and a demonstration of our belief that the world can still be a hopeful place, a generous place, and that we can help make it so, even when fear and scarcity seem to dominate the narratives around us.

Choosing to believe in the redemptive possibility of this world—in its goodness, in its capacity fpr renewal—this is part of what we mean when we speak of the Kingdom of God—not just a place up in the heavens that we escape to when we die, but the emergent, lived reality of God’s love here and now—the power of that love, the triumph of that love, the sovereignty of that love. The ultimate gift for which we give thanks.

And so while it is somewhat a fluke of the calendar, it is fitting, perhaps, that Thanksgiving and Christ the King Sunday fall in proximity to one another, because each observance, at its best, calls us toward a vision of beloved community. Thanksgiving calls us back to what is essentially good and true in our own lives, and as we conclude the calendar of the church year and prepare for the cycle to start anew with Advent next week, we pause to ask ourselves: who is this Christ, this King whom we worship and follow? What is the essential goodness and truth that he brings? And how do we take part in it?

I will admit that answering these questions and then living into the answers can be harder than we care to admit. We want to believe that love wins, that hope endures, but sometimes we look at the world around us and we look up at Jesus above the altar, on the cross, and we can feel as incredulous and bitter as Pontius Pilate, and we ask: Are you the King? Are you? Because you are nothing like any king I have ever seen. You are not the sort of king who fixes all of the problems around us. And even if you are, what is truth when no one is honest anymore? And what is love when everyone is just out for themselves? And what is justice when blood flows in the streets and children go hungry, just as it has always been? And what is hope when it’s just the same bitter pill to swallow, time after time?

Are you the King?

And Jesus simply looks back at us, infinitely tender, and says: “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world: to testify to the truth.”

Because the truth is that Jesus’ power, Jesus’ kingdom, is still not the type we expect it to be. And he comes into our midst, still, not to rule like other kings. Not to control. Not to gather power and wealth at the expense of others, and not to tell us to do so in his name. Jesus comes to testify to a truth that is deeper and more powerful than kingship, even if it is less obvious. A truth that God has been trying to convey from the very beginning, although we continue to ignore it, time and again.

A truth that rises up, growing like a seed sown in a field A truth that rises up like yeast in bread. A truth that rises up like a spring of living water. A truth that rises up and refuses to be killed or silenced, even in our most desolate, hungry moments: the truth that love persists through death. The truth that mercy persists through brokenness. That there is, indeed, enough for everyone, if we will let it be so. That we are, indeed enough. That we belong to this earth and to one another. That we are known and seen by God in our weakness, in our hunger, and we are forgiven.

The truth that we have to stop being afraid, stop hiding from God and one another, and step out towards each other with hope and gratitude and say, yes, here I am. And yes, I believe in your goodness, Lord. And yes, I believe that it is love—not fear, not the power of kings—that is the strongest force in the universe. And so I will take a chance on this Kingdom, I will reach out my hands to the world, to my neighbor, to give and to receive, to bless and to be blessed, to join in the feast, to gather round the table where there are always enough seats, always enough to satisfy even the hungriest of hearts.

Because that’s the thing to remember about Christ as a king, as a ruler. What did he actually rule over? In his earthly life, Jesus never led an army into a battlefield, nor did he oversee a court of law, nor did he celebrate a Temple rite.

Instead, he presided over…a meal. Many meals, in fact, culminating in the Eucharistic banquet in which we still take part. A meal to nourish the world. A meal in which his own life, his own love is the substance. He is the Lord of the feast, the King of the abundant table, and more than anything we are his grateful guests, called to celebrate with him, called to invite others to take their place alongside us.

That is the Kingdom of God, my friends. That is what will transform the world. That is what will transform us. Bigger hearts and bigger tables. More time spent breaking bread, listening to one another’s stories and creating a new story together. A story that tells of peace, of justice, of the deep joy that is the birthright of all people. A story that can yet be true.

May we live like this, on Christ the King Sunday, on Thanksgiving Day, and on every other day, for the rest of our lives. And then, by God’s grace, may we one day, after a long and deep and restful sleep, wake up in the morning light of a new life, a new earth, warm and half-dreaming, to the smell of brewing coffee and baking pies, and may we know that we are home, that we are all home together at last, and that there will always be enough, and that we will alway be welcome, in that beautiful Kingdom, at that glorious table, forever.

“Who Is This King of Glory?”: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on November 24, 2019, Christ the King Sunday, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are Luke 23:33-43 and Colossians 1:11-20

Recently, I enrolled in a weeklong evening workshop to learn how to paint an icon—those beautiful religious images that are especially associated with the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition. We were tasked with creating an icon of Christ on the cross, and after nearly 20 hours of sketching, painting, applying gold leaf, and layering colors, the last step was to add Jesus’ name, in Greek, and a title above the cross: The King of Glory. This final act of inscribing the name and title, our instructor told us, gave the image its sacred quality. It defined who the icon was, and how it should be viewed by those who gaze upon it.

And it is this title which I carefully added to the icon, “The King of Glory,” that has been on my mind all week.

It is a designation found in only place in the entire Bible, in the 24th Psalm:

Lift up your heads, O gates!

and be lifted up, O ancient doors!

    that the King of glory may come in.

Who is this King of glory?

    The Lord of hosts,

    he is the King of glory.

And the question keeps presenting itself to me, like an insistent whisper: who is this King of Glory? Who is he indeed? Where is he to be found? What sort of king is he?

On this day, Christ the King Sunday, at the conclusion of the church year–at the threshold of Advent–we, too, are asked to open the gates and doors of our hearts and ask ourselves this question: who is this King to whom we have pledged our lives, our resources, and our trust? Who is this King whom we worship and wait for?

There is, perhaps, no more important question we will ever ask ourselves, because the nature of our King—the one in whom we place our identity and our destiny— tells us, fundamentally, who we are and how we are to live. To understand Him is to glimpse our ultimate significance as God’s people.

But truth be told, there is a strangeness in naming Jesus as king and ourselves as his subjects. Not just because you and I happen to live in a country where the concept of monarchy is foreign. But because humanity’s usual ideas about the nature of a king and of royal prestige are wrapped up in power dynamics that Jesus seems to undermine at every turn.

Far from being a mighty ruler in the gilded halls of influence, our King is the one who walks dusty roads alongside the marginalized, the one who hangs pitifully on a cross, scorned and abandoned, and who, at the end, offers no satisfying retribution against his enemies; only forgiveness and a whisper of paradise.

This is a far cry from the King whom the Psalmist describes; in the Psalm, the King of Glory is the Lord of Hosts, the Lord of mighty armies, charging into battle to defend his people with impressive strength. He is the one who subdues the nations and ensures his justice by the power of the sword.

And frankly we know a lot about kings like that—too much, in fact; they haunt our violent history, and their successors are still rattling around among us, weaponizing power and treating the world like a playing field for their own deluded ambitions.

But this is not what we are given in Jesus, and I think it is a mistake when we attempt to fashion him in those terms. As revealed in today’s gospel, it is a Crucified King who reigns over us: a man of sorrows, whose earthly palace is the Place of the Skull; whose coronation is an execution; and whose royal title, “The King of the Jews,” is a cruel bit of imperial irony. There is no pomp and splendor here, no adoring crowd, no royal feast.

Christ is, in fact, revealed to us on the cross as the anti-king, the one who upends our entire notion of dignity and honor and power, who reveals himself to the world not in the heights of glory but in the depths of vulnerability and weakness. And this tender pathos is part of him always; even the risen Christ still bears the wounds of his humiliation.

So when we sing of thrones, we also sing of thorns, because in Jesus the two realities—the glory and the sacrifice—are bound up in one another. For our King, true power is revealed in the moment when power is given away for the good of others. For our King, it is a surrender to God’s will, not triumphalism, that leads to eternal glory.

And all of this makes *Christ the King Sunday* a rather subversive occasion.

Because just as the earliest members of the Church proclaimed that it was Jesus, crucified, risen, and ascended, who revealed the true nature of kingly authority, and not the passing tyrants of a declining Roman empire, so we, as Christians, must proclaim the same thing today to all the would-be leaders of our own time: that their power is contingent. That they are answerable to something greater than themselves, greater than all of us. That justice without mercy, and strength without humility, is an abomination.

This is an uncomfortable position, no matter where one falls on the political spectrum, because it requires each of us to relinquish the illusion that any one person or party or movement will save us, or any one earthly ruler, even those whom we admire. It requires us to challenge both those with whom we tend to disagree and those whom we desperately want to follow.

These leaders will not save us. They cannot save us. Because the ultimate questions of power and destiny have already been resolved by another—by Jesus Christ, the King—the firstborn King of all creation and the Last King, who will return to us in a blaze of mercy. This is our King of Glory, the only authority who has ever mattered, and who reveals himself in a most unexpected way: born in a shed, living in obscurity, dying in shame, rising again in quiet, piercing light.

In the end, our only duty is to seek him in the shadow of his cross and in the radiance of his love, and to live as he would have us live. Our true identity is found only here—in Christ’s kingdom, where we are not merely passive subjects, but active citizens, patterning our lives after his own, proclaiming his mission of justice and reconciliation, and trusting that his eternal glory will belong to us as well.

This requires much of us—everything, in fact, that we have to offer. And as the cross reveals, it is not a life that guarantees comfort. But there is nothing more true, nothing more real, nothing more for which we were made. And so, as St. Paul prays in his letter to the Colossians, “may you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience.”

Who is this King of Glory?

For us it is Jesus, broken and yet eternal; wounded and yet wondrous; rejected and yet reigning supreme. It has always been Jesus, the Christ, Our King. And it always will be.