Christ the King Sunday
November 25th, 2007
Colossians 1: 15-20
Today is the church’s New Year’s Eve. Next Sunday ushers in Advent, those four Sundays just before Christmas that mark the New Year in the church calendar. How then shall we end the year? With apologies to T.S. Eliot let us be reminded that
This is the way the year ends,
this is the way the road ends.
this is the way the world ends,
not with a whimper but a bang!
Today we finish the old year with a bang! Today we celebrate “The Festival of Christ the King.” Today we revel in an unusual and bizarre kind of royalty. Today we remind ourselves that there is no other king in history like this one whom we love and praise with heart and mind and voice.
The first Christians knew all about kings. Not the contemporary version, that real life museum pieces whose endless dysfunction provides continual fodder for the tabloids. Not the wise and mostly benign kings of story books and fairytales. No, the early church knew the real deal. They knew kings with absolute power over subjects and arbitrary authority over life and death. The early Christians knew kings who saw themselves as gods, with all the divine powers that went with such aspirations.
Images of this sort of king were as ubiquitous in the first century as Nike swoosh is in our own century. The image of Caesar and other symbols of Roman power were literally everywhere-in the market, on coins, in the schools, at the gladiatorial games, on jewellery, wine goblets, lamps and paintings. The sovereign rule of Caesar was simply assumed to be the divine plan for the peace and order of the cosmos. Of course this is the way the world works. Under such conditions it becomes hard to imagine any alternative to Empire; it becomes next to impossible to imagine king as anything other than the embodiment of absolute power.
But there were those in the church who had liberated imaginations; who could envision a different sort of king. One of those was the author of Colossians. The text we read this morning is one such effort, it is a poem meant to counter the imperial imagination and allow for the possibility of a new sort of king
In a world populated by images of Caesar, who is taken to the literal son of god, a world in which the emperor’s pre-eminence over all things is bolstered by political structures and institutions, an empire that views Rome as the centre of the universe, a world in which imperial peace is imposed by force, sometimes even through capital punishment and crucifixion, such a poem is nothing less than treasonous. In the space of these few well crafted lines, the author subverts every major claim of the empire, turning them on their heads and proclaims Christ to be the creator, redeemer and Lord of all creation, including the empire.
The experience of the early Christians should resonate with us for we too live in a time of empire. The average North American person is confronted every day by between five and twelve thousand corporate messages, all geared to shaping a consumer imagination. Whether you are running a political campaign or selling beer, it’s all about the image. Whether you are designing a new fashion line for the winter, the lines on a new running shoe or the look of a new website, it’s all about the image. A society directed by the consumerist imperative of global capitalism is driven by images with a vengeance. Some of us are wearing these images on our shoes, our jackets and our shirts. The messages are all telling the same story: a finite world can sustain infinite growth, economic growth is the driving force of human history, consumer choice is what makes us human, and greed is normal. We live in an empire, the empire of global consumerism.
So what are we as Christians to do? Does our faith offer up another image with which to see the world?
Perhaps we can expand on our Colossians passage and remind ourselves that:
In an image-saturated world,
a world of ubiquitous logos permeating our consciousness,
a world of dehydrated and captive imaginations in which
we are too numbed,
too satiated and
too tired
to be able to dream anything else,
in a world in which the empire of global economic affluence
has achieved the monopoly of our imaginations,
in this world remember Christ is the image of the invisible God.
In this world driven by images with a vengeance,
Christ is the image par excellence,
the image above all other images,
the image that is no a façade,
the image that is not trying to sell us anything.
Christ is the image of the invisible God.
The image of God,
a flesh and blood God,
a here and now,
in time and history God,
a God with joys and sorrows.
The image of who we are called to be,
image bearers of this God.
He is the source of a liberated imagination,
a subversion of the empire,
because it all starts with him
and it all ends with him,
everything,
all things,
whatever you can imagine,
visible and invisible,
oceans and atoms,
outer space,
urban space,
personal space
and cyberspace,
whether it be the Pentagon,
Disneyland,
or the Bank of Nova Scotia,
whether it be the McCains,
the Irvings,
Conrad Black,
or Bill Gates,
whether it be the institutionalized power structures of the state
or the market,
all things have been created in him and through him.
He is their source,
their purpose,
their goal.
Even in their rebellion,
their idolatry
he is the sovereign one.
Their power and authority is derived at best,
parasitic at worst.
In the face of empire,
in the face of presumptuous claims to sovereignty,
in the face of the imperial and idolatrous forces of our lives,
Christ is before all things,
he is sovereign in life,
not the pimped dreams of the global market,
not the idolatrous forces of nationalism,
not the insatiable desires of a consumerist culture.
In the face of a disconnected world,
where home is a domain in cyberspace,
where neighbourhood is a chat room,
where public space is a shopping mall,
where information technology promises a tuned in, reconnected world,
all things hold together in Christ.
The creation is a deeply personal cosmos,
all cohering and interconnected in Jesus.
And this sovereignty takes on flesh.
This coherence of all things is embedded in the church,
against all odds,
against most of the evidence.
In a show me culture,
where words alone don’t cut it,
the church is the flesh and blood,
here and now,
in time and history,
with joys and sorrows,
embodiment of this Christ.
As a body, around a common meal,
in alternative economic practices,
in radical service to the most vulnerable,
in refusal of the empire,
in love of this creation,
the church re-imagines the world
in the image of the invisible God.
In the face of a disappointed world of betrayal,
a world in which all fixed points have proven illusory,
a world in which we are anchorless and adrift,
Christ is the foundation,
the origin,
the way,
the truth and the life.
In the face of a culture of death,
a world of killing fields,
a world of the walking dead,
Christ is at the head of the resurrection parade
transforming our tears of betrayal into tears of joy,
giving us dancing shoes for the resurrection party.
And this glittering joker
who danced in the dragon’s jaws of death
now dances with a dance
that is full of nothing less than the fullness of God.
This is the dance of the new creation.
This is the dance of life out of death
and in this dance all that was broken,
all that was estranged,
all that was alienated,
all that was dislocated and disconnected,
what was once hurt,
what once was friction
is reconciled,
comes home
is healed
and is made whole
because grace make beauty out of ugly things.
Everything,
all things,
whatever you can imagine,
visible and invisible,
oceans and atoms,
outer space,
urban space,
personal space
and cyberspace,
every inch of creation,
every dimension of our lives,
all things are reconciled to him.
And it happens on a cross.
It all happens at a state execution where the governor did not commute the sentence.
It all happens at the hands of the empire,
it all happens through blood,
not through a power grab by the severing one.
It all happens in embraced pain,
for the sake of others.
It all happens on a cross,
arms outstretched in embrace
and this is the image of the invisible God.
This is the body of Christ.
This is not a strutting earthly king.
Not Herod or Nero, Henry VIII, or Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao, not Castro or Bush, not Musharef or Hugo Chavez.
Here is not a commander of elite troops, or US marines, or goose stepping North Korean armies.
Here is no military ruler from Burma, no one living 10 downing street, the Oval Office, the Kremlin, or even 24 Sussex Drive.
Here in Colossians is a crucified man wearing a crown of thorns.
King Jesus.
The wounded healer.
The bloodied reconciler.
The one who lays down his life for others.
This is Jesus our king, the one who turns all other ideas of kingship inside out.
Here is the humble son of Mary.
The apprentice of his earthly father, Joseph the carpenter.
A village man who become an itinerant preacher and healer.
The fellow who listened to women with an unusual respect in what was a man’s world
A misunderstood man who spent nights out on the hills with only a stone for a pillow. Here is a young physician actually touching untouchable lepers.
A blesser of street kids (not the same thing as kissing babies before an election!!)
A dinner guest among the equivalent of bikers and petty hoodlums.
The saviour trusted by prostitutes and tax collectors.
Friend of foreigners and fishermen.
A servant washing the feet of guests.
The wanted man slipping through city streets by night.
A soul in agony, praying in an Olive grove.
The young rabbi betrayed by a disciple.
Prisoner in kangaroo court, abused by the police guards.
Condemned man,
mocked, flogged and spat upon
A victim carrying his own cross to the Place of the Skull
The crucified man, speaking forgiveness on his foes.
A corpse hastily buried in a borrowed tomb,
the stranger walking with men on the road to Emmaus.
A host with wounded hands, cooking a fish breakfast for his friends on the shores of Galilee.
The ever living One,
The Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end of all things.
We have no other king than this one
this same Jesus,
this Saviour and Lord who “lords it over” no one.
Always central is his cross,
reconciling love,
and the promise of universal peace.
Please my friends, I beg you, stay true. Yes, I beg you! Never surrender the merciful Christ of the New Testament for a later edition. Don’t betray him by making him into a gorgeously dressed monarch made in the image of our human arrogance and aggression.
Cling to the King on the cross. Worship this king of reconciliation. There is more hope in his little finger, than in the power and pomp of all the kings and presidents, emperors and prime ministers, parliaments and cabinets, that ever were, are, or will be. There is more transforming power in his reconciling humility, than in all the rockets and land mines, battleships and bombers, armoured tanks, helicopter gun ships, that have been ever made or ever will be made on earth. There is more security in Christ than anything offered by Wall St. or Bay St, stock exchanges, commodities, RRSPs or pension plans. There is more happiness in Christ than any brand, any clothing line, any car, any drink, any toy could ever hope to offer.
Worship this new type of king, this Jesus, and trust him.
Don’t just pay lip service, but trust him. Commit your ways to him and you shall know his peace, a peace such as this crass old world can never give. Thanks be to God. Amen