Of Bossy Kings and Big Love

           A friend of mine told me a true story about a seminary intern who had to do a  children’s sermon  on Christ the King Sunday.  Unlike our wonderful interns at St. Thomas, this intern was very new both to preaching and to children. First, he nervously gathered all of the young kids up to the front of the church and gave each of them a paper Burger King crown to wear. Everyone watched in anticipation .

          “Now,” he asked, full of enthusiasm, as the newly crowned kings and queens wiggled on the chancel steps, “tell me, what are kings like?” The kids didn’t have to think about this for long.

          “Kings are mean!” one little boy blurted out.

          “Yeah, they’re super bossy!” cried a little girl.

          “They put people in dungeons!” added another with drama, as the poor intern grew paler and paler.

          “Henry the Eighth was a king,” mused an older girl, who must have caught a glimpse of The Tudors on TV, “and he had six wives, and he chopped off their heads!”

          The young intern stood there in the midst of helpful children, with a growing deer-in-the-headlights look on his face. He had obviously been hoping to tie the children’s sweet descriptions of the magnanimous power and royal glory of kings to Christ’s role as our Heavenly King, but these kids were not leading him where he had planned to go. They were totally derailing his sermon! Cutting short their participation, he lamely said something about Christ being a nice kind of king and hurried the children back to their seats, crowns akimbo.

          Out of the mouths of babes! Even without the challenge of inviting the children forward today, I must admit that I always struggle with my own Christ the King sermon. Christ the King Sunday is inescapable. Every November, I watch it loom before me, the last Sunday of our Church Year. It is supposed to be a celebration of the majestic Jesus who sits at the right hand of God the Father, before we pour him back down to earth in the frail flesh of a little baby shivering in an animal feed trough. I understand the necessity of juxtaposing the divine and human natures of Christ. I am still enough of a Calvinist to be all about the Almighty Power of God. But divine majesty sure is a difficult thing to describe in language that means anything to us 21^st century Americans. Just listen to our reading from Colossians and tell me honestly if you get anything out of “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation?” And then to that invisible vision, we add this ancient “king” metaphor, full of the kind of unpleasant overtones that the children in my story brought out. On top of the ambiguous nature of kings, we can even add problems with masculine language, as theologians and liturgists these days move to the even more abstract, “Reign of Christ Sunday,” substituting the gender-neutral “Ruler” for “King.” Oh my. What is a poor preacher to do?    

          This year, I decided to go back to the Hebrew Bible for some answers. After all, our metaphor of God as King comes from the Hebrew Scriptures. And I found that our Old Testament holds the image of God as King in the same kind of tension that we found between the seminarian and the children. On the one hand, we have the language of the “royal psalms,” describing God as “King of Glory,” a Lord mighty in battle and a strong Protector of God’s people. These psalms glorify kingship, drifting easily from the power of God as King to the power of the human king of Israel, whom God has appointed to rule over God’s people. Some of these songs sound a bit too much like political propaganda for the Davidic monarchy, if you ask me, especially that one about how many gorgeous wives the king is being given. The little kids would have had a field day with that one.

          On the other hand, we have texts that are suspicious of the power of kings, and we have language that describes both God and the true king of Israel not as a warrior but as a shepherd, one who knows his sheep and leads them beside still waters. The prophets often see the kings of Israel in a negative light, as ineffective and malevolent shepherds. Today’s reading from Jeremiah is just such a prophetic text, speaking God’s condemnation of the shepherds. It describes the kings of Judah (the Southern Kingdom) who “destroy and scatter” the people, defrauding and robbing them. Jeremiah rails against the mean, bossy, and violent kings, against kings who build their own houses with unfairness and their own upper chambers with injustice, while they force their fellow men to work without pay. Right before today’s reading, Jeremiah goes on to implore the kings to “do what is just and right; rescue from the defrauder him who is robbed; do not wrong the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow; commit no lawless act, and do not shed the blood of the innocent in this place” (Jer. 22:3).      

          For Jeremiah, to know God is to do justice, to take care of the poor and the needy. The prophet pronounces a future in which God will appoint new shepherds over God’s people, gathering the “remnant” of God’s flock back from exile and raising up a “true branch of David’s line.” The name of this new king is “the Lord is our Righteousness,” or “the Lord is our Vindicator.” This name in Hebrew is actually a pun on the name of the bad and ineffective king Zedekiah and expresses the hope that God will finally give the people a ruler who will uphold God’s covenant and lead them in the exercise of social justice and right relationship with God and our fellow human beings.

          When we as Christians take Jeremiah’s words and read them on Christ the King Sunday, we are often just using them to lend prophetic support to the Christian claim that Jesus is God’s chosen Messiah, the Davidic ruler to whom the Hebrew texts refer. When we do this, we are reducing prophecy to mere “prediction,” and any meaning and context concerning kingship and righteousness in Israel disappears beneath our Christian meaning. Without realizing it, it is easy for us to become like the Roman soldiers in today’s gospel, snipping the image of “King of the Jews” out of context and pasting it above the Cross, not mocking our Lord, but disregarding Jeremiah and his people.

        What does it mean, then, for us Christians to use this text about justice and righteousness to help us in our understanding of Jesus as our King? It seems to me as if these words should mean more than just an evolution of kingship from Israel’s “bad kings” to the eternal reign of Jesus Christ, a “good king.” It should be more than praising Jesus as the king who finally gets it right, who finally saves his people.  I think this text from Jeremiah asks us to turn our eyes from the king to us, his subjects. For Jeremiah, the king sets the example by which the people as a whole are to live. By appropriating the promise made to Israel for a just and righteous king, we are also accepting the task laid on the people of God, the task to lead lives of justice and righteousness ourselves. By calling Jesus our King, we are calling ourselves his people, subject not to our own desires but subject to the rule that he establishes: a rule of justice, a rule of love.

          Such an understanding of our text turns us away from the image of King to the image of Kingdom. I might have trouble picturing an invisible King, somehow sitting on a Heavenly Throne, the Logos through whom the Father speaks all things into being. But I don’t have trouble picturing the place, the Kingdom that Jesus establishes in his living and his dying, the Kingdom that Jesus asks us to enter. It is a Kingdom like we heard about last week in which no one suffers, in which everyone has enough to eat, in which death and pain are no more. I don’t have trouble picturing that place at all. I see it in the little glimpses of that future Kingdom: the caring nurse in the hospital; the helpers in Peoria, Illinois that Rob described to me this week after his work there; the miracle of birth; the saving miracle of new birth in baptism; God’s people gathered each week at this altar.

          The criminal hanging beside Jesus on the Cross, who understands him only as Israel’s Messiah, expects him to leap off of the Cross and save him through violent earthly strength. The other criminal, however, does not even address Jesus as King, or Lord, or Messiah. “Jesus,” he says, calling his savior by his given name-- the only time anyone ever addresses Jesus by his first name alone in the whole Bible. This criminal does not try to name Jesus as King. He merely asks to be remembered into the Kingdom. And Jesus welcomes him.

           The great preacher William Sloane Coffin once said: “It's a profound Christian conviction that we all belong one to another, every one of us on the face of the Earth -- from the pope to the loneliest wino, and that's the way God made us.” The prophet Jeremiah would agree. And then Coffin adds, “Christ died to keep us that way… For every serious believer the question arises: Who is big enough to love the whole world?”[1]

          For me, the answer to “Who is Christ the King?” can never be a statement. The only statements that our human imaginations allow us to make are about the Kingdom and our invitation into it.  For me, the answer to “Who is Christ the King” must be another question, “Who is big enough to love the whole world?” I bet that if that seminary intern had asked the children that question, he would have gotten the answers that he was looking for.

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           [1] Religion and Ethics Newsweekly Profile, Episode 752 (August 27, 2004).

A Christian "Zombie Survival Guide"?

          When Jesus described the walls of the Temple being thrown down and the chaos of the End Times tearing apart civilizations and families alike, I bet that he wasn’t thinking about zombies. But in our culture these days, think chaos and fear and destruction and the end of the world, and your mind is very likely to go straight to a relentless, moaning, tottering hoard of blood-thirsty zombies. Just look at the films that have come out in the last decade: World War Z, Shaun of the Dead, and the popular TV show, The Walking Dead. Look at the zombie walk on Bardstown Road in August that is played out in similar fashion all over the world. Are there any zombie fans among us today?

In order to get up to speed on this twenty-first century kind of apocalypse, I watched World War Z this week, and lo and behold, in one scene I thought that I was watching our Gospel lesson portrayed on the screen: In a huge courtyard in Jerusalem, surrounded by tall, sturdy walls just like the outer walls of the old Temple Mount, thousands of people had taken shelter from an outside world overrun with zombies. Truly, except for the helicopters whirring overhead, the images of this mass of Middle Eastern people singing songs of praise and rejoicing at their safety could have come from a movie about crowds of worshippers joining Jesus on the ancient Temple grounds. But then, stirred up from the singing (noise gets zombies all worked up, you know), thousands of zombies on the outside start climbing over one another, scaling the walls like frantic ants climbing  a fence, until they reach the top and hurtle down to earth inside the walls, chomping and biting and hurling themselves into the now-frantic crowds and infecting them with the zombie virus, too. At the end of the scene, “parents and brothers, relatives and friends” have put one another to death; vehicles explode and fires of war break out; “not one stone is left upon another,” and everyone has lost his soul. Sounds pretty much like the days that Jesus describes in our Gospel, doesn’t it?

          I’m not the first theologian to wonder where our present fascination with zombies comes from and what is says about our spiritual hopes and struggles. If you google “zombies and religion,” you get long lists of blogs and articles drawing all kinds of conclusions. One of the best is an article written by Rodney Clapp,[1] in which he states that our fascination with zombies comes from a reaction to our crowded lives, where we live and move elbow to elbow with crowds of strangers in our cities and are blasted by constant electronic messages from soulless corporations on TV and over the Internet. Think of the girl who committed suicide recently after the taunts of bullies followed her from school into the safety of her home via Twitter and Facebook. Think of those of us who try to purchase health insurance online and are frustrated by the glitches run amok in the vast, impersonal realm of cyberspace. At the same time, we are besieged by friends and relatives who, like zombies, turn against us because of our politics in this antagonistic age; and we harbor a constant threat of contagion with new viruses that spread across the globe and ecological disaster that seems impossible to contain. Such forces bombarding us from all sides can seem as relentless and inescapable and as lacking in compassion as the power of the “living dead,” who mindlessly devour anyone who crosses their path. It is no surprise to me that World War Z begins with unrelenting news flashes about global disasters, about new diseases, about political unrest—news flashes that follow the starring family around as they try to enjoy their pancakes on a Saturday morning, filling their ears with rapid-fire doom.

          It strikes me, then, that there is another angle to the zombie apocalypses that fascinate us these days. I believe that the zombies filling our nightmares are a symbol not only for relentlessness and contagion, but for the hopelessness that invades our secular worldview—a hopelessness fed by our inability to take seriously passages like today’s Gospel and first reading. Don’t we Episcopalians roll our eyes every year when these readings about the End Times come around in November and during Advent? We are not Bible-thumping televangelists raging about signs of the End. We cringe at all the talk of judgment. We snicker at the implausibility of lions and lambs snuggling up together. We would like to snip apocalyptic eschatology (theologian speak for uncovering what will happen in the End Times) out of our Bibles and our creeds—as the more secular among us have already done.

While I am certainly not saying that we are to take today’s readings literally, I am saying that we Christians somehow need to hang onto a vision of the future that we can share with others.  We scorn or ignore today’s readings at our own peril—the peril of our Christian hope. (See Thomas Long, Preaching from Memory to Hope.) In their imagery, today’s readings give to our imaginations the two central images that we Christians must hold in tension as we make sense of the world: images of crucifixion and resurrection.

Like the crucifixion, Jesus’ warnings here in Luke speak to the pain in our lives and to the sin and death in our world. When we can do nothing but cry out with Jesus, “God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then we are holding on to the vision of crucifixion, of God suffering with us on the Cross. The crucifixion of God is in the destruction of Jerusalem and her glorious Temple by the Romans in the first century, and the crucifixion of God is in the horrible devastation of typhoon Haiyan today. The ability to endure pain, while enfolded in the arms of a loving God, comes from just such a vision. Jesus’ Cross gives us hope that God is with us in our suffering, and it is what will give us the grace to endure until resurrection.

The vision of resurrection is one of wondrous transformation on a cosmic scale. Resurrection affects all of human history, defeating sin and death, encouraging us with, as Nicolas Berdyaev describes it, “’a dream of joy and freedom, of beauty, of soaring creative power, a dream of love.’”[2] Our text from Isaiah, while certainly not originally written with a Christian view of resurrection in mind, is full of the same wondrous hope and cosmic wholeness that we believe Christ brings us in his rising from the grave. It shows us a return to paradise and assures us that creation is ongoing, and that, however it looks, all is being made new. Resurrection imagery promises us that God’s gracious will is still taking shape and will have the final word.

A world full of zombies is a world without hope, a world without the hope hidden in crucifixion and the hope proclaimed in resurrection. I ran across a quote from Karl Barth this week about hope that sounds just like a description of those zombies splatting woodenly into things in World War Z. Barth writes, “All that is not hope is wooden, hobbledehoy, blunt-edged and sharp-pointed … There there is no freedom, only imprisonment; no grace, but only condemnation and corruption; no divine guidance, only fate; no God, but only a mirror of unredeemed humanity.”[3] On the one hand, when we ignore the Cross, our efforts to escape death on our own are as futile and as unending as trying to flee a chomping horde of zombies. Death will jump out at us at every turn. It will knock us down as we cut off our own arms trying to free ourselves from its grasp. We will watch helplessly as it takes our loved ones. On the other hand, when we ignore the Resurrection, the joy goes out of our souls and the light goes out of our eyes. We ourselves become the zombies, bound and wandering in a landscape without meaning, hurling ourselves around with abandon and unseeing eyes.

Jesus tells us in our reading from Luke that, in the midst of chaos, we Christians are called to testify. Like Brad Pitt in World War Z, we are called to leave behind our cozy lives, to come out from underneath our warm comforters and to leave our Saturday morning pancakes, and to rejoin the fight. We are called to hold up the Cross of a suffering God to those who only want glory; to bring God’s presence into the dark corners. We are to look death in the face and to proclaim new life, not just at the grave but in our daily speech and actions; we are to look at what is old and proclaim that it will be made new, no matter how silly that might sound; we are to speak justice to injustice in word and deed. We are to cry “yes” to hope when it looks like “no” is the only answer. There is no time to waste. The author of 2^nd Thessalonians knows that now is not the time to be weary, to waste our time gossiping and watching TV. The world needs our Christian hope. Only our testimony can keep the zombies at bay!

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[1] Rodney Clapp, “Attack of the Zombies,” http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2012-01/attack-zombies.

[2] [2] W. Paul Jones, “Inside Out as Upside Down,” in Weavings XXV: 2 (2010), 9.

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[3] Karl Barth, quoted in Thomas Long, Preaching from Memory to Hope (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 124.

An Ever-Failing Succession of Saints?

         On a recent trip to my alma mater, The University of the South, I stopped to admire the new baptismal font in All Saints’ Chapel. As I passed my fingers over the stone relief figures standing tall and unsmiling all around the large cement bowl, I wondered aloud to my old college roommate who they could be. “Oh, they must be part of the ‘never-ending succession of benefactors,’” she laughed. As undergraduates, we used to poke one another in the ribs and giggle about the university prayer as it was solemnly intoned in chapel services--the prayer that asks God to bless all who have contributed to this institution and to “raise up to the University, we humbly pray thee, a never-failing succession of benefactors.” We used to imagine God pouring plump middle-aged men and women onto the campus in fur coats and fine suits, gifting the college with trustees who would fork over large sums of money to the latest capital campaign. It seemed to me in my youthful idealism a tacky blessing to be constantly bothering God about in our official prayer.

          Of course, now that I am a plump middle-aged woman wandering about the campus, even hoping to be a trustee from the Diocese, and praying about my own parish pledge drive, I am not as easily amused by the phrase. But as I thought this week about All Saints’ Day, I remembered that baptismal font in All Saints’ Chapel, surrounded by what was surely a circle of the saints of the Church, not benefactors of the University, and I wondered about how often we in the Church do confuse the two. Don’t we often see the Church as an institution held up by virtuous pillars of saints, by men and women carved in rigid stone who guard the status quo, by benefactors who have given of their treasure, time, and talent to keep the institution going? Don’t we often picture the saints standing in a closed circle around the heavenly throne like members of an exclusive club? And don’t we often think of blessing as something that we ask for and receive from God, like a university receives a bequest from a powerful donor, as something that will forward our cause and bring peace and prosperity to us or to those that we love?

Our Gospel reading for this All Saints’ Day sure does its best to shake up this common idea of blessing and sainthood, however.  Luke’s Beatitudes tell us what it means to be blessed, and they certainly make it clear that blessing is not marked by a never-failing succession of wealth or even of easy happiness, for that matter. The saints that Jesus sculpts around his baptismal font in this reading are poor, hungry, weeping, hated, scorned, and cast aside. They are people who are able to love their enemies, who can turn to those who hate them and offer them blessing, people who seem to give more than they are ever given in this world. Luke does not offer us the easier spiritual take on Jesus words’ that Matthew does in the Sermon on the Mount, giving us blessing on the “poor in spirit” rather than on society’s poor, on those who hunger for righteousness, rather than on those who don’t get enough to eat. I might be able to identify with Matthew’s version, but if you are like me, you can’t help but pull back incredulously from Luke’s stark blessings, unable to recognize yourselves among the poor and the hungry, unwilling to bless those who hate you, and all too clearly able to see yourselves sitting among those whom Jesus curses: the rich, the filled, the joyful, the acclaimed. One of my favorite prayers is that evening collect that asks God to “shield the joyous.” I want God’s blessing to shield me, not to throw me to the wolves! Why do God’s blessings here have to be so totally backwards, so dismally painful?

          Think for a moment about the saints, the blessed ones, among us? Pick your favorite saint from the list that the church has handed down throughout the ages or even from those beside whom you have sat in the pew. Isn’t it always the case that those who have blessed us the most have at some point experienced the most profound pain in their own lives? Think of St. Francis of Assisi who only heard God’s call as he lay ill and hopeless as a prisoner of war, and who had to give up his wealth and his heritage before he could serve God. Think of the famous women mystics like St. Julian of Norwich, all gifted with magnificent visions of God, who suffered terrible physical ailments or extreme rejection by others, “enduring grace” just as much as desiring it.[1] Think of St. Paul, with his terrible “thorn in the flesh,” or of Martin Luther King, Jr. who grew up in poverty and prejudice and endured countless arrests and death threats before being murdered. Think of some of our holiest and kindest St. Thomas saints, people like Darlene Peterson, crippled and blinded from MS and grieving the tragic death of her only son, yet welcoming so many people into our parish and blessing so many lives.

We can’t deny it. There is something about suffering that opens us up to God, and there is something about prosperity that lulls us into a dangerous sleep. Theologian Paul Tillich explains that Jesus is not praising those who suffer because of their suffering or cursing those who have much simply because they are rich. God despairs of “all of us who are well off, respected, and secure, not simply because we have such security and respect, but because it inevitably binds us, with an almost irresistible power, to … things as they are [in this world.]”  It allows us to resist the change that the Kingdom requires and to convince ourselves that we need neither God nor our neighbor. In the same way, God can promise that blessing will come to those of us who are mourning in body and soul because “the very fact of our lacks and sorrows [in life] may turn our hearts away from things as they are,” toward God’s Reign on earth.[2]

The blessing that God offers us, you see, is a moving, swirling thing—a part of the dance of Love that is the Trinity itself. It demands transformation and movement and cannot survive in hearts and souls that refuse to be torn open or in customs or institutions that refuse to break. Christian Sharen points out in his work on blessing that our blessing always connects to the need of another. On a simple level, he quotes John Bell’s short mealtime grace: “God bless to us our bread. Give food to those who are hungry and hunger for justice to those who are fed. God bless to us our bread.” But the dynamics of blessing goes deeper than the simple political correctness of asking nicely for justice. Sharen shows that, from the beginning of creation, God blesses with love and goodness everything that God has made. Any special blessing, like God’s blessing to Abram, to “make his name great,” is only to make Abram and his descendents a blessing in turn to the whole world. Blessing in the Scriptures—in the blessing of Israel and in Jesus— always happens within history, multiplying as we pass it on, bearing fruit in and through the suffering that is inevitable in this world. This dynamic kind of divine blessing cannot be, then, something that we keep for ourselves, but must be something that we give abundantly away to others.[3]

So what about that baptismal font at Sewanee, ringed with straight-backed saints who hold in the holy waters? I’m thinking that the Church would do better with Frederick Buechner’s more fluid image of the saints as handkerchiefs dropped by God during God’s “holy flirtation with the world.”[4] Picture the movement of a flirtation, the quick give and take, the strong, dynamic energy passing back and forth between two people. Imagine God and the world each looking for a relationship one with the other, testing the waters, reaching out and touching, withdrawing in a blush. Into that movement, God drops blessing in the form of a saint, a person set apart, often by hardship, to flutter down into our lives on the wind of the Spirit, like a handkerchief. “Pick me up,” the blessing begs. Pick me up and pass me into a waiting hand, and look into God’s eyes as you do it and see the love there.  Please don’t stuff me safely into your dark pocket. Don’t use me to blow your nose. Look up, like Jesus looked up into the eyes of his disciples, and pass blessing on, no matter what the cost.”

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[1] See Carol Flinders’ well-named book, Enduring Grace: Living Portraits of Seven Women Mystics.

[2] Paul Tillich, http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=378&C=68

[3] Christian Sharen, “Blessing,” in The Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, Bonnie Miller-McLemore, ed., Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2012.

[4] Frederick Buechner, quoted in a sermon by Samuel Candler, http://day1.org/2379-saint_carlton_is_lowest