Christ the King: A Meditation on Power

Christ the King
21 November 2021
Grace and St. Peter’s Church, Baltimore

Proper 29B:  Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14
Psalm 93, Revelation 1:4b-8
John 18:33-37

This sermon is available as a FaceBook stream on the page: "Grace and St. Peter's, Baltimore" on Nov. 21, 2021.  The sermon begins just after the 28 minute mark.

    In today’s gospel Jesus says “My kingdom is not of this world.”  Kings and kingdoms are about power.  Pilate is looking for Jesus to assert the power he as a Roman governor understands: the power of the state,  an assertion of legitimacy against the emperor who calls himself divi filius, son of the divine, who rules by force and fear of force.   Jesus however is asserting a different kind of power: not of the forces of this world, but the power of ultimate reality.
    Power and religion are always intertwined.  Whether it is about public righteousness, the law and the state, or about personal righteousness, interpersonal behavior or interior striving, religion by its nature stakes a claim to define what is good  and promote it, to declare what is evil and oppose it.  In our public lives it defines what is good and just.  And it invites us in our private lives and in our private concerns, our small selves, so partial, so of the present moment, so pressing to us now but also now passing away, it invites us as well to the same encounter with the eternal.  This is the power of natural religion, the collective human wisdom of the ages.
    Ancient people, and not just ancient people, have always been on the lookout for the power of the eternal, looking for it to break in.  In fact, it’s a little bit like birdwatching.  Someone reports the sighting of an unusual specimen, like the fabled red crested tee-too-wit, seen only once in the last 45 years, in a mulberry bush, down by the shore.  The birdwatchers rush out to see this great thing.  Those first at the site see it, but it is a shy thing, and flies away.  Or like the dead eagle that falls on the head of the boy Claudius, foretelling his unlikely promotion to emperor in the tv production of I Claudius.  Looking for phenomena.  Looking for the inbreaking of power, from above.
    From the beginnings of human consciousness we all have been watching carefully to see what is happening, what succeeds and what fails, what we can understand and control and what we can’t, and asking, What power is making this happen?  What does it mean to us now?  How can we get on the good side of whatever it is?  
    Where did our ancestors find this ultimate, eternal power?  By observing how the powers around us operate.  The powers of nature: the alternation of light and dark; the sun, the moon and the stars; the course of the year with its seasons moving from warmth to cold and into warmth again; the mysterious ways plants and animals grow, flourish and die, and then regenerate, reproduce to life again; the weather, sometimes delightful and sometimes violent; the sea with its winds and storms and currents and tides; the powers of human interaction: love in its many forms, and lust and hatred and war, with all their mysterious energies; health and disease; wisdom and folly; birth and death.  Some of these powers follow patterns which we can learn by patiently watching and come to understand them  But what of the ones we can’t understand?  Those we name, we honor them, we identify our needs in whatever department these deities might be, and we take those needs to them in sacrifice and supplication.  Then we watch and see if we have been heard.  
    This is not just ancient human behavior.  We still behave this way.  And as more and more of the phenomena of nature are understood by careful observation and reason, we come to think that our need to connect to what is ultimate can be left behind in the graves of our less enlightened ancestors. We think we can use our skill and understanding to bring about a better world.  We come to think that we hold the keys to ultimate reality.  We think we are God.
    But the need to connect with an ultimate power, an ultimate reality, is deeply human.  It does not go away.  It is there even if we don’t believe in God or the gods.  Rather it changes.  It secularizes.  The desire for what is good, for what is better, for a better life for ourselves and those we love and care for, drives our politics, our economics, our legal systems.  It is so powerful that we construct more and more all-encompassing systems to bring about these good ends.  We tell ourselves that when we strive for power we are striving for what is good in order that it may be better.  And because it is better, we can use that power to bring about that good.  Even when it seems that force is needed.   
    This mysterious connection, beginning by wanting what is good and ending with all-encompassing coercive forces, comes from a restless desire for what it better, married to the conviction that if we only apply ourselves we can surely bring it about.  In Jesus’ time it was called the Empire.  It now goes by other names, among which which are the ones we don’t approve of  - authoritarianism, fascism, communism, but there are other names as well, all of them claiming ultimacy, claiming total allegiance.  We think we are God.
    In this process we also want to invest our leaders with almost divine identities, as the ancients did with Caesar.  We are not content that they simply be people who have been given responsibilities and are as answerable to the ultimate as any of the rest of us.  We unthinkingly, unconsciously exalt them.  We want to exalt them, but when the prove unworthy we’re deeply, deeply disappointed.  And they are glad to accept this invitation to quasi-divinity: pharaohs, kings, emperors, captains of industry, prime ministers, presidents, the great and the good of every age, all who would wield power welcome their divine promotion.  But this is not the way of God.
    We strive for the good, the better, the best.  We search for it, hoping to find it, and when we think we have found it, we invest ourselves in it.  This active yearning and striving is deep in every human heart.  St. Augustine puts it best: “Our souls are restless” he says. “Fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te”, from the first paragraph of the first chapter of Augustine’s Confessions.  “You have made us for yourself, and so our heart is restless until it rests in you.”  
    We keep restlessly looking and looking for what cannot be found in the things of this world.  We genuinely want the things of this world to work good for us.  But as wonderful and bountiful and good as the things of this world are, they are not ultimate.  They will all fail, now or later.  They are not God.
    The persons we wish so desperately to trust are not in fact divine.  They are not God.
    The systems we build to achieve what is good will fail.  At best they are strivings.  At worst, their coercions in fact lead us in the opposite direction of the good.  They are not God.  
    In time, we will know all about the mysteries of nature.  In time those mysteries will yield to the patient efforts of science and reason.  They are not ultimate.  They are not God.      
    The powers we find in this world are awesome.  But they are not God.
    The great breakthrough of the Hebrew, Christian and Muslim understandings of reality is that while we can learn from the powers of this world, while we can name them and honor them and learn and follow their wisdom, they are not ultimate.  Only God is ultimate.  God who stands outside of our reality, who encompasses it all but is not determined by it.  Who nevertheless reaches out to us and to our world with the compassion of a parent, with the ardor of a lover.
    This is the One who Is.  Ultimate.  To Whom we are drawn by our restless hearts.
    Jesus’ royal legitimacy is categorically different from that of Pilate and the world.  Christ’s kingship is not political.  It is not based on force or fear.  His kingdom stands outside the present moment and circumstance, holding up standards of goodness as plumblines of comparison for our efforts, bringing our efforts to the hope of ever higher goodness and to the judgment of our failures and cruelties.  
    This king is the Word through whom all that is has come to be, and he draws all he has made to himself by the attraction of his truth and beauty and harmony.  He never forces but waits in patience for everyone, everything, to respond to his invitation of goodness and generosity, to the great wedding banquet He has been preparing for us since the dawn of time.  He is willing to wait in patience as long as time exists.  He is willing to suffer to bring us all to Him.  He is even willing to suffer death for what is good and for what is right in order to bring us all and all that is to share his kingdom.  He rules the world with love.

Anglican Values 9: Church and State

 Anglican Values 9: Church and State

    The Christian faith has had an ambivalent relationship with official power since its earliest days.  In any monarchy, which is what the Roman Empire in fact was, any religion which calls its central figure a king, traces his line back to the founding royal figure, calls his expected triumph a kingdom, and looks for that kingdom to be manifested in our time and in this world, is throwing down a challenge to the existing authorities.  An interesting recent approach to New Testament interpretation traces this theme of engagement with Roman power.  Warren Carter, The Roman Empire and the New Testament: A Essential Guide (2006) is a good introduction.  
    In fact the Christian faith was for almost three centuries a movement divorced from this world’s power.  Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 recognized Christianity as a legitimate religion, and the rest of that century can be read in the light of the consequences the Church moving into the seats of power.  From that point on, Christianity held power and at the same time was power’s severest critic.  Over time every state in Europe and many in North Africa and western Asia came under the banner of the Cross.  Which raises the question, How can the state exercise its power through force and be Christian?
    Our own Anglican tradition, as is true also of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, has always been deeply embedded in this issue.  The conversion of England was in many ways a top-down affair.  The Venerable Bede’s charming story from the 600's of King Oswald accompanying St. Aidan as his translator on that monk’s missionary journeys has an underside: What is the message when the king is backing up the preacher?  Power is evident here.  The church in England has always been deeply involved with the monarchy, long before Henry VIII and his famous marital career.  
    Henry did not intend to create a new church; in fact he loved late medieval Catholicism.  His issue was whether the Pope had a right to interfere with a political question: in an absolute monarchy, providing an heir was the most important work the monarch could perform.  It was not personal.  Without an heir, the inevitable struggle for power could well ignite a civil war.  The last civil war had come to an end only in 1485.  But once the door was opened to one issue, many others followed, and the English church entered the Reformation.  This struggle did not end until Elizabeth, some 30-plus years later, defined the nature of the Church of England, embedding the Church in the English state.  Since then, the Church of England has been the religious face and voice of a state which, at least in its official self-definition, embodies Christian virtue and values in its public policy.
    All Anglicans share this history and heritage.  Anglican churches in countries still nominally under the Crown do not suffer much of an identity crisis in this regard.  But in the United States, as well as in other places not subject to the monarchy, Anglicans have had to find another way.   The American Revolution made it impossible for clergy and laity alike to swear loyalty to the King and continue their ministry in the new situation.  How to be loyal citizens of the new republic and faithful Christians in our Anglican tradition?  Our church found its way through this dilemma by creating a self-governing system in our General Convention, in which the Church is independent of the state, abandoning all official connection to public power.
    But interestingly, one thing did not change.  The Church of England’s assumption that it acted on behalf of the public, enshrined in the official status of that church, morphed into an American Anglican assumption that public issues were also issues which the Church had a right, even a duty, to engage in.  The Episcopal Church has always felt a responsibility to weigh in on the questions of the day: slavery in the leadup to the Civil War; the needs and rights of working men and women; the conditions under which the poor and disadvantaged live; the beginnings of an American colonial empire in the Philippines and the Caribbean; the entry of the nation into a world war; civil rights; ecology and climate change; immigration, to name only a few.  As a church we act as though the nation is waiting with bated breath for our latest official statement on public issues.  It isn’t.  In fact, the Episcopal Church is now quite small, and has lost the importance it once had as the religious expression of many American political and other leaders.        Nonetheless, although as a Church we are relatively powerless, we continue to act as though what we say and what we do matter.  Our church has found numberless ways to put its values into practice.
    In the face of smallness and what seems at times to be irrelevance, I believe that this continuity of Anglican/Episcopal engagement with public issues is a clear sign of one of the unique values of our Anglican heritage:  Even when we are not sitting in the seats of power, we think it is important to proclaim and do what we think the teachings of Jesus are, and to proclaim and do what we believe the voice of the Gospels tells us.  And to do it even when it seems it doesn’t matter, because in the light of what Jesus tells us about the Kingdom of God, small things do matter.