Sermon: Full Circle

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

November 23, 2025, Reign of Christ

Jeremiah 23:1-6; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 1:68-79

 

Full Circle

  

 

This is the last Sunday of the lectionary year, a kind of liturgical New Year's Eve as it were. Next Sunday when we show up here, provided enough people stick around after the service to get it all done, you will see purple vestments, some greenery about, at least one banner hanging, some extra candles, and maybe even a manger scene. One could magnify that fact of finality with the observation that, as the last Sunday of Year C, this is the end of not just a one-year liturgical observance but of the whole three-year lectionary cycle; next Sunday brings us to the First Sunday of Advent, Year A - we really have come full circle. 

For much of the church's relatively recent history this final Sunday of the liturgical year has been known as Christ the King Sunday, making it one of two Sundays of the year devoted as much to a doctrinal idea as to any event or sequence of events recorded in scripture. The other is Trinity Sunday, which falls directly after Pentecost Sunday, and is dedicated to the mystery that one God is also "God in three persons, blessed Trinity" as the hymn teaches us. 

Here the point is that Jesus, the one whose nativity we'll be marching toward starting next week, and the one whose life and teaching takes up most of the gospel readings across the course of the liturgical year, is king. A few hymns take us there as well, like the one we sang at the beginning of this morning's service.

What is harder to come by, however, is a great deal of scripture that is quite so direct about making that point about Christ the King, at least not in the way that we have come to understand kingship and rule in human history.

Kings, or queens in such cases as they reign, often end up seeming horribly out of touch with those over whom they rule. A couple of theatrical examples might help us see this: think of the musical Camelot, as Arthur and his queen Guinevere wonder back and forth "what do the simple folk do?" Their answers, let's say, aren't great. Or for a more farcical example from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail (and its later very loose theatrical adaptation Spamalot) that same King Arthur travels through the countryside amongst many of his subjects who don't even know who he is - "I didn't know we had a king," and other such exclamations. 

Real life offers the painful example, again from England, of the royal family's utter disconnect from their people after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, twenty-eight years ago. The royal family's initial dismissiveness after the death was met with a wave of indignation and even anger, to the point that the Queen herself (yes, the same Queen so deeply lauded and grieved at her own death not too long ago) had to come forth with what amounted to a giant public mea culpa and a rather elaborate funeral with no less a star than Elton John involved. 

If one confines one's search to the history of the people of Israel, it looks even worse. When you have some time to kill, take a trip through the books of Samuel and Kings and even Chronicles in the Old Testament and scan through the various kings of Israel and of Judah whose stories are told there, sometimes briefly, sometimes in greater detail. If you do this, take particular note of how many of those kings had their careers summarized in the words "they did evil in the sight of the Lord" or something similar. It's a lot.

Speaking of those Old Testament scriptures, take a look at 1 Samuel 8, in which God is quite explicit in telling Samuel about how the people of Israel will suffer for their desire to have a king "like all the other nations." The people don't listen, God tells Samuel who to anoint (a tall, good-looking guy named Samuel), and the trouble begins. Even God isn't all that fond of human kings, it turns out.

To be blunt, calling someone a king in scripture isn't necessarily all that complimentary. The office has to be respected, of course, but an awful lot of people who filled that office did not earn that respect. So perhaps it's not a surprise that the readings selected for this Sunday do less going on about Jesus being a king and more about what Jesus was or was prophesied to be.

Look at that reading from Luke. You might remember it from the season of Advent, of all things, a song of Zechariah upon the birth and naming of his son John, who would be the forerunner of the Messiah. This was what came some nine months after Zechariah had been struck speechless (and maybe unable to hear as well) upon his scoffing response to the angel Gabriel's announcement of the birth to come. Once that muting has been lifted upon his announcement of his son's name, this is what Zechariah has to say. (You can find a hymn version of this at #109 in your hymnal.)

There is a reference to being of "the house of David," but if you're looking for royalty or any suggestion of such, that's about it. Instead Zechariah's song speaks of a "savior," one who would preserve the people of Israel from their enemies. The song goes on to sing of mercy and holy covenant, of being able to serve this savior "without fear" - not a way human kings typically work. At last Zechariah sings of a "dawn from on high" that will come "to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet in the way of peace." Not typical king-talk of the time. Or, to put it in modern terms, not exactly a winning campaign pitch for a major presidential candidate these days.

The passage from Jeremiah looks promising, until it becomes known that this passage isn't necessarily referring to a divine Messiah, but a more earthly king. The earlier verses of the passage speak more of shepherds than kings, but then prophets of that era were inclined to compare a good king to a shepherd in how that king would rule over, and care for, the people of his realm. Colossians comes the closest in speaking of God who has "rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son...". From there, though, the passage takes a different direction with its description of "the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation" and going on to speak of God reconciling Godself to all humanity through this One. Close, but not quite.

Of course, I have left out one reading from the lectionary today, another passage from Luke. It starts off like this: 

When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing." And they cast lots to divide his clothing. And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, "He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!" The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, "If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!" There was also an inscription over him, "This is the King of the Jews."

 

That's it: a man hanging on a cross, named as "the King of the Jews."

For "Christ the King Sunday" to make any sense at all for us, and for it not to lead us off on some very un-Christlike rabbit trails that an awful lot of self-declared Christians are following these days, we have to get over our ideas of what a king is like. That's not Christ. 

Think Good Shepherd.

Think of the teacher.

Think of the one who welcomed the children and then told his disciples off when they tried to turn them away.

Think of the one who broke the bread and poured the cup. 

Think of the one who rode into Jerusalem on a mere colt.

Think of the one who raised Lazarus out of the tomb.

Think of the one who stilled the storm on the sea of Galilee.

Think of the one who was transfigured on that mountain with Moses and Elijah standing by.

Think of the one baptized, with the Holy Spirit crashing in to pronounce him as God's beloved son.

Think of the one born to Mary, placed in a feed trough, with a bunch of shepherds as the main witnesses.

And yes, think of that one crucified, the one who did not stay dead.

There's your King, the only king you want. Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #268, Crown Him with Many Crowns; #309, Come. Great God of All the Ages; #274, You, Lord, Are Both Lamb and Shepherd

 

Sermon: The Paradoxical Reign of Christ

Grace Presbyterian Church

November 20, 2016, Reign of Christ C

Jeremiah 23:1-6; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43

The Paradoxical Reign of Christ

While for most folks the main “holiday” of note this week is the one marked by massive feasts on Thursday and massive shopping bills on Friday, the liturgical calendar does offer up one more small-scale commemoration for today before the turning of a new liturgical year next Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent. Today is the festival day of the church known as Christ the King, or Reign of Christ Sunday.

This is, unlike most of the dates that dot the church calendar, one which is both pretty new and possible to date fairly precisely. It was first declared in 1925. Pius XI, the pope at the time in the Roman Catholic Church, decreed the feast day in reaction to the increasing rise of dictatorships and other governments he saw as inimical to the authority of the church; Protestant church traditions eventually adapted the feast day as well, pointing to the ultimate authority of Christ as against any secular government or other pretender to the throne of the human heart.

I wonder, though, if such an occasion is itself fraught with potential for confusion or distraction, not because of the theological premise behind it – being able to acknowledge the sovereignty of Christ is a good thing for the church – but perhaps because of our own human capacity for misunderstanding and misapprehension of a term like “Christ the King.”

Put another way: do we, in our modern minds and ways of thinking, get the “kingship” of Christ wrong? Do we, because of our modern connotations of the word “king,” turn Christ into something Christ is not?

Let’s face it; we get a particular mental picture in our heads when we hear or say or think the word “king.” Aside from the modern British monarchy – ceremonial but largely without power – our concept of “king” is usually about absolute authority. The king commands; you obey, or else. Though we might not think of them immediately, the most apt synonyms for our image of “king” are words like “tyrant,” or “autocrat,” or maybe “emperor” – words that evoke rulers who wield absolute power, and who punish those who resist it. (To be clear, one does not have to have the title “king” to be such a ruler, or to desire to be such a ruler, as a cursory survey of world leaders, and would-be leaders, makes clear.)

When applied to Christ, some Christians take comfort in such an image. We can slip into the desire for a really Old Testament-style deity who gets into smiting enemies and unleashing judgment on those we don’t like. Christ is a pretty poor fit for that title, though, as the gospels uncomfortably remind us. Much more than smiting our enemies, Christ is apt to point out what might be called the “gospel of Pogo.” Perhaps you might remember the most famous quote from that old comic strip character: “We have met the enemy, and they is us.”

It isn’t just the gospels who undo our image of kings, though. Even the prophet Jeremiah, pronouncer of judgment and woe that he was, doesn’t necessarily look at kings in the way we’d like. You will notice that in today’s reading from Jeremiah, though it really is all about kings, it takes him quite a while to use the actual word “king.” The image he calls up most clearly is instead “shepherd.” You know, as in “The Lord is my shepherd.” Jeremiah’s prophecy isn’t the only one to invoke this image; both Isaiah and Ezekiel also include discourses on the mandate for kings to serve as shepherds to their people.

Of course, it’s not hard to make the connection between Jeremiah’s image of king-as-shepherd and a Messiah who proclaimed “I am the good shepherd” in John’s gospel. What is hard is to make a connection between Jeremiah’s words and any king Israel had known up to his time. Not even the great King David, who had literally been a shepherd in his youth, truly lived up to this mandate. Human kings had not truly filled the role God had meant for kings to fulfill, but this does not stop Jeremiah from pointing forward to a time when God would bring forth “a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and he shall deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.”

In the reading from the letter to the Christians at Colossae, we get a slightly different image, directly of Christ, one which does point to the all-encompassing authority of Christ (even speaking of God transferring us into “the kingdom of his beloved Son” in verse 13) without quite conforming to our human image of a king. Here, the “reign of Christ” is one that is meant to pull us forward into full maturity in Christ, growing in wisdom and trust as we come under the reign of the Christ who is celebrated in the hymn that begins in verse 15. This is a “king” who is “before all things, and in him all things hold together”; “the head of the body, the church”; the one in whom “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” But all this fulsome praise is not merely for praise’s sake, but to encourage the Colossians to remain steadfast in the gospel that had been proclaimed to them. Christ the King here is both the source of our wisdom and maturity, but also our only hope of attaining it. Again, not terribly characteristic of the human “kings” we recall.

But if any of today’s readings should undo all our human images of how kings work, the portion of Luke’s crucifixion account we heard ought to do it. This is the eye-twister, the one that makes our brains shut down and say “nope nope nope nope nope.”

Crucifixion was no mere means of execution in the Roman Empire. It was execution combined with humiliation. You didn’t just die; you died pathetically. Even your clothing was an object of a dice game. You were a public spectacle. You hung on that cross for all the world to see and be reminded who the real ruler was – the emperor in Rome, not some insignificant desert rabbi.

In this context, the sign placed over Jesus’s cross – “This is the King of the Jews” – was nothing less than a taunt directed towards a broken, humiliated, dying man, and indeed all who had followed him. The mockery of the soldiers pointed towards that humiliation – “you’re a king, huh? So hop on down from that cross and save yourself.” Being mocked by another criminal at the same time just heaped scorn upon scorn.

And yet Jesus’s response, hanging upon that cross? Forgiveness toward those who had done this to him, and redemption to the second criminal, the one who somehow grasped what he was seeing and cried out for mercy to Jesus.

Here is the ultimate rebuke to our very earthly tendencies about kingship and power. In the words of theologian Eberhard Busch, “The majesty of this king is revealed, not when we look up, but when we look down.” This is the kingship that Jesus has taught us, and this, if we are truly devoted to the reign of Christ, is the kingship we celebrate – one of humility, forgiveness, and utter and undying fidelity to Christ and no other. No human claim on our allegiance can ever – ever – come between or contend with our allegiance to Christ, the shepherd king, the humiliated and broken and crucified Messiah.

The Reign of Christ is not about pomp and power; its only glory is in the cross and the empty tomb. Let our human fumbling with words never lead us astray from this incomprehensible, paradoxical truth. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal):

 #12                        Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise

#109                        Blest Be the God of Israel

#274                        You, Lord, Are Both Lamb and Shepherd

#273                        He Is King of Kings

Was going to give agnusday.org a break, but in all honesty searching for images for Christ the King Sunday kinda proves the point of the sermon...