Readings for the Last Sunday after Pentecost: Feast of Christ the King
Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14
Psalm 93
Revelation 1:4b-8
John 18:33-37
This sermon was preached at Christ Episcopal Church Eureka on Sunday November 25, 2018.
Today is the feast day of Christ the King, the culmination and conclusion of the liturgical year. Next Sunday we begin a new liturgical year with the first Sunday of Advent; and I am so excited to experience my first Advent and Christmas with you all in this beautiful space, with all the angels who join us for worship. We might consider today, Christ the King Sunday, to be our parish’s patronal feast day since we, as a parish, are named after Christ. A few days ago, many of us gathered here for a Thanksgiving Eucharist followed the next day by a delicious Thanksgiving feast (prepared primarily by Thomas and Sanford) and we celebrated the 150th anniversary of the day our founder Thomas Walsh wrote a letter to the Humboldt Times expressing his intention to build an Episcopal church in Eureka. I read Walsh’s original letter in its entirety on Thanksgiving and I want to read a small portion of it today, on Christ the King Sunday, because in it, Thomas Walsh explains why he wanted this church to be named Christ Church. On November 21st, 1868, Thomas Walsh Esquire wrote, “I propose deo volente [God willing] erecting an Episcopal Church in Eureka, to be called Christ Church (I think a most appropriate name: Christ being the means, the Faith, and the door to Heaven). [I propose doing this] with the assistance of the good people of this place, knowing their liberality heretofore,” which is a 19th century way of saying, “I believe this will happen because people in Eureka are very generous.” It was important to Thomas Walsh that our church be called Christ Episcopal Church because Christ is our access and our door to heaven, and because Christ is the King of heaven and earth, and because Christ longs to be the King of all our hearts. What does that mean? What does it mean for Christ to be the king of our hearts?
I invite us to look for some clues in the Gospel reading appointed for this feast day, a reading from the Gospel of John. Our reading begins after Jesus has been betrayed by his disciple, arrested by a cohort of soldiers (which is about 600), interrogated by the high priest while being slapped in the face, all while his close friend and disciple Peter denies having anything to do with him.[1] The Jewish leaders hand Jesus over to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, who has the power to execute Jesus in the most horrific, violent, and humiliating way. And so our reading begins with Pilate summoning Jesus and asking him, “Are you the King of the Jews? What have you done?”
Jesus answers, “My kingdom is not from this world.” What does this mean? This does not mean that Jesus’s reign is purely heavenly, “leaving earth to stew in its own [toxic] juice.”
Anglican bishop N. T. Wright explains, “The saying [My kingdom is not from this world] isn’t about the kingdom’s location, but about its character: this kingdom isn’t the sort that advances by violence. It will come on earth as in heaven, because it is about truth. Pilate […] doesn’t know that there can be a kingdom without violence.”[2] Pilate doesn’t know what the truth is.
Pilate asks, “So are you a king?” Jesus responds and says, “I came into this world to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
If you open up your Bibles to John 18 on page 987, you can read what the lectionary unfortunately leaves out, which is the next verse (38), in which Pilate asks Jesus his most famous (or infamous) question: “What is truth?” It’s actually a great question and I admire Pilate for asking it; but unfortunately, Pilate fails to stick around long enough to listen to Jesus’s answer. Instead, he walks off to speak to the Jewish leaders and then orders his soldiers to flog Jesus, soldiers who then dress him mockingly in a purple robe, spew insults at him, strike him on the face, crown him with a crown of thorns, strip him naked and crucify him.
I wonder what Jesus would have said to Pilate if Pilate remained with Jesus and genuinely listened to him after asking his question “What is truth?” Maybe Jesus would have said, “I am the way, the truth and the life” as he says in John 14:6. Or maybe Jesus would have simply sat in silence and looked Pilate in the eyes and maybe that’s why Pilate left because he was too uncomfortable with the silence, as many of us can be. Maybe Jesus was inviting Pilate to pause and take a breath and listen in the silence for the answer to his question, “What is truth?”
Have you ever asked God a question and spent time actually listening in silence for some kind of response? Silence is, after all, God’s first language. Everything else is a poor translation. Contemplative author Henri Nouwen asked,
Have you ever tried to spend a whole hour doing nothing but listening to the voice that dwells deep in your heart? … It is not easy to enter into the silence and reach beyond the many boisterous and demanding voices of our world and to discover there the small intimate voice saying: “You are my Beloved Child, on you my favor rests.” Still, if we dare to […] befriend [the] silence, we will come to know that voice.[3]
Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.
The voice that Christ invites us to listen to is the divine voice that says, “You are my beloved child, on you my favor rests.” It is the inner voice of love. And it is the ultimate truth. The answer to Pilate’s question. If he would have entered into the silence and reached beyond the many boisterous and demanding voices of his world he would have heard it. Can we hear it? Can you hear it?
When we talk about Christ as the King of our hearts, we are talking about that voice of love reigning supreme in our hearts and minds. All the other boisterous and demanding voices will still be there, but when Christ is the king of our hearts, those voices become almost irrelevant as the divine voice of love holds court.
This Voice of Love does not rule by force or violence. At the same time, the voice of Love is not a therapeutic self-esteem boost meant to tranquilize us. Archbishop Desmond Tutu described the voice of Love when he said, “God loves me as I am to help me become all that I have in me to become…those who think this opens the door for moral laxity have obviously never been in love for love is […] demanding.” In the words of the English hymn writer Isaac Watts, whose feast day happens to be today, this love is “so amazing, so divine, [that it] demands my soul, my life, my all.”
When we let the voice of Love rule our hearts and our homes, our church and our community, we begin to manifest on earth the kingdom of heaven and we become a powerful and hope-filled sign of the truth that we celebrate today, the truth that Christ is indeed king. Amen.
[1] The high priest Caiaphas understood that the Roman execution of an apparent Jewish Messiah would actually benefit the Jewish people politically. In this same chapter in John (18:14), Caiaphas is identified as the one who advised the Jewish leaders that it would be good if one Jewish man died. The death would be a kind of cathartic release valve for all the pent-up tensions between Judea and Rome.
[2] N.T. Wright, Twelve Months of Sundays: Biblical Meditations on the Christian Years A, B & C (Morehouse: New York, 2012), 257.
[3] Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World (New York: Crossroads, 2002), excerpt from the Inward/Outward daily meditation
DANIEL DeFOREST LONDON 
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