11 24 2024 REIGN OF CHRIST

Rena Turnham

The Venerable Rena Turnham

Last Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 29 “Reign of Christ”

November 24, 2024

St. John the Baptist – Minneapolis John 18:33-37

 

Today we celebrate Christ the King. The Reign of Christ. For many reasons, this feast day can be hard to embrace.

We’re not too keen on kings in this part of the world; they represent the very thing we sought our independence from, the tyranny we fought so hard to escape from when we became a country and a church, when our white ancestors fled from England, the grip of her kings AND her church, to become the United States of America and the Episcopal Church.

So why do we keep the feast of Christ the King Sunday?

A little background…

This feast is relatively new to our liturgical calendar; it was first instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925, when he wrote the encyclical Quas Primas. In it, he laid out the different understandings of the kind of kingship that Jesus Christ possesses – the kind of authority we ought to not only point to but humble ourselves to and submit to.

This proclamation came on the heels of World War I, which was known at the time as the Great War, the War to End War, the most deadly and destructive war the world had ever seen at that time.

Nationalism and fascism were taking root and spreading like wildfire across Europe.

Today, our world seems like it’s falling apart at every turn.

What’s left for us today to hold on to on this feast day, to reconnect to in our minds and draw closer to in our hearts?

Our message today is that we are FIRST and FORMOST citizens of the Kingdom of God. Empires and nation states will come and go, including ours, but God endures.

I don’t know about you, but this is EXACTLY what I NEED to hear right now.

It’s exactly what I WANT to hear…post-election and just a few days away from when I’ll be sitting at my family’s Thanksgiving table with people who I love; people who think so very differently about what’s wrong with our society and our country and about what this nation and the world need right now.

 

Even our reason for gathering, the story of Thanksgiving, isn’t just inaccurate, it’s a bloodless myth about how the Indigenous people handed off their land to white people so that a great nation dedicated to liberty and opportunity could be born, planting the seeds of Manifest Destiny.

So, what is TRUE? Where CAN WE find TRUTH?

We can look to Jesus – The Way, The Truth, and The Life.

What we need now is ‘other worldliness’ – a kind of world beyond our understanding and our imagination. The Beloved Community, the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom Jesus the Christ himself ushered in.

When we strive to Walk the Way of Jesus, the Way of Love, we’re exercising our responsibilities in being co-builders of the Beloved Community.

This is not a feel good, sugary, sweet kind of love. It’s about what Jesus said and did, speaking and exemplifying truth in love, solidly standing with the marginalized and the oppressed. It’s about calling for the liberation of all and not doing it from the sidelines of our comfortable pews, homes, school, neighborhoods, and places of work.

It’s about getting unstuck from our daze and paralysis and fear of ‘the other, the immigrant neighbor, the trans neighbor, the Muslim neighbor…and the church member, family member, and neighbor who voted differently from ourselves.

It’s about being with the very people Jesus held and healed, and speaking truth to power for the sake of all in the grips of oppressive governments and nation states.

I’d like to put two movies on your holiday must-watch list: Conclave and Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin. Raise your hand please if you’ve seen either of these films.

No spoiler alerts here, other than be prepared to be wowed by narratives that challenge the

status quo of the church while witnessing the expansiveness of God’s love and the true sacrifice

of discipleship and truth telling.

Bonhoeffer is the true story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man who preached love while plotting the assassination of Adolf Hitler. It begs the question; how far will you go to stand up for what’s right and true?

Conclave is a fictional thriller. It takes place in modern times after the Pope dies of a heart attack and the College of Cardinals gathers in seclusion for a papal conclave to choose the new pope. Through an ancient spiritual process carried out by fallible men, God shows up on the scene in a most surprising and vulnerable way that I found to be in a similar fashion to Incarnation and the Resurrection. Otherworldly, unexpected, expansive, and inclusive.

 

Both movies are thought provoking, inspiring, and challenging, offering a glimpse at the ‘otherworldliness’ of the Kingdom of God. Both demonstrate the power of God waged against the ambition of humans. And both draw eerie parallels with the current political environment in which we find ourselves.

Bonhoeffer teaches us that we can’t be blind or inactive to injustice. It’s not faithful, in fact it’s

sinful.

Bonhoeffer reminds that we must seize critical moments to recommit to being partners and partakers in the Kingdom of God, beyond prayer, to become active builders of the Beloved Community. We do this by the power of Christ’s reign in our hearts. So that we may be God’s love and action in the world.

We can practice this when we stand with our gay, lesbian, and trans siblings, when we stand with our immigrant siblings in our pews and with those we serve at Casa Maria. We can practice this as we accompany our immigrant families from Ecuador.

Will we look these people in their eyes and remind them that they’re made in the image God,

God’s beloved, that WE love them, and that no harm shall come to them under our watch?

Will we be sanctuary for one another, in this place, and in our hearts and for those whose fears become realized?

For this is what the Kingdom of God looks like. Empires come and go; tyrannical leaders come and go.

Evil stirs the hearts of people to demonize the other and create a climate of hostility and indifference toward their plight.

And yet, God HAS prevailed, God IS prevailing, God WILL prevail, in and through us. This is the promise that we point to when we celebrate Christ the King.

It’s also important to note that today is the last Sunday of the liturgical year, the Sunday before the beginning of Advent.

We can almost think of this as the New Year’s Eve of the liturgical year.

It can be an opportunity to look back and take stock of all that is and has been.

Both the gratitude and the joy, and heartache and the tears, and to look forward to what Christ points to and is, and what our participation in THAT kingdom looks like.

What did we do with the gift of our own lives and the life of this congregation, as gifts to the world, for the sake of others and the sake of the Kingdom of God, the building up of the Beloved Community?

By the grace of God, at St. John’s we have done so much this past year!

 

We have welcomed the newly baptized, served and blessed God’s creation, confirmed our youth, travelled on pilgrimage, worshipped God through song and praise, blessed newly arrived immigrants, and fed, clothed, and educated many people experiencing poverty and homelessness. We have mourned our dead, grieved losses, celebrated countless blessings. We have wrestled with our church’s role in Indigenous boarding schools. We have dreamed of the future God is calling us to through our ministry of Sustainable Mission.

We have lived out our baptismal promises in a broken world, not merely hoping for a new day, but living each day in faith, hope, and love.

This isn’t only countercultural, but it’s courageous.

As Christian nationalism spreads and some peddle the God of authoritarianism, harsh judgement, and false promises we can be the people who not only remember Christ the King but also strive to be that love, that peace, that mercy, that healing, that justice.

Let us pray:

O God, as we approach Advent help us to grasp its invitation, so our hearts and minds may be re-illuminated, reignited, as we await Jesus’ coming so we that we too can be the light our world so desperately needs right now.

Amen

10am Service