Serving the humble King

Reign of Christ Sunday, November 26, 2017
​Text:  II Samuel 5:1-5; John 12:9-19

Today is the last Sunday of the church year.  Next week  a new year begins  with the season of Advent.  To conclude this year,  today is called  the Festival of Christ the King, or  the Reign of Christ.  We’ve just heard  lessons for this  feast day,  with David being anointed  king of all Israel;  and then  the Gospel of John’s version  of the Triumphal Entry in which  Jesus is extolled as king.  That lesson concludes with a remarkable statement:  The Pharisees say, “Look,  the whole world  has gone after him.”  

And so it did.  Within a few decades of his death, stories were told  about  his miraculous birth.  By the end of the first century, he was awarded  the most exalted titles  imaginable:  Son of God,  One with the Father,  the Word become flesh,  Bread of Life, Light of the world,  the One who would come again  as cosmic King and Judge.  Within a few centuries, he was recognized  as Lord  of the Empire  that crucified him.

No other figure in the history of the Western world  has ever been accorded such extraordinary acclaim. But less so  now  in America.  

In the lifetimes of most of us  there has been a huge cultural shift  from “modernity”  to “post-modernity.”  Postmodernity challenges the notion  that there is anything such as  universal truth, whereas once  the Christian narrative held sway in this land.  For instance, when I was kid, a weekly radio program was called  “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” It was  all about Jesus.  But now, no single  “meta-narrative”  can speak for all of humanity.  In post-modernity,  no one  has  a “God’s eye” view of the world.  Even  generic belief in God  has taken a huge hit.  According to the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Survey,  in just  the last twenty-eight years, there has been a 26 percent drop  in the certainty that God exists.  

And so,  mainline Protestant  churches – churches like Trinity – have been shrinking  for more than four decades.  The numbers are  devastating.  Statistically,  every Sunday,  somewhere in the United States  seventy-one churches will celebrate their last Sunday service.  Annually, some 3,700 churches  end up closing their doors.  Researcher George Barna says  that churches lose an estimated 2,765.000 attendees every year. In our  current congregational project,  we need to recognize  that what we are trying to do  is to climb up  on a down escalator.  Which, of course, makes the small, but noticeable surge of increased children and their families here at Trinity Church  even more impressive.  We  are  trying to rise  at a time  of sharp decline in mainline Protestantism. We know that, don’t we?  But I suppose,  it can serve to make our shared adventure  that much more interesting,  don’t you think?

Before I move on from this  excursis into religious sociology,  one more thing I want to say,  which is,  that this  bad news  is not  the whole story in 21st century America.  Sure, says David Hollinger, an historian at U.C. Berkeley – sure,  the old-line, ecumenical Protestant denominations are in decline.  And up until recently,  the more evangelical and fundamentalist churches  have been thriving,  apparently  at our expense.  But also consider this:  We of  the ecumenical mainline  have been  “more accepting of religious diversity,  more sympathetic to  anti-racist legislation and judicial rulings,  more skeptical of American foreign policy,  more supportive of abortion rights,  more concerned with civil liberties issues,  more tolerant of non-marital cohabitation,  and more accepting of same-sex relationships.”  The fact  that these values  are now embraced  by many, if not most, Americans  is due  in no small part  to the leadership  of the old-line Protestant churches.  All of which  has led  sociologist N. J. Demarath III  to contend  that the ecumenical churches – we – may have lost  American Protestantism,  but we have  won  the United States.  Isn’t that fascinating?  And deeply heartening?

David Hollinger goes on to say  that the steep decline of Protestant establishment churches has occurred  because, by and large,  the children  raised in this tradition,  where they learned  the values of acceptance of diversity  and tolerance for difference,  did not  see  the indispensable need  for communities of faith  or for theology  to sustain the values  they learned  in places like this.  And so  religion, and especially spirituality,  have become  a personal choice  rather than  a vital necessity.

So we have  an enormous challenge.  It’s why  we are spending so much time  trying to get clear on what it is  we stand for.  And how  we are going to express this  in our life and work.  

I think that we,  along with all our brothers and sisters  in ecumenical American Protestantism  need to keep  doing what is  our unique hallmark.  We are the followers of Jesus  who take  both theology  and social action seriously.  We  not only appreciate  the social sciences and the critical study of Scripture  but also, at our best,  practice the presence of God  made know in Jesus Christ.  We are people who appreciate tradition – not to be confused with convention – and  also  new ways of expressing the faith.  We  value  the gifts of culture  and, at our best,  remain  counter-cultural  and  distinctively  Christian.  Particularly,  in this  historical moment. 

* * * *
So…  okay.  Mainline American Protestant Christianity  is  less fashionable than it used to be.  But where did we  ever get the idea  that the way of Christ  was supposed to be  popular,  successful,  and culturally dominant?  Yes,  it used to be  in this country.  But the idea that it should be  probably has much more to do  with  the anomaly  of the so-called “revival of religion” in the 1950s – and  the Emperor Constantine – than  it has to do  with  Jesus of Nazareth.

    When Jesus was born,  it was in a shed.
        Herod promptly sought to assassinate him.
            His earthly parents opposed his vocation.

His disciples  listened to his words, but did not understand.
    The rich young ruler turned away from him.
        Some whom he healed thought he was a sorcerer.
            Religious leaders plotted against him.
                Judas sold him out for thirty coins.
                    Peter repudiated him.
                        His other followers deserted him.

A crowd which had hailed him  soon  thirsted for his blood. He was accused of sedition.
    Pilate at first  tried to avoid him,  then  condemned him to death.
        The soldiers mocked him.
            A criminal taunted him from the cross.
                Some  gambled for his garments.
                    Skepticism greeted his resurrection.

A strange  kind of king, this Jesus.  It may not be  the worst thing  that our kind of Christianity  has fewer  cultural supports  and is less “the thing to do”  and “the place to be”  than used to be the case.  It could be  especially at the margins  that we can understand  whose we are  and where he would lead us.

He rode into Jerusalem, accompanied by those who had become part of his movement,  his  alternative community,  based  on  active,  risk-taking  compassion.  They entered  to challenge  the conventional wisdom of their day,  and the culture  of separation  and exclusion  that emerged from it.

But the outcome that week in Jerusalem  was devastating.  He and his counter-community  were  destroyed.  Pilate and Herod  were victorious.  So quickly,  it was all over.  But we  know  better.  Actually,  it had barely  begun.

* * * *
Still  he rides – into cities and villages  where outcasts are shunned  and women abused,  where hurts  are not healed  and the poor are despised,  and violent means are employed  everywhere.  Still,  he challenges  the conventional wisdom  which destroys the innocent,  and blames  victims,  and exonerates  those  who are too important  or too busy  or too pure  to get involved.

Still  he seeks to enlist  disciples  for his new community.  In its own life,  his community  is to live  the alternative values  he taught and lived,  and to seek the transformation  of the world.  We can hope to do this  only  by being grounded  in the Spirit  of the compassionate,  cruciform  Christ.

He will not  bowl us over.  Not  this  humble king.  He will allow us  to put him off,  to crowd him  out of our busy lives.  He will even allow us, again,  to push him  out of the world,  onto a cross.

“He comes to us as  One unknown,” Albert Schweitzer wrote  in the conclusion of his classic work,  The Quest for the Historical Jesus.  “He comes to us… without a name,  as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not.  He speaks to us the same words: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks  which He has to fulfill  for our time.  He commands.  And to those who obey Him,  whether they be  wise or simple,  He will reveal himself  in the toils,  the conflicts,  the sufferings  which they shall pass through in His fellowship,  and,  as  an ineffable mystery,  they shall learn [– we  shall learn –]  in [our] own experience  Who  He is.”
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-- With thanks to Norman Bendroth, Marcus Borg, 
    Jaroslav Pelikan and William Stringfellow