Today
is “Christ the King” Sunday, sometimes called “Reign of Christ
Sunday.”  It is the last Sunday of the Christian Liturgical year,
the completion of the annual cycle of remembrance and growth.  Next
Sunday we start a new year of remembering and recreating with the
beginning of a new Advent.   I often skip these texts, and this
topic.  Most years the hierarchy of monarchy and patriarchy of
kingship combined with ridiculously high Christology are enough to
turn my stomach.  Many years Thanksgiving gives me a way out.

This
year I heard the texts and the topic with a different energy.  This
year I heard them speak about leadership, and I heard them speaking
about leadership in a radically different way than it is normally
spoken of.  As I continued to reflect on the texts, I was reminded
that not everyone identifies as a leader, but we all lead.  Much of
the leadership in human history and even today has been about
CONTROL, and about having power OVER other humans.  God doesn’t call
anyone into that sort of leadership.  God calls us into relationships
with each other, and leadership in that vein is about shared
empowerment.  That is, I think that there are leadership components
in every relationship, even (if I’m honest) the relationship we have
with ourselves.  That is, within each of us there are various needs,
desires, and values vying for control, and some of the work of our
lives is to balance each of those so that good is maximized – thus
there is leadership within.

Unfortunately,
often relationship between people are centered on control, instead of
on mutual benefit, listening, and affection.  Those relationships
reflect a system of broken leadership, utterly unlike the idea of the
reign of God – which is also called the kindom of God.

It
seems at times that we don’t spend adequate focus on the kindom of
God.  You may disagree, and that’s OK!  However, since the kindom is
mentioned twice in the Lord’s Prayer, and is said to be the ACTUAL
messages that Jesus preached in his ministry, I don’t think is is
possible to focus on it too much.

Together,
we spend a few sermons focusing on it in 2014, and I want to bring
back some of the ideas we talked about then.  They seem really
central to our faith, and it has been a while (and not everyone was
here then.)  Both then, and now, I think this quote from Rev. Dr.
John Cobb is the most important thing I can share to bring the idea
of the kindom of God into clarity:

“Jesus
did not do away with the future tense. We still pray for its coming.
Clearly there is no earthly political region (basileia) that realizes
this ideal. Nevertheless, what is different in Jesus message is that
this ideal is already being realized. He says it is ‘at hand.’ Even
in his lifetime, to follow him was to take part in this new reality.
His table fellowship already realized it.”¹
“Jesus understood his message to be the proclamation
of the kingdom of heaven understood as a great opportunity or
blessing, not as a terrifying judgment. … ’The kingdom is
“at hand.” The requirement for being part of that kingdom is that
one change the basic way one thinks and lives. … Even more
important in my view is that a “basileia” need not be
hierarchically governed at all. Of course, the “basileia” Jesus
proclaimed involved God’s will being done. But when we read the
beatitudes, to take but one example, we may be struck by the
absence of one saying that those who obey God’s laws are blessed.
The first one, for example, says “blessed are the poor in
spirit,” and it goes on to say explicitly that “for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven.” (Mt.5:3) There is nothing here to indicate that
we should understand that the government of the divine
“basileia” would be like that of an earthly
kingdom, simply with God replacing the earthly ruler. That may have
been the theology of the translators of the New Testament, but there
is no reason to attribute it to Jesus. Jesus prayed to God as “abba”
of “papa.” Papa cares deeply how his children behave but even
more for their true happiness. The basileia of abba is
not a “kingdom.” I know of not perfect translation, but I am
fully convinced that “commonwealth” is better than “kingdom.”
One of the ways in which Jesus called people to change their thinking
was away from the hierarchical mindset that expresses itself in
“kingdom.”²

While
I REALLY like the idea of the commonwealth of God, or the basileia, I
most often use the phrase “kindom of God.”  I use it because it
is identifiable as related to the “kingdom of God” and also names
a different dream – the dream of the time when all the world will
live in justice and peace because all people will treat each other as
kin.  If there is any meaning to Christ being KING, it is that this
sort of kindom is what the Body of Christ is working on building.

By
the way, this kindom of God is language from the New Testament, but
it isn’t something that really started with Jesus.  Jesus preaching
was continuous with and based on the visions of God from the Hebrew
Bible.  Rev. Dr. Cobb
connects the prophetic tradition with Jesus’ kindom message saying,

“Jesus
calls us uncompromisingly to enter the prophetic tradition of Israel,
the one long-lasting tradition in human history that calls for a
reversal of the social, political and economic values that are
otherwise universally accepted. True wisdom is not what is taught in
universities. True wealth is not material possessions. True power is
not the ability to force people to do one’s will. Communities based
on this deep reversal are “at hand.” We can take part in them as
a foretaste of God’s hope for the whole world. Jesus understood his
mission to be to proclaim and realize this possibility.”³

That
all being said, the work of the Body of Christ to build the kindom
may make more sense in the words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, as
he preached it,

“We
shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to
endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force.
Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot
in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because noncooperation
with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.
Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and
threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded
perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and
beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be
ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One
day we shall win freedom but not only for ourselves. We shall so
appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the
process and our victory will be a double victory.”⁴

In
their own ways, our texts today also point to the kindom of God.  The
Gospel lesson has long annoyed me, mostly because it seems to assume
that salvation has to do with afterlife, and I simply don’t think
that reflects the authentic Jesus.  The Jesus Seminar colored this
text black (vindication!!), indicating that they don’t think it
reflects the actual words or ideas of Jesus, but rather of the early
Christian community.  

The
text is worried about the care of “the least of these” which is
part of what the kindom of God is all about. One scholar points out
that of the ways that the sheep and goats were judged, “The first
five actions were typical Jewish acts of mercy.  (Jews did not use
imprisonment as punishment.)”⁵
Matthew thought that while those early Christians were waiting for
Jesus to come back, they should act in continuity with good living as
both Jesus and the Jews had understood it.  That scholar connects
these commandments even more strongly to the kindom, saying, “Jesus
teaches that God’s reign, the full revelation of which we await –
is characterized in the present, not by powerful works and miracles,
but by deeds of love, mercy, and compassion, especially toward those
most in need.”⁶

Our
Ezekiel passage understands salvation to be healing for the whole
community, not a particular form of afterlife. (Phew)  It sees all of
us as sheep – some overfed and some underfed- but all the same.
This text speaks of a God who wants justice, not punishment.  There
is a bit of punishment in it, but even within that, God’s concern is
for caring for the afflicted!  This passage comes after an extended
metaphor about the leaders of Israel being like bad shepherds who
don’t care for their sheep.  Here, God claims that God will shepherd
the people directly, since the human leaders have failed them so
badly.  Historically, this passage is placed within the exile, and
Ezekiel is speaking hope to the people in a time and place when hope
itself is a form of resistance!

God
wants the people well led, so
that justice and love define their lives together.  In both the
Gospel and in Ezekiel we see the concern God has in how ALL of the
people are treated, especially the vulnerable.  God wants the people
to have good leaders, who care about the vulnerable, who care about
the well-being of the whole community, who are using the resources
they have for the COMMUNAL well-being instead of just using the power
for their own enrichment.  The Bible, time and time again, calls on
leaders and on the justice system to be FAIR, and JUST, and to make
sure the vulnerable have a fair chance.  It really is a different
idea of what leadership is than I tend to see in the world at large.

We,
all of us, are called into the kindom, which is build on people
believing in an alternative set of values – values of cooperation,
values of shared joy, values of hope, a refusal to discount the full
humanity of anyone, of peaceful resistance, of trust in God.  The
kindom one where all the sheep are well-cared for.  It requires
leadership, and it requires it of all of us.  We have to let go of
the idea of power over others or control of them, that isn’t the way
of God.  Enforcing our will isn’t leadership.  Caring about each
other’s well-being, listening and responding, that’s leadership.  As
Jesus said, the kindom is at hand. We are called to be leaders of the
kindom.  May we learn the values well, and teach them with our lives.
Amen

1 Dr.
John Cobb “Fourth
Sunday after Epiphany” Process and Faith Lectionary Commentary,
accessed
on February 1, 2014.

2 Dr.
John Cobb “Third
Sunday after Epiphany” Process and Faith Lectionary Commentary,
http://processandfaith.org/resources/lectionary-commentary/yeara/2014-01-26/third-sunday-after-epiphany
accessed on January 25, 2014.

3 Dr.
John Cobb “Fourth
Sunday after Epiphany” Process and Faith Lectionary Commentary,
http://processandfaith.org/resources/lectionary-commentary/yeara/2014-02-02/fourth-sunday-after-epiphany
accessed
on February 1, 2014.

4
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King A
Christmas Sermon for Peace on Dec 24, 1967

5 Thomas
D. Stegman, SJ “Exegetical Perspective on Matthew 25:31-46” in
Feasting on the World Year A Volume 4, David L. Bartlett and
Barbara Brown Taylor, editors (Westminster John Knox Press:
Louisville, KY, 2011) 335

6 Thomas
D. Stegman, SJ,  337

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady