Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

On this Feast of Christ the King we are invited to meditate on a rather foreign concept to us modern, Western people. We have no king in this nation; though sometimes looking at the nastiness that seems to define Washington at present we may wish we had one. Even those European countries which have maintained a monarchy have kept the institution while gradually stripping it of its political power over the course of centuries. It’s hard for us to wrap our minds around what that image of Jesus on his “throne of glory” is all about. The best image most of us have of kingship is from things like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones.

But the reality is, none of our images in popular culture really gets to the heart of the biblical view of kingship. We must, then, remind ourselves of the political milieu of the first century. The Jews were, as happened so many times during their history, a people ruled by heathen outsiders. While much can be said of the benefits Roman rule brought to the Ancient Near East as well as Europe, the reality is that those subjected to such rule without consent were not inclined to appreciate an Emperor governing from a thousand miles away. While governance by consent is a hopelessly anachronistic concept, we can nonetheless appreciate the fact that the Jews would have been none-too-happy about the arrangement, just like I said last week regarding the Jews during the period of Seleucid rule during which Daniel was written. To make things worse, Roman rule was not a benign institution in this part of the ancient world. Granted, most Roman governors made shrewd concessions to those practicing the Jewish religion in order to keep the peace (concessions which former empires, like the Hellenists, had failed to make). Even so, the uneasy peace which would ultimately break apart roughly thirty years after the death of Christ was constantly tested by regressive taxation and occasional violent persecution.

Suffice it to say, Roman rule in Israel was predicated on one overarching goal- namely, the accumulation and protection of power in the hands of a few individuals. There is no sense of a social contract in this period, no commonwealth. Contemporary anarchists have no idea how good we have it today, in a nation which (for all of its flaws) recognizes that, to some extent at least, we’re all in it together. I mean, these days we at least get tax breaks for doing what we ought to be doing anyway, like contributing to the church and to charities.
This being the context, Jesus’ action in as our sovereign is all the more radical. I think the most clear example of this is our Lord’s action during his crucifixion. As the King reigning from his throne, the cross, Jesus welcomes a stranger, a criminal, into his kingdom. He doesn’t require proper documentation or a citizenship exam or the promise to pay taxes. He doesn’t ask the criminal hanging beside him if he’s really a terrorist out to infiltrate the Kingdom of God. In response to nothing more than sincere desire, our meek king said “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

The King of Glory is a King whose law is love, and (as I’ve said from this pulpit many times before) Christian love is not about warm, sentimental feelings; it’s about treating those people we call brothers and sisters as if they really were our brothers and sisters. It’s about comforting the weak and feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and putting the stranger’s needs before our own.

And when I say “stranger”, I mean it. If Christ is truly King, it means that His Law is universal. It really means that we are obliged to see our God and King in people outside our own community. It means we treat the stranger just as well as the person already inside our walls, because in a very real sense the stranger is our King. It means we have to welcome the criminal, just like Jesus did. It’s easy to prop up those whom we see as “our own” (which phrase, by the by, implies a rather disturbing sense of ownership we claim over those who wish to live their lives in community with us). It’s far more difficult to see Jesus in the outsider and thus to treat that outsider as if he were more important than ourselves. As William Tyndale, father of the English Bible, famously put it, “The Church is the one institution that exists for those outside it.” I fear, sometimes, that we’ve forgotten that.

In all events, the Kingship of Christ is not only different from the kingship of the emperor; it is diametrically opposed to the spirit of our age- the spirit which revels in individualism and so-called enlightened self interest. There is no place in the Kingdom for ethical egoism. I am not sure which is worse: an Emperor in Rome or a king in every man’s self-estimation. Whichever is worse, the latter is the contemporary sin, and it is more dangerous than the former at least as it regards our souls.

So our response to the Kingship of Christ is pretty simple. It is in loving sacrifice that we involve ourselves in Christ’s Kingship. It is in that remarkable paradox in which we see Christ reigning not only from His Throne of Glory, but from the Cross of Shame with a Crown bejeweled by thorns. Our own Glory, our own Kingship is bought on that more shameful throne with that most heavy crown, and our acceptance of the reign which Christ wishes to give us is a condition of our willingness to take up that Cross, put on that crown and follow.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It is only once in our whole three-year lectionary cycle that we get to hear from the Prophet Daniel, so as wonderful as this morning’s Epistle and Gospel are, I feel I should focus on this strange Old Testament book. You’re likely to have heard the more well-known incidents from the book—the fiery furnace and the lion’s den and so forth—but it’s the really weird bits, like Daniel’s dream of the four beasts and that interesting character, the Archangel Michael, whose first appearance is in this morning’s lesson, which are perhaps more interesting.

Like most hopeful tales, Daniel was paradoxically written in the context of desolation. A little history: after the death of Alexander the Great the known world got divided up to his forebears, and by the 2nd Century B.C. the King Antiochus Epiphanes came to rule over Israel. Antiochus instituted a program of Hellenization, conforming the customs of conquered peoples to the Greek standard. This included mandatory worship of Zeus rather than the God of Israel, and imprisonment or even death for those who failed to comply. Needless to say the Jews were not tickled with this state of affairs, and although a number gave into Antiochus’ pressure, a faithful remnant remained true to God despite certain persecution. A goodly number, despite the personal cost, stayed true to the words of the psalmist:

Their libations of blood I will not offer,*
nor take the names of their gods upon my lips.

It was in the context of this difficulty that the book of Daniel was written. It’s a funny little book, and in some ways out of place in the Old Testament. It is partially in Aramaic rather than biblical Hebrew, the only Old Testament book to use the more modern dialect. It was, you see, written for the people alive then to read. Daniel is neither straight prophecy nor standard history, but allegory, much like the New Testament book of Revelation.

The author of Daniel was writing about the struggles of his people in the present, during the Greek occupation, but he placed the story in an older context, the days of the Babylonian captivity. Instead of Antiochus Epiphanes he wrote about Nebuchadrezzar and Belshazzar. The very present reality which was implied underneath the text would have been apparent to the faithful Jews suffering under the yoke of foreign rule, and it was not explicit enough to get the author or his readers into more trouble (just like, as you may know, John used coded language in Revelation in order to speak about the Romans without being explicit enough to get his readers crucified themselves).

And the similarities between Daniel and Revelation do not end with the fact that both are obscure and symbolic. Both books are written in the context of horrendous persecution, but both are among the most hopeful books in the bible. Revelation presents us with the vision of a new heaven and a new earth in which God has put all things to rights for his faithful people. Just so, Daniel presents a remarkably hopeful vision in the midst of a situation which would lead most to despair:

Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, [it says] some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.

This is the first explicit mention in the bible of the Resurrection of the dead, the great hope which Jesus himself would define and enable. It was only in the midst of an apparently hopeless situation that the most hopeful message in the history of humankind was revealed.

So it is for so many of us. Steve Miller was no theologian, and though it’s not literally true, there’s something to that old lyric “You know you got to go through hell before you get to heaven.” Christian mystics throughout the centuries have recognized that great hope and joy comes out of apparently hopeless situations. As I’ve mentioned before, St. Teresa of Avilla wrote about aridity, dry periods which seem always to precede spiritual breakthroughs; St. Ignatius of Loyola wrote about the twin experiences of desolation and consolation, the former being the precursor to the latter; and St. John of the Cross wrote of the “dark night of the soul”, a period of pain and fear which preceded his own spiritual awakening.

This is not to say that God causes pain. God did not will that the Jews should suffer under the yoke of the Babylonians and the Greeks, that early Christians should be put to death by Rome, that all the nasty experiences that we might suffer in our lifetime should have visited us. However, God can and does use those experiences as a means for revealing his glory and love. Just as Jesus said to his disciples in today’s Gospel: “do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come… This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.” May we, then, recognize that in the midst of our own troubles, God is still at work, bringing about a new and better creation; let us pray for patience in the midst of these trials, knowing that at the end of every death comes the light of resurrection.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My wife was on the board of the local community theater group back when we were in Arkansas, and it occurred to me how shocking it would have been for a priest’s spouse to be involved in such a venture only a few hundred years ago. The theater was considered borderline unacceptable by many church people, and actors were considered the worst of the worst. There is a famous church in New York, the church of the Transfiguration, which made quite a splash by permitting theater-folk into the church. Actors were reckoned a lowly bunch, and the bad rap didn’t start with John Wilkes Booth or even the bawdy seventeenth century plays that the puritans had banned before the Restoration. In fact, the idea that acting was a most disreputable profession can be traced back at least to the ancient Greeks, who coined an interesting word for play-actors: hupokrites. Hypocrites.

I don’t share this little lesson in etymology to deplore the theater, which I quite enjoy, but to help flesh out what we’re up against with the sin Jesus warns against in today’s Gospel. “Beware of the scribes,” he said, “who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”

You see, hypocrisy is like malicious play-acting, putting on a performance whose audience doesn’t know is a show, for an undetermined but usually high cost of admission. And when the subject matter of said performance is religious, the deception is dangerous indeed.

And, what’s worse, the actors in the charade that is religious hypocrisy can be very good, so good that their tactics are only seen once tremendous damage has already been done. Religious hypocrites have gone from devouring widows’ houses to committing horrible acts of violence, physical and spiritual, against the weakest among us. And it’s not only the so-called “crazies”, the David Koreshes and Jim Joneses of the world, but ministers, priests, and rabbis from the American religious mainline. “Beware the scribes,” indeed!

But let us change the focus from these, turn around the camera which captures their shows, because nothing is easier than pointing out hypocrisy in others. Such radical forms of hypocrisy can serve as an easy distraction, because we can always say, “well, I’m not as much a hypocrite as him.” The difficult task, the hard work which we all need to do, is to search our own hearts for what apparently minor hypocrisies any of us is prone to commit.
I’m in an especially dangerous position, because, though a sinful person like anyone, my profession means that I walk around in long robes, and I do have the best seat in the synagogue (except when the bishop comes and displaces me from it). It is a short step from doing my job and exercising my authority appropriately to clericalism, and it’s an even shorter step from clericalism to outright hypocrisy.

But I am not alone in these dangerous waters, you see, for every single Christian can fall into it because of pride or simply negligence. A good model for all of us, however, is found in the second half of this morning’s Gospel.
“Jesus sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.'”

Now, the point is neither that rich people and their contributions are bad nor that penury is a laudable choice. If all you have in the world is “two small copper coins”, I’m not advising that you put it in the offering plate this morning, because I don’t want to be accused of devouring widows’ houses. The point is quite different from this.

In both Mark and Luke, the story of the widow’s mite, as it’s come to be called, immediately follows the denunciation of the scribes, and biblical scholars will tell you that this is intentional. Both episodes are meant to be understood as meditations on the same theme, the dichotomy between authenticity and hypocrisy. This is why, though neither Mark nor Luke says it explicitly, it is believed that those putting great sums into the treasury were actually doing it with great pomp and ceremony, ostentatiously drawing attention to their generosity. In other words, they were play-acting, just like the scribes. They wanted to be seen as surpassing “holy”. Giving generously wasn’t the problem, it was giving simply to be seen giving that was. The widow did not make a great deal of her offering. She just gave it.

Money is an obvious example, because it’s so tangible. It can be both a great source of good and potentially harmful to the soul, and we can often see the effects either way, comparing those who give selflessly and those who either become miserly or who give for self-aggrandizement. I challenge you to consider this as we wrap up our annual pledge drive next week. But money is just the most tangible example of this dichotomy of hypocrisy and authenticity. In reality, all that we do and say has implications in this regard. When we follow the widow to the treasury, the treasury of merit as the medievals called it, we deposit all our good works. Whether what we do is authentic or hypocritical, God can no doubt use it to His own ends, but it is only a true offering and a sacrifice if it’s done for the love of God, and his people, and his Church rather than for the love of attention.

In some ways, I feel like I’m preaching to the choir, because, as I’ve said from this pulpit before, there is a great deal of selfless work done around this place and in our community by many of you. Even so, we all, myself especially, need an occasional reminder along these lines. Thank God that we have such good examples. If you look hard enough, you’ll see the little acts of loving-kindness you catch your friends furtively doing, not blowing a trumpet but toiling in the dark. You can find examples in the stories of saints long gone on to their reward who took their master’s call to heart by giving of their energy or of their wealth or of their very lives. If nothing else, you can find a very good example in the poor, nameless widow from Jerusalem who all those generations ago gave her two mites, and was, no doubt, richly rewarded by her Father in heaven.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.