Sermons

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

Not having access to cable or broadcast television I had for several years been largely insulated from tv advertisements, which is just as well because my brain tends to latch on to annoying jingles. There are many such commercial jingles from the 1980s and 90s that are still taking up valuable mental real estate. Unfortunately, YouTube has for a while now been running precisely the sorts of ads that I assume air on regular television, and I’ve been exposed to an annoyingly catchy jingle from Burger King, informing the potential customer that he or she can have french fries or onion or french fries and onion rings. This is followed by the deathless reminder that at Burger King you can “have it your way.”

On this Christ the King Sunday, it is good to remember that the Kingdom of God is not Burger King. We don’t get to have it our way. I mentioned this to a group of clergy colleagues earlier this week as we were talking about what we might preach about today, and I was amused when one of them informed us that if one goes through a drive-through at this restaurant in the Year of Our Lord 2023, one is greeted with the following words: “Welcome to Burger King, where you reign.” I suppose they should really change their name to “Burger Anarcho-Syndicalist Collective”, though that just isn’t as catchy. That said, as contemporary Westerners, and as Americans in particular, the idea that one in authority should determine our choices (even if it’s just about what sort of fast food burger we should have) rubs against our commitments to democracy and individualism.

I hasten to add, I am happy to be an American and I also think that (at least in the secular realm and to an extent within the church) democratic principles are necessary and beneficial. My favorite political philosopher is Jacques Maritain, who laid the intellectual groundwork for Christian Democracy which became ascendant in Western Europe after the Second World War and later in parts of Latin America and in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union.

As an aside, Maritain got in trouble with one Pope–Pius XII who wouldn’t follow Maritain’s advice to unequivocally denounce antisemitism–and became best friends with another–Paul VI, who tried to make Maritain the first layperson to be a Cardinal in hundreds of years, but Maritain refused. So, Jacques Maritain was, in my opinion, one of the coolest dudes of the Twentieth Century, and deserves to be more widely known.

Anyway, democratic principles are necessary in a world in which one cannot trust an individual to be sufficiently enlightened and charitable to rule well alone. I was reminded of this when Annie and I went to the movies and saw the highly entertaining (if somewhat silly) Napoleon biopic the other day. The most important thing about that film, I think, was its reminder at the end (and this is not a spoiler, since it’s common historical knowledge) that 3 million people died during the Emperor’s various wars of conquest. Yes, what preceded this was a brutal example in Revolutionary France of the excesses to which democracy can fall, but this doesn’t mean that despotism is at all preferable in this world.

The vision of the Kingdom which is to come, which Jesus proclaimed, stands against both “every man doing right by his own lights” on the one hand and merely human authority on the other. The First Century Jews who were the first to hear Jesus’ words from today’s Gospel would have known painfully well that the answer to anarchy was not unchecked human authority vested in the Roman Emperor or any other fallen human, but in a different country with the only king who could be trusted.

We see in today’s Gospel the nature of this King and his Kingdom. As the King reigning from his throne, Jesus welcomes those whose citizenship is determined solely by the love and concern they share for those on the margins of that same society. He doesn’t require proper documentation or a citizenship exam or the promise to pay taxes. He requires love for the least, the last, and the lost.

The King of Glory is a King whose law is love, and (as I’ve said from this pulpit 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 on the cross. It means seeing Jesus in the outsider and then treating 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 into which Christ wishes to welcome us is predicated on 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 Spirit. Amen.

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

This morning’s readings may strike us as a bit disconcerting, as well they should. They all deal with last things, the events which precede and surround Christ’s return on the last day. We’re a couple of weeks away from Advent, which is the season typically associated with these last things, and specifically with what have been called the “four last things”: namely death, judgment, heaven, and hell. But, since we also get to talk about Mary and Joseph and John the Baptist and all that in Advent, the lectionary has wisely given us a few extra weeks before to get a good healthy dose of teaching on these often difficult themes. I concluded last week’s sermon by saying that reasonable Christians need to spend more time proclaiming our beliefs about eschatological matters, and here is our chance.

As I said, we might find this morning’s readings a bit disconcerting. The long section of potentially terrifying prophecy we heard in today’s Old Testament reading from Zephaniah concludes with the assertion that “in the fire of [God’s] passion, the whole earth shall be consumed; for a full and terrible end he will make of all the inhabitants of the earth.” And, in the famous “parable of the talents” from Matthew, we hear the master rendering a very final judgment against the unproductive servant: “throw him into the outer darkness,” he says, “where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

All of this is enough to send us each into a tizzy. However, this is precisely the wrong approach. We learn in today’s epistle the necessity for approaching the anxiety about last things, and indeed all of life’s troubles, with seriousness and calm clarity rather than panic; or to use Paul’s words, with sobriety rather than drunkenness.

In this morning’s epistle, the apostle writes to the church in Thessalonica commanding such spiritual sobriety. “Therefore let us not sleep,” he wrote, “as do others; but let us watch and be sober. For they that sleep sleep in the night; and they that be drunken are drunken in the night. But let us, who are of the day, be sober.” The command was all the more appropriate for that young Christian community considering the occasion for Paul’s letter to them. The year was A.D. 52, not twenty years after Our Lord’s ascension into heaven. Paul had sent his young apprentice, Timothy, from their headquarters in Corinth to check up on the church in Thessalonica.

The news with which Timothy returned to Paul was not encouraging. Now, the Christians in that little missionary outpost believed that Jesus would return within their own lifetimes, a common expectation among the first generation of Christians. When members of the church had died, they were unsure of the eternal fate of their recently departed loved-ones, and some began to lose their faith entirely. The result was fear and mourning and probably, as we might imagine, in at least a few cases, panic. They suffered from spiritual drunkenness.

It is because of this that Paul wrote the epistle from which we read this morning. He began the letter by reminding the Thessalonians of the good faith with which they received the initial proclamation of the Gospel, and, in the letter’s climax, which we heard last week, he explains the Christian view of Jesus’ return and the general resurrection of the dead. Remember what we read last week:

But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again: even so them also which sleep in Jesus, will God bring with him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord, shall not prevent them that are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the Archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we which are alive, and remain, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

In short, those which are dead by the time of Christ’s return will precede the living to be with him, so there is no theological rationale for the kind of reaction suffered by the Thessalonians. Of course, loss (especially, the death of a loved one) can cause profound grief and even fear, which God, it seems to me, would not hold against us. Even so, the Christian message compels us to remain both faithful and hopeful in the midst of such hardships, knowing that on the last day God will raise his faithful people and make all things to right.

The theological problem addressed, Paul proceeds to the spiritual problem, namely what I termed spiritual drunkenness. Spiritual drunkenness, it seems, is the tendency to take our eyes off of the ways of God in an attempt to run away from painful reality. Its effect may be panic, an utter and irrational loss of hope like that experienced by the Thessalonians. Or its effect may be denial; as Paul said “when they shall say peace and safety: then sudden destruction cometh upon them.” Indeed, our reaction to the apparently nasty bits we read earlier from Zephaniah and Matthew might lead us to either panic or denial. So, too, might be our response to any profound troubles we experience in this life. In all events, the spiritual drunkard is like the literal drunkard–he cannot see things clearly for how they are. His vision is blurred and his reason is compromised. He cannot see God’s Providence at work in the time of trial. He sees only a world of horrific danger, and either he refuses to acknowledge it or he succumbs to sheer terror.

Indeed, in these last days—for just as St. Paul lived in the last days so do we still—there will continue to be trials, but however long they last God will, in the end, make all things new. In this same lesson from Thessalonians, the Apostle likens it to a woman in child-birth. It is a painful process, for sure, yet at the end comes a new and beautiful creation, a child. New life is always born of pain. So it is with the world to come. Its approach is beset by toil and peril, and ultimately death, for each and every one of us lest we’re fortunate enough to see Christ’s return in our own day. Yet the end for all of us, whether we live or die, is finally and unspeakably good.

In the meantime, the time in which we still live between Our Lord’s ascension and his return, we are called to stand firm in our faith and follow the counsel of Paul in his letter to the Ephesians to “be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the sleight of men.” This can only be achieved if we grow in our souls a spirit of sobriety. We must remain serious and steadfast and vigilant if we are to respond to the pain and travail of these days faithfully. St. Paul commands it, as does St. Peter in his first epistle general. “Be sober,” he says, “be vigilant: because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”

Spiritual sobriety is being able to see things clearly as they are and in the light of God’s plan for us all. It is also a matter of seriousness and intentionality in the spiritual life. This isn’t brain-surgery. It’s as simple as saying one’s prayers and reading one’s bible and coming to church on Sunday. This isn’t just naïve churchiness; it really works. A simple, serious commitment in these basic disciplines gives us the grounding we need to grow mature in the faith and approach the spiritual life with sobriety because they instill in us both the substance and the spirit of faith. The bible and the prayerbook especially, used together over many years of practice, build in us a firm foundation on which to stand, so that “in all the cares and occupations of this life” we may not stumble about as the drunkard, but remain awake and watchful and sober. And then, when Our Lord does at last return, He may find us to be a people who persevered during the time of trial.

+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.

The current Middle East crisis is complicated, and I’ve seen enough folks online, including some colleagues, providing simplistic, ill-advised “hot takes” to know that this is not a wise thing to do. The only thing I will say is that for years it has troubled me when certain American politicians get this complex issue all tangled up with a peculiar and, frankly incorrect, eschatology (that is, a theology of the end times). That is to say that a view which holds that a particular political settlement in the Holy Land will hasten Christ’s return, as if we can manipulate Divine Providence, and that this will bring about a state of affairs having something to do with a rather fringy interpretation of today’s Epistle is more than a little scary to me.

In his First Epistle to the Thessalonians Paul writes:

For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.

This has become a key text in the ideology of modern Christian fundamentalism. You may know that already, but what you may not be aware of is how this came to be the case.

In the year 1827 an American preacher named John Nelson Darby popularized a theory called premillenial dispensationalism. He was building on some of the hypotheses of the seventeenth century puritan preachers Increase and Cotton Mather and the eighteenth century Welsh historian and Baptist preacher Morgan Edwards. While the Mathers and Edwards were somewhat oblique in their description of the eschaton, or end-times, Darby developed a remarkably specific vision of the future. Taking the passage from First Thessalonians as a centerpoint and placing it in the context of apocalyptic events described in the books of Daniel and Revelation, Darby presented what he believed to be a timeline for the end of the world.

While the theory is complicated the short version is as follows: Jesus will return and believers will be raised bodily into heaven and disappear, the unfaithful will be subjected to seven years of tribulation, Jesus and the Church will return to reign on earth for a thousand years, there will be a final battle between good and evil, and then the final judgment will take place and everyone will go to either heaven or hell.

This remained a somewhat marginal view until the 1909 publication of the Scofield Reference Bible. Taking a cue from the 1560 Geneva Bible, this translation included extensive commentary right alongside the Scriptures themselves, encouraging one to read the bible in such a way as to accept Darby’s theory. Incidentally, it was also the bible which introduced the modern strain of “Young Earth Creationism”- the idea that God created the world sometime in the last ten thousand years. It is Scofield whom we can thank for Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, the popular Left Behind series of books (as well as the feature film starring everyone’s favorite crazy man, Nicholas Cage), and a whole host of prognosticators who have from time to time speculated on the timing of the Apocalypse.

The most remarkable part of this story is that a guy in the nineteenth century basically made it all up. Virtually nobody believed any of this stuff two hundred years ago. This is not to say that every Christian in the world believed exactly the same thing about the eschaton prior to Darby. There have been good and healthy debates between people who believed different things about the second coming, particularly whether things were going to get better and better or worse and worse leading up to Christ’s return and the General Resurrection. Each of these schools of thought can be argued on the basis of Scripture and traditional Church teaching. But each of these schools of thought reads the fourth chapter of First Thessalonians as referring to the General Ressurection on the Last Day which immediately precedes Christ’s judgment and his gracious act of establishing a new heaven and a new earth, not some early boarding pass for the heavenly banquet while the unbelievers are left to suffer below.

This is neither a conservative nor a liberal point of view. Anglicans teaches it. Lutherans and Prebyterians and Methodists believe it. Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians believe it. Moderate and Progressive Baptists believe it. The Amish and the Mennonites believe it.

But a heck-of-a-lot of Christians in this country have been taught premillenial dispensationalism. Seven of the Left Behind books have reached “number one” on the New York Times Best Sellers list, which gives you a good idea of how popular the theory is. I’d be willing to bet that the vast majority of television and radio preachers teach the theory- a theory which simply doesn’t hold up under any serious program of reading and interpreting the bible. But why, you might ask, does it matter?

Is this not an issue on which we should just agree to disagree? I don’t agree, for example, with the Presbyterians on how many sacraments there are or with the Roman Catholics on papal infallibility. These issues seem more important or at least more relevant, yet I don’t get really exercised about their points of view, at least in my preaching.

First, I think theological positions like that have a basis in at least some ways of faithfully interpreting Scripture and Church Tradition. One can have civil, theologically informed debates over those issues. Maybe it’s some unexamined prejudice on my part, but I just don’t see the same conversation being possible with the issue in question. It’s almost like fundamentalist eschatology uses a language which isn’t intelligible to me, like I’m speaking in English and they’re speaking Mandarin, and neither of us even has a phrase book.

The other reason is that I honestly believe that premillenial dispensationalism produces a dangerous worldview. This is not a polite or absolutely inclusive thing to say, and I beg your pardon for that, but I believe this to be both true and deadly serious. The idea that one smart or lucky enough to be a believer should be spared difficulty while the nonbelievers deserve tribulation leads one to one of two equally dangerous conclusions- either we should stop caring about the plight of those whose creed is different from our own because God ordained them to suffer or else our only responsibility in this world is to rack up converts, put notches in our belts for the souls we (not God) have saved. I’ve not read the Left Behind books, but I have read exerpts of some of the nasty bits as well as interviews with the authors, and the tortures they describe being inflicted on nonbelievers(by Jesus himself, no less) is nothing short of despicable. It reminds one of the genre of film which includes the Saw movies (which just released its tenth film) in which one is meant to get a kick out of horrible violence being inflicted on people. It dehumanizes “the other”, making the most depraved, wicked sort of hatred not only palatable but fun. It is not hyperbole to say that this sort of “entertainment” harms ones soul, and when one doesn’t believe it’s entirely fictitious it can eventually make one vicious.

The most terrifying thing to me, as I suggested earlier, is that there are people who completely buy in to this theory and believe the State Department should making decisions based on it. I imagine there are people here who agree with me on certain matters of our country’s foreign policy and those who don’t. That’s perfectly fine. Reasonable people can disagree. It scares me witless, though, to think that there are some people with a lot of pull with regard to our policy in the Middle East who honest-to-God believe that the modern state of Israel has something to do with Jesus’ second-coming.

I’m sure there are some here who disagree with me with regard to education and energy and environmental policy. That’s fine, too. Reasonable people can disagree. It horrifies me, though, that there are people deciding what textbooks our children read who don’t believe in science and that there are lawmakers and bureaucrats who believe that the world is going to end anyway, Jesus is going to give us a thousand-year-long do-over, so our planet is more-or-less expendable.

So, what do we do? I believe it is time for reasonable Christians to start talking about eschatology again. We’ve been reticent to do so and have ceded that topic to a very vocal minority. It’s time for us to say that Jesus is coming again, but not to torture heathens. He’s coming to breathe new life where death reigns. It’s time to admit that we’ve made a hash of things, but we don’t get a millenial do-over so we’d better start being more virtuous and responsible and loving here and now. It’s time to start preaching the Resurrection again, because that message is a whole lot more compelling than anything a fundamentalist post-apocalyptic horror story can come up with.

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