Sermons

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

I’ve been talking a lot in sermons recently about our expectations regarding Christ’s second coming, and that since the biblical witness gives us not an apocalyptic horror story but a message of hope, that Christ’s return will be a good thing. When we pray “thy Kingdom come,” it’s because we have reasons to want that to happen. No doubt the first generations of Christians recognized this, which is why Christ’s return wasn’t coming soon enough for their liking. This is the context of this morning’s Epiustle.

It is a shame that we so rarely hear from the Second Epistle General of St. Peter. Indeed, after consulting the lectionary I discovered it only appears on two Sundays in our entire three year cycle of readings. So I wanted to focus on our that this morning. Don’t worry; we’ll get more John the Baptist next week.

Like Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians, Peter’s Second Epistle was written in a period of delayed gratification with regard to the Second Coming of Christ. In fact this letter was written at least a decade after Paul’s; Peter actually references Paul’s epistles explicitly in the verses which follow this morning’s lesson, calling them “Scripture,” so not a little time has passed. That being the case, we can imagine the anxiety of Peter’s audience to be even more acute. Why hasn’t Christ returned? Has he forgotten us? Was the second-coming merely a fond idea, vainly invented?

In the Year of our Lord 2023, I admit I feel a bit more kinship with Peter’s audience than I would have done years ago. Perhaps I am not alone. With all the sad and violent things happening in our world today, I’ve found myself saying, without any sense of irony, “why won’t Jesus just come back and fix it already!?” I went to two ordinations this weekend, and at one of them the bishop, in her sermon, highlighted this theme of Advent expectation, and amusingly said more or less the same thing “won’t Jesus come back” but said it would be nice if he delayed just a few minutes so we could ordain a colleague first.

Peter, such a great pastor, gives us a compelling answer to this seemingly unfulfilled hope. God’s time is not ours, and any delay is surely so that the Good News can spread farther abroad and more can be saved. Our part is to persevere in godliness and “holy conversation,” to be patient and to persevere in living that simple call to prayer and study and works of charity.

“Every year,” the great Fleming Rutledge has said “Advent begins in the dark.”The world indeed seems dark, but we are called to watch and pray until the glory of the Lord is to be revealed, until all flesh shall see it together.

My prayer is that at the last we will be found to have been a people who did just that, who kept hope alive in the darkness, knowing that the great and terrible day of the Lord would come when we least expect it, like a thief in the night, and then we should find that, our consciences being made pure, the Lord has made in us a mansion made ready even for himself.

+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 Ghost. Amen.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we mainline Christians have ceded too much of what is essentially Christian belief and action for fear of being identified with fundamentalist Christians, and that in particular we tend to shy away from talking about Jesus’ second coming and the advent of the Kingdom of God. This is precisely what Advent is about (it’s not just about waiting to put the bambino into the crèche), but, due to mainline discomfort with the idea, we’ve been putting conditions on the meaning of the doctrine ever since the nineteenth century. Back then, liberal protestants started speaking in terms of gradually building the Kingdom of God themselves rather than expecting Jesus to actually, literally come back and establish it himself. The view has even gained some traction in American Catholicism with a very popular, but theologically unfortunate hymn whose refrain proclaims “Let us build the city of God.” Little is said in the hymn about Jesus’ role in the matter. It suggests, one assumes unintentionally, that we’re more powerful than God, or at least that God chooses not to act in history.

Conversely, we find people who espouse the view that we’ve really no part in God’s work. The claim is that being responsible stewards of creation, that working to bring about a better state of affairs for the poor and the oppressed is really to no avail, because Jesus is going to come back and fix everything anyway.

Like so many other theological issues, the truth here may be found in the middle way, the via media that our own Anglican tradition talks about so much but seems to overlook so often. The historical Christian view, which we hear in the Gospel appointed for this week, is that Jesus really will come again, there really will be a second advent, more grand and glorious even than Christ’s first Advent on the first Christmas, and, what’s more, we’ve got got something to do about it.

For one, we watch and wait. “Watch therefore — for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning — lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Watch.” This is rare for me, but I actually prefer the newer translation of this passage, which is less accurate, but somehow more resonant. Instead of “watch,” Jesus says “Keep awake”.

We not only watch, but we pray. We pray ceaselessly for the establishment of God’s reign. “Thy Kingdom come”–we say it every week in church, and many of us every day, but we probably don’t fathom the full extent of the words when we utter them. They’ve become rote. If we did indeed pay attention, we’d recognize how potentially frightening those three words are. Jesus said in today’s Gospel:

But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of man coming in clouds with great power and glory.

Scary stuff, huh? Actually, our Gospel reading this morning picked up right after the really nasty bits; I love nasty bits, so here they are:

But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains; let him who is on the housetop not go down, nor enter his house, to take anything away; and let him who is in the field not turn back to take his mantle. And alas for those who are with child and for those who give suck in those days! Pray that it may not happen in winter. For in those days there will be such tribulation as has not been from the beginning of the creation which God created until now, and never will be. 

It’s no wonder we tend to shy away from this theme in Scripture, why we replace the old themes of Advent—death and judgment and heaven and hell—with sentimentality. I think we’ve made a big mistake in that regard.

The response that the kingdom of God will elicit when it does ultimately come, doesn’t sound too comforting; but two-thousand years have passed since Jesus said these words, which has tended to take away the sense of urgency. But, as I said last week, we don’t need to be frightened or, worse, to cling to strange theories and time-tables regarding Christ’s return, but we should, nonetheless, urgently pray that God’s will might be done, that his Kingdom might come and his reign might begin on earth as it is already in heaven.

And prayer is not the only duty to which we are bound in light of our expectation of Christ’s return. Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth with the following words of encouragement:

I give thanks to God always for you because of the grace of God which was given you in Christ Jesus, that in every way you were enriched in him with all speech and all knowledge — even as the testimony to Christ was confirmed among you — so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ; who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

Paul says that in response to Christ’s return we should “[be] not lacking in any spiritual gift” and “[with God’s sustenance be] guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.” God is the agent, of course, the one giving the gifts and sustaining us in holiness, but it is ours to open ourselves up to that. It is up to us to permit God in to make us love our neighbors and to make us more holy, more saintly, in preparation for eternity.

You’ve all seen the bumper sticker: “Jesus is coming, look busy”. In fact, what it should say is “Jesus is coming, let God get busy.” Let God get busy making each of us a temple of his presence, a mansion made ready for Christ when he shall come again. Let God get busy, his power working in us infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Let God get busy, restoring whatever is lacking in our faith. This is what Advent is about. Jesus is coming again; let God get busy, making us ready to receive him when he does.

+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.

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.