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Sermon: The Festival of Christ the King Year C - 21st November 2010
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 7 and 8am
Readings: Jeremiah 23:1-6 Luke 1:68-79 Colossians 1:11-20 Luke 23:33-40
Jesus said that those who would follow him must deny themselves and take up their cross? What then does it mean for a Christian to bear a cross? We meet in this world some suffering which is our own fault; we bring accidents upon ourselves by our carelessness, or punishment by our own offenses. This is not "bearing a cross". We also sometimes suffer in ways we cannot understand, as from an unexpected or unexplained illness or catastrophe that strikes us. Yet this is not what Jesus was talking about when he predicted suffering for his disciples.
The cross of Christ was the price of his obedience to God amidst a rebellious world; it was suffering for having done right, for loving where others hated, for representing in the flesh the forgiveness and the righteousness of God amongst humanity, which was both less forgiving and less righteous. The cross of Christ was God's overcoming evil with good.
Jesus began his ministry with the devil in the wilderness challenging him three times, and the way he tried to get under our Lord’s skin was to say “If you are the Son of God, then …”. Now, as read the Gospel story of that ministry coming to an end on a cross at Skull Hill, the devil uses some surrogates once again to tempt Jesus again: “Jump down from there if you are the Son of God! “ If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself.”
It was a powerful temptation in the wilderness to give in to the taunts of the devil it would have been even more powerful to take when that same taunt came his way while on the cross. Jesus had already asked his Father to forgive them because they did not know what they were doing but it’s possible that what they did not know was the great irony of their taunts.
Because as it turned out, being the Son of God did not mean what everyone else thought it meant: namely, exercising raw power, proving your identity through some spectacular event that would spell the end of pain and suffering for yourself. The truth was that Jesus in one sense gave in to the taunts on the cross. Being the Son of God meant suffering and dying. Coming down off that cross, saving himself from more harm and injury would have been a profoundly wrong thing for the Christ, the Son of God, the King of the Jews to do.
What Jesus did, of course, and in so doing he turned not only those taunts on their head, he turned the whole of reality upside-down. Only by upsetting the status quo could Jesus save a world that had long ago convinced itself that up was down and black was white and might made right.
The cross is a strange place to go the week before we start our annual Advent journey to Bethlehem. When you think about it, it’s an even stranger place to visit to celebrate the kingly reign of someone. Such an odd route to glory and power certainly was not on the minds of all those mockers who taunted Jesus that day. However, that odd route is God’s route. It was no mistake. It led to the glory of salvation.
While we consider God’s Kingdom it is also to consider that we all have our little kingdoms in life. A kingdom is any area of life where my will and my desires determine what happens and what does not happen. “A man’s house is his castle,” the old adage says. Indeed, in our homes, at our places of work, we all have little spheres of influence, little patches of this earth where we make a kingdom for ourselves, where we try to arrange things so that what we say, what we think, what we believe determines the shape of life.
The kingdom of God is where God’s desires, God’s dreams for this creation, God’s will and God’s intentions rule. The kingdom of God is where the shape of life mirrors God’s design for life.
The kingdom is real and it is real now. We can see it, right now, today. The kingdom is present wherever people pray the way Jesus taught us to pray. The kingdom is present wherever Jesus nurtures certain behaviours and lifestyles that we call the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. The kingdom is present wherever people pour water over the heads of babies in baptism or take bread and wine to their lips in communion, with one another, simply because Jesus told us that this is the way we are to act in remembrance of him.
The kingdom is present wherever a believer somewhere refuses to go along with some scheme because they believe it is untruthful and that going along with it would make them less transparent to Jesus. Wherever someone acts to bring light into a neighbour's darkness by speaking a word of peace, whenever and wherever someone sits down to help a child, and whenever and wherever all such things are done there is the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom is there because these people believe there is a cosmic Lord named Jesus. Right there and right here and right now, the kingdom of God is present because the effective rules of God’s Kingdom are in play.
When the Son of God came to this earth, he announced the arrival of the kingdom. It’s not pie-in-the-sky-when you die and far off in the future. It is now. The thief on the cross said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
Thanks be to God, he has remembered each one of us and we are in his kingdom, now, today and for ever.
This sermon composed using the resources and work of the following:
John Yoder, http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj7705&article=770521&mode=sermon_prep&week=C_Proper_29,The Rev. Stephen Lewis http://day1.org/2381-choose_to_care_or_else,Scott Hoezee, http://cep.calvinseminary.edu/thisWeek/index.php?pNav=cep.