Psalm 46 | Colossians 1:11-20 | Luke 23:33-43
Jeremy Richards
For many of us, Grant Park Church probably seems like a pretty liturgical church, at least for those of us who grew up in what some call the “Free Church” – Pentecostal, Baptist, Anabaptist, and most non-denominational churches. In our last book study meeting, someone shared that they were surprised we use the lectionary the first time they came to worship here. In addition to some call and response in our service, the use of the lectionary is probably the thing that feels the most liturgical about Grant Park.
And, I’m guessing, most of us are still a little confused by it. Well, let me let you in on a little secret, so am I. Despite the fact that I’m the one who decided we would follow the lectionary most Sunday, I’m still more of a novice than an expert when it comes to the church calendar. I didn’t grow up in a church that used the lectionary, and I was first introduced to it as an undergrad at Concordia University, a Lutheran school, but at the time I had no idea what it was all about. It wasn’t until I went to seminary and started attending a Mennonite church that used the lectionary, and then interned at a United Methodist Church that used the lectionary, that I began to understand it.
The lectionary assigns 4 passages to be read every Sunday – usually one from the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, one from the Psalms, one from the New Testament, and one from the Gospels. We use the Revised Common Lectionary, which most mainline protestants use. Some churches, like the Catholic church, have their own lectionary. We don’t read all 4 readings every Sunday, because I feel like that’s a lot to ask of the Scripture reader, and it would take quite a bit longer. The downside to this is that we don’t really get the continuity that exists in the lectionary if one week we hear a Psalm and a New Testament reading, and the next week we hear an Old Testament and a Gospel reading.
But I like the lectionary, because 1) it guides my preaching and often forces me to address texts I wouldn’t otherwise choose, and 2) it connects us, as a church, to the larger body of Christ who is also hearing the same readings we are from Sunday to Sunday.
But, like I said, I’m still kind of a novice. For example, I still can’t figure out what the theme of the season after Epiphany – the period between January 6th and Ash Wednesday every year – is all about. And I have trouble when a special Sunday, seemingly unrelated to the season it’s in, is plopped down out of nowhere. Take for example today, “Christ the King” Sunday, or “The Reign of Christ” Sunday, the last Sunday of ordinary time, before the season of Advent starts. Advent marks the beginning of the Christian year, so this Sunday is the last Sunday of this liturgical year, and the year always ends with “Christ the King” Sunday.
Whenever these special Sundays appear in the lectionary, I’m not sure how to handle them. Since most of us don’t come from liturgical backgrounds, it’s not like we’re ready and expecting the theme, right? I’m guessing most of us just show up, read “Christ the King Sunday,” on the front of the bulletin, and we go, “Okay, whatever that means.” So then I’m always left debating, in the week leading up to the special day, how much do I address this specific theme, because to do so means I might have to spend the first half of the sermon explaining how the lectionary works and why this day is called what it is…like I’m doing right now :).
But I think it’s worth it sometimes, like today. Today, as I said a minute ago, marks the end of the current church year, and as such it restates for us the kingship of Christ, it reminds us that Jesus Christ is Lord of the cosmos, and in the end all things will be redeemed, transformed, reconciled through him. This is the faith we confess, the hope we hold onto even when it seems unlikely, even ridiculous.
Christ the King Sunday is also important in its juxtaposition with the coming season of Christmas. Today we proclaim that Christ is the “image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” and yet in a month we’ll proclaim that Christ is a little baby named Jesus, born in the muck of stable, to a disgraced, unwed, teenage mother and an earthly father who would also be disgraced for staying with that mother. Today we proclaim Christ as the universal, cosmic King, and on Christmas we remember that he entered the world the way we all did: naked, vulnerable and screaming, utterly dependent on his mother.
Sometimes I’m pretty dense. Common sense is not always my strong suit. So, when I looked at the passages for today, knowing it was Christ the King Sunday, the reading from Colossians, titled in our Bibles “The Supremacy of Christ,” made sense, but when I read the Gospel passage from Luke I was…confused. It drops us, out of nowhere, into the crucifixion. There isn’t even any lead up. Jesus gets crucified in the very first verse! “When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left.” Other than a couple references to him being the King of the Jews, both said in mockery, there’s nothing kingly about this passage. There’s no victory, no glory. It’s Jesus at his lowest. It doesn’t make any sense.
Of course, this is the point. Of course, this is the scandal of our faith, the very hinge on which it all turns. Our King is the crucified, the humiliated, the disgraced and the mocked. And also he is the firstborn of all creation, the image of invisible God, the one in whom all things were created, the one who continues to hold all things together. He is eternal, yet both his birth and death can be dated (approximately). “He is the beginning” of all things and was “before all things,” yet he was born in a manger to earthly parents, Mary and Joseph, on a specific day in history. He will reign forever, yet he was crucified and died, like the two ordinary criminals who hung beside him.
He is always both/and, never either/or.
Even Colossians 1, with its high and lofty language, pulls the universal down into the particular, the absolute into the finite. Our reading today from Colossians ends, surprisingly, where our reading from Luke begins: at the cross. This universal Christ in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, in whom all things hold together, through whom God has reconciled all things, has made peace through…the blood of the cross?
How does peace come through blood? Why is this the way?
Because of love.
Because of God’s great love for us. Richard Rohr’s constant refrain throughout his book The Universal Christ is “God loves things by becoming them.”
God is not an abstract God, but a God who has always been among us, reaching out to us, though we often fail to recognize God. Genesis paints a picture of a God who walks and talks with Adam and Eve, a God who created humanity for relationship with God. But that relationship was ruptured, and that rupture reverberated out into all of creation. But God was not content to let it stay that way. The story of Scripture is the story of God reaching out, pursuing us, calling us back to right relationship with God, longing for reconciliation. And then, in the Divine’s own time, the Divine became the human, loved us by becoming one of us, bringing together what had been separated, infusing the finite with the infinite so that all things would be reconciled in a body that held both Divine and human together, not as contradictory but as one.
The blood of the cross reconciled us not because God demands violent retribution, and so Jesus had to die, but because on the cross God became utterly and completely human. There’s nothing abstract about suffering, nothing theoretical about pain. A violent death like Jesus wasn’t peaceful, beautiful, or sentimental. It was horrific and ugly and tragic.
The blood of the cross was the divine, eternal life taking on the finitude of human death and hanging between the two. The cross is an instrument of death and a symbol of the eternal life intersecting with your life and my life, God’s assertion that God was not and is not separate from you and me and the rest of creation, not separate from the darknesses we feel and experience, the struggles that are uniquely ours.
God doesn’t hover above us, as God hovered above the waters in Genesis 1, God plunges into the chaos with us. There is no divide between our human limitations and the limitless God, no pain God doesn’t know. Because of the blood of the cross. Because on the cross God said, I’m unequivocally with you and for you, I will not forsake you, even in death. And from the place of Gods own suffering, God’s own pain, God speaks words of assurance and hope to us, as Jesus spoke to the thief who hung beside him, promising redemption.
Colossians tells us that Christ is the very life-force of all of creation. Christ is the source and sustainer of all flourishing. “In him all things in heaven and on earth were created,” and “in him all things hold together.” And the cross tells us that this is true even in the darkest of times, even in the midst of suffering, pain, and even death. In the words of our Psalm, God in Christ truly is a “very present help in times of trouble.”
This past week I got tea with Carren Woods, the pastor of Rivergate Community Church in North Portland. Carren is Val’s pastor, the little girl we prayed for recently, who’s only 9 but has had multiple heart surgeries and has endured more than many of us ever will. Others in Carren’s church, like people in every church, have experienced or are experiencing real hardship. And yet, she told me, she tells them to always look for God working in their lives. Not in a way that ignores the struggles and the suffering, but the ways in which, in the midst of all that hardship, they see God with them – in the hospital bed, sitting at the table, looking at bills that can’t be paid, experiencing PTSD from past trauma. God hanging on the cross.
In Genesis, in the beginning, God hovers over the chaos and God speaks. God’s Word plunges into the darkness and God’s Word brings light, brings forth flourishing plant life, births animals and humans. Christian theology says that Christ is that creative Word that goes forth from God and pierces the darkness with light, draws solid ground out of tumultuous seas, calls forth beautiful vegetation with life-giving fruit. Christ is God at work in tangible ways. That’s what Paul’s referring to in Colossians 1 when he says that in Christ all things were created. Christ is God plunging into the chaos of life, bringing light out of darkness, reconciliation out of division, resurrection out of crucifixion.
So my question for you to consider this morning in our time of silence is: What is the darkness in your life, and where is God speaking life in the midst of it? Where is the light breaking? Where is the water parting and the dry, solid ground emerging?