Christ shows up in the suffering: Reign of Christ

The other reading referenced is Colossians 1:11-20.

 

The holy gospel according to Luke (23:33-43)

³³When 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.

³⁴⟦Then Jesus said,

       “Father, forgive them;

              for they do not know what they are doing.”⟧

And they cast lots to divide his clothing.

³⁵And the people stood by, watching;

       but the leaders scoffed at him, saying,

              “He saved others;

                     let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God,

                            the chosen one!”

³⁶The soldiers also mocked him,

       coming up and offering him sour wine, ³⁷and saying,

              “If you are the King of the Jews,

                     save yourself!”

³⁸There was also an inscription over him,

       “This is the King of the Jews.”

³⁹One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding Jesus and saying,

       “Are you not the Messiah?

              Save yourself and us!”

⁴⁰But the other rebuked him, saying,

       “Do you not fear God,

              since you are under the same sentence of condemnation?

              ⁴¹And we indeed have been condemned justly,

                     for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds,

                            but this one has done nothing wrong.”

⁴²Then he said,

       “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kindom.”

⁴³Jesus replied,

       “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

The gospel of the lord.

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Today, as the final Sunday in the church year, is Reign of Christ Sunday. It is the day we name Christ as the ultimate authority over all.  We celebrate our God who has all the power.

When we say Christ reigns or Christ is King or Lord—or, in today’s language we might say, Christ is our President—we are making a statement about whose authority we follow.  This is the day that our Gospel reading especially gives us great insight not only into who Jesus is, but more deeply into what power and authority mean to God.

What do they mean?  How do we best understand Jesus? 

Through the cross.

Christ’s reign—Jesus’ power and authority—is best understood in the One who would rather die than kill anyone, who talks to criminals, and challenges the assumptions of his day; the One who doesn’t give into complacency, the One willing to suffer for another.

As Jesus suffers and dies on the cross, we find that, as the letter to Colossians says, “in Christ all the fullness of God [is] pleased to dwell.”  When all of God’s power and might is on display, that power places itself below—it takes on the suffering of the world. God becomes incarnate—taking on our very flesh all the way to the cross, so that when we proclaim that Christ reigns, it is really that Christ is most present in and with those who suffer.

Christ shows up when we’re filled with anxiety at unmarked cars driving by and word of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, la migra, in the area.  Christ sits with us in our anxiety, recalling what it was like when his own family had to flee his home country and live without papers in a strange land.

Christ shows up when the doctor calls about the biopsy and says we should come in to talk to her.  In the waiting and the heartbreak, in the treatment and the sickness.  Christ sits with us in our pain, recalling the pain of the cross.

Christ shows up when we wonder if it’s safe to go out in public because at least 295 of our transgender and gender nonconforming siblings were killed this year just because of their gender identity—23 in this country alone.  Christ sits with us in our fear and dies with us in our death, crucified again and again with each person killed.

Christ shows up.

Whenever and wherever there is suffering, Christ is there. 

Tears rolling down, beaten and broken by people or life itself, Christ shows up.  That is the God we know and the God we worship.  The One who shows up.  The One who takes on all our suffering. 

Because God has literally been to hell and back, there is no experience too foreign, too painful, or too awful, for God.

Christ gathers “all the strength that comes from God’s glorious power” and sits down in the sackcloth and ashes.  Christ relocates the power and authority from the places we usually look to, to the places of suffering.  For Christ, power exists to be given up and given over, because no matter how loud or how strong we try to become, strength and power cannot have the final word for a God who gave it all up to come be with us.

It’s like Kid President says, “Even if hate has a bullhorn, Love is louder.”   It is love—in solidarity—that has the final say.

It is in our ability to be with—to be in solidarity with those who suffer—that we also encounter Christ’s truest self.  When we sit and breathe, when we go to doctor’s appointments, when we cry, we encounter Christ with us.

So we follow Christ—our Lord, King, and President.  We follow Jesus to the cross and we look on wondering what to do about that one who suffers.  Do we stand by watching with the crowd?  Do we scoff, mock, and deride?  Or, like the criminal, do we ask Jesus to recognize us, to draw us in? 

And Christ does—Christ always will.  Again and again Christ shows up.  When fear, anxiety, illness, and even death overwhelm us, Christ shows up in full.

Sometimes we recognize it and sometimes we don’t. But Christ is still there.

Christ is in the brokenness.  There is an art form in Japan called Kintsugi where broken pottery is repaired with gold so that the thing that was broken becomes even more beautiful in the brokenness—a new thing is born out of the old that would be discarded or destroyed.

That is Christ’s work.  In communion, Christ, the bread that is broken, connects us to each other and to God.  Our broken bodies come for broken bread and become one body of Christ.  In Christ’s fullness, bread is broken, wine is poured—and Jesus gathers all the brokenness of the world to himself on the cross and fills our cracks, our anxiety, illness, and pain with a love that casts out fear.  Christ’s presence in communion fills us and Christ walks with us in our fear through a dangerous world, through a sick world, through a scary world. 

Christ shows up and Christ shows up on the cross.  Perfect power and authority made known in perfect love and service, not because it is required, but precisely because it is so freely given.

That is who Christ is.  Christ, our King, Lord, and President, is Christ crucified, Christ who suffers with the suffering ones.

Thanks be to God

god recognizes us and all our gender: reign of christ / christ the king

the holy gospel according to matthew (25:31-46)

[Jesus said,]

³¹“When the Son of Man comes in his glory,

       and all the angels with him,

              then he will sit on the throne of his glory.

       ³²All the nations will be gathered before him,

              and he will separate people one from another

                     as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats,

                            ³³and he will put the sheep at his right hand

                            and the goats at the left.

³⁴Then the king will say to those at his right hand,

       ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father,

              inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world;

                     ³⁵for I was hungry and you gave me food,

                     I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink,

                     I was a stranger and you welcomed me,

                     ³⁶I was naked and you gave me clothing,

                     I was sick and you took care of me,

                     I was in prison and you visited me.’

³⁷Then the righteous will answer him,

       ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food,

              or thirsty and gave you something to drink?

       ³⁸And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you,

              or naked and gave you clothing?

       ³⁹And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’

⁴⁰And the king will answer them,

       ‘Truly I tell you,

              just as you did it to one of the least of these

                     who are members of my family,

                            you did it to me.’

⁴¹Then he will say to those at his left hand,

       ‘You that are accursed,

              depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels;

                     ⁴²for I was hungry and you gave me no food,

                     I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,

                     ⁴³I was a stranger and you did not welcome me,

                     naked and you did not give me clothing,

                     sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’

⁴⁴Then they also will answer,

       ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you

              hungry

              or thirsty

              or a stranger

              or naked

              or sick

              or in prison,

                     and did not take care of you?’

⁴⁵Then he will answer them,

       ‘Truly I tell you,

              just as you did not do it to one of the least of these,

                     you did not do it to me.’

⁴⁶And these will go away into eternal punishment,

       but the righteous into eternal life.”

the gospel of the lord.

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throughout this month, we have been talking about and sharing where we’ve found jesus and i hope you’ve gotten the chance to check out jesus on the back wall.  if not, take a look today after worship or during communion, because it’s pretty powerful.  you all have found jesus in a lot of different places.  and, today, we’ve heard again who jesus is; where to find him: the hungry, the stranger, the naked, the outcast.  today’s gospel raises the question: how do we recognize jesus, and other people? 

when i began seminary, i had a professor, dr. ralph klein, who was the perfect combination of dumbledore and moses.  he was wise and funny and many of us were convinced that he could read genesis in the original hebrew because he was the one who wrote it.

the first day of class, dr. klein took a picture of us all so that he could study our faces, matched with names, and start to recognize us between classes.  well, after a week, when we came back to class, there was one person that dr. klein couldn’t recognize.

the first week of classes, when he took the picture, my hair was long and i had worn it down and curly, like a lion’s mane as my mom used to call it.  the next week (and much of the semester to follow), it was pulled quickly back into a ponytail.  dr. klein had studied our stand-out, most obvious characteristics in that first week, but hadn’t looked deeper.  he hadn’t gotten past my hair to see even my glasses, let alone who i really was.  since those first weeks, dr. klein has come to know me, and my hair, more fully in all of its diverse lengths and in all of my questions, comments, and experiences.

but, to this day new people in my life still don’t recognize me if i wear my hair differently the second time they see me…and, they tend to grow quite attached to my hair.              i don’t have that same problem, mainly because i am not very attached to my hair and enjoy changing its length frequently, making people recognize me by more than just my hair.

and while dr. klein couldn’t recognize me those first weeks, he was the one to introduce me to a god i knew and yet hadn’t recognized.  dr. klein taught us hebrew bible, or old testament, and that man could find grace anywhere.  as i explained to the confirmands this week, dr. klein was the one to point out: the grace in the 10 commandments, where the first commandment, according to jewish numbering, is “i am the lord your god, who brought you out of the land of egypt, out of the house of slavery.”  not a commandment at all, but a proclamation of god’s love active in our lives. 

dr. klein was also the first person to refer to god with diverse pronouns.  we know from study and from faith that we are made in the image of god—all of us, together—so it would make sense that god would not just be male—in fact, the holy spirit is feminine in hebrew and gender neutral in greek.  dr. klein recognized the fullness of god’s diversity and was the first person i heard refer to god as she as well as he.

these days we spend a lot of time being concerned with gender—usually that of someone else.  we can spend so much time worrying about and policing other people’s gender that we lose sight of the jesus in them.  this past thursday was the annual transgender day of remembrance where we gathered for a vigil and read the names of those beloved children of god who others chose to harm and kill because their gender didn’t fit in the box that person had for them. 

i went to the vigil, as i have the past few years, for several reasons.  i went to bear witness that violence is wrong.  i went to bear witness that god’s love is for everybody.  and i went because sometimes people get confused by the way i dress, when i wear a tie, or by how i cut my hair.

in today’s gospel the son of man is talking to the gentiles, people who don’t know or follow the way of jesus.  people who really don’t have a context in which to recognize jesus.  it’s not just that the “goats” don’t recognize jesus, nobody does!

there are so many ways that each of us can get caught up in our expectations and assumptions that we fail to recognize each other and, more importantly, we fail to recognize jesus            in            the            other.  sometimes it’s because we are more concerned with figuring out their gender than recognizing that god is a god of all genders.  sometimes we are too concerned with what papers they have, forgetting that we are a country of strangers and immigrants and that god comes to us as a stranger in our midst. 

other times we can see too much of ourselves—specifically those characteristics in ourselves that we don’t like to acknowledge.  we see too much of us in them to remember that god created us all—them and us—as beloved children, just as we are.

at this end of the church year, we celebrate christ the king, our namesake.  we celebrate the One whose power and love is made known in the “least of these.”  christ’s presence in the hungry, the stranger, the naked, the outcast, is the way we know: god’s love is for everybody.  we know god’s diversity as we are all made, in our diversity, in god’s image.  we know god’s love as we are all called beloved children.

so whether our hair changes length or style, whether we have the right papers, whether we lose our jobs, or are diagnosed with a grave illness, we never lose the ability to recognize jesus in those we encounter.

more importantly, though, god will never lose the ability

       not only to recognize each of us as beloved children,

              but also to be present in us,

                     to know us more deeply than how we wear or don’t wear our hair,

                     to know us more deeply than our gender,

                            our immigration status, our job, or our health.

god knows us deeply enough to call us beloved, and god knows each person we encounter deeply enough to call them beloved as well.

thanks be to god.