Sermon begins at 16:50
Today is Christ the King Sunday
And it is also a Sunday for the next installment of our favorite way to begin a sermon: It’s another St. Andrew’s Trivia Sunday!!!
Okay, I have one easy one, I think, and one more difficult one.
First trivia question (have we been keeping score on these?):
Let’s do the more difficult one first.
What year was Christ the King Sunday instituted?
(There are some people who belong to this church or are associated with this church, like my grandma Tutu Roberta DuTeil, who are older than Christ the King Sunday)
Christ the King was first observed in 1925. It was originally placed at the end of October, but was moved after the ecumenical second vatican council to the last Sunday of the church year.
Pope Pius XI was the one who decided that observing Christ as King above earthly authorities was an important Christian doctrine to observe every year.
The world was less than a decade removed from the Great War that had ravaged Europe.
One of the reasons the war started was because modern people were tired of feudalism in the industrial age. This animosity resulted in the assassination of a royal Duke. But that was only the pretext.
The war was actually waged because of alliances and rivalries between kings who were all cousins.
Maybe you remember way back in June, when we read the prophet Samuel’s warning to Israel about wanting a king?
To paraphrase: a king will take all of your stuff, take your sons and daughters, your livestock, and your produce. He’ll take everything and use it for himself.
But the people said, “yeah we’re down with that, because he’ll help us fight wars and feel like we’re in the big leagues.”
Samuel’s warning was, “be careful what you wish for when you’re seeking stability from a human leader rather than from God.”
World War 1 was a warning about the human cost of decrepit, human monarchies.
I mean, when most of us have an argument at Thanksgiving with the cousin who likes to, “say it like it is,” millions of people don’t go to war.
Under monarchical rule… there have been lesser reasons for war.
But, Pope Pius XI wasn’t just concerned with World War 1, he saw the rise of totalitarian leaders, who were just as bad as monarchs beginning to rise from the ashes of feudal Europe: Russia, Italy, and Spain were all witnessing the rise of authoritarians.
In less than a decade, Germany would see Hitler become the Fuhrer, taking the place of the Emperor, who had lost the Great War.
Pope Pius instituted Christ the King Sunday as a reminder in a time of significant conflict that only one king can guarantee safety and peace, and that elevating a human person to the status of king is an idolatry that can cause mass destruction of life.
The world did not heed the warning and within 15 years, we had a second world war.
I wonder if we’re listening now?
I’ll let that sit for a minute and come back to it.
On to our second trivia question…
Who is the most famous mythical king of England?
King Arthur. Famous for the Sword in the Stone, the Lady of the Lake, the Knights of the Round table, the sword excalibur, Merlin, Sir Lancelot, the Holy Grail.
Not all of these were part of the most original tales, but they grew up around the King Arthur tradition over 10 centuries.
King Arthur was a wise king, almost like a Welsh and later British equivalent to King David.
A king who was fierce in his younger years, and who became a shell of himself in his older years surrounded by his kingly wealth and privilege.
In 1889, Mark Twain wrote his own novel about King Arthur, called A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
The conceit of the novel is the question, what would it be like to take a modern person and have them time travel with the latest industrial technologies and ideologies to medieval times.
Hank Morgan, the Connecticut Yankee, is a thoroughly modern American man. He is skeptical of religion, he believes in individualism, human psychology, and he abhors the idea of monarchy.
Hank finds himself in the court of King Arthur, this David-like British king.
He eventually gains the trust of the king and convinces him that if he would just disguise himself and go among his people, rather than sitting in his high and lofty castle, he would discover how his kingly ideals affect the common person.
What transpires is a 19th century version of that t.v. show Undercover Boss.
You know the one where they try to make people who make 300 times the salary of their average employee seem more likeable?
King Arthur and Hank start their journey and it is obvious in their interactions with common people how out of place the king is.
Mark Twain makes King Arthur look ridiculous like the Emperor who wore no clothes in situation after situation.
Nothing Hank does or says seems to change the King. And this person dressed in pauper’s clothes continues to act with the pomp and circumstance of his station, and all of the people think he’s just some crazy person.
King Arthur just doesn’t seem to get it. He can’t pull himself out of his privilege and really understand his people on a human level, until…
Until he comes to a small hut on the edges of town, where a woman is dying of smallpox.
The house has been left desolate, because the deadly disease is so infectious.
The king, without regard to his own safety and against the advice of the Connecticut Yankee, Hank, finally finds his old chivalry and tries to help the woman.
She asks him to check on her husband, who has already died in another room.
This brings her comfort to know that he is no longer suffering.
He brings the woman her daughter, who dies in her arms.
He listens to the story of how her sons were wrongly imprisoned by the Lord who owns the land that they rent.
He stays with her until she also dies at midnight, and though they are not allowed a Christian burial by the Roman Catholic priest, he covers them with dignity.
It is a truly transformative episode for this king, who just didn’t get it.
It seems at last that he does understand what it is like to be human and to care about people and to honor the love that people have for one another.
It’s a beautiful scene, where the lofty king, remembers and resembles Christ the King.
Part of Mark Twain’s genius, though, is that unlike Undercover Boss, where everything turns out happy and we discover that our CEO has become a super human worthy of his executive pay,
Twain gives us an Arthur who reverts back as soon as this human moment is over.
As they leave the house, Arthur and Hank run into the sons who were imprisoned.
They had escaped.
After hearing their plight from their mother about the Lord who had wrongly imprisoned them, Arthur, instead of having compassion on these boys, has an immediate reversion to life as usual.
He tells Hank that they have to arrest the boys and take them back to their Lord for punishment.
His knightly chivalry that had him attend to the needs of the mother, regresses to the knightly duty to police the commoners and uphold the feudal system.
In the end, King Arthur has not been changed by his experience.
He remains the 1 Samuel type of king, not the Christ-like type of king.
So, after all of this, why have I brought to you two stories from our trivia questions on this Christ the King Sunday?
The first is that if you think about it, Jesus was an “undercover boss.”
I mean he came down in garb like ours so that the king of the universe could know what it was like to live inside of creation and to know the sufferings of ordinary people.
Unlike King Arthur, though, Jesus didn’t immediately forget what he learned. He suffered under Pontius Pilate as the Nicene Creed reminds us.
That’s reason number one.
The second, I suppose, is a warning that has been sounded throughout the generations by prophets and popes and Connecticut Yankees;
It seems to be human nature to want a strong and powerful person to create safety and security and a sense of identity for a people, to want kings.
But as Christian people our vision of kingship lies beyond the kingdoms of earth.
This is something that Pontius Pilate didn’t understand, and it’s something that we all need to be reminded of on a regular basis.
The second thing is that the church is not perfect, it is made up of humans after all, but in times of uncertainty it is a place where we can receive reassurance that all storms can be calmed.
As you gather together this week with family, as people talk about, worry about, and come to terms with the current state of our nation,
Maybe you’ll remind those you love that there is a place that you know where, even if the troubles of this world don’t disappear, you can be embraced by a community that feels safe in troubling times.
Maybe, if someone says that they’re worried that their belief has fallen by the wayside,
You can tell them that we accept people no matter where they are in their journey, and that St. Andrew’s is a great place for people with doubts because we belong to a church where it’s okay to ask questions, and to challenge, and to wrestle with truth.
We don’t need like-minded individuals, we just need like-hearted individuals;
People who want to leave the rancor of the world behind for a minute and find a place for embrace.
We all think slightly differently about things and that can be a beautiful thing.
What’s most important, though, is not always what we think, but how we commit ourselves to love.
Maybe, if someone says that they don’t know if they’re into our type of traditional worship style, you can tell them about why you love it, how long it took you to get used to it, how it reflects the earliest way that Christians gathered together.
Or you can tell them that your church is working on starting a new contemporary worship service in the new year and they can be a part of it.
Finally, I think it is also a good reminder in a world like ours that continues to prize the individual over the community,
That in the coming days, it may be that the church needs you more than you think you need the church.
We so often get stuck in this mindset of thinking only about what we need from God.
What if God needs us? What if all of the vulnerable people in our nation, need us?
What if there was an altruistic institution that gave you a chance to serve others’ needs before serving your own needs.
So many people don’t know what to do right now, you may hear this at work or at Thanksgiving dinner.
People who just don’t know how best to help.
The Black Church has always been a hub for community organizing and thriving.
Black churches were the backbone of the Civil Rights movement, Emancipation, and resettlement after the great migration (to name a few).
As things have gotten more comfortable in the last several decades for more folks, somewhere we were convinced that the church’s only job was to serve us and our own ambitions.
For people who are looking for a way to help their neighbors who are under threat, it may be a good reminder that the church is also here so that you can serve and make a difference.
As we continue to see how the current version of kingship takes shape 100 years after Pope Pius instituted Christ the King Sunday and warned us about authoritarians replacing feudal kings,
This is a time when the world needs the church again, not to enshrine new kings, but to remember Christ the King,
And to work for justice and peace.
Remind those you love that there is a place for calm in the uncertainty, there is a place where they can ask important questions, and there is a place where they are needed.
If we want to turn this world around, No king will do it for us.
No individual effort will make it happen, we have to do it together.
Thank God for churches like St. Andrew’s, and thank God for Christ the King.
Amen.
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