Sermon, Last Pentecost, Christ the King

Today is the last Sunday of the church year -- Christ the King Sunday. Next week begins a new year in the Church cycle with the first Sunday of Advent. This can be a jarring time.

Today we give Jesus all glory and power, wisdom and might. Today we hail the power of Jesus' name, bring forth the royal diadem and crown him Lord of all. Next week we begin our season of hopeful expectation of learning to slow down and wait patiently while the world around us speedily, eagerly and greedily rushes toward Christmas Day.

Today we stand on the brink of the already and the not yet. The already of proclaiming Christ King. The not yet of Advent. And the already and not yet of time itself as John wrote of the Lord God as the one who is, who was and who is yet to come.

This is jarring because here we are singing the praises of Jesus as all-powerful King and hearing him before Pilate stating that his kingdom is extra-terrestrial, and next week we begin our preparations for the arrival of that king born to an unwed mother in a manger. It can be jarring because now we see him as King of kings and Lord of lords, and in a few weeks' time we will see him in a pair of Huggies.

We seem to be caught in the middle between the two polar opposites of Jesus Almighty and our little Ba-boo. But we aren't caught at all. We are in that place where we can recognize Jesus' full divinity and full humanity. And we are in that place where we can look upon both with fear and trembling, awe and wonder.

We look with fear and trembling upon this great king whom we worship. This is the one who is the firstborn of the dead, resurrected in glory and who freed us from our sins. This is the one who will come again with glory riding on the clouds and making himself known to every tongue and nation. This is the one who is the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the one who is and who was and who is to come. This is the one who is the great I AM.

We also look with awe and wonder at an infant in a cradle. In a world where infant mortality was high, we are awed that God would take this form. We can't help but wonder in amazement that the God of the universe, a universe that is expanding at greater and greater velocities every second, that God is now in the form of a person no bigger than my arm. And we are in awe that God Almighty now eats, sleeps, breathes, bleeds, loves, lives and dies just like us.

It's hard to wrap our heads around the idea of fully human/fully divine. How can God manifest himself completely in a human being? How can a human being not use that omnipotence for selfish gain? And because this is a difficult thing to do, I think we tend to compartmentalize or favor one over the other.

Do we favor the image of all-powerful Jesus ruling heaven and earth, coming on clouds in glory to purge earth of Satan and evildoers? Or do we favor the image of baby Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes on a silent night with shepherds and angels come to honor the little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay?

Maybe one of those images scares us. Maybe we are terrified of Jesus coming again, afraid for the possibility that it might be us who are cast into the lake of fire and everlasting torment. Or maybe we don't know how to deal with a God in human form who would humble himself and be like us with all of our weaknesses and temptations and ability to mess things up.

God can't be compartmentalized or contained in our boxes of limited understanding; after all, he's not a tame Lion. The best we can hope for is to understand him more. But how can we ever hope to understand the incomprehensible?

We do that, I think, by spending time with the other. If we want to limit Jesus to all-powerful king, then we should spend time getting to know the man. If we want to keep God in the manger, spend time with the King. It's really no different than how we learn about, and get to know, people. If we spend all our time with those exactly like us, what will we learn?

And that might be the most important thing to take away from this time of kingship and babyhood: Are we willing to spend time with each to learn more about how our God reigns?

And once we get that figured out, will we be willing to apply what we have learned about God to each other. Will we be willing to treat others with both the deference and honor due a king, while at the same time caring for them like we would care for a baby? And that, more than anything, is what makes all this so jarring.