fundamental hostility to Christ and his Church

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

and St Martin’s, Duntroon

KO TE KARAITI TE KINGI - CHRIST THE KING  

(November 20^th) 2022

Near Eucla, January 1998

 

 

 READINGS:

 

Jeremiah 23: 1-6

For psalm: Luke 1: 68-79

Colossians 1: 11-20

Luke 23: 33-43

 

 

There is a strange sense in the lectionary that introduces periods of incremental change in the themes of the readings that we journey through. It is as if we were meant to prepare ourselves gently for the larger changes around the corner.

As it happens, if you will excuse a digression for a moment, there's a couple of places in the geography of Australia where you drive through unofficial time zones that create a segue from one time zone to another. If you drive from Adelaide West to Perth you don't make the full 2½ hour time change at the border but drive through an unofficial region about 80 or 100 kilometres long around the minute settlement of Eucla, where your time is changed by three quarters of an hour. In reality it makes considerable business sense, as is even more apparent in the New South Wales town of Broken Hill which on the basis of population gravity locates itself in South Australian time. These are important subtleties when you pick up a phone or e-mail your nearest business contact who may legally share your time zone, but who in reality isn't out of bed yet. Of course if you're driving the reasonably significant distances across our big flat red western neighbour it doesn't matter quite so much.

So yeah, we are in a sort of transition zone here. We have leapt from Jesus journeying towards Jerusalem to not only his arrival there, but, omitting a few details about meals, arrests and torment, have leapt to his crucifixion. We saw the full process, of course, months ago in Holy Week, but now we are approaching the death of Jesus wearing a different pair of glasses. Surrounded by political upheaval in the world we are looking for leadership that is greater than, sounder than, more just and compassionate than, the dictatorships of a Putin or a Muhammed bin Salmin, or the chaotic narcissistic machinations of a leader-in-waiting of that powerful nation between Mexico and Canada.

So how is this shift in the church calendar, originally invented by Pope Pius XI, supposed to rumour good news? To answer that question we need to know that Pius in 1925 was doing all he could to counter the emerging tyranny of an Adolf Hitler, a Benito Mussolini, a Joseph Stalin, or, though he was still a year from infamy, a Francisco Franco. Pius XI was a brave and visionary man, who openly accused the Nazi government of sowing “fundamental hostility to Christ and his Church,” the same accusation we might make of Vladimir Putin, despite his snuggly relationship with leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church. They must themselves stand alongside Putin before the stern judgement of God on the day of reckoning.

We know of course that they have always been tyrants, that the more things change the more they stay the same. It is often hard to proclaim a God of hope when tyrants prevail. Yet that is an eternal problem and in our Jewish and Christian heritage it reaches back at least to the beginnings of scripture. As it happens the story of Cain and Abel was a reasonably late Hebrew scripture, but it makes clear that there always will be as there always has been tyrants soaked in blood. Against all common sense we are called to believe that nevertheless God’s final word is one of light, not darkness, is “Yes” not “No.”

The kingship that we acknowledge and celebrate on this day is revealed as a polar opposite to the kingship that the tyrants of history have sought to establish. God is not a king of missiles, but as revealed in Christ is the King of Love. The hymn writer Henry Williams Baker put it beautifully when he interpreted Psalm 23: “the king of love my shepherd is.” The kingship revealed in Jesus Christ is compassion, love, justice, and it is of these graces that we are called to be bearers.

If we were to hold the entire church year together in our thoughts we would recognise the recurring theme that we can only be ambassadors of this king of love by opening again and again our hearts, minds, spirits to his redeeming, sustaining, edifying and transforming love. It is to that surrender to this king of love that we called day by day, Sunday by Sunday, and it is for that reason that it is such a fine and soaring note on which to end the church year.


My sermons will be conspicuuous by their absence for the next couple of weeks, as I swan around in the southern reaches of that vast flat western isle, acquainting myself with a few grandchildren / mokopuna born since Covid, and reaquainting myself with a few born before. Oh and a few daughters, too. And their partners. Bring it on!