A Different Kind of King

Some of you know that in a few short weeks I am going to be a great aunt. My nephew David and his girlfriend are expecting a baby—a little boy named Oliver.
Perhaps it’s the impending arrival of Oliver, or maybe all the younger children in the parish, but some of those old favorite Disney films are playing in my head. Most notably, The Lion King. It was just a few weeks ago that I quoted the theme song from the Lion King: The Circle of Life. Today I give you Simba’s Song:
“I Just Can’t Wait to be King.” You remember that song---Simba has just been told by his dad, Mufassa, that one day he, Simba would be King. Thrilled by this news, Simba bounds into his evil Uncle, Scar, full of excitement:
[Simba:] I'm gonna be a mighty king! So enemies beware!
[Scar:] Well, I've never seen a king of beasts
With quite so little hair
Scar is a bit incredulous as he looks at this little boy, working on his roar, waiting for his kingdom to come. Scar just can’t imagine him as King.
But Simba? Simba can:
“No one saying be there
No one saying stop that
No one saying see here
Free to run around all day
Free to do it all my way!
Oh, I just can't wait to be king!”
Simba has no problem proclaiming himself as the future King nor does he have any problems imagining just what it means to be King. For lil’ Simba being King means not getting pushed around and doing whatever he wants.
I Just Can’t Wait to be King is a conversation between a King wanna be and his doubtful Uncle.
Today’s Gospel is a conversation between a reluctant King and an even more reluctant, and confused and exasperated Governor—Pontius Pilate.
Today’s Gospel happens on the first Good Friday. Jesus has spent the night in prison and Pilate is torn. He knows this Jesus is a bit odd, but no threat to the empire. On the other hand he’s stirred up a lot of passion in folks. The governor’s job was to keep the Empire’s massive machine of power running smoothly. Offshoot rebellions were to be squelched.
It seemed that the passion around this man Jesus was brewing into a rebellion so it needed his attention. Now Pilate was a man with some integrity-- he wasn’t going to sentence Jesus to death without good reason…so what we hear today is Pilate trying to find “cause.” If one were to claim they were King that would be “cause,” because there was only one King: the Emperor.
But, what makes a King (or a Queen, or an Emperor, or a Pharaoh) after all?
To hear Simba tell it, a King is The Boss. If you look it up, besides being the male monarch of an independent state, King is defined as a person or thing considered to be the best, the most important. In other words, Being King is pretty darn good….if your goal is to be the best, the big cheese, the most powerful.
The problem, of course is that most Big Cheeses, most very powerful people are, at their core, afraid.
Afraid that they’ll lose their power. It seems like those who are in charge, those who hold a lot of power—kings and their ilk---spend a whole lot of time protecting their claim to the throne.
So for anyone to call Jesus King is a big problem. Poor Pilate, he knows that if Tiberius, the emperor, found out there was King wanna be down in Jerusalem, he would FLIP OUT. Pilate had to nip this in the bud.
But there’s a problem. This Jesus won’t say he’s King. He won’t say he wants to dethrone the ruler of the land. He simply doesn’t  give Pilate much to work with. You can’t even say Jesus was a reluctant King. Jesus was, simply put a totally different kind of King.
And therein lies the heart of this Christ the King Sunday. Christ is a totally different kind of King.
The rule of this God in the flesh is something unlike anything else we have ever known. If we forget that, if we look at Christ the King through the lens of this world---then we’ve  missed the boat. Understanding just what Christ as King means is, in a way, our final exam of the church year.
What do we hear, week in and week out? What do I preach week in and week out? What is the fundamental message of our faith?
That what we think we know we need to turn….inside out and upside down.
The reign of Christ as King is all about power. But not the power of Emperors, or Pharaoh or Queens, or Presidents or Prime Ministers.
The Reign of Christ as King is the power given to the downtrodden, the rejected, the sidelined and the outcast.
The Reign of Christ as King  is the power we hold in our hearts when we proclaim that we will respect the dignity of every creature of God, no exceptions.
The Reign of Christ as King is all about giving power to the disenfranchised. The Reign of Christ as King is about distributing power equitably and fairly.
The reign of Christ as King is about a world where everyone, even poor little Mary’s boy from Galilee can take the Power of this world and turn it on it’s ear.
Simba couldn’t wait to be King. And neither can Christ. The difference though is that Simba became king in the old fashioned way, after the death of his father.
The only way Christ can take that throne, the only way Christ can be King of Kings and Lord of Lords is when all of us, each and everyone of us, gives up our focus on the power of this world and turn ourselves over to the power of the next.
Amen.

The GREAT Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day. A once a year holiday in the secular world. Too bad for them.
Once a year?….pshaw….
We have Thanksgiving every single week…and not just any ol’ordinary Thanksgiving, it’s a GREAT Thanksgiving. Go ahead, take a look on page 5 of the bulletin. The Great Thanksgiving is the communion portion of our service---when we, a holy people share holy food.
Each and every week we gather around the dining table of our Lord to offer thanks for all that we have and all that we are. Everything. Our blessings and our burdens. Our hopes and our fears. Our happiness and our worries.
The Great Thanksgiving of our Lord doesn’t seek only the good. The Great Thanksgiving of our Lord requests---longs for---everything we have. And all that we are.
We are called each and every week to place it all –our joys and our triumphs, our sorrows and our losses---on this altar. And by giving it all to God we are doing exactly what Jesus is saying in this evening’s Gospel: we are turning it over to God. The whole kit and caboodle. Doing that is an act of true and thorough and full thankfulness.
In a few moments we’ll recite A Litany of Thanksgiving. A Litany where we offer thanks for the good as well as the challenges of life.
I encourage you to pray this litany fervently, honestly and whole-heartedly.
Because God wants it all—every last bit of it. So please, PLEASE give it all to God. Even those things too difficult to express, those things to painful to utter—offer them to God. For when we give them to God—only when we give them to God can we, like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, live in true and full faith.
In your pews are note cards. If you care to write down specific blessings or burdens go ahead. After I sit down I’ll give you a few moments. You may place them in the offering plate to be blessed as part of our Great Thanksgiving where they’ll serve as a physical reminder that God wants it all, every single thing.
So whether you write your blessings and burdens down or you silently pray them during the Litany or you hold them in your heart for another day know that our Great Feast of Thanksgiving: the Holy Eucharist will be here every single week and this—this altar? It’s always ready to accept your gifts. +

Big Faith Turns the World Upside Down November 18, 2012

In the days of Jesus the Temple in Jerusalem was the most magnificent structure anyone had ever seen. Some of the stones were 40 ft long…. JUST ONE STONE. Most of the western wall, plus some of the northern wall, from a later incarnation of the temple, still exists today. Even these remnants, small in comparison to what the disciples are marveling at in today’s Gospel, are pretty impressive. When I touched the Western Wall last January I was moved to tears. It is an amazing and formidable place. To the fishermen, tentmakers and stonemasons from rural Galilee the site must have been equally incredible. But it wasn’t just the site that blew them away, it was Jesus’ outlandish claim that it would be destroyed and rebuilt in three days. It just plain ludicrous.
And ludicrous is exactly what Jesus was going for. Along with awesome, incredible, amazing and unbelievable.
Welcome to pre-Advent, my friends. Years ago, Advent had six weeks, just like Lent, so these two Sundays before the official start to Advent have much the same feel as our Advent readings: lots of apocalyptic, end world imagery, lots of violence, lots of chaos. You see, Advent is all about a beginning emerging out of an end, it’s all about a new creation, it’s all about turning what we know inside out and upside down. Advent is about readying us for the coming of a savior, of The Savior. Advent is about welcoming a new creation.
Now I’ve never given birth but I sure do know an awful lot of people who have and I think I am right in saying that giving birth isn’t pretty. Birthing involves ebbs and flows of pain, fear, hope and peace. Giving birth hurts. And once birth happens, there’s a lot of cleaning up to do. Oh and then there’s that whole utter world changing aspect to bringing a brand new human being, a human being you are responsible for, into the world.
All this apocalyptic literature, the readings from Hebrews, the readings from the 13th chapter of Mark’s Gospel are tools used by the writers of our sacred texts to give us some sense of what the Coming of Jesus meant to the world of 1st century Palestine and what it means to us today.  The coming of Jesus then and the coming of Jesus now is mind-blowing, overwhelming and little bit scary. Because the coming of Jesus blows everything else to bits.
Thanks be to God.
You see what the coming of Jesus blows to bits is the business as usual of this world:
Hatred. Fear. Intolerance. Hopelessness.
What the Coming of Jesus brings to us is a clean slate, a fresh start, a beginning to the creation of a world where Love replaces Hate, Courage replaces Fear, Tolerance, Intolerance, Hope replaces Hopelessness.
But getting there? Getting there is just like childbirth---painful scary messy and at times, overwhelming.
Preparing for the messiah is not for the faint of heart.
It requires perseverance, fortitude, grit, spunk and persistence. It also requires faith. Big Faith.
The kind of Big Faith found in Mary, the mother of Jesus, the kind of Big Faith found in Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, the kind of Big Faith found in Sarah, the kind of Big Faith found in Hannah.
The Big Faith of the matriarchs I just mentioned isn’t big in the usual sense. It isn’t loud, it isn’t flashy, it isn’t all that apparent to the casual observer. What makes their faith Big is the breadth and the depth of it. You see these women really got it. They understood that professing one’s faith means nothing if the faith isn’t lived. They understood that shouting their faith from the rooftops meant nothing if deep within their homes, deep within their souls they weren’t living it.
Hannah had that type of faith. Her life wasn’t easy…. each and every time her husband made the obligatory animal sacrifice at the temple she was subject to the disdain and the disgust of his other wife---the one he didn’t love so much, but the one who was fertile. If you’ve ever wanted—desperately wanted---to have a child and were unable too you know the anguish, the deep in your gut anguish of not being able to do so. That was the anguish of Hannah.
When confronted with such a burden, such anguish you have two choices: bitterness or grace.
Hannah displayed some bitterness early on in today’s reading but she seemed to have turned that around fairly quickly when she decided, once and for all, to turn the whole mess over to God. It is a show of great grace, it is an example of  Big Faith when Hannah, assumed to be a drunkard by Eli, stands up for herself—and her faith—by telling Eli that what he assumed was drunkeness was, in reality fervent and faithful praying. Hannah, in the same vein as the Woman with the Hemorrhage and the Woman at the Well---very familiar stories we heard earlier this year in Mark’s Gospel--- teaches the judgmental male in the story a thing or two.
That’s actually what makes faith Big. Faith is Big when those who witness it are changed by it. Eli was changed by Hannah’s faith, Jesus was changed by the faith of the woman at the well, the woman with the hemorrhage and the woman who birthed him, to name a few.
So welcome to this season of pre-Advent, the season of expectation, the season of apocalypse, the season when Big Faith comes to us in the unexpected person of a peasant baby who turns everything, from that magnificent temple to you and me, upside down and inside out.
Amen.

From the musical The Lion King we hear: 

“From the day we arrive on the planet

And blinking, step into the sun

There's more to see than can ever be seen

More to do than can ever be done

There's far too much to take in here

More to find than can ever be found

But the sun rolling high

Through the sapphire sky

Keeps great and small on the endless round

It's the Circle of Life

And it moves us all

Through despair and hope

Through faith and love

Till we find our place

On the path unwinding

In the Circle

The Circle of Life” 

(Elton John and Tim Rice)

This past week had three of the most under-appreciated days in the church year: All Hallow’s Eve, All Saints Day and All Souls Day—three days when the veil between this life and the next, between the living and the dead is lifted just a bit. Three days when we laugh in the face of death, when we remember those who have gone before, when we celebrate the legacy they have left behind. I think these days are underappreciated because we all struggle with death… we fear it, we do everything in our power to prevent it…..but ….this is always a losing proposition. We lose this battle because death is universal and death is inevitable. People are born, people live and people die. 

But this circle of life, the reality of life and death, is not something to be feared, it is something to be celebrated. Celebrated because death has been defeated….once and for all... through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. Jesus looked death in the eye and death blinked. 

Each and every baptism is a recreation of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Our baptisms defeat death. Our baptisms give us eternal life. 

A baptism offers us a glimpse into that very circle of life so emblematically etched in our brains by the song written by Tim Rice and Elton John and so memorably heard in the Lion King. In baptism we are put on that winding path that takes us through despair and hope, through faith and love until we rest in the arms of our God, taking our place among that great cloud of witnesses that populate the heavenly banquet, a seat at which each and every one of us is guaranteed.

This week at Good Shepherd we took our own journey through this Circle of Life. We had a funeral and this morning, three baptisms. It was fitting that we bade farewell to Norma McIntosh on All Souls’ Day and it’s fitting that this All Saints’ Sunday morning we baptize (d) LJ, Riley and Caylee…because the path around the Circle of Life is made up of death and birth, beginnings and endings, alpha and omega.

Any community---our families, our neighborhoods, our churches, our world----is part of this great circle. Things begin, things end. New people come into these communities, old people depart. 

All Saint’s Sunday is a day to remember and this year especially, a day to look ahead. All Saints day is a day when the open veil between this world and the next allows us to consider where we’ve been and where we are headed. 

The Great Cloud of Witnesses—the saints in heaven---represent where we’ve been. 

Pause for a moment. Take a good look around this place. The windows, the woodwork. Look at the altar—think of all the hundreds, the thousands of times the Eucharist has been celebrated atop this gorgeous table, think of all the caskets, all the urns that have been honored right here. Look at this font---how many people have had the waters of baptism poured over them—babies and children young adults and older adults alike. This place is full of history, full of memories, full of the people who built it into what it is today. [For use at Ascension:This place has both glory and struggle in its past, and we have struggle and glimpses of glory in our present. Our forebears know what it is to struggle, to dream, to hope and to worry]

On a day like this we are to honor those people, honor each and every one of these Holy Witnesses …people who have entrusted this place to us. 

To all of Us. 

It’s quite the responsibility. Just how are we to honor them? By doing what we’re doing: by baptizing new members, by welcoming the stranger, by reaching out to the needy, by loving one another. When we do that: when we love one another like Christ loves us, then we are building something---we are building a community of saints, earthly saints, folks just like you and me who love this place, love one another and long to give this church—its people, its purpose, its past, its present and its future the very best that we can.

So as we [For use at Ascension and 8 am: renew our baptismal promises remember all those who’ve been washed in the waters of our fonts, remember all those whose final journey was taken from this space, remember all those who have come before, HONOR all those who will come after as we say, Welcome, welcome to our circle, our glorious, wondrous circle of life] baptize Caylee, Riely and LJ into this, our community of earthly saints, we say; welcome, welcome to our circle, our glorious, wondrous circle of life.