The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
November 25, 2007

Christ the King: Proper 29 – C
Jeremiah 23:1-6
Colossians 1:9-20
Luke 23:33-43

Deep within the child is the person he or she is to become, which is the reason the Feast of Christ the King marks the end of the year that began with Advent and Christmas, because concealed within the child in the manger is the man on the Cross.

As a child, Jesus surely asked that question asked by every child: How do I make a difference in the world? If I want to make a real difference in the world, how can I do it?

We all know the world’s response to this question. Things aren’t to our liking, so we use the leverage we have to turn them around. Terrorists fly airplanes into buildings and destroy things and kill people. And in response, nations deploy armies and destroy things and kill people, all in an attempt to turn things to our liking. And six years ago, in a poll taken shortly after 9-11, it was reported that Americans wanted to turn things to our liking so much that 60-70% of us were in favor of assassinations, torture, the indefinite detention of persons who had been charged with no crime, and the effective annulment of other parts of our own Bill of Rights, if such means were required to do it.

These are not new means, of course. They are the same old means that have been tried since the beginning of the world. But if we really want to make the world different, do these means achieve the ends we desire?

How to change the world was the question on many minds on the night of Jesus’ birth. Rome had its armies deployed to the ends of the earth. Rome ruled Judea against its will, and many in Judea wanted a change. They wanted the Romans out. But since the Romans wouldn’t leave on their own, Jewish zealots resorted to insurrection and riot, to early forms of terror. The Romans met this threat with terror of their own, with crucifixions, hundreds of them, thousands of them, with a show of force meant to keep the peace, to keep the people in line.

And three decades later, on that Friday we call Good, three men were crucified on a hill outside Jerusalem, all of them criminals, according to the authorities. It is possible the three knew each other, you know. The two thieves on either side of Jesus were probably not just ordinary street criminals. Very likely they were zealots, and guilty as charged as one of them admits, freedom fighters who had spent much of their lives stealing in order to supply the local forces who wanted to drive Rome out of Judea. Possibly they had heard of Jesus, because Jesus was proclaiming a new kingdom, and a new kingdom was promising to insurrectionists.

But any new kingdom was alarming to Jewish authorities, and to Rome. So something had to be done about Jesus. “If we let him go on like this,” said the priests, “then all the people will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away our Temple and our nation.” “Whether he is guilty or not,” added Caiaphas, the high priest, “it’s better that one man should die than that the whole nation perish.”

They polled the Sanhedrin, and they all decided that, under the circumstances, the ends justified the means. And they had Jesus arrested. And Peter took out his sword and was going to fight back to save Jesus, and maybe start the rebellion. But Jesus warned him, “Put your sword back in its scabbard, Peter, because those who live by the sword, die by the sword.”

So, armed with clubs and spears, the authorities brought Jesus in under cover of darkness, even though their own law, a law they had a sacred duty to uphold, prohibited secret trials at night. If, in order to save the law, they had to destroy the law by ignoring it, they reasoned, well, under the circumstances they would just have to do it. Although Jesus assured them that his kingdom was not of this world, and even though there were no credible witnesses to testify to his disloyalty, Jesus’ talk about a new kingdom made the authorities nervous and edgy. “If we let him go on like this,” they said, “then all the people will believe in him, and the Romans will remove us from power.” So they turned Jesus over to Pilate, and even though Pilate, too, knew that Jesus was innocent, he agreed with the high priest that it was better that Jesus die than to let an angry mob get any angrier. So they all justified their means by the ends they sought, and Pilate had Jesus beaten and tortured and crucified along with two real threats, and rebellion was crushed. For a time. But was anything made different, really different?

Power. Everyone is awed by genuine power.

Consider a locomotive. Standing by the tracks, one senses the tremendous power necessary both to pull and to stop a train. Or consider the wind. What awesome power wind has! Wind can, in a matter of minutes, destroy a town. Or it can, if controlled, light the town or heat it. Or consider our great rockets, engines that can lift tons of hardware off the earth and send them into space.

But power, impressive, awesome power inherent in the nature of things, is not always so dazzling as a locomotive or a storm or a rocket. Consider the power of a few drops of water, which can fall into a crack, and simply by responding to the temperature, by freezing and expanding, can rip open your sidewalk and the city’s streets.

And ivy. It’s lovely there on the wall, but you’ve got to keep your eye on it, because ivy and water, given time and left to their own devices, will slowly tear the building apart, brick by brick.

Power – the deep, persistent power of the universe, quietly surrounds us all our lives, and most of the time we’re simply unaware of it!

One scientist (Waldermar Kaempffert) estimated that there is enough energy in a single drop of water, if released in a controlled manner, to supply 200 horse power for a year, and enough buried power in an ordinary business card to drive a ferry across the Hudson River for a year.

Much of the time, however, perhaps most of the time, we confuse power with physical force. Just a century or so ago, Britain thought its power beyond serious challenge because it had such great imperial forces. Didn’t Britain have the greatest navy on the seas? Hadn’t the Crown’s soldiers, with their superior weapons, gained control of much of the world, including the whole of the subcontinent of India and all its people?

So it seemed, until a small, funny-looking little man named Gandhi, working as quietly and persistently as the ivy on the wall, brought the Empire to its knees. Not by leading an armed force of his own, but by the power of faith and prayer and personal sacrifice and by his refusal to meet physical force with physical force. And so Gandhi changed the life of his people and gave them new hope.

We should never underestimate the strength of physical force. But is physical force what one appeals to if he wants to change people, if he wants to make human life really new and different? There are, after all, some things that force can never do. No force on earth can change a mind or a heart!

Consider little Paul in the wonderful movie “A River Runs Through It.” The movie is about a father, a Presbyterian pastor, and his two sons, and about their relationships with one another. And early in the movie, when Paul is eight years old, there is a confrontation between him and his father at the breakfast table. Everyone’s bowl is empty, except Paul’s. Paul’s oatmeal remains untouched, Paul’s cheeks in a pout and his spoon lying defiantly upside down on the rim of his bowl.

“We’re not saying ‘Grace’ and leaving the table until every spoonful of oatmeal is eaten,” Paul’s father tells him. But time passes, lots of time, and all day long Paul sits there without touching his oatmeal. “People have been eating the Lord’s oats for centuries,” Paul’s father adds in an appeal to authority, ”and it’s not the place of an eight-year-old to change that tradition.” But Paul does change it. It takes all day, but in the end he outlasts his father.

Paul’s father was bigger than Paul, of course, and with his superior strength he could have shoved the oatmeal down his son’s throat. But what would that have done to their relationship? And would it have changed Paul’s mind about oatmeal? Would it have touched Paul’s heart? No, something else, some deep personal power, not brute force, would have to do that.

When I ask people what they consider the most powerful miracle in the Bible, some suggest that it was the raising of Lazarus from the dead, or perhaps the multiplication of the loaves and fish or the Resurrection. I submit, however, that even the Resurrection required no special effort for the God who brought the world into being out of nothing. All these miracles and others reported in the Bible were easy for God to pull off compared to the much more extraordinary miracle of the conversion of St. Paul! Paul’s conversion, I believe, was the most powerful miracle recorded in the Bible, because it was a genuine change of heart and mind. It required real power, genuine personal power, to accomplish that. No physical force could have done it. No army could have done it. It was only the power of Jesus’ love for Paul and the world, which Paul came to experience personally, that could change the determined, self-righteous will of Paul from the crusader who breathed murderous threats against the followers of Jesus into the great apostle of the Gospel of grace.

Physical force can have its way with the world for a time. Two thousand years ago it had its way with Jesus, for a time. But which, in the end, prevailed? The soldiers who marched Jesus to the Cross and nailed and suffocated him to death? Or the love of the One who made life different by willingly giving his life on the Cross?

Physical force, the force of governments and armies, drove the nails into Jesus’ hands and feet and put up the mocking sign, “This is the King of the Jews.” But it is the power of the love of the One on the Cross that moved Handel to acclaim him King of kings and that inspired Edward Perronet to write the words we sing in adoration this morning: “All hail the power of Jesus’ Name! Let angels prostrate fall,” we sing. “Let every kindred, every tribe, on this terrestrial ball, to him all majesty ascribe, and crown him Lord of all.”

Ironic, isn’t it? Rome is no more. The British Empire is no more. Gandhi brought it down without firing a shot. The Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain are no more. Time always has its way with the principalities and powers of this world. But the Cross, the deep power of the love of Jesus, continues to work its way into the lives of all who are open to him, continues to make them different.

Jesus knew the truth. He knew that if, in order to defeat the beast, one acts like the beast, then bestiality prevails. And so Jesus responded with truth to the question that many were asking on the night of his birth, and that he must have asked as he grew up: How do I make a difference in the world? If I want to make a real difference in the world, how can I do it? He responded by living the truth. And on the Cross he died the truth. And to this day he continues to live the truth Jesus is. For Christ the King, the truth is that the ends can never justify the means, because the means with which we seek to make life different are part of the ends we seek. And therefore, if you want to make a difference in a fundamental way, an appeal to force is simply futile. And that’s why Christ the King, the Child of Bethlehem come to maturity, appealed not to force, but to the Cross and to love.

One of the thieves beside Jesus takes up the mockery of the crowd. “Jesus,” he says, “if you’re the king everyone says you are, then do something. Get yourself, and us, down from here!”

But the other thief, also broken and dying, saw something fundamentally different in Jesus. He heard Jesus say, “Father, let it be, forgive them, pardon them, because they don’t know what they’re doing,” and this dying man knew that it was neither the nails nor the soldiers that kept Jesus on the cross. He knew, as Salvador Dali knew after him when he painted the crucifixion without the nails, that “it was love alone that held Jesus there.”

This second dying man knew that, ironically, the sign on Jesus’ cross spoke truth. This is a king, because the power of his love for them all was greater than all the forces that put him there. So he turned to Jesus and said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus said, “Today, friend, you are with me in paradise.”

It is a breathtaking story, the story of our redemption, the story of the One who was with God in the beginning, and yet who, not counting equality with God something to be grasped, humbled himself to reconcile us one to another by showing us how to love God by loving each other, by making peace “through his blood shed on the Cross.”

The old monk was later to realize the cost of redemption. When someone asked him what it was like to live in love with his brothers in community in the monastery, he said simply, ”Community is excruciating.” In other words, community, life lived together in love, is, literally “of the Cross.”

At the end of “A River Runs Through It,” Paul’s father, too, is destined to find out just how excruciating it can be. His son Paul’s rebelliousness leads him to fall in with a wild crowd, and he begins to gamble and drink, and in time he is killed in a fight in an alley. And at Paul’s funeral, speaking through a lifetime of tears he has shed over his defiant and rebellious son, whom he could not understand, Pastor Maclean says, ”It is one of the ironies of life that it is those we are closest to that we are least able to help or to understand, for often they either resist the help we want to offer or do not need it. And so,” he adds, ”it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we are still free to love them. And we are free to love completely, without complete understanding.”

Isn’t that truth? With all the people in the world who are so different from us, and whom we don’t understand, and whom may not even like, isn’t it true that it is not necessary to understand them completely in order to love them completely? The Cross of the Child of Bethlehem still stands, throwing its shadow across life as we know it, making life different, inviting an appeal to the court of love and sacrifice rather than to the court of force.

This is the power to which Christ, the King, appealed when he wanted to change life at its roots. It is what he thought, and what he believed, and how he lived and died. Because he knew that in the end sacrificial love, like the ivy and the water, always prevails. The Cross prevails over Rome, and over the British Empire, and over the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, and over the United States, and over every throne and dominion and sovereignty and power of the world, even over the power of death itself.

This is the Power whose praise we sing today.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.