Christ the King Sermon, Last Sunday of Pentecost

Last Sunday of Pentecost

Proper 29 - Christ the King

Transcribed from a sermon given on

November 25, 2012

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Today is the last Sunday of Pentecost. We begin the church year again next Sunday on the first Sunday of Advent. The last Sunday of Pentecost is also called Christ the King Sunday, where we celebrate the reign of Christ. 

As I was thinking about this and trying to wrap my mind around what it means for Christ to be king, I realized that king is not a word that we really identify with. Our image of kings, like the king or queen of England, is of people who don’t have very much power. It is not like kings in ancient times. But I had a thought and came up with a story. One of the people at the first service called it a parable. 

I’d like you imagine a high school that has just gotten out of hand. What has happened is that the normal cliques and groups in a high school have coalesced into what they call teams, and each team has a captain. This captain rules it over every one of his team members. He tells them what to do and collects money from them. There are drugs being sold, there’s violence and there are fights between the members of the different teams. Those who are not part of a team get harassed. It has become a very ugly place. 

Some of the police in the area were discussing this and the young captain from another town said, “My heart is really breaking for these kids because I know there have got to be kids in there who are good kids and want to have a different kind of experience in High School.” This young captain was one of those people who looked very young, the sort of person who when he wasn’t wearing his uniform got carded every time he wanted to buy anything. So he volunteered to go into the high school and try and talk to some of the kids. Those of us who are old enough to remember 21 Jump Street, it is that sort of thing. For those of you who don’t remember the show, don’t worry about it. 

The officer makes arrangements. He gets his hair cut in a strange way and he finds whatever kind of clothes the high school is wearing at that time and makes arrangements for him to be a transfer student. Of course he is a transfer student with a poor grade point average so he is not put in the AP classes but in those other classes. You know. And he hangs out with the kids. At lunch he sits alone at one of the tables. Usually there are the teams that are all in different parts of the cafeteria. He sits in the middle. At first there are just a couple of kids who talk to him. Gradually each day more and more of the students sit at his table and want to listen to what he has to say because he is so gentle and loving and caring and smart. He tells them that they don’t have to live like that. That it is much better to work together. They need to take care of each other. And that nobody has a right to take away your lunch or your lunch money. You don’t need to do that and you don’t need to be part of one of these teams. You don’t have to be violent. 

Slowly but surely more and more of the kids start to hang out with this new person. Not just the kids that weren’t in a team, but some of the ones who were part of a team, were leaving their teams and saying I don’t like what’s happening and also began to hang out with him.

Well you can imagine how the captains of the teams felt about that. The teams were like, “You can’t do that. He’s messing up the whole system.” So one of the team captains has his thugs go in and confront him and say you better stop doing that. “If we see you doing that any more you are going to be in real trouble.” Well of course this guy is a police officer. He’s not the least bit scared by that. So, that didn’t work. 

Finally the strongest captain has his thugs grab him after school, bring him around behind the school in the alleyway and beat him terribly. And then the captain comes in and says, “Well, now what do you think?” And of course this police officer is not intimidated the least bit. A little beat up, yes, because he chose not to fight back, knowing that he probably could have done a good deal of damage to the kids. Then the captain says, “You don’t look afraid, what’s with you.” He responds “You have no power over me.” “Oh yes I do.” Then he asks, “Are you trying to be the captain here?” The officer responds, “I’m not a captain in this high school. I have no interest in being a captain in this high school.” The high school bully asks, “Oh, you are a captain then?” The officer responds, “Yes, but not in this high school. I have no interest in that.” 

So it was decided that it was time for him to leave, and he wasn’t seen again at school. There were a couple of the people who had been listening to him who saw him in his police uniform and suspected it was him, but nobody was quite sure. But the ones he talked to began to change the school because they began to work together and not be afraid of these powerful team captains. Slowly the culture of the school began to change. 

Then when graduation came, guess who was there to shake the hand of every one of the students as they graduated. The ones he had gotten to know well, he helped them in the next step in their lives with scholarships or jobs.

This little parable to me is kind of what Jesus was. He came into our world, but never was totally of our world. He always was more than that as well. That beautiful but confusing concept “Who is and was and is to be.” He is outside of time, outside of space - beyond. Something quite different.

We all have memories of our own high school experience. When we were in high school, didn’t we take it seriously? Didn’t it really matter whether you made it into the cheer leading squad or not. And it really mattered whether you got invited to the prom. And when you were called one of the dorks or geeks or whatever the word was that they used, you felt terrible and humiliated, awkward and strange. We all have our own particular experiences of high school. 

When we were in high school it seemed really, really important. And when we raised our kids and they were in high school, and they were all bent out of shape, we did our best not to say, “Oh don’t worry, it’s just high school” because we tried to remember that for them that is real. Perhaps that is how Jesus sees us. We are so concerned about power, or money, or how many things we are going to have. Does it really matter? Is it really important? Yeah it’s important to have food, clothing, health, all of those are important but how much do we need? Does power on earth really matter? What does matter? What remains from high school? What was really important when you were in High School that has remained? Maybe there are some friendships. Maybe there are some things you learned. But they are all those positive things. Those things you didn’t worry about at the time. Christ came among us, became human, was born and lived as a human being to tell us that there is something more to life than just accumulating things. There is something more to life than power. There is something more to life than security. That it is about love - loving each other, loving God, loving ourselves.

And every one of you who is here today is here because there is some part of you, maybe it is a large part, maybe it is just a tiny little voice inside, that knows that there is something more than just this reality, this world, this cosmos. That knows that there is something more than this. That this is not everything. And Christ came to assure us that that is true and invite us to help bring a new kind of reality into the world.

When we say, “Thy kingdom come” it means helping to make this world be the way it was intended to be, the way God would like to see it - whole, loving, kind and good. And here we are. Each day we have a choice - who is our captain, who is our king. Do we follow the leaders of this world or do we follow the leader of that which is beyond this world? Do we bring in peace and love and hope or are we stuck here. Each day we have that choice. 

Christ the King invites us to help bring his kingdom here on earth.