All Saints by the Lake
November 26, 2023
This is the sixth Reign of Christ Sunday that I’ve been at All Saints’ (although I haven’t preached every one of those, thanks to our excellent team of Lay Readers). If you’ve been taking notes on the sermons I have preached, though, you’ll have gathered that I’m generally a fan of this feast and of the concept of Christ as King – with one important caveat: that we always need to be paying attention to where the power is, in our scriptural texts and in our conceptions of God. That’s true in general, but it’s particularly true today.
The power that Christ the King wields is not the power of a human dictator, tyrant, or even benevolent monarch: it is the power of the One who made the cosmos, who sees the truth of all things from the vast sweep of history to the tiniest detail of our human hearts, and whose Spirit dwells in each one of us.
The power of Christ the King is not one among many competing mortal allegiances, but, as Paul says, is “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.”
This is the power of the God who is also a caring shepherd, as described by the prophet Ezekiel: who goes looking for the sheep who have been scattered by defeat and exile, and who brings them home to the rich pastures of their own land. And, as always, we know we’re seeing power wielded well because this shepherd cares particularly for “the strayed, the injured and the weak”, feeding them with justice, while rebuking the “fat and the strong” who have preyed upon those weak and injured sheep.
(A footnote here that “fat” might be perhaps better translated “well-fed” or even “gluttonous” – it refers to those who have enriched themselves at the expense of others, and who have thereby denied the necessities of life to the poor. Ezekiel is not saying that you need to go to Weight Watchers to get to heaven, or that God punishes people with high BMIs.)
The power of Christ the King is the power of the Son of Man enthroned in glory who separates the sheep from the goats, and who makes it clear that how you treat the least of those who are members of his family – the hungry, sick, homeless and oppressed – is how you treat the King of the whole universe.
God’s power is above all the other powers, and all other powers are accountable to God.
So we can be pretty certain of what the good and healthy use of power looks like: it is used on behalf of those who have no power, and to restrain those who would use their power to oppress others and enrich themselves.
But what about our own power in the context of God’s power?
Pretty much all of us have some power, whether or not we are comfortable admitting it. We have power in our families, in our workplaces, as citizens, and as consumers. And if we choose not to use that power, there are less well-meaning people who would be happy to step into the vacuum that results. Sometimes being faithful means acknowledging our power and using it for good, even if it pushes us outside our comfort zone.
Last week was, of course, American Thanksgiving. A friend of mine – let’s call him Alex – drove from upstate New York to the Midwest to visit his parents. My friend’s sibling – let’s call them Jordan – was also visiting from New England. When Jordan arrived, the family discovered that they had a gun in the car and were expecting to bring it into the house during Thanksgiving dinner. Jordan had been clearly told ahead of time that this was not acceptable, but decided to force the issue, and their and Alex’s parents – the homeowners – were reluctant to come right out and say, “No, you cannot bring a gun into our house” to the face of a child who had just driven a thousand miles to come to Thanksgiving.
There ensued a very awkward twenty-four hours or so during which Alex and his partner and Alex’s aunt and uncle tried to run interference between Jordan and their parents. The eventual outcome was that Jordan came to dinner and the gun did not, but it took a long time to get to that point, during which Alex was a participant in several conversations where his parents kept asking for his opinion and hinting that they might be thinking about allowing the gun in after all to avoid antagonizing Jordan.
What Alex and the other unarmed members of this family gathering needed from his parents was for them to exercise their power as homeowners and de facto heads of the family. They needed them to say to Jordan, clearly and unequivocally, that they had set the boundary of no guns at Thanksgiving dinner, and that their choice was to respect that boundary; to turn around and drive home; or to find a hotel room to sit in with their firearm. Instead, their waffling meant that for a full day, Alex and his partner were unsure whether they – who had not violated his parents’ trust and defied their clear directive by showing up with a gun – would face the choice of hotel, drive home, or sitting through the meal across from a relative who had strong-armed everyone else into allowing them to bring a deadly weapon to the dinner table.
Alex’s parents desperately wanted not to offend anyone, to keep everyone happy, and not to have any awkwardness or have to outright tell their child “no”. But that wasn’t possible under the circumstances: it was only a question of who would have to feel uncomfortable, the person who had behaved badly or the ones who hadn’t.
The situation is perhaps not always so cut and dried – nor, thankfully, do they always involve the possibility of someone getting shot – but exercising our power very often means making some version of this choice: whether to rock the boat or not, whether to enforce the boundary, whether to call out the bad behaviour, whether to prioritize fundamental safety or the preservation of surface politeness.
It’s hard. It frequently means overcoming decades of conditioning that tells us we should be people-pleasers and keep the peace at all costs. It can take a long time to lean fully into this kind of power. But this kind of power is a form of truth, and the truth, as always, sets us free.
When you find yourself needing to decide whether to abdicate your power or take it, and if you take it, how to use it: ask yourself – what would Christ the King do? Who here is seeing Christ’s presence in the least of the members of God’s family, and how can I back them up? Who, conversely, is butting at the weakest sheep with their horns, and do I have the capacity to make them stop?
We all have power in some form. Let Christ the King show us how to use it.
Amen.
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