Welcome to “Subversive Sunday.” That is what I call this last
Sunday of the Christian year. Part of the reason I call it that is because in
each of the three years of our Lectionary, the cycle of scripture readings we
use for Sunday worship, we have some of the most subversive texts found in the
Gospel on this particular Sunday. I’ve never proposed using this as a real
title since the church insists on calling this day, “Christ the King” or “The Reign
of Christ.” I prefer the name “Subversive Sunday” because it is the day on
which we are particularly called to examine where our allegiance lies. To whom
do we pledge our allegiance as Christians? Is it to the world and all its fears?
Or is it to a king of triumph, beauty, hope, and love?
In this
morning’s Gospel, Pilate knows Jesus is dangerous. Pilate knows this because
Jesus has a completely different way of ruling than the ways things currently
are. Pilate knows if Jesus and his followers were part of this world they would
do things differently. Pilate, you see, used violence as his way to triumph. He
perverted beauty, destroyed all hope, and sowed fear instead of love.
But Jesus,
while he is in this world, is also not of this world and will not use violence.
Instead, Jesus tells Pilate his kingdom is not from here and he came into the
world to testify to the truth. The truth is where triumph is revealed as
justice without violence, hope appears in the midst of despair, where beauty is
truth and truth is beauty, and love casts out fear.
Jesus’ kingdom is
so subversive we can barely comprehend just what it means. Jesus rules in a
kingdom unlike any we have seen before. Jesus’ kingdom is where justice triumphs,
hope is found even in despair, beauty is truth, and love casts out all fear.
Because we
cannot imagine a kingdom of justice, hope, beauty, and love, except perhaps in
the dimmest recesses of our minds, our minds are full of what we see and hear
in our world. For most of us, that is our only truth and it is full of fear and
violence.
Yet Jesus calls us to join him in
this kingdom of justice, hope, beauty, and love, in this reign of God where
there is no ruler other than One Great Ruler. This is a kingdom where instead
of trying to maintain a system, the members of the kingdom work to open the
system so all may enter in.
In seems particularly timely that
this Gospel occurred when world powers are struggling with overcoming violence
and deciding whom to let in and whom to keep out. We might want to remind
ourselves, that just in the United States we have struggled throughout our
recent history with whom we let in and whom we keep out.
Late in the 1800s and early 1900s,
the United States struggled with Italians, Poles, Greeks, Jewish people from
Russia and central and Eastern Europe, as well as Chinese, many fleeing from
political terror. The U.S. began a processing camp on Angel Island in the San
Francisco Bay that operated from 1910 to 1940. Arriving Asian immigrants often
stayed there for months. More people were excluded from the U.S. there than at Ellis
Island, the most famous processing site in the New York Harbor, in the shadow
of the statue of liberty. And of course in the 1850s it was the Irish, fleeing
from famine. In 1918 and beyond there was another wave of immigrants from
Greece, Italy, Russia and other Eastern European countries.
Beginning in the late 1930s (Did you
learn this in history class?), European Jews and other political refugees fled
from the approaching Holocaust. And did you know that President Franklin
Roosevelt convened a 29-nation conference to discuss Jewish refugees who were
fleeing in large numbers? When the ocean liner St Louis arrived with more than
900 passengers, most of whom were Jewish refugees, the ship was not allowed to
disembark its passengers. The ocean liner sailed back to Europe where most of
those 900 people died during the Holocaust. A Gallup poll during that time
found 61% of Americans were opposed to allowing 10,000 Eastern and central
European children in to the U.S. Most of the children were Jewish.
My great uncle Leopold died in a
concentration camp because he wrote an editorial criticizing Hitler. My father
and grandmother landed in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1939, where the entry
processing was less strict. We can ask ourselves, would the Holocaust have a
different ending if we and the other 28 nations gathered in that meeting had
overcome fear with love and taken in those people and others?[1]
We need to remind ourselves that
Jesus challenged the political principalities and powers of his day. Our newly elected
Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, has issued a statement
about the Syrian refugee crisis that begins with the words, “Be not afraid!” He
goes on to say, “We will not let the
nightmare this world often is keep us from carrying out the words of Jesus who
told us to be a neighbor to those in need.” And, our own Bishop Ed stands with the Presiding
Bishop in this. Bishop Ed repeats, "Be not afraid!"
To bring this “Be not afraid!” among
us at Church of the Resurrection, we can remind ourselves that in the midst of
our fears about not being as many in number as we once were, searching for a
new priest and pastor, refurbishing our programs and buildings to be welcoming,
we are welcoming new people, we are gratefully giving back to God, we are doing
God’s work in this place, and we are praying and gathering here each Sunday.
So if you want to talk “Subversion
Sunday,” how about not just this Sunday but every Sunday? The most seditious
and subversive thing we say each Sunday is the Lord’s Prayer. Each time we
pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven,” those are
dangerous words. When we pray those words we separate our allegiance from
principalities and politics, from death and destruction. We pledge our
allegiance to a kingdom that is not from this world. We give up our allegiance
to country, to political party, to flags, to whatever allegiances from this
world we have. Instead we pledge our allegiance to the Kingdom of God and to
Christ the King, and to his reign on earth as it is in heaven. Our king is Christ
Jesus, the king of justice, hope, beauty and love. Our king is the king whose
kingdom is Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. AMEN.
The
Rev Nicolette Papanek
©2015
[1] The sources for this information were npr.org, “This
isn’t the First Time Americans Have Shown Fear of Refugees,” by Ron Elving, 21
November 2015, and various historical texts, too numerous to mention in a
footnote.
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