19 December 2015

Sermon 22 November 2015 John 18:33-37 Christ the King Year B

         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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