-
Contact Info
- Office Hours
- M-Th 9-12, 1-3
- Closed Friday
- Telephone
- (503)640-1775
- Address
- 168 NE 8th
- Hillsboro, OR 97124
- Directions
-
Email
- General Info
- Office
- Spire
- Webmaster
- Gwen Drake
- Pastor
- Sandra Hunter
- Director of Family
- Ministries
- Lefty Schultz
- Visitation Pastor
- Laura Lillegard
- Office Manager
- John Hiestand
- Music Minister
- Youth E-mail
- Youth Ministry
- Oregon-Idaho UMC
- Main UMC Website
- Boy Scout Tr #240
Sermon - November 25th, 2007
If You are King, Save Yourself
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture: Luke 23:33-43
Call to Awareness: Just who is Jesus anyway? He asked the question, others asked the question, Pilate asked the question at his trial, many still ask the question. Jesus did not really answer the question. Did you notice? “Who are you?” hangs in the air, and for many of us it hangs there still, the one question we ought to know the answer to and the one question that continues to haunt many of us because we do NOT know the answer, not completely, not in any way that is easy to answer. If you think it is an easy answer, try to explain who Jesus is to a child or to a questioning middle schooler. I think you’ll discover that the names we have for Jesus are not enough, words are not enough, we are left wanting. And let me tell you that that is okay...
I ask you to ponder this question today, because we are about to enter a very holy time of the Christian year—a time of waiting. What are we waiting for? Who are we waiting for? Who is this Jesus? As we sing and pray and listen and worship, let us be open to the unexpected, to the stirrings of our hearts, to a brush with the Spirit. Let us make this ordinary time, become an extraordinary time of experiencing God in our midst.
This Sunday is known on the church calendar as Christ the King Sunday. It is our last Sunday in Ordinary Time. Next Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent—one of my favorite times of the Christian Year. But before we launch into Advent, we take time to remember what means for Jesus to be a king. Listen to the story--
Love came into the world like a little child, fresh from God. When love grew up, love fed people, love healed people, love turned things upside down. This did not sit well with the kings and governors and chief priests—the people in charge. They warned love to leave well enough alone. Love met hate, love met politics, love met the love of power, love met fear. But love did not become those things; love kept on loving, which in the end got love killed—not by villains in black hats but by people like us: clergy, patriots, God-fearing people. What brought them together was their rage directed at him because he was being LESS than they wanted him to be. OR, because he was being MORE than they wanted him to be. Which ever it was, they killed him because he was not WHO they wanted him to be.
He was a good man. Perhaps that is the first thing to say about him. He resisted the temptation to be more than a man, although people could see that clearly it was within his power to do so. On the whole, he limited himself to what anyone made out of flesh and blood could do. He obeyed the laws of gravity and mortality just like the rest of us. He did this so we could not dismiss our kinship with him. He did not come to put us to shame with his divinity. He did not come to be superior in any way. He came to call us into the fullness of our humanity, which was divine enough for him.
He was survived by his mother. His father is not mentioned after his birth, a wife is not mentioned, no children, although he had a genuine fondness for women and children. Some said that he had brothers and sisters. But there was no one else. He called his friends “children” more than once, although he was not much older than they were. They seemed to know what he meant. He never wrote anything, except with his finger in the sand, just before and after he said, “You who are without sin, cast the first stone.” Many of his words were remembered. You can find them easily today, printed on all sorts of things: T-shirts, coffee mugs, car bumper stickers, bill boards. It is more difficult to find people who know what his words truly meant and even more so to find people who live them.
He was a good man. He was not such a good god, if being a god means being big and strong and out of reach. He was a suffering god, which no one had heard of ever before. He talked many times about his death before it happened. He wanted to transform the world by loving it, not by controlling it, and that made his life hell a lot of the time. Compared to the founders of other major religions, he had a rough time of it. Buddha died at eighty, surround by his followers. Confusius died an old man, too, while he was putting together the ancient writings of the Chinese people. Muhammed died in the arms of his loving wife while he was the ruler of Arabia.
Not Jesus. He was not that lucky. But if he had been luckier, what would he have had to offer all those others who die too soon, who die abandoned by their friends, who suffer for things they did not do, who are punished for the capital offense of loving too much, without proper respect for the authorities? His hard luck makes him our best company when we run into our own hard luck. He knows. He has been there. There is nothing that hurts us that he does not know about.
On the whole, his love was not the sweet and nice kind, though. It may have been sweet when he was holding a child in his arms, saying “Blessed are the children, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” It may have been nice when he was washing his friends’ feet, showing them that there was no ranking between them or among them. But more often it was a fierce kind of love—love that would not put up with any kind of tyranny. Love that would not stand by and watch a leper shunned or a widow go hungry or a blind beggar ignored. Love that turned over the money-changers’ tables, cracking a homemade whip before he let God be made into one more commodity, one more way to make a profit.
And what else? He was a king. Whether Pilate could get him to say it or not, only his kingdom was not of this world. His kingdom broke into this world from time to time—it still does—but many of us are afraid of it. Because our world is built on knowing who is up and who is down, who is first and who is last, who is in charge and who is not in charge. His world turns that all upside down. And we don’t seem to know how to function that way. So we run this world our way and we make noises about wanting it to be his way, but we do not really mean it or we would make it happen. He either walks or rides a colt instead of a chariot. He rules with love instead of weapons. He dies instead of instigating a violent take-over. That’s not like any king that has sit on an earthly throne.
For us, something keeps getting in the way of his world breaking through—call it fear or greed or the me, my, mine, I’m the center of the universe thing, or call it sin. It is not all there is of us, but it is strong stuff. Yet according to him we should be finished with it. It is suppose to have no dominion over us, because his death killed it off once and for all. You figure it out. We have been set free. He said, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
His death saved us, and while no one can explain that any better than anyone can explain how he was all human and all God, it would be a terrible thing to deny. It would be like pounding in more nails. Into him and into us.
He even gave us the benefit of the doubt, by assuming that we have no idea how much harm we do—by our inaction as well as by our action, by our collusion as well as by our outright contempt for those whom we declare our enemies. If we have been forgiven, then that is the end of all the blaming, all the scape-goating, all the getting-even, all the revenge. He volunteered to be the last victim, so that we would never make victims out of anyone else again. He was a king to his last breath. He was human to his last breath. He was God to his last breath. He was love to his last breath.
But he was not the last victim, was he? We keep crucifying him over and over again. “If he saved others, then let him save himself, if he is the Messiah, if he is the King.” We keep living our lives in the cesspool of holier-than-thou-ness. We live by the belief that they are wrong and we are right. We are righteous and they are unrighteous. How else do we justify what we do in the world? We all seem to be joining in this same chorus, a chorus of hating when the world desperately needs wisdom.
It’s as if we are still waiting for his “holier-than-thou victory.” We are still waiting for the hero, for the king, for some power to tell us that we are right, we have always been right. But Jesus stays on the cross, just as he stayed at the table, just as he stayed on the road to Jerusalem. And he says, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” But if we truly listen, if we truly open ourselves up to the divine wisdom that is present inside of each one of us, you won’t hear Jesus say only that. If I truly listen with my heart open, I will hear one more variation, “Father, also forgive me; for I do not know what I am doing.”
Maybe that would stop us from getting stuck today in our mutual holy hate. Maybe that would stop our sheer determination to be the last righteous one standing. Maybe we would finally learn to yield to the king, Jesus, the one who was killed because he loved us too much and power too little. Amen.