C Reign
of Christ Col Paul 2025
Jeremiah
23:1-6; Luke 23:33-43
November 16, 2025
I have always thought that the Revised Common Lectionary
should include I Samuel 8 for every Reign of Christ Sunday. In explaining that passage, Jewish scholar,
Everett Fox, shares the fundamental Jewish understanding that serves as a
critique against every foreign ruler and despot, every authoritarian regime and
supposed righteous shepherd within Israel and Judah. God alone is your Ruler and King and would
govern quite differently from every earthly administration. Fox shares the poetry when the prophet Samuel
comes back to tell the people what will happen if their demands to, “Give us a
king!” are met.
God says, “Here is what will happen. The king will take. Be careful about what you demand for if this
demand is met, and I grant you a king, the king will take and take and take.”
The king shall take your sons. The king shall take your daughters. The king shall take your slaves. The king shall take your animals. The king shall take your land. The king shall take. The king shall take. The king shall take. Heck, after the king finishes “taking,” there
is hardly anything left for your promised Israelite freedom and enjoyment. The people shall return to being slaves under
their own Israelite king.
Later, in I Samuel, chapter 12, four chapters later,
Yahweh, the Living God, makes it clear that as Sovereign of Israel, and the
Ruler of the Universe, the Living God never took a darn thing from you.[1]
Storming against the people, Yahweh asks, “Whose ox have I
taken? Whose donkey have I taken? And whom have I defrauded? Whom have I oppressed? And from whose hand have I taken a bribe so
that justice might not be done?”
I pray that all of you have heard Frederic Handel’s
“Hallelujah” chorus enough times within your life that you have a vague
recollection of the wording. At the
campus church I served in Champaign, Illinois, and the city church I served in
Billings, Montana, it was tradition to sing it every Easter Day. Handle
composed the oratorio, The Messiah, containing the “Hallelujah” chorus
in 1742, using Scriptural text and Psalms that were a part of the Book of
Common Prayer.
And
maybe you have been in attendance for its singing enough times, to know the
tradition f standing when it is sung or when you are singing along to a
performance of the “Hallelujah” chorus.
Nobody is exactly sure why, but legend has it that when King George II
heard the chorus during a performance in England, he assumed it was being sung
in praise of him and his reign. So he
stood that he might be rightly recognized.
When the king stood, the rest of the audience was obliged to stand with
him. “King of kings” and “Lord of lords”
King George II was. If not King George,
whosoever could they be singing about?
As people of faith, who is our king?
One of my spiritual mentors in Champaign, Illinois, a
retired Disciples of Christ campus minister, told me to try and sing the
“Hallelujah” chorus without any political language. “Hum the political parts,” he told me, “and
all you have left is hallelujahs.” Jim’s
point was that we have made religious faith such an impoverished romantic,
sentimental practice that it barely speaks to real life at all. And there it is, right before us, buried in
the tradition of a song we consider central to that same faith.
Jim also reminded me of the famous quote by a theologian
who counseled young preachers about the reality of walking into such deep
waters. “Always preach the gospel with
your bags packed,” he said. It is not
the nature of the gospel to make things easy, agreeable, or comfortable for
those in the pews or the pulpit.
University of Chicago professor and political scientist David Easton
defined politics as “the authoritative allocation of values for a society.”[2] In that definition, a focus on values, how
can we not understand the inextricable ties between religious faith and
politics?
We wax nostalgic about Congregational ancestors who
provided refuge for freedom seekers just before the start of the Civil
War. False walls are found in many of
those homes around the I-80 corridor in my home state of Illinois. Think about that. Our Congregational ancestors regularly broke
federal law in the Fugitive Slave Act.
We puff out our chests remembering our Evangelical
ancestors who formed the Deaconess movement in St. Louis, Missouri, providing
health care for German immigrants, leading to other hospitals in the
Midwest. Advocate Health Care, based in
Downers Grove, Illinois, and a descendant of that Deaconess work, is the
largest integrated health care system in the State of Illinois.
But that was back then.
Racial tension, breaking federal law, immigration, and health care
weren’t considered political issues way back then. Literally, thank the heavens, that these
religious issues of racial tension, breaking federal law, immigration and
health care aren’t political issues in our day.
Our faith might require something of us if they were. After all, when is the last time you have
heard something in the news about race?
Or immigration? Or health care?
Scholars of early Christianity believe that Jesus had a
habit of referring to the movement he was leading as “the Empire of God”
movement. In Greek, Basileia
tou Qeou. It was a way of
acknowledging, as Jewish prophets like Samuel and Jeremiah had done before
Jesus, that the sitting ruler did not carry the authority of God and stood as a
juxtaposition to how God would rule rightly and justly. In the time of Jesus’s early life, that
Augustus Caesar (“Augustus” meaning “the one to be worshipped and adored”)
sitting on the throne had no real claim to the throne and should be removed and
replaced by the Holy One of Israel. The
Empire of God stood as a critique over and against the empire of the Romans or
the empire of Caesar.
Today we heard words from the prophet Jeremiah. Because Jeremiah shows up regularly in the
Revised Common Lectionary this autumn, you have heard me say that the prophet
Jeremiah was thrown into a well, accused by his own countryfolk of not being
patriotic, and locked in jail for his critique of the sitting rulers of his own
country. Jeremiah lashed out at the way
they destroyed the lives of the poor and took advantage of the vulnerable,
regularly dismissed their responsibility for their neighbor in favor of
amassing their fortune and power.
In the passage before us today, Jeremiah imagines the
“shepherds” of his time, “shepherds” a term regularly used for the political
rulers or kings, Jeremiah imagines them deposed and replaced by “shepherds” or
kings of God’s own choosing. Those
rulers, Jeremiah says, shall make mishpat and tzedakah, justice
and righteousness, central focus.
Here is how Jeremiah defined those terms. Mishpat, justice, is making sure all
members of the community have access to resources and goods for the sake of a
viable life of dignity. In the covenant
tradition, Hebrew Scripture focuses particularly on three groups who are
vulnerable to having their access to resources and goods compromised—the widow,
the orphan, and the immigrant. In a
culture still largely governed by the whims and wishes of adult, Hebrew males,
these groups needed an advocate. The
widow, the orphan, and immigrant had no standing of their own in the senate or
the square, at the bank or the market—the places of power and wealth. To do justice then, was to see and know life
from the perspective of the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant.
Tzedekah, righteousness, is about the active
intervention into social affairs to rehabilitate society. Tzedekah is also about having an inner
integrity that is expressed through outer action. Interrupting the status quo and working
toward transformation are hard. Nobody
likes to enter into that much conflict.
Righteousness says that if interruption, transformation, and conflict
need to happen to rehabilitate society, then bring it on. No hurdles are too high, no stumbling blocks
are too many which will keep us off the path.
If one says, “I value this but then blinks and gives up when things get
tough, that person betrays themselves as something less than a righteous peep.
To paraphrase Dr. Cornel West, “Never forget that justice
and righteousness are what love looks like in public. They are love with legs on.”[3]
The prophet Jeremiah proved he was just and righteous
through his prophetic witness—exhibiting a solidarity and special concern for
the poor and vulnerable even when it cost him.
Jeremiah does not ask that we be merely neutral. As the great Brazilian educator, Paolo
Freire, who worked in the slums of Brazil would say, “Washing one’s hands of
the conflict between the powerful and powerless means to side with the
powerful, not to remain neutral.”[4] Or Howard Zinn, the late, great American educator
who said, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”[5]
As we look to Reign of Christ or Christ the King Sunday,
the last Sunday in our liturgical year, we are now called to the
countercultural mission, practice, and way of being to ask how the world would
be different if the God of Jeremiah sat on the throne. Better yet, how might the world be different
if the crucified Christ sat on the throne?
How shall our Advent and Christmas in 2025 be defined by
that mission, practice and way of being in the world? A new church year approaches with Advent and
Christmas. I know so often I plan to
have a different Advent and Christmas only to throw up my hands in exasperation
a week before the season starts and say, “Well, it’s too late now.”
We know the onslaught is coming and it would seem that what
was once, at the very least, a segue season in Thanksgiving, has been lost,
tossed aside, in favor of getting the season started sooner and sooner. Those orange and black M&M’s and Hershey’s
kisses seem to be replaced in ever-faster record time by green and red ones
with every passing year.
The prophet Jeremiah knew.
The first thing to go in God’s created order is an appointed time of
Sabbath. Remember Sabbath? It is the idea that times of rest and
re-creation are necessary for the thriving of all creation. Slaves work 24/7. Now the store times are extending sooner and
later. More and more businesses will be open
on Thanksgiving Day. Many people
standing against authoritarian rule are asking us not to buy any items during
the busiest shopping week of the year that begins with Black Friday. That we might fast to show not only our
freedom in Christ but to also assert our power as people who are not slaves to
the capitalist onslaught.
Who is our king? Are
we dominated by rhythms of production and consumption? It is to acknowledge that the culture is
cutting further and further into what it means to thrive. We will have to be more and more intentional to
not let the culture carry us on a wave of convenience that means always on,
always open, and trample others to get the biggest sale. Find meaning in glitz, gluttony, and
greed. In other words, don’t let the tryptophan
stop you from a bag of thinly cut, highly-salted fries late Thursday night.
It ripples out.
People have to work those hours.
And as long as they are offered, someone will always want or maybe even
need those hours. Even the earth, which
needs its own cycles of Sabbath and rest, loses its balance and begins to spin
out of control.
The culture comes like a runaway train, maybe even like an indiscriminate
natural disaster, making us whisper, “Thank God I survived this time
around. I didn’t get crushed. I didn’t go without family or friends. I am not an emotional wreck from the
season. I didn’t exhaust myself this
time.”
But we should be asking in the midst of the devastation, “What
intentional practices will we be about this Advent and Christmas season such
that everyone knows that Christ does reign in our lives, that Christ is King,
stepping into a throne originally ruled by a Caesar—a Caesar who wants us to
stay busy, buy more, eat more, and deplete ourselves to near ruin?” To the point where the mere mention of Advent
and Christmas 2025 will fill us with a holy dread.
How shall these holy seasons be filled with not one more
thing tacked onto our list? How could we
make a wholesale replacement of the usual cultural practice to grant ourselves
Sabbath and rest, love our neighbor, and strengthen that connection a little
more, display our love and care for the earth a little more? How do we come out of the somber, sometimes
scary and terrible Scriptural texts for Advent and Christmas to hope in the
same way the gospel hopes.
Those hopes are found not at the center of Caesar’s
spirituality, in Rome, nor at the center of Herod’s theology in Jerusalem, but
in a young, suspect Jewish girl from a backwater town, maybe a family that just
finished harvesting in Bainbridge, Watervliet, or Coloma. The gospel passages from Matthew will tell us
that she and her child will be hunted as refugees and immigrants.
The crazy Revised Common Lectionary places not only the
Jeremiah passage before us on Reign of Christ Sunday, but, in speaking about
Christ the King, the lectionary has us reading the crucifixion story, a story
of political execution. It is a reminder
that if we are to claim the Reign, the Empire of Christ, Christ as our King, we
will need courage to join in solidarity and friendship with those people who
are persecuted, tortured, and executed by the Caesars of the world. Caesar must be de-throned not only in our
hearts but through practices that say we welcome the Empire of God.
For the crazy and odd thing about calling Christ as King or
Caesar is that we recognize our power comes from not being “over” others but
having “power with” and “power for” others.
Christ as King is a parable that somehow does not make sense
logically. For it subverts the notion of
king and suggests that God in Christ should also be about making sure that we
work alongside the atheist and non-believer, we join hands with the most vulnerable
and hurting, we cast our lot with the crucified in the world. Biblical Christianity is always suspicious of
a religious faith that cares more about power over and winning rather than
identifying with those who might be the most vulnerable, the political losers.
As we begin to enter one of the most somber seasons in our
Christian liturgical calendar, a season that begins in the darkest of night,
let us not add one more thing to our list this year. Do not walk away from this worship service
saying, “And now Mike wants me to find time to rest too? When is that going to happen?”
Rather, write a thoughtful card to a loved one, one who
would understand, and tell them that rather than a gift, you would like them to
give to one the non-profit where they volunteer, or have a passion for the
world, or are most human, and to do it in your name. Cout it as a sign of hope for the world.
Write one note to your local Congressperson, thanking them
for their service, but challenging them to specifically adopt policies that
would bring more shalom—wholeness, connectedness, and well-being. Count it as a sign of peace on earth.
Replace a day of shopping with this. Each day, take five minutes, start out with
five, and just dwell on the love of God for you. See it as a gift and God’s intent for you.
Finally, turn off all the lights in your house for one half
hour each night and light Advent candles, remembering the unquenchable and
insatiable love Go has for this good earth.
In that time of small light and surrounding darkness, pray that you
might mirror that love. Remember people
in the rural countryside, those poor so often found in places like Coloma,
Bainbridge, and Watervliet. Or in the
Sudan. During that time, ask God softly
each night what must be done to turn back a season that probably does more for
ravaging the planet than any other.
Let Christ reign in your heart and be part of your regular
practice during these upcoming seasons.
May he be your king—spiritually, religiously, politically, and
economically. When Christmas arrives, let
it not be said that we have to hum all the words to the “Hallelujah Chorus”
because we are unwilling to recognize that our faith necessarily intersects
with politics.
Look up ahead! There
is some crazy guy baptizing people in the Jordan River. He is not found in Rome or Jerusalem but out
in the wilderness, out in the rural countryside. During these Advent and Christmas seasons,
let us draw close enough to hear what he is saying. So that the Empire of God movement might
continue through you.
And let God in Christ reign forever and ever. Amen.
[1]
Everett Fox, Give Us a King! Samuel,
Saul, and David (New York: Shocken
Books, 1999), pp. 33-34. I use Fox’s
beautifully poetic translation of this passage which shows the author repeating
the word “take” as a header to every phrase.
Fox also interpret God’s name YHWH as “I-Will-Be-There.”
[2]
James Hanley, “What is Politics?” The
League, December 21, 2010. http://ordinary-gentlement.com/2010/12/21/what-is-politics/.
The other common definition Hanley quotes is from Lasswell, “who gets what,
when, how.” If justice is about the
material bases of life, as John Dominic Crossan suggests, then politics and
justice should have an intimate relationship.
Wen Hanley, in his critique states,”’Politics’ as a term should not be
limited to any one set of activities but should be applied to a class of human
behaviors that have a common purpose,” how can we not understand that as
intersecting with a definition of ‘church?’”
[3] “Cornel
West’s Catastrophic Love,” bigthink, http://bigthink.com/videos/cornel-wests-catastrophic-love.
[4]
Paolo Freire, The Politics of Education:
Culture, Power, and Liberation (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1985), p. 122.
[5]
Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).
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