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What must one do when walking into a room to meet with Queen Elizabeth the Second? If you are not sure, here are the instructions from a member of her staff:
“The protocol is as follows. When you’re announced, bow from the neck. The first time you see the Queen, you say, ‘Your Majesty.’ After that, it’s ‘ma’am’ (rhymes with ‘ham’)... [that is,] until you leave [the room]—then it’s ‘Your Majesty’ again. Don’t sit until Her Majesty does. Don’t talk until she does. Absolutely no physical contact, other than taking her hand, if and only if she offers it. No small talk unless she invites it. At the end, she’ll buzz, and I’ll come and get you. Bow from the neck and walk back towards me.”
We hear these instructions in the first episode of season three of “The Crown,” a Netflix series that explores life in and around the court of a modern queen, a young sovereign coming to the throne during the tumultuous mid-20th century. Queen Elizabeth is portrayed as steady and dignified, yet—you can see it behind her eyes—also quite frightened. When her aide tells you that she will “buzz” when she is done meeting with you, he means she will press a buzzer by her chair, but you might understandably think it means that the Queen herself, so inhuman in her stoic bearing, might herself buzz, like a compact, pastel-colored Amazon smart device.
In this lavishly-produced TV show, we are meant to see how heavily the burden of the crown falls on the delicate shoulders of a young mother who had expected her dear father to live much longer. We are also meant, I think, to see how heavily the burden of the modern age—and the collapse of the modern age—falls on everyone’s shoulders, on our shoulders, in this time of astonishing, often terrifying, crisis and conflict and change.
As Christians, we are called to bear the burdens of our own time and place. We are called to proclaim the Gospel, too, no matter how difficult it may be to do so, in the difficult, chaotic here and now. Our faith grew from its Jewish roots in a time very different than our own, but also very much like our own. Then, as now, there were forces of chaos and change that moved far above the everyday lives of any one person, or community, or nation. Then, as now, power was often expressed in violence. Then, as now, the people longed for a leader who could be a symbol of their highest hopes for themselves, an icon of the people at their best. The people wanted a good king.
A scattering of people in a backwater of the Roman Empire saw Jesus of Nazareth as this leader. He was the One, they said. He is the One, they say to us this morning. But Jesus himself is enigmatic about the title of “king,” because he knows that by worldly standards, he is no king: he is at once far less powerful and far more powerful than a political head of state. He bitterly disappointed his followers, at least at first, because far from being an icon of the people at their best, his death reveals who we are at our worst. And yet, his death is not the end of the story, we do call him our “king,” and today we celebrate what we call “the Reign of Christ.” “For the Lamb who was slain,” we sing, “has begun his reign, alleluia.” Jesus Christ can be understood in many ways, most often with metaphor: Jesus is Bread; he is Light; he is the Good Shepherd; he is the True Grapevine. But today, we say this:
Christ is our King.
And so, I will once again ask the protocol question. What must one do when meeting Christ the King?
Well, there is no buzzer. No immaculate audience room. No private secretaries. No palace, or castle, or fortress. Some of us do bow at the neck when we hear the name of Jesus Christ the King… or we bow at the waist, which many of us did a few minutes ago when we walked into this room and stood before the consecrated bread and wine, hidden behind this wall, the Real Presence, we say, of Christ himself. But for a lot of us, and maybe for you, meeting Christ the king is… much more complicated than a stiff, dignified royal audience.
Christ demands both more and less than our polite bows, and he is usually not found in an ornate palace, but appears instead in your own living room, or around this table. His royal crest is a cross, that is, it is an ancient execution device. How do we understand him? What must we do about him, or with him?
The thief on the cross gives us good guidance on all this. Not one to stand on ceremony, the thief just blurts out to Jesus, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” (You’ll notice that he did not wait for Jesus to speak to him first.) When we pray to Christ the King, we can just start blurting things out. Prayers rise from the depths of our being. They ascend in emergency rooms at 2:00 in the morning; they are disgorged, thrown up, to God, from our sickbeds, from our prison cells, from our ambulance stretchers, from our deathbeds, from our graveyards.
Then what happens?
Perhaps to our own frustration, when we pray to Christ the King, we do not then watch as Christ zaps away all of the problems around and within us. No, this king does not even save himself from adversity and violence and death. But he does save us from other things.
For one thing, he saves us from our worst selves, and the terrible loneliness we feel when we stay small. When we pray to Christ the King, we open ourselves up. We allow God to make us bigger. (Do you remember your Dr. Seuss? “In Whoville, they say that the Grinch’s small heart grew three sizes that day!”) With the help of Christ the King, we stop resisting, and in prayer, God calms us down (or, if necessary, riles us up!), and then God sends us back into our lives... changed. We are changed by Christ the King, changed into his own Body, broken and shared in this world, changed so that Christ can save not just us, but also everyone else.
Christ the King, whom we call “the firstborn from the dead,” also saves us through death. He follows that final path himself, and leads us into a future beyond death. We preach Christ crucified, and so we proclaim this faith: “for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.”
When he dies on the cross, praying for the forgiveness of those who killed him, and promising enduring life in Paradise, Jesus Christ gives his whole life away in self-giving love. By this act of pure, perfect selflessness, this loving gift that can only be given by the one pure victim—by this act, he breaks the power of sin and death. He shatters the terrible bonds that cut into the wrists of every human being but one. He breaks our bonds of oppression and victimhood; he breaks our bonds of wrongdoing and selfish, self-seeking violence; he breaks the chains we forge around our own wrists, and he sets us free.
We see our king, then, hanging on a tree. But we also see him in the resurrection garden, wounded but alive. What, finally, do we say to this king?
We need only say this: Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.
Say it often, sing it often, let it be your prayer. Do not be afraid: Christ has triumphed, and even today, even here and now, we will be with him in Paradise.
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Preached on the Feast of the Reign of Christ (Year C), St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Burke, Virginia, November 24, 2019. Note that at the conclusion of the sermon, the congregation sang the Taizé chant, ‘Jesus, remember me.’
Jeremiah 23:1-6
Canticle 16 (Song of Zechariah)
Colossians 1:11-20
Luke 23:33-43)