Last Sunday after Pentecost, Christ the King, Proper 29C, November 20, 2016; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of mercy, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Perhaps you are wondering what a crucifixion story is doing being read this far away from Holy Week. Today marks the end of our liturgical year. This Gospel lesson is appointed for today because, while we are celebrating the all-embracing authority of God’s Christ, that is, Love’s redeeming urge, and we sing hymns of gratefulness and praise, we can always use a reminder that our King of kings and Lord of lords was executed as a criminal with other criminals. He was friends with criminals while he lived, and then he died with them too. The word that Luke uses for criminal is literally “evil doer.” Our king, our highest earthly authority was executed for sedition – that is, for inciting resistance or disobedience to the government.

Our highest earthly authority, Jesus, was a victim of the most brutal form of capital punishment the Roman government could devise. The government not only executed people they deemed to be dangerous, the crucified bodies served as grotesque public warnings to all who saw them. The Roman historian, Josephus, wrote that thousands of people were crucified by the Roman government in and around Jerusalem in the first century of the common era – as many as five hundred a day after the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in the year 70 CE. [1] So while we are hearing the shocking story of Jesus and two others being crucified, we should know that Luke’s audience, in the last third of the first century, was witnessing or hearing reports of mass executions.

This week I found myself feeling grateful that our liturgical year does not end with some happy-clappy victory lap lessons on a Sunday called The Feast of Christ the King. I feel relieved to hear our scripture readings in our context — in this time of intense national conflict in the present and so much dread about the future. What feels curiously hopeful to me is knowing that, in the years after Jesus’ brutal execution, the Jesus movement grew. People knew what had happened to him – his crucifixion wasn’t a secret. It was a scandal and it was proclaimed. And as the Roman government got more brutal, the Jesus movement got more important, not less important; the Jesus movement got stronger, not weaker. Five hundred crucifixions a day, and the communities of Jesus followers said to themselves, we need to write these things down about Jesus of Nazareth. We need to save these letters from Paul and other Jesus movement leaders. We need to write down the teachings and the stories so that they will survive even if we don’t. More people need to learn the Jesus way — to stand with and for people who are oppressed, with and for people who are hungry and thirsty, unsheltered, incarcerated, sick or disabled, disenfranchised and alien. I’m struck by the resilience and daring that the love and dignity movement grew stronger, the worse the government brutality got. They reported that Jesus said “do not be afraid,” more than anything else, probably because then, like now, there was so much to be afraid of.

Our letter to the Colossians was probably written not by Paul, but in Paul’s name at about the same time as the Gospel of Luke. A bolder assertion of the lordship of Jesus Christ cannot be found in the Second Testament of our Bible. [2] I want to say something about the last verse of our epistle reading from today, because no sermon of mine would be complete without some translation complaint. The phrase “by making peace through the blood of his cross” is where I want to call your attention. This might seem like a very small point, but it has huge implications, I think. The issue is about how, through the blood of his cross, God was making peace. This passage is widely read as God requiring violence to appease or reconcile, but that is a dangerous misreading. There are other ways to translate or understand the word “through” (both in English and in Greek). In fact, the first two Greek lexicon definitions give the sense of space and time. “Through” can mean “going by way of” or “physically passing,” and it can mean during (as in “throughout”) and it can even mean “after.” Through the blood of the cross can have the sense of not ignoring or looking away from the violence of the cross, or during or after the blood of the cross, without assigning instrumentality or agency to the violence of the cross.

I acknowledge that I am in the theological minority here, but I believe it’s vital to stop perpetuating the myth of redemptive violence that has so captivated Christianity, especially American Christianity. It seems to me that our souls depend on it. What saves us is not the blood of the cross. What saves us is when we acknowledge the blood of the cross, see it with wide open eyes, and still commit ourselves to acts of compassion and generosity on behalf of the least, and the last and the lost. What saves us is when our compassion, our generosity doesn’t shrink, but grows. Not looking away or averting our eyes from cost of discipleship, together, Jesus followers move through fear to Love. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once preached that “Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power, and with its plea for the weak…Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power…Christians should take a stronger stand in favor of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong.” [3]

You probably know that another word for Christ is Messiah – the one hoped for, anointed, to save and redeem God’s people who are lost and not valued, especially and because of the power mongers of this world. The Gospel of Luke tells us about the mocking of Jesus that came from the soldiers, from the crowd and even from another guy hung along side of Jesus. That really takes some nerve doesn’t it? The mocking challenge to Jesus is that if he’s really a king, he should really do some saving, starting with himself. That’s how a “real” king would behave. But Jesus was on earth to show people how God behaves, not how a “real” king behaves. One of the important things that Jesus taught us was that God, as it turns out, doesn’t save us by getting us out of humiliating and painful situations. God doesn’t save us from chaos or disaster and God doesn’t save us from dying. This was surprising in Jesus time – and it’s still surprising today. Death is no more proof of the absence of God than clouds are proof of the absence of the sun.

What God does, according to our First and Second Testaments, is forgive and forgive and forgive, knowing that we are never far from calculated and uncalculated acts of violence and devastation, as perpetrators or victims or bystanders. What strikes me about this scene most is that three times Jesus is challenged to save himself, and he does not. Perhaps he could not. What he does is save the person next to him. If we are going to follow Jesus, that is what we must do too. We must remember that we are not called to save ourselves but to save one another, to deliver one another to hope and blessing, to help lift one another’s heavy hearts, to welcome one another into the garden for the souls of the righteous (which is what paradise literally means), remembering that we all need a little forgiveness and some of us need a lot.

Luke’s crucifixion narrative is a Gospel story that reminds us that injustice, violence, and even death do not have the last word in the realm of God – which is the realm of Love. Love and only Love that has the last word. Love and love and more love. What Jesus came to demonstrate is that Love is the Highest Authority, that Love is the first word and the last word. Love is the boss of bosses and the ruler of rulers. That’s how Jesus saves us – by showing us that God loves us no matter what. And when we can soften our hearts enough to realize it, to have compassion for ourselves and for others, God welcomes us right into God’s glory – God’s glory — that’s another way of saying paradise. It was the criminal on the other side of Jesus, who demonstrated compassion for Jesus in this story. Even in his own agony, rather than joining in the hard-hearted taunting, he managed to quiet the other criminal with words that demonstrated his capacity to love and be loved – even if it was only a glimmer and at the very end of his life. Turns out, all Love needs is a glimmer – a small crack in our hearts to work its way in.

What might Love do with the small cracks in our hearts? I have a list inspired by my one-time next door neighbor, a guy named Jim Wallis who is the editor of Sojourners Magazine. This past week, Wallis published a list of acts of holy resistance, [4] and when I read it, I felt a glimmer of Love coming through the cracks in my broken and trembling heart. As your rector, it is my responsibility to remind you of what we will do, as Emmanuelites, in the weeks and months and years to come.

1. We will not shrink. We will grow in Love. We will come together to lift one another’s hearts to the Lord, especially when hearts are too heavy to lift alone.
2. We will take an even stronger stand in favor of those who are weak, those who are weakened by poverty and discrimination due to race, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, immigration status, illness or disability, incarceration. I know you know the list, but it’s good to be reminded.
3. We will seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may and cost what it will.
4. We will love our neighbors by protecting them from hate speech and attacks and we will reject White Nationalism
5. We will welcome and care for the stranger as our scriptures instruct.
6. We will expose and oppose racial profiling in policing and other institutions.
7. We will defend religious liberty for people of faith and people of no faith.
8. We will work to end the misogyny that enables rape culture.
9. We will maintain our commitment to non-violence.
10. We will create and maintain sanctuary and we will use the moral voice that is our heritage.

(repeat #1) If you are with us, please say amen.

← Back to sermons page