Last Sunday after Pentecost,  Proper 29C: Christ the King.  The Very Rev. Pamela L. Wentz.

Jeremiah 23:1-6. I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them!
Colossians 1:11-20. May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power…prepared to endure everything with patience.
Luke 23:33-43. Today you will be with me in Paradise.

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.

 On the last Sunday of our liturgical calendar, our lectionary brings us to the foot of the cross in Luke’s Gospel, lest anyone get too sentimental about what it means to follow Jesus. This Gospel lesson is appointed for today because 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. While we do that we can always use a reminder that our King of kings and Lord of lords was executed as a criminal with other criminals accused of crimes against the state. 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, humiliating form of capital punishment the Roman government could devise. The government not only executed people they deemed to be dangerous, they crucified people along busy streets and highways 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 still witnessing or hearing reports of mass executions. 

The longer I live, the more grateful I feel 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 an ongoing time of intense national conflict in the present and so much anxiety 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. As the Roman government got more brutal, the Jesus movement got more important, not less important; the Jesus movement got stronger, not weaker. 

Amid as many as five-hundred crucifixions a day, 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 or alien.” I’m struck by the resilience and daring that as the love-and-dignity movement grew stronger, the government brutality got worse. As they wrote down the stories, 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 his name, at about the same time as the Gospel of Luke was written. 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, during (as in throughout), and even 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 believe it’s vital to stop perpetuating the myth of redemptive violence, which has so captivated Christianity, especially American Christianity. It seems to me that our very souls depend on rejecting this myth. What saves us is not the blood of the cross. What saves us is that 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, the last, and the lost. What saves us is that our compassion and generosity don’t shrink in the face of violence and humiliation, but grow. Not looking away or averting our eyes from the cost of discipleship, together, Jesus followers move through fear to Love. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once preached that [3]

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.

This past Tuesday at our vestry meeting we reflected on our Gospel passage’s call to bear witness as disciples of, students of, Jesus. Bearing witness goes far further than simply witnessing. Witnessing is seeing; bearing witness is responding to what one has seen by being a living example. Bearing witness to Jesus means testifying to truth, compassion, and Love with our deeds, using words if necessary.  We understand that by bearing witness, in living lives of compassion and generosity, we can’t expect God to save us from 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 or nighttime are proof of the absence of the sun.

What God does, according to our First and Second Testaments, is to forgive, forgive, and forgive, though we are never far from calculated and uncalculated acts of violence and devastation, as perpetrators, victims, or bystanders. What strikes me most about this scene is that when Jesus is challenged three times to save himself, 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 has the last word: love, 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, no matter how unlovable we feel. When we can soften our hearts enough to realize it, to have compassion for ourselves and for others, God welcomes us into glory, which is 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. As it turns out, all Love needs is a glimmer, a small crack in our hearts to work its way in. How will we bear witness as a congregation? As your rector, it is my responsibility to remind you of what we will do, as Emmanuelites, to bear witness in the weeks, months, and years to come. I’ve adapted this list from my one-time neighbor, Jim Wallis of Sojourners. [4]

1. We will grow in Love. We will come together to lift one another’s hearts to our Lord, especially when hearts are too heavy to lift alone.
2. We will take an even stronger stand in favor of those who are weakened by poverty and discrimination and violence due to their race, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, immigration status, illness or disability, incarceration.
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 
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 violence against people identifying as female.
9. We will maintain our commitment to non-violence.
10. We will create and maintain sanctuary,
11. We will use the moral voice that is our heritage and our hope.

If you are with us, please say, “Amen.”

1.  Ronald J. Allen & Clark M. Williamson, Preaching the Gospels without Blaming the Jews: A Lectionary Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), p. 247.
2.  “Introduction to Colossians”, The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 285NT.
3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “My strength is made perfect in weakness: Sermon on II Corinthians 12:9,” in The Complete Sermons, transl. Douglas W. Stott et al., ed. Isabel Best (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), v. 1, pp. 167-70, which is widely quoted on the Web.
4. Jim Wallis. Ten commitments of resistance in the Trump Era.   Sojourners, 17 Nov. 2016.  I’ve slightly edited his inspiring list of acts of holy resistance.