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Answering Phil

Luke 23:33-43
November 25, 2007

When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with
the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive
them; for they do not know what they are doing.” And they cast lots to divide his
clothing. And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, “He
saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!” The
soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, “If you
are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” There was also an inscription over him, “This is
the King of the Jews.” One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him
and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked
him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of
condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we
deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus,
remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He replied, “Truly I tell you, today
you will be with me in Paradise.”

This particular Sunday is the last worship we’ll experience together together, you and I,
this year—this year meaning the Christian year, which always ends the Sunday right
before Advent, right before the season where we are asked to wait for four Sundays for
what will come on Christmas Eve. We Christians have usually named this last Sunday
of the church year as Christ the King Sunday, or The Reign of Christ Sunday, and its
meant to be a day where we wrap up this story we’ve been following since last
December, that first Sunday of Advent in the previous year, in 2006. The Christian
year has been crafted over centuries to begin with waiting for a birth, and then ending
with Christ being King, being ruler, being sovereign of all that is. But what has been so
weird to me over the years has been the choices of Scripture the church has made
when it came to celebrating this kind of seemingly joyous day—Christ the King, the
Reign of Christ, all of that sounds like one ought to find Scriptures that point out the
power and majesty of Christ, this one who defeats his enemies soundly, and who is now
entering the hall, with courtiers and the people shouting Hosanna, and praises to the
king. I know it’s pathetic, but I have all those images of kings arriving from battle to the
welcome of throngs of crowds shouting their name and cheering the victorious king—
probably too much watching Lord of the Rings or Gladiator, or a million other films like
them.

But that is not what we get from the church on this particular Sunday, this Reign of
Christ Sunday—instead, we get a Scripture passage that points in the opposite
direction of my personal images of what this day should look like, of those triumphalist
images that haunt my idea of what a king should look like. And yet, that seems to be
the point here, in this passage about the crucifixion, this radical challenge to people like
me that think that a king ought to be a winner, that when we speak of the reign of
Christ, it ought to look like how a human king reigns, oversees, controls his kingdom.
And yet, here we are, looking at Luke’s brutal picture of a crucified King, a loser king,
someone the Roman world had difficulty stomaching because of the way they—and us,
even—understand what it means to “win” in this world.

And I just want to remind us of the Roman world that Christ’s crucifixion took place in—
we often where our crosses around our neck with some reverence, maybe even some
pride, but we must remember that in the world that Christ died in, the cross was a
symbol of the worst kind of death—a criminal’s death, and it was the very opposite of a
noble death, which we associate with it nowadays. You had been found guilty of a
crime so heinous that death was to be your punishment, so the cross itself was seen as
a badge of shame, something one would never sport as jewelry. And so we early
Christians had a big problem—we have a savior who died like a common criminal, who
died a shameful death, and so everyone in the Roman world assumed what we assume
when we execute someone in this culture—that they are guilty of what they have been
charged with, and if the sentence was death, it must have been quite a heinous crime
indeed. There was an ancient cartoon, found in the stone ruins of ancient Rome that
shows how crazy the Christian message seemed to the people of that time. It's a
caricature of Jesus' crucifixion, showing a man's body hanging on a cross -- but the
body has a head of a donkey. Standing to the left of this cross is a man with his hands
raised in worship. Underneath is the inscription, "He worships his God!" The message
seem absurd, to worship this loser who ends up being executed in a horrible, shameful
way—and so the early church to had to respond to that charge, that accusation, that
Christians made fools of themselves by worshipping a God who so clearly wasn’t a
winner, and probably, was nothing more than a common criminal.

And so, in response to those early critics, the writer of the Gospel of Luke gives us this
story, this story of crucifixion that doesn’t shy away from what really happened—a
brutal, horrific death—but Luke molds the story by having Christ, in many ways respond
to those who, first, questioned the honesty of this Jesus—after all, he died as a
common criminal, and secondly, and more importantly, we had to answer the question
of how a supposedly powerful king could be so helpless, so without power that he could
not even save himself. You see those answers being given by the early church in this
passage—he is not criminal, one of the thieves on either side of Jesus clearly sees;
they are guilty, he is not, and no real crime has been laid at Jesus’ doorstep. And then
the leaders and the Roman guards mock him for inability to save himself—if he is a
King, he could get himself off that cross, but he can’t, so they think, and thus he is no
king, because kings have the power to save others, and certainly themselves in these
kinds of situations…what is a king without the power and willingness to use that power
to have his will be done? He is nothing more than a simple Galilean fraud, as so many
in the ancient Roman Empire believed, if they have even heard of Jesus at that point in
the first century.

Soon, though, the whole Roman world would know of this crucified God, this loser of a
deity, this smack in the face of all that was believed about divinity and the way the world
worked. Losers don’t win, crucified, failed messiahs don’t get crowned king, it was
believed—power to wield, power to control, power to overwhelm, power to save
yourself—that is the purest definition of Roman power that one is likely to ever get, and
what they saw in Jesus was the exact opposite of the way the world is, and should be.
And yet, here we are, on the Reign of Christ Sunday, on Christ the King Sunday,
celebrating this crucified and risen one as king of the universe. It is an amazing thing
to come here and celebrate a savior whose way was so different than what was
expected by Jew and Roman alike, someone who said that love was the greatest power
in the universe, and not the brute force of empire; someone who said that the poor
were richer than the wealthy; someone who had power to hurt those who were hurting
him, and yet he chose not to go down the violent path that was being visited upon his
own bloodied body. This is a great reversal from anything the Romans had ever seen,
a great reversal, someone to be mocked as a donkey—and, yes, that other word, as
well—in an ancient cartoon in their version of the funny pages. This Jesus of Nazareth
turned the world upside down, saying the winners were losers, and the losers were
winners, and the greatest of all were the servants of all—this is crazy talk, if you had
been a Roman 190 years ago, and, to be frank, its still crazy talk. Winners are winners,
Bill Gates is no loser, and the one who loses the most men and women in a war is still
declared the loser. Its crazy talk, friends, it was then, and it is still crazy…and it may be
true, and it may be the truest thing we’re ever likely to encounter on this side of eternity.

Studs Terkel is one of the great oral historians of this age, someone who simply listens
to people tell their stories and records them for the rest of us to read and savor. He’s
been doing it for a long time, and so, in watching history unfold in the lives of others,
and seeing how unfair life can be to ordinary folks, he sometimes gets discouraged,
understandably so. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine printed in 2001, Terkel
shares some of what gets him through those difficult times: “I'm an emotional yo-yo. I
wake up in the morning and think, ‘We're not going to make it.’ Then I come across
[individuals] capable of extraordinary things. So I'm both. Despair, hope; despair,
hope...Two thousand and one years ago, there was a demonstration at the foot of
Calvary. During the time of the Roman Empire, the number-one superpower in the
world, there was a subversive sect known as Christians -- twelve "crazies" who never
carried a gun in their lives and who had a credo, "Love thy neighbor." Whereas the
Roman Empire said, "Clobber thy neighbor" or, if they were Americans, "Destabilize
them." And the people were scared of them because they were condemned by the Un-
Roman Activities Commission.”   Now, he’s being tongue and cheek there, especially at
the end, but you get the point, don’t you? That what happened two thousands years
was unlike few moments in the history of the world, a moment when God clearly showed
us a whole different way of doing things in this world. It’s as if God hit the reverse
pedal, and went in a whole different direction than the way we had been going, and
sadly enough, are still probably going on. The revolution had begun, and though it had
its fits and starts, and maybe it’s had more moments of sorrow than joy, the outcome of
the revolution is inevitable—really, after all, that is what the book of Revelation in our
Bibles is really all about.

So, on this Christ the King, Reign of Christ Sunday, I think there is something to grasp
out of this history you were probably not interested in, and the thing to hold tightly to is
the heart of this day—that we are bound together, as individuals and a community to a
God who never seems to do anything the way we or others, or the larger world, would
expect them to be done. This is the unexpected God, the revolutionary God, the weak
God whose strength is found, not by wrecking revenge on the soldiers and leaders who
mocked Christ, but in taking the hell being gotten through and transforming it into
something else altogether, the empty grave, the resurrection, new life. Christ is
radically unexpected to the end—instead of calling on the heavens for revenge, for
justice even, Christ asks forgiveness for these ones who do not know what they are
doing, which is all of us, when we buy into the world’s ways of doing things. This is not
a God who does it the way I would have done it, the way I think most people I know
would have done it, and so maybe I need to let go of the way I think things should be
done, and let God do what God wants to do with it. For me, I think it’s a reasonable
question that these solders and guards hurl at Jesus on the cross—save yourself, if
you’re the Messiah—but the answer is never given, and what we are left with is a whole
different understanding of what it means to be “saved,” so to speak. They think
salvation is about avoiding pain, avoiding death, at all costs, and yet, and yet, God
seems to think salvation is about that inevitable pain, that death, that comes with
sometimes doing the right thing, that pain that salvation is about being transformed into
something new, into something fresh out of all that was old and tired about how things
had always been done before.

This is not a God one can explain easily, nor a path that is easily followed, this radical
changing of the world, turning it upside down, saying that weakness is strength, the
poor are rich, that doing nothing can sometimes being doing everything that is needed
in that moment. Sometimes we have to trust the one whose ways seem absurd to us,
whose movements in this world are not our movements, whose eyes can see deeper
and more thoroughly than our own. Sometimes we have to sit back and see how God
has done it in the past, in our lives, in the lives of the people of our Scriptures, in the
lives of the people we love and those we struggle to love. And then its about letting
God be God, and letting the absurdity of Christ the King Sundays be what they are—
reminders to us that the way God moves in this world, including even in Jesus’ life, is
still mysterious, is still a paradox, it is still craziness, and, if we were to be honest, with
ourselves, it would also remind of us how God has actually worked in our own lives.
Every time I am sure I know how God will do something in my life, I am stunned by how
upside down it all turned out…and maybe also how right it ultimately turned out, as well,
later, when my crucifixion has been transformed into resurrection. I suspect you know
what I am talking about…that is really what this Sunday is about, this Christ the King
Sunday is all about—the God who works so unexpectedly in our lives, doing the radical
things we never thought were possible, making new what we thought we had long ago
buried and put away for good, in some grave somewhere. . Amen