The following is the sermon preached by Joel Marcus at St. Joseph's on the last Sunday of Pentecost, November 21, 2010.
Colossians 1:11-20
Luke 23:33-43
CHRIST THE KING
Our collect for the day praises God “whose will is to restore all things in [his] well-beloved Son, the king of kings and lord of lords.” This collect is related to the Epistle reading from Colossians, which describes Christ as the one through whom all things were created, who has reconciled all things to God through the blood of his cross, and who presently holds all things together. It is a grand, cosmic vision, in which Christ already reigns over everything. This is, after all, the last Sunday before Advent, the day on which we celebrate Christ the King. The language about all things subsisting, or holding together, in Christ, is particularly striking.
The only question is whether or not this grand, over-the-top language actually corresponds to reality. Let me make a confession, brothers and sisters: sometimes it doesn’t seem to me that everything is holding together. This may be an idiosyncratic view on my part—but sometimes it seems to me, on the contrary, that everything is falling apart.
We human beings seem to have a remarkable talent for screwing things up. I know some people don’t like to hear about politics in church, but I don’t get to preach very often, so bear with me. Because, hard as it is to believe, our government seems poised on the verge of going into an even more advanced state paralysis than has prevailed before. The opposition party has pledged itself to make its number one goal for the next two years not to allow the executive branch to accomplish anything of substance. This at a time when we are confronted by numerous crises in the foreign sphere, in our eroding economic position, and in the climatic Sword of Damocles that hangs over our heads.
The situation reminds me of a story I heard on NPR yesterday about the greatest naval disaster in American history before Pearl Harbor. It happened during the third year of the Revolutionary War, when our Senior Warden’s ancestors sent three small ships with 700 soldiers try to establish a foothold on the shore of Penobscot Bay in what is now Maine. The colonials responded by sending a huge fleet of 42 ships to dislodge the evil British from their position on the bluffs overlooking the sea, where they were starting to build a fort. The colonials were initially successful; after hard fighting, they gained the high ground and could easily have overrun the British fort, whose soldiers were vastly outnumbered. But then the commander of the American army insisted, "I won’t attack the fort until the three British ships are destroyed." And the commander of the American fleet responded, "I won’t attack the ships until you attack the fort." And each of these generals refused to budge until the other made the first move. And so they stopped speaking to each other and did nothing.
Meanwhile the British were building up the fort and sending a small fleet to relieve their ships. The Americans eventually panicked and were not even able to organize an orderly retreat. The British ended up burning the entire American fleet; only one ship out of the 42 escaped. The man in charge of the American artillery, by the way, whose name was Paul Revere, was later courtmartialed on charges of cowardice and incompetence, and his name would have been mud in our collective memory, had not Henry Wadsworth Longfellow salvaged his reputation with a famous and largely fictional poem eighty years later. In any case, the story of the Penobscot disaster strikes me as a parable for where we seem to be heading today—stupidity, stubborrness, and paralysis, leading to disaster. Things fall apart; the center cannot seem to hold.
On a smaller scale, here at St. Joseph’s, things also seem sometimes to be falling apart. We have been vicarless for six months, during which time a major crisis has hit us in the action taken by the city against our homeless neighbors. We on the vestry and other concerned parishioners, especially our tireless Senior Warden and future Verger, have tried to hold things together, but it ain’t always easy. And, in the personal sphere—well, I bet you can fill in the blanks from your own life there. It may suffice to recall one of the most famous opening sentences in all of literature, the beginning of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”--to recall this sentence and to ask yourself which group you identify with. And if the answer is the first group, please do not let the rest of us hear from you!
So what do we make of Paul’s claim that God has reconciled all things to himself? Is this just a pipe dream, the sort of charming vacation from reality that preachers seem to enjoy indulging in?
I’m seriously afraid now that this may turn out to be one of those sermons in which the questions posed are better than the answers proferred. But let me give it a shot anyway. Because, in spite of everything, Paul’s words do ring true. God has enabled us to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his Son, through whom we have forgiveness of our sins.
Notice that Paul does not say that God has transferred us into a kingdom in which we don’t sin anymore. He says, rather, that He has transferred us into a place where we receive the forgiveness of our sins. This means that we don’t have to be sinless to walk in the light of the kingdom. Good thing, too. All we have to do is acknowledge our sinfulness, our incompleteness, our lack of togetherness, both in our corporate and in our personal life. We are not “together,” to use a sixties cliché; we are not whole; we are not happy. But if we can admit our lack of “togetherness,” then perhaps we are on the road to recovery—as was the one criminal who was crucified with Jesus, who acknowledged that he had been justly judged, but asked Jesus nevertheless to remember him when he came into his kingdom.
For the sense of life spinning out of control is not the only thing we have experienced in our lives. We also know what it’s like for someone to turn to us with a bright and joyous look that we didn’t think we deserved or could expect, and at those moments, we may have felt that we were just about to enter Paradise. As one of the characters in Toni Morrison’s great novel Beloved says about his woman, “She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather me and give them back to me in all the right order.” We have experienced that, too. We have known the wholeness that suddenly floods over us and into us when we come into the presence of someone who is unfeignedly grateful for our existence, who thinks we’re the cat’s meow, that we’re “the top,” as in that great old Cole Porter song:
You're the top!
You're Mahatma Gandhi.
You're the top!
You're Napoleon Brandy.
You're the purple light
Of a summer night in Spain,
You're the National Gallery
You're Garbo's salary,
You're cellophane.
And we have experienced this sort of grace corporately, too, as we struggle on in our quest for a vicar and to discern God’s will for this little church as it battles through the dilemmas of daily life here in Durham. We are still together, the church is still here, six months after our vicar left—in fact, it even seems to be growing. Wonderful, self-sacrificial people have stepped into the breach—people like our Senior Warden, and our beloved brother Nils, who probably didn’t know what he was getting into when he crossed the ocean blue to take the job as Episcopal chaplain at Duke. We on the vestry have learned to put up with each others’ absurdity and stubbornness and volatility, to forgive as we have been forgiven, to just keep putting one foot in front of another until we reach our destination, whatever that may be. And from time to time we have been amazed by the word of wisdom, or of encouragement, or the sudden flash of humor, that comes from one of the unlikely candidates for sainthood seated around the table. And so as we plod along in this way, we realize from time to time that we are not plodding alone. We find ourselves, in other words, in the situation of those disciples on the road to Emmaus who were suddenly joined by an unknown stranger who asked them, “What are you talking about as you walk along and seem so sad?”
Yes, sometimes you reach the point where you realize that it’s time to stop talking about what is making you so sad, and to turn with surprise to the one who has suddenly popped up in your midst, who asks the searching and compassionate question that penetrates to the bottom of your situation, the question that elicits the answer that starts to accomplish what all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not do for all us sad little Humpty Dumpties—to take the bombed-out, shattered bits of our lives and start to put them back in all the right order. That miracle is what this place is for, what this table is for, for here we meet and experience and actually consume the one in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, who reconciled all things to himself through the blood of his cross. That blood, and his shattered body, will soon become our food and drink, and the means for bringing us together with each other and with him and with the God who rules over all forever. Amen.
