November 24, 2024 - The Last Sunday after Pentecost, Christ the King Sunday
My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
Good morning, Epiphany. It’s very good to be back with you here this morning after missing last Sunday, when Abbey and I went to South Bend and spent the weekend walking around Notre Dame. It was our first Sunday off since moving here, we were grateful for it, and Jim Wright did a fine job filling in for me here, by all accounts, so thank you, Jim.
We are five months now into my first call as rector of an Episcopal church, your rector here at the Church of the Epiphany, and the subject of leadership has been on my mind quite a bit of late. Father Jim Steen is especially fond of the subject, recommending several books to me on leadership, including Leadership Can Be Taught by Sharon Parks, which is now one of many books I’m slowly working through. Do you just not finish books when you’re a rector? I don’t know yet. Good and bad leadership are both obviously in the air after a presidential election, with two clearly different examples pretty evenly splitting 150 million voters in this country, and now there’s an assortment of cabinet officials set to lead us all into an uncertain future. Even here in South Haven, leadership discussions are happening; our local alliance of South Haven Area Ministers, SHAMA, is on life support. Few ministers are attending meetings, and no one seems to have time or desire to actually lead the decades-old ecumenical organization. Our schools here need a new superintendent too, leadership in the district seems to have been weak of late. Our diocese is without a diocesan bishop and has had two recently removed; our churches have clearly been scarred by bad leadership. Everywhere I turn, leadership.
Quality leadership is apparently in very short supply these days; Jim Wright said as much in his sermon last week, the candidates for rector positions are admittedly few. Thank you for choosing me, choosing us, to serve here. I hope to lead you well as your pastor, priest, and teacher.
But, in the middle of that mess of navigating what it means to lead in a world with so many mixed examples, with so much pressing need for good leaders... I’m personally a son and a husband and a dad, the father of three girls, trying to survive school drop-offs, grocery pickups, and endless amounts of laundry. So, let me put leadership aside for a quick second and tell you a family story. This fall, Abbey and I took our kids to the movies. In June, when we went to see Inside Out 2, we saw a trailer for another animated movie called The Wild Robot (maybe some of you have heard of it), and we immediately put the release date for it on our calendar. Lily had read the book version of The Wild Robot back in third grade, and Abbey had planned on reading it to her second-grade class at Maple Grove Elementary this fall, so we knew we had to see the movie version when Dreamworks’ adaptation of The Wild Robot came out in September.
Without spending too, too long on the plot (you may remember I really do try to keep this a spoiler-free zone up here), the movie centers around a robot who is initially lost in the wild. Surprising, I know: wild, robot. Roz, the robot, awakens on an island, and programmed to be helpful to whichever human or humans had purchased her, she finds herself surrounded only by animals without a human in sight. Without specific human-given tasks to carry out, Roz hunkers down and learns the language of the animals in hopes of helping them, but the animals still aren’t receptive. By learning their language, Roz the robot realizes that the animals call her “the monster,” they’re afraid of her, and they’re certainly not open to any help.
One stormy night, an angry grizzly bear chases Roz, and she crashes down a cliff and lands on a goose nest, crushing the mother goose and many of the eggs. (This is all spoiler now, I’m sorry.) One of the eggs, though, is left undamaged in the fall, and Roz makes it her task on the island to take care of the egg and the goose that hatches from it, who she eventually names Brightbill.
I’m going to end the plot summary there, still in the story’s first act, because I really think it is a phenomenal movie, one that should legitimately win some Oscars, and one that you should definitely see. But I tell that story because of a quote that follows in the second book of the Wild Robot trilogy, one that never makes it into this movie but comes in a conversation with her creator, Dr. Molovo, later on. I read this quote last weekend. In telling her own version of events on the island, Roz says this: “I tried to win them over with kindness. Animals ran from me and laughed at me and attacked me, and I always responded with kindness. It was a good strategy. But the real key to my survival came in the form of an egg and a gosling. When I adopted Brightbill, everything changed. I was finally accepted by the animals. I was surrounded by friends and family. I was home.”
You might be wondering at this point if I’m drawing comparisons between myself and Roz the robot, between South Haven and the wild, between you, the beloved members of Epiphany, and wild animals. (Ha.) I’m not, I promise, don’t go there. But, when Roz tried to be helpful, to be a tool sent from the outside to make the lives of the animals better, she found she was held at arm’s length. It was a good strategy, kindness, sure, but it wasn’t quite connecting. Then, when she became a part of the community, when she found herself personally invested, in adopting a goose and caring for its survival as much as her own, well, then she was in. Then, she was surrounded by friends and family. She was home. And they loved her as she became not a robot lost in the wild, but the wild robot.
Today, as you might have noticed from our hymns and readings and from the front page of the bulletin, today is Christ the King Sunday. Christ the King is not an official feast day in the Episcopal Church; it was instituted in the Catholic Church in the early 20th century after the fall of European kingdoms in World War I, set up to contrast Christ and his kingdom with those fallen royals and theirs. With Advent coming and with the gospel text so clear before us today, you might see why other traditions have unofficially taken up the holiday as well on this Last Sunday after Pentecost: Jesus Christ, questioned by Pilate, confirms that he was indeed born to be a king, to testify to the truth, but that his kingdom is not from this world. If it were, if he were to be a king like everyone else, his followers would be up in arms, fighting to keep him from being crucified.
So, then, after this gospel text, we are left to wonder, as was Pilate: what does this kingdom of his look like? How does Christ the King rule if not from earthly palaces and thrones? Well, in short answer, we have his Sermon on the Mount, where King Jesus lays out the upside-down kingdom of the beatitudes, where the mourners, the meek, the poor, and the merciful are the blessed. We have his parables, where King Jesus says that the last shall be first and the first shall be last, that faith like a mustard seed can move mountains, that it spreads like yeast in dough, throughout the world, changing everything.
And then most importantly today, alongside his words and his teachings, we have his life. This King Jesus was not just a philosopher or a spiritual guru, friends; we believe he was the incarnate son of God, born to the virgin Mary in a lowly stable, hailed by shepherds and wise men alike and feared by those in political power, by King Herod (if you haven’t heard that whole story yet, boy, December’s going to be right up your alley). This King Jesus was a child in the temple, a carpenter, a working-class man from Nazareth with friends from all walks of life: tax collectors, fishermen, zealots, peasants. He did not merely use words to teach, to help the humans around him during his time on earth, to improve their lives and to be of service. No, he was invested, he came alongside us... our God became like us, lived like us, surrounded by friends & family. God is home with us.
We have this example, then, this morning friends, in both Roz the robot and in Christ the King, on this Christ the King Sunday, a week before Advent: Christians must not merely offer help from the outside of difficult situations, we must not simply vote and post and tweet and grumble at coffee hour about the problems in this world. Christians must follow the example of Christ their King and get invested, get alongside those we claim to love. As Mary Moore said two weeks ago in announcements, we must get to really know our neighbors before we can claim to love them.
That is what leadership in the church, in the kingdom of God looks like: We lead with our whole selves, with love, with relationship, by following Christ into the real life of our neighbors, by seeing ourselves in them, by letting others minister to and love us too, by truly becoming part of a reciprocal, beloved community and then caring for and about it with everything we are, by loving our neighbors as we love ourselves.
Leadership is a tricky thing in the twenty-first century, as we are seeing played out around us. Popular examples might tell us that to lead we must be loud, we must be controversial to gain attention, we must be cutting-edge and innovative, we must try to do everything all the time all at once so that we can be a light in the darkness in difficult times and so no cause is not championed and we need good marketing and packaging for all of it so that others can see us doing it and, and, and... I’m exhausted just by that sentence, let alone the work it could all take. There are many voices right now about what good leadership may look like. I beg you not to listen to all of them, lest you go mad.
Instead, I want you to hear that I am personally comforted this week by knowing that Christ is the King, that his kingdom is not of this world, and, as we enter Advent, by knowing that God so loved us that God came to be one of us, entering the world in the person of Jesus Christ, to be surrounded by friends and family and to make this his home, loving all of us so radically that the powers that be could not help but put him on a cross.
I challenge you this morning, Epiphany community, that if Christ is really your King, that you live like that is so. That you lead in our community and in our greater community outside these doors, that you lead in caring for this world by coming alongside and really getting to know those whom you want to love, that you get invested in the communities of the people who are and who will be marginalized and oppressed. If you’re not sure how to do that, that’s okay. But keep showing up here, because we have some saints in this room who can and will show you the way. They’ve been doing it for years.
As Janet MacKenzie preached not too long ago, we are all, here at the Church of the Epiphany, called to become the people tasked to do God’s work in the world. It’s my job to remind you of that, and I’ll keep doing it as long as you let me. Thankfully, thanks to the lived-out example of Christ our King, we all know what Christian leadership for all of us truly looks like, we know what God’s work in the world looks like, we know what the kingdom of God looks like. It looks like him.
Now let’s get to work. Amen.
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