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SERMONS

Last Sunday after Pentecost
November 26, 2006

By The Rev. Sylvia Czarnetzky

When my husband and I were in New Orleans for Thanksgiving, we went to see Helen Mirren in The Queen. Her performance was brilliant, by the way. It follows the life of the royal family in the days just before and just after the death of Princess Diana. I won’t give the plot away, but I will tell you this:

In the movie, at least, I was struck by how little attention most people seemed to pay to what the Queen had to say! I’m exaggerating only a little bit, but I came away from the movie with a strong sense that, in our modern day, royalty seems to have very little real power -- that there’s a real disconnect between the ceremonial role the Queen plays in English life, and the role of royalty that makes much difference in people’s everyday lives. Royalty seems largely beside the point, especially to us in America, where we don’t have royalty.

At any rate, given our lack of experience with kings and queens, Christ the King Sunday -- which today is, by the way -- is a little hard to sell. Yet, the image of Christ as King is a key image in the Bible and in our liturgy, but it’s hard for us modern folk to really get our hands around the concept of kingship. The good news is that it’s pretty easy to design a Sunday School class for children around Christ the King, because children at least have heard stories of kings and queens in storybooks! All you do is what we did today in Sunday School -- get a bunch of those free paper crowns from Burger King, and let the children decorate them with glitter and fine jewels!

And the children went to town. Each child made a crown of his or her own, and I made one for myself. And there were some splendid crowns! And we let each child take a turn being king or queen, and leading a procession around the parish hall. And children get immediately the basic concept of kingship: When you put a crown on your head, you get to boss everybody else around!!

Then I started to think about my own childhood and what I learned about kings and queens. And my first exposure to kings was in the game of checkers! We were big game players in my house growing up, and one of the first board games I learned to play was checkers.

And, of course, there are kings in checkers! If you move your man all the way to the other side of the checkerboard without getting jumped, then you get crowned a King. And when you’re a king, you get to move more freely around the checkerboard, which makes you a more dangerous opponent than a regular man. So the first thing that I learned about kings was that it was better to be a king than it is to be a regular man, because it makes you more powerful. So, so far, we’ve accumulated two truths about kings: 1. they get to boss other people around, and 2. kings are more powerful than regular people.

Then I started thinking about other childhood experiences with kings, and I suddenly remembered that Rogers and Hammerstein production of Cinderella that Leslie Ann Warren starred in! (The guy who played the prince ended up spending the rest of his career on General Hospital, but that’s another story!) And I remembered that the King and Queen in that production were played by Walter Pigeon and Celeste Holm.

And the King that Walter Pigeon played was a kindly king, a benevolent king, whose dearest wish was to find a good bride for his son the Prince. So they invited to the palace all the eligible young ladies in the kingdom, and, well, you know the rest. But to our understanding of kings and kingship, we add the kindly Walter Pigeon king, whose dearest wish for his son was that he should find a good wife!

The rest of what I know about kings I learned from history books and dictionaries. I know kings and queens wear crowns nobody else gets to wear, ermine robes nobody else gets to wear, and they sit on thrones nobody else gets to sit on. But that stuff is largely ceremonial. I know kings and queens rule over particular places -- countries or empires with geographic boundaries. W ruled over you depended on where you lived. If you lived in France, say, back in the day, the king of France was your ruler - Period.

But when we talk about Christ as King, it’s a different kind of kingship, isn’t it? Are we automatically under the sovereignty of Christ? Or is this something we must choose? To say Christ is my King, or Christ is our King, is to say something particular about who or what will be sovereign in our lives. Paying lip service to the idea of the kingship of Christ is not the same as living in ways that reveal that Christ is king of your life.

For example, if Christ is the king of my life, and I say he sits on the throne of my heart, what might that mean in terms of how much Christ the King can, well, boss me around? Doesn't that mean I have to listen to him, and conform my will to his? And if I have to listen to Christ the king, don't I have to read his word and study his life, so that I know what Christ said and what Christ did for me in dying and rising again? Don't I need to keep that story near and dear to my heart? And don't I need to set aside time in my busy life for him, for prayer and silence and Sabbath and the things that are needed if I am to feel the movement of God's Holy Spirit in my life? Don't I need to make room for that in my life, if I really mean it to say that Christ is my King?

What if Christ the King is like the benevolent king in Cinderella, wanting for me the fullness of live and desiring for me the wonder of loving another person, and wanting these things for me because he loves me? And if Christ is crowned the King in the checkerboard that is my life, Doesn't that give him more power in my life than “a regular man”? Doesn't that mean, if he is King, that he gets more freedom to move over my personal checkerboard? And isn't that where the rub is?

Now we're getting somewhere, talking about kingship. Now we're talking turkey, because it doesn't matter if you SAY Christ is the King of your life if you don't give Christ any room to work in your life. It doesn't matter if you CROWN Christ in your imagination with a thousand crowns, if you don't give Christ any power in the checkerboard that is your life. To say Christ is your King is not enough. You must invite Christ into your actual life. You can't keep him in the margins or just pay lip service to him. You have to make room in your life for Christ to move. You have to say “yes” to the authority of Christ in what you do.

I’ll tell you a little bit about my own experience with the kingship of Christ. About thirteen or fourteen years ago, I went on retreat at a place in Louisiana called Grand Coteau. And while I w as there, I had an experience of God that made me willing to open up my life to God in a way I never had before -- to invite God to rule in my life completely, and to let Christ in to the corners of my life that I had kept back for myself, that I had shooed him away from before. That experience of letting Christ be king of my personal checkerboard, is what made me willing to consider pursuing the path to seminary, and eventually, that path led me here.

But the truth is that ever since I made that choice to open my life completely up to God, I’ve struggled to keep it that way, not always successfully. Ever since I became willing in that time to open my life to Christ and to actively seek out his will for me, I’ve been tempted to take back certain corners -- I’ve wanted to take back charge of little corners of my life -- to say to God, essentially, God you can have dominion over most of it, but I’ll be in charge of this part, if you don’t mind. Let me handle this, God.

And I think in the years since my Grand Coteau moment, I’ve probably chipped away at God’s dominion over my life. God’s kingship over my life waxed and waned a bit as I struggle to take my sticky fingers off the wheel. But maybe part of the truth of saying “yes” to faith is that the choice to make Christ King of your life is a choice that is made over and over again -- sometimes daily, sometimes even hourly, sometimes even minute-by-minute! It’s human nature, I believe, to think, as Bill Horne said so beautifully last Sunday, that we can do it on our own -- that we don’t need God or want Christ to be the King of our lives. That we push God aside, especially when we don’t want to hear what he has to say. So we push God to the margins. We pay lip service to the idea of Christ the King, while making him sit on the sidelines.

So I guess this sermon ends where it began: Is kingship just a formality, or is it real? That’s the question that Christ the King Sunday asks us today. Is Christ the King of your life? Is Christ the King of this church? Are you willing to seat Christ on the throne of your heart, and to give him real power on your checkerboard? These are the questions I want us to ask ourselves this Advent, as we prepare for the birth of our King. Amen.

[The sermon writer would like to thank her preaching group at the Cathedral College of Preachers in Washington, D.C., for their help with the shaping of this sermon.]