Proper 29 A; November 20, 2011
Ezekiel
34:11-17; Ps.
100
Ephesians 1:15-23; Matthew
25:31-46
Spoiler alert: close your ears if you have NOT read The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, because I’m going to tell you the ending. The
king returns. The righteous ruler is placed up on the throne. Justice is
restored. Power joins with mercy. The meek – or at least the beavers, nymphs,
satyrs and other creatures, led by four sturdy, British children – inherit
Narnia, the kingdom prepared for them by Aslan.
Spoiler alert again. C. S. Lewis’ friend, J.R.R. Tolkien,
also writing in the terrible, war-torn years of the 20th century, ends The Lord
of the Rings in the same way. The king returns. The righteous ruler is placed
upon the throne. Justice is restored. Power joins with mercy. The meek – this
time a Rainbow coalition of elves, dwarfs and swarthy men led by four sturdy,
British hobbits – inherit Middle Earth, the kingdom prepared for them by
Gandalf.
The British have built this longing for the return of the
righteous king into their civic life. When the Tudors came to the throne in the
late middle ages, they created a back story to give their ascent to the throne
some legitimacy. The Tudors recreated the legend of Arthur, the true king of
all the Britons, whose Round Table of equality and chivalry brought order to
violent warlords. Even to this day the British monarchs vow to step aside if
Arthur awakens from his slumber in Avalon and returns to rule England’s green
and pleasant land.
We can chuckle at the quaint notion of “the return of the
king.” After all, we Americans overthrew the king in 1776, dethroned in place
of democracy. And yes, of course, Britain is a democracy, too – and in fact,
democracies do a much better job than monarchies at maintaining order and
distributing justice.
But when times are bad, social conditions unsettled and the
way to a prosperous future unclear, do not these stories of a righteous king
coming to settle account appeal to our deep longings? Maybe we can learn
something from them, not to recreate a past that perhaps was not ideal, but how
we can look to the future – how we can use our lessons from scripture – of
Ezekiel’s description of the Good Shepherd-the Good Ruler, and of Matthew’s
description of judgment day as righteous king coming to settle accounts.
How about another story? Ireland, at the turn of the 5th
century, was a flourishing pagan culture. Patrick, who had lived there for some
time as a slave, heard a call from God to evangelize the Irish. It was a
culture governed by kings who were the representatives of the gods, who had to
be appeased through blood sacrifice to bring about fertility and prosperity.
Patrick did many things in his mission to the Irish, but this one point has
relevance here: he replaced their warrior kings with “the high king of heaven,”
their angry and fickle gods with a “God they could depend on.” Patrick used the
image of the king bringing order to society not in a backward-looking,
nostalgic way, but with a bright vision of a new society: a society of
peacefulness, of new relationships, of a God who brought life from death.
Move ahead to the end of the 19th century, to Episcopal
churches in cities like Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia. It is the
height of the industrial revolution, and suffering among the working classes is
widespread, without any of the safeguards such as child labor laws, a
40-hour-work-week, health and safety standards. Many Christians are moved to
alleviate this suffering, inspired by the reading of passages like today’s
Gospel. Among the boldest leaders in this “social gospel” movement are
Episcopal clergy and parishes. People at the time noted the paradox of the
elite, aristocratic Episcopal Church at the forefront of movement of solidarity
with the poor. Oddly enough, it is Episcopalians’ understanding of “kingship,”
of a society guided and led by the church, that inspired their activism. The
social gospel took what the righteous king would do and democratized it, advocated
the spreading-out of power and privilege across society. They took this
powerful image from the past – a righteous king restoring order during a time
of social upheaval -- and adapted it for movement into the future.
Both lessons from Ezekiel and Matthew overthrow our
traditional understanding of the regal monarch, the warrior, “the king.” Kings
were to be the shepherds of Israel, feeding the hungry, binding the broken,
gathering the lost. Ezekiel denounces those made themselves fat at the expense
of the people they were there to serve. The king in Matthew comes down entirely
from his throne, not just to help but to identify completely with the poorest
and most desperate of society. By loving the stranger and the outcast, we indeed
love the king; we love God.
The way these lessons take old images and turn them around
for new, challenging times can be helpful to us Christians in this time of
social dislocation. We may have to describe Christ the King in words from the
past, using the old monarchical words and images that really don’t work
anymore. But the reality they point us to is one very different indeed: it is
the reality of God’s justice, where all the poor and neglected are welcomed,
where their suffering is even part of God’s own self. This high king of heaven
is indeed a God we can depend on -- not a benevolent despot who “knows what is
good for us;” but a God who became one of us, and who took all of human nature
into the divine.
We enter Advent next week with these “marching orders” of
engagement, sacrificial giving, solidarity and hope. “The king shall come when
morning dawns, and light triumphant breaks,” we will sing in the hymn at the
end of the service. “and let the endless bliss begin, by weary saints foretold,
when right shall triumph over wrong, and truth shall be extolled.”
How wonderful it is, even in these darks days, with no human
king on the horizon, no Aslan getting ready to roar, no Gandalf on the ridge
with armies of thousands behind him to slay the wicked orcs, no Arthur coming
back from Avalon – how wonderful it is that we have been given the words to
hope for something real.
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