“CHRIST THE KING”

 

 

A post-homiletical discourse delivered by the Rev. Dr. James R. Beebe

Rector, St. Patrick’s Church, Incline Village, Nevada, November 22, 2009

 

 

     Freedom is not as much fun as you think.  Nor do you end up with much after you try for liberation.  Take the Protestant Reformation, for example.  Led by Martin Luther, John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli, the protesters broke from the Roman Catholic Church.  “Free at last!  Free at last!  Thank God Almighty, free at last!”  Right?  Well, actually, not so much.

 

     Theology, like nature, abhors a vacuum.  You can’t just do away with the infallible authority of the Pope, can you?  That would mean that you would have to be responsible for finding answers to existential questions.  You – as an individual!  No, can’t have that.  What if you don’t get the answer right?  So -- what we’re going to do is replace the infallible authority of the Pope with the infallible authority of the Bible.  Ah, that’s better.  The Bible is King.

 

     But why go to all that trouble when you can think up a system in which it is inherently impossible to figure out the cosmic answers yourself.  Yes, let’s make our system predictable.  No, let’s make our system predestined.  Let’s say that God has already chosen who’s on the gold team and who’s on the brown team.  Then it won’t matter one whit what you do, one way or the other.  It’s the world of John Calvin, where the Mighty Predestinator is King.  Yes, that’s better.

 

     Eric Fromm has written a book called, Escape from Freedom, in which he theorizes that once we’re out from under someone’s thumb, we get nervous.  We long for security.  At least in Egypt we got three squares a day….  So, to compensate, we choose one of three paths:

 

1.         The most obvious one is authoritarianism.  The authoritarian seeks to gain control over other people to impose some semblance of order on an out-of-control world.

 

2.         Or we can choose destructiveness.  This is not sadism.  A sadist wishes to gain control over someone.  A destructive personality wishes to destroy someone it can’t bring under his control -- simply get rid of the problem.

 

 

3.         Or, we can choose conformity.   It’s the handmaiden to authoritarianism.  What people do is internalize the values of their culture and then experience them as their own.  It avoids genuine free thinking, of course – that would be too dangerous.  Culture is King.  Yes, that’s more like it….

 

     For some perverse reason, human beings would rather be under the jackboot of a dictator (or, for that matter, be one themselves).  Authority sells.  Theodore Adorno and his colleagues were college professors in Germany until the Third Reich drove them out in the mid-1930’s.  Having been closely monitored by the National Socialists, they knew authoritarianism.  And they were curious as to what kinds of personalities Nazism was attracting.

 

     In 1950 they collaborated on a book entitled, The Authoritarian Personality.  They found a number of traits this personality seemed to have:  conventional thinking, authoritarian submission and aggression, superstition, stereotyping, cynicism, a habit of projecting their own failings onto others, and exaggerated concerns over sexuality.  It’s a world view that is populated by enemies, lack of empathy, and zero-sum games.

 

     A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces his altitude and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon and shouts, "Excuse me, can you tell me where i am?"
  
The man below says, "Yes, you're in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field".
 
"You must work in technical support," says the balloonist.

 

"I do,"  replies the man. "How did you know?"

 

"Well,"  says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but completely useless."

 

The man below says:  "You must be in management."

 

"I am," replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

 

"Well", says the man, "You don't know where you are, or where you're going, but you expect me to be able to help. You're still in the same position you were before we met, but now it's my fault."

 

 

     Today is the feast of Christ the King.  It is a Royal visit.  And, speaking of which, it reminds us of what happened several years ago to Andrew Colquhoun, a brother in the Order of the Holy Cross.  He was the Assistant Minister at the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh when he and the others were making preparations for the arrival of Queen Elizabeth and the unveiling of a plaque.

 

     He got the chance to see her, he says – well, actually he saw her feet up close because you have to bow when she passes by.  She had on yellow shoes.  It was a wonderful day for the church and the people of the neighborhood because the Queen represented who they were.  She represented the ordinary people – the butchers and grocers and hairdressers and carpenters.

 

     This is the Feast of Christ the King.  A Royal visit.  But when we open the door, we find no yellow shoes, no red carpet, no programmed itinerary.  Just some naked, hungry, sick prisoners, yearning for what they don’t know what.  The invitation is still the same, of course.  But if we walk with Christ the King, it’ll take us into a commitment that doesn’t include tea and crumpets.  It’ll be into the nurseries full of babies born with HIV and crack dependency; it’ll e into Afghanistan or into the shallow, brittle laughs of the desperately lonely rich; it’ll be into the abyss where the lonely and the abused live.

 

 

     “I’ve seen God, you know,” says Brother Colquhoun.  “It’s not a very big deal.  Once, when I was leaving the ER, a voice called out to me, ‘Chaplain….’  As I turned, I saw a woman on her knees in the lighted ambulance.  She was a friend of mine, a nurse with two kids and a husband who expected supper on time.  But, instead, she had run with the paramedics.  She’d jumped up from the dinner table, leaving her husband and children, and gone.  And here she was, with towels, mopping up the blood of broken kids.”

 

     “And she said to me,” ‘I don’t know what we’d do without you.  You do such wonderful work.  I could never do what you do!’  And I thought, she doesn’t know.  She doesn’t even realize it.  She could just as well have said, ‘When did I see you hungry and feed you?  When did I give you clothes, when did I do anything for you?’  There he is, on his knees, mopping up the blood in an ambulance.”

 

It is Christ and King.