Christ the King 2022

While I was training to be a priest, I had to spend some time in a variety of churches doing what we called ‘field education’. I ended up spending most of my time at theological college working in San Francisco at Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, and it will tell you a lot about the place that when I was being interviewed, the director of ministries, a woman named Sara Miles, said to me, ‘So, we understand you’re heterosexual. Is that going to be a problem for you working here?’

Having been at the front lines of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 90s, Episcopal Churches, which correspond in the US to the Church of England, were some of the first religious organisations to go into the hospitals and to offer pastoral care to people with HIV and AIDS, in particular Episcopal Franciscan friars. As a result, the Episcopal Churches of San Francisco were also among the first churches in the US to offer unequivocal welcome and affirmation to LGBT and queer people.

Like many churches in the City, Saint Gregory’s membership is lesbian or gay or bi or trans or non-binary or living in any number of ways that were not readily legible to the categories by which most of American society is structured. This was so much the case that categories such as sexuality and gender identity were not so much welcomed as boring: these were generally considered to be the least interesting thing about someone. And, never in my life have I been part of a church community so wholly dedicated to the life of demonstrated and made possible by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But none of it looked much like the reserved sort of Christianity usually associated with the Episcopal Church or the Church of England. Vestments were made of batik silk and the liturgy involved singing and dancing and the sacrament of the Eucharist was given to everyone without exception and to everyone by name.

Somehow, by putting down roots deep, deep into the Christian tradition, the people of Saint Gregory’s were able to take that which has been handed on from one generation of Christians to another and to make of it something wonderful and new, refracted through the prism of San Francisco LGBTQ history and experience. To use the language of cultural theorists and theologians, the liturgy and the tradition had been queered: interrogated and re-appropriated and resurrected as something wonderful and beautiful and new: absolutely welcoming and reflective in a familiar-yet-new way of the beauty and holiness to which God’s people have always been called, have always been drawn.

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Though, of course, the queering of categories and repudiation of the strict binaries and hierarchies of culture do not always end in beauty and hope.

This past week has been the annual week of Transgender Awareness, culminating in Transgender Day of Remembrance, when we remember those who have died whose bodies and gender expression were made the object of others’ fear and hatred.

Among other things, Transgender Day of Remembrance exists as a testimony to the degree to which our categories, however helpful they may be in serving to make sense of an otherwise chaotic and turbulent world, are not without very real, very human costs, and it is our responsibility to reflect on those categories and reflect on those who have suffered for them.

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Our reading this evening from 1 Samuel also represents a kind of warning, a warning to the people of Israel that their understanding of the world, of power and authority, is also not without cost, not without a human price.

Eager to take their place as a nation among nations, the people of Israel longed for a king: a king to be glorious on their behalf, a king to treat with neighbouring nations, a king, first and foremost, to lead them into war.

In the minds of the people, there is a category called a nation and it requires a king to be a proper nation like the others. Dazzled by the prospect of conquest and a stature of their own, the people turn away from the cost in human lives that monarchy entails: even wars that are one result in the deaths of thousands.

Reluctantly, God gives the people what they ask for, and human beings being what we are, the history that follows is not glorious. The line of kings is disastrous almost to a one, and in the end, the possession of a monarchy divides the country and ends with exile and destitution.

So much for kingship.

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But as the period of mourning that followed the death of the late Queen Elizabeth, and our own prayers this evening for King Charles attest, the idea of kingship has a long half-life.

Even after the monarchy of Israel had passed to a family of puppet kings culminating in the Herod of Christmas infamy, the people longed for a proper king who would come and set things right.

And, as if once again to answer their prayers, but in a ways opposite from their desire but congruent with honesty and truth, God answers their prayer. But the king who arrives might be said to have queered the idea of kingship: turned it on its head, interrogated its contours to the degree that it barely resembled the old idea of a glorious monarch leading the people into victorious war, but resembled instead a defeated and executed criminal, murdered for nothing other than the words that he said, the way that he lived, the implications of his body.

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At the crucifixion, the Romans affixed a plaque to the cross that read ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’ in Latin and Greek and Aramaic, as if to dismiss and denounce the very idea of divine kingship in Palestine.

But as has happened many times before and since, what was intended as a word of opprobrium was re-appropriated as term of praise: Without meaning to, the Romans got it exactly right.

Today is the feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday of the year and the last Sunday before Advent, when we begin to prepare for the nativity of the one we have come to call King.

The first Christians were not stupid or naive when they called Jesus Lord and King: they knew that they were actively appropriating the titles of the Emperor and of his local puppet and applying them to the crucified body of their teacher and their friend. And it is this one we praise when we sing in a few weeks’ time ‘glory to the newborn king’. It is a conscious, radical re-appraisal and transmutation of the idea of human kingship to reveal and resemble the nature God, who is before and beyond and above every human category and authority.

By taking on a life shaped by suffering and rejection, shame and death, the one whom Christians have called King and Lord since the earliest days of the faith, aligns himself definitively and forever with those whom we reject and cause to suffer, those who are shamed and those whose lives are bound or shortened or ended in the name of others’ fear and hatred and pride.

Identifying himself with those most deeply misunderstood and rejected and yet not defeated, the love of the God manifest in the crucified and resurrected one runs past our violence and terror to bring new life.

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To trust that true authority rests not with those who command violence but with the one who rejects violence utterly, this is the vocation of the Christian, this is the doorway we must enter who would prepare our hearts to receive Christ at the nativity, in the beauty of carols and candle light.

Will we dare to risk it? To follow the one whose life refuses to conform to our patterns and expectations of power and authority? To trust that the truth is found most clearly not in the power of war but in the experience of the rejected and shamed? To live as though God, the creator and sustainer of all that is, is most powerfully revealed in the vulnerability of a tiny child?  Shall we take that chance?