SERMON 33 - SUNDAY 24 NOVEMBER 2013

Sermon at Holy Trinity Church, East Grimstead – Christ the King Sunday - Sunday 24 November 2013

Psalm 72; Jeremiah 23:1-6; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43

May I speak in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit,  Amen

Today is, as we have seen, the last Sunday before Advent and is traditionally the day when we celebrate Christ as our King – the one to whom we pray, frequently – “Your Kingdom Come” in the words of the prayer which he left us.  But what exactly does that mean?  And especially, what does that term mean to you and to me?  In the next few minutes I’d like to explore those questions further.

Many terms are used to describe Jesus in the bible – Lord, Saviour, King, Messiah, Emmanuel and so on.  Indeed, Jesus was all of these things but above all he came to save us from our sins by dying on the Cross – a Cross upon which the Roman authorities, in the form of Governor Pontius Pilate, had placed, as a description of his crime, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”.  The Jewish authorities had denounced Jesus to the Romans as a traitor of the Roman Empire by stating that Jesus claimed kingship over a Jewish people who had, as their ruler, a puppet King beholden to Caesar already. When questioned by Pilate during his trial as to whether he was indeed a King he responded that his Kingdom was not from this Earth – something which we Christians now understand but which puzzled and concerned the Roman Governor.

Today we live in a world of relatively few monarchies.  In just under a year’s time we will be commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.  At that time Europe was largely governed by a plethora of Royal and Imperial families – in Russia, Germany, Turkey, the Balkans, Scandanavia, United Kingdom -whose colonising extended sovereign or imperial rule much farther afield – notably in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia.  It has to be said that the fall of many of those imperial dynasties and royal families was brought about by a realisation that absolute monarchy was no longer suitable to nations which craved some measure of democratic rule.  The absolute rule of monarchs was something which could no longer be tolerated to enlightened people.

It is interesting to reflect that in the Old Testament we read that originally the Hebrew nation had been governed by Judges but the supreme ruler had always been Yahweh/Jehovah – the one true and living God of Abraham, Jacob and Moses.  God was the King not only in Heaven but on Earth. Yet the Jewish people had sought and were given a King (Saul) to rule over them and ultimately their system of monarchy became divided and fell with the people being taken into exile.  God had warned the people, through Samuel that one day they would “cry out for relief from the king they have chosen and the LORD will not answer you on that day” [1 Samuel 8:18]. And so, eventually they were taken into captivity by the Babylonians and ultimately ruled by the Romans after a succession of bad kings and foreign occupations.  So, the idea of earthly kings has not, in biblical terms, been an entirely happy one.  Furthermore, the absolute authority of some tyrant kings in our more modern day history has not been without a great deal of accompanying suffering. 

Now let me make it clear, I am not a republican!  When I use the term “king” I use the term loosely to encompass many autocratic rulers or unfair systems of totalitarian government which have existed.  Those monarchies that have survived have done so because they have realised that they need to rule within a democratic constitution.

I have recently come back from a holiday where I had the uninterrupted opportunity to read a fascinating book of speeches and sermons by former Archbishop Desmond Tutu entitled “God is Not a Christian”.  This rather bizarre title is easily understood when you read the speeches and sermons from which this phrase is taken – Desmond Tutu says that God is not the sole property of Christians but because he created the world and all that is within it, he is the God of everyone and everything.  Many of his speeches and sermons contained in the book are concerned with criticising the Apartheid system in South Africa – an unjust system perpetrated by an unjust regime.  Quite often, he refers, in the arguments he had with the regime to Psalm 72 the first lines of which reads

Endow the king with your justice, O God,

The royal son with your righteousness.

He will judge your people in righteousness

Your afflicted ones with justice

The mountains will bring prosperity to the people

The hills the fruit of righteousness.

He will defend the afflicted among the people

And save the children of the needy

He will crush the oppressor.

He will endure as long as the sun

As long as the moon, through all generations.

Tutu says that, any ruler or regime which shows these qualities has no need of extensive or oppressive security forces to keep it in control – the people will themselves want to ensure that such a regime prospers and continues in power.  The Archbishop was often cited by members of the Apartheid government of South Africa as being a Communist sympathiser and was accused of quoting from Communist literature. I think it came as quite a shock to them that his manifesto, if that was what they wanted to think of it as, was actually taken from scripture contained in the bibles on which many of the Apartheid supporting politicians would have sworn an oath of allegiance!

When I was made a Freeman of the City of London I was obliged to swear an oath of allegiance to Queen Elizabeth and to the Lord Mayor and Common Council of the City.  But above this, I was first and foremost to swear obedience to God – in other words to my Heavenly King – and to me that also means reading and following scripture and particularly the words of Jesus in the gospels.

Jesus was crucified because he spread the news about the kingdom of heaven – no earthly domain but a place where the king of David’s psalm would rule with that justice and compassion which was spoken of.

The two robbers on each side of Jesus couldn’t have been more different.  The first, who taunted Jesus to save himself if he was truly Christ – meaning, in Greek, “the anointed one” the king and son of God - had completely missed the point – unlike the second robber who actually received more than he asked for.  Realising that Jesus was indeed what he claimed to be, and knowing that he himself deserved the punishment of crucifixion meted out to him, he simply asks Jesus to remember him when he reaches the kingdom of heaven and probably was thinking in terms of some form of redemption at a future time; but he gets far more than he asked for, for Jesus responds that the criminal will enter paradise with him that day. 

The importance of this passage is, I think, that Jesus is demonstrating that the kingdom of heaven is not something in the future and he is not the monarch of some future kingdom but he has authority as the king of heaven today – at the present time.

I fear that many people today, many Christians, think in terms of heaven as a place to which they aspire to go by the good works they do – to earn a place in the kingdom when their earthly life is over – by doing good works and generally being nice people.  

Of course there is nothing wrong in that as it stands, but I think as Christians, in contrast to simply being nice people, we are expected to live as though the kingdom of heaven is here – not to concentrate on finding a way to mount the staircase to heaven but to act and think in ways of bringing the kingdom of heaven down to earth now.

As we progress through Advent I think we need to think and reflect beyond the Nativity.  We need to remember that the Jesus of the manger was to have a short ministry of just over three years culminating in his cruel death and resurrection.  Those tiny hands and feet in the manger would, just three decades later, be driven through with those awful nails.  And we need to reflect upon the resurrection – which is the fundamental episode which, by our belief, defines us as Christians, and finally the Ascension and Pentecost when we were left with the means by which we can indeed be the subjects of a heavenly kingdom here on earth.

Empires and regimes may come and go, but Christ’s kingdom, will, in the words of Psalm 72, endure for so long as the sun rises and sets and the moon shines in the evening sky… and beyond.

Let us be kingdom people and acknowledge, daily, our service to that kingdom and our love and loyalty to Christ the King.

 

Amen

SERMON 32 - SUNDAY 10 NOVEMBER 2013

Sermon at St. John’s Church, West Grimstead - Remembrance Sunday - Sunday 10 November 2013

2 Thessalonians 2: 1-5; 13-End

 May I speak in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit,  Amen

Whenever I stand in silence for those two minutes on each Remembrance Sunday I not only remember those who have died in  those two World Wars and other conflicts since then, but I also reflect on the fact that I belong to a very privileged generation for whom those great and devastating wars are no more than pages in history books. Having been born only 8 years after the plutonium bomb was detonated over Nagasaki, I have lived in a period of relative peace and prosperity for which I regularly, through worship, give thanks to God.

When I was a child a regular event in our household was to watch the Royal British Legion’s Festival of Remembrance from the Royal Albert Hall on our small 9-inch black and white TV.  Back then in the 1960s a large number of veterans from World War I, together with veterans of my own parents’ age (or slightly older) from World War II, would march into the Arena.  They would include Chelsea Pensioners who had been at Gallipoli, Jutland, Ypres and so on – servicemen and women who had real and vivid memories of the horrors of war – who had seen, for themselves, comrades killed and companions maimed and many who had seen the legacy of evil and inhumane regimes in Europe and Asia.

As a child, the war held a great fascination for me and many of my schoolboy friends and invoked a great interest in modern history – especially as many of my friends’ parents and my own family members could remember vividly the Blitz and Battle of Britain – when the Second World War came to our shores. Today, whole generations have grown up having little or no understanding of those horrors although, of course, here in Wiltshire there are many families involved in the armed forces which, today, have personal experiences of the effects of warfare in far off lands; where our servicemen and women continue to fight for justice and peace. 

However, for many of our younger generation, there is no real concept of why those whose names are engraved on our war memorials gave up their lives.  Indeed, recently, during a discussion with a school friend of my 12-year old daughter, it became clear that she had no idea who Winston Churchill was, let alone the role he had played for this country in those dark days of the 1940s. 

Remembrance Sunday, then, is such an important occasion – not just for those veterans to recall what they went through or to remember companions who never survived the conflicts, but also so that those generations from my own onwards may clearly understand why so many lives were given,  and can continue to give praise and thanks that so many stemmed the tide of evil which could have so easily engulfed the world.

Today, those conflicts in which our troops are engaged are largely in far flung parts of the world and the issues which have provoked them are complex.  Again many young people have no real understanding or concept as to why or where these conflicts are taking place – indeed many adults, including some politicians it could be argued, don’t, either.  Although these modern conflicts may be remote, the battles now often fought with technology,  and the victims largely unknown to us, the horrors are still the same.

The true reality of those horrors perpetrated by the Nazis in World War 2 was brought home to me and to my 16-year old son, Thom, quite recently.  He and I spent a short break in Poland last summer and during our trip we arranged a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau – the infamous extermination camp about 50 miles from Krakow in the south of the country.  In this terrible place, 2.3 million people were sent to the gas chambers – many from Western European occupied countries including the Channel Islands  - and to where an estimated 700,000 British Jews and other “undesirables” would have been sent had the Germans ever successfully invaded and occupied the United Kingdom. 

Thom had read about the Holocaust in history books but I don’t think had any concept of the scale of the atrocities committed in that one single camp.

As we approached Birkenau in our minibus, the first thing to be seen was the infamous Hell’s Gate – the railway gatehouse into the camp. His face dropped and his complexion was ashen.  He turned to me and simply said “Dad it’s in colour, it’s real!”  Up to that point he had only seen it in black and white photographs in history books. In that split second, his perception of the horrors of that evil regime turned from the recorded pages of history to the reality of the suffering and horrors beyond that real gate.

And so, the importance of today cannot and should not ever be trivialised.  We owe it to forthcoming generations to keep alive the memory of those brave fallen and the causes for which they fell – to remember the evil which could have engulfed us.  In the words of the Kohima they gave their today so that we, all of us and the generations to follow, could have our tomorrows.

And this is what, in effect, Paul is saying in our passage from his second letter to the Thessalonians, read this morning.  I could speak at great length about the Christian ethical doctrines on the justification for war – but I’ll leave that for the moment for my academic essay writing – there is also a good article in this month’s Christianity magazine in the context of Syria.  Instead I simply want to re-iterate Paul’s thoughts here.

Paul reminds us that the return of our Saviour Jesus Christ will only come after the “lawless one” is revealed through rebellion.  In other words, as Christians we are expected to uphold the ethics which we have been taught by Jesus and should stand up against and expose all  who would deceive the truth as revealed by him.  Throughout history leaders have waged war and oppressed people either in the name of Christianity or by pretending to be Christians themselves.  In Nazi Germany, Hitler and his regime tried to appeal to Catholics and Lutherans alike that there was a score to settle against the Jews because the Jewish leadership had been responsible for Jesus’s crucifixion.

I have just finished reading a wonderful book of sermons, lectures and speeches by former Archbishop Desmond Tutu with the interesting title of “God is not a Christian”.  In it he reminds us that there is only one omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent God – creator of all thing and all people, everybody, black white, and yellow.  He appeals to Christians and God-fearing people everywhere, just as Paul does, to stand up against tyranny and oppression.  He puts it simply – If the Church is not going to stand up for the poor, the hungry, the oppressed, the discriminated, then who is?

This brings me back to the two-minute silence.  During those two minutes I try to recall all the battles of the two world wars, all the sites of oppression, all those areas of suffering, the blitz, the death camps, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hamburg and so on and especially members of the church like Bonhoeffer and Maximilian Kolbe.   Two minutes is simply not long enough.

I praise and thank all those who have so courageously given their lives to oppose tyranny and evil.  Let us never forget them.

Amen