What Kind, What King?

 Revelation 1:4-8; John 18:33-37

November 25, 2018

Years ago we had a house guest from Swaziland, a kingdom in southern Africa. We Americans don’t do kings, so we had some interesting conversations with our guest.

She respected American democracy, and was a big fan of then-President Obama, but, all-in-all, she told us, she preferred having a king. “The monarchy is good for my people,” she told us.

I am, and always have been, a small-d democrat, so she didn’t persuade me.

But she did give me a different perspective, and getting a different perspective is necessary for understanding what it can possibly mean to proclaim that Christ is king.

Most of our liturgical holidays – Easter, Christmas, Maundy Thursday, Pentecost, and so on – have ancient roots going back to early Christian communities. This Sunday – Christ the King Sunday, the final Sunday of the liturgical year – has only been designated as such for around a century. But the designation of Christ as “king” goes back to the very beginning with its roots in the passage from John that we read together as a call to worship.

To speak of kings and of kingdoms is inherently to speak of politics – that is to say, it is to speak of how power is employed to shape the lives of a particular people. Politics – from the Greek polis – concerns the ordering of the city. To speak of kings and of kingdoms is to speak of life, here and now, in the city, and it is to ask, of ourselves, who – or what – is our king? That is to say, what rules your life?

As our call to worship this morning reminds us, the “kingship” of Jesus is not like that of other kings.

We 21^st-century followers of Jesus – especially we North American ones – tend not to think about him as “king.” Similarly, we are increasingly uncomfortable with calling him “lord” because both of these titles seem inescapably bound up in patriarchal systems and structures from which we’d like to escape.

After all, before we even get into critiquing the gendered language of monarchy, most of us give at least lip service to being small “d” democrats who do not cotton to inherited power. We don’t believe in the divine right of kings, and we don’t believe in notions such as “royal blood” and “royal families.” We may find the “royals” fascinating, and some of them actually admirable, but it’s primarily as quaint museum pieces trotted out by our British cousins to help them remember times long since gone by.

That leaves us grasping for different images for our Christologies, and that grasping leads to strange ideas like Jesus as CEO or Jesus as life coach or Jesus as best friend, Jesus who is like me but only better.

The confusion of Christologies reminds me of one of the great cosmic coincidences of my lifetime: the deaths in the same week back in 1997 of Princess Diana and Mother Teresa. Both women were, in their respective ways, admired, and both were, while complicated, in many ways admirable. But what struck me in the response to their deaths was the distinction in desires revealed in the way they were mourned.

Princess Diana was held up as the dream of every little girl who wanted to grow up to be a princess. Mother Teresa was held up as this distant saint living a life so holy as to be beyond anyone’s aspiration. But the truth was exactly the opposite: Diana was born to a family of British nobility – to the manor born, to royalty destined in part by that birth. Theresa, on the other hand, grew up in a small town in Albania in a household comprised of a her younger sister and their widowed mom. Their family was not destined to any kind of power, prestige, or privilege.

Anyone who wanted to follow the path of Theresa could do so – could still do so. Diana’s path was then, and remains now, open to but a chosen few.

Perhaps when Pilate asked Jesus if he were a king, Jesus’ response was intended to confuse the categories. For only those to the manor born, and in the right order of birth within the right family, might aspire to be king. Jesus, however, was always inviting people to join his family.

Of course, as the genealogy of Jesus from Matthew’s gospel underscores, Jesus’ family was a mixed bag of royalty and complete outsiders. The mythic family tree goes all the way back to Abraham, and includes Jacob, who stole his brother’s birthright; Tamar, who was accused of being a sex worker; Rahab, who pretty clearly was a sex worker; David, who was a king, to be sure, but also, just as surely, the murderer of Uriah the Hittite. There are other nuggets in the list in the first chapter of Matthew, but that’s enough to underscore the truth that Jesus’ lineage is not what provided the title “king.”

Indeed, pretty much any one of us could look back through our own families and find a mixed bag of scoundrels, on the one hand, and, on the other, folks who faithfully responded to the call to serve their families and communities faithfully and well in whatever role suited their gifts and opportunities. Sometimes, in fact, all of that can be found bound up in a single person.

We’re not likely to find royalty, but we may well find fidelity – faithfulness – and, what’s more, we’ll likely find love. Those are the forces that bind a people together.

The flip side of any royal relationship is the people. That is to say, to be a sovereign one has to have a people. The royalty of King David, for example, rests not merely on his chosenness, but also on there being a people over whom he rules. To be king of Israel required that there be a people known as the Israelites – a king needs a kingdom. The kingdom of Israel was defined, in part, by geography, but, more significantly, it was tribal and familial. It was defined, to a significant degree, by blood.

But Jesus clearly insists that his kingdom is not of this world, and, if it is defined by blood, it will be his blood, shed for the world, that defines it. In this world, Jesus had – and still has – a people. But membership in that people – the followers of Jesus – is different than membership in other kingdoms.

This is where the invented term “kin-dom” is helpful. Not only does it help us get out from under the patriarchy, it reminds us that all one need do to be part of the kinship of Jesus – to be among those he called siblings and friends – is to follow his teachings. All one need do to follow in Jesus’ footsteps is to take up the cross and follow.

Ah, and there’s the rub, of course. Kings tend to promise their people security and prosperity. Jesus holds out neither of those.

His invitation to follow him – to take up one’s cross and follow – comes with no promise of personal prosperity or security. Indeed, it comes with the possibility – indeed, the likelihood, of great risk to both of those notions. His invitation comes with his observation that greater love has no one than to be willing to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. Sacrificial love, service to others, are the marks of membership in the kin-dom of Jesus’ followers. That love – and our faithfulness to one another -- are what make us a people. Love and faithfulness make a family, and mark us as members of the household of God.

The benefits package of this membership? Well, I suppose it depends on what truly matters. If personal security and prosperity are what matters, then Jesus offers slim pickings. But, if what matters is to matter, to make a difference, to live a life of meaning, to find oneself bound in web of relationships of love and compassion that transcends one’s own time, indeed, that transcends time, itself, well then, the kin-dom of Jesus’ followers is quite remarkable and distinctive.

It would have been easier had Jesus simply pretended to the throne of David in some more or less traditionally political fashion. Pilate would have understood it better. Heck, the disciples would have understood it better. But the kin-dom of Jesus’ followers would have been unremarkable and indistinct from all the others that strove against the powers and principalities of their time, and we would know nothing of them in our time.

“If my kingdom were of this world,” Jesus said to Pilate, “my followers would be in the streets fighting. If my kingdom were limited to my lifetime, they would have swords drawn to draw out the time.”

Instead, his community stretched beyond the lives of everyone in his hearing, and the lives of their children and their children’s children, and certainly far beyond the lifetime of his one frail and all too human body. Indeed, it stretches down to us, and we, now, are his body in the world.

If, as he said to Pilate, he came to testify to the truth, then, as his body in the world, that responsibility is ours now: to testify to the truth.

And what is the truth that binds together the body of Christ in the world, that marks us as a people inescapably tied to one another through love and faithfulness? The ageless and simple truth that Jesus came to testify to, that we now echo in our very bones: we are, each of us, created in the image of Love; we are, each and every one of us, worthy of love; we are, each and all of us, capable of loving.

To us falls the responsibility to speak that truth to power, and to live it out day by day such that power itself is bent to the rule of love. That is the truth we proclaim.

Go out and live as if you believe it. Such a life will mark you as a member of the household of God and a follower of Christ the King. That’s a monarchy that’s good for all the people. Amen.