Several months ago, I took the United Church of Christ to task for passing a General Synod resolution affirming Jesus Christ as "Lord and Savior." It's not that I object to affirming Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, because I don't object. My disappointment arises from the fact that the proposal does not call upon the UCC to provide resources to local churches to help them interpret the titles Lord and Savior.
The titles Lord and Savior held a rich and powerful meaning for the earliest Christians, but I'm afraid that many contemporary Christians, especially in the more mainstream, liberal, or progressive churches, don't really grasp the depth of this richness and power. If anything, a title like Lord can obscure our relationship with Jesus Christ because it's an archaic term. Lord is a royal designation, and for a people who long ago rejected kings and shunned royalty, calling Jesus Lord or Christ King can create a serious disconnect in our thinking and our faith. That's why I took the United Church of Christ to task.
How can the UCC help contemporary Christians in churches like ours affirm that Jesus is Lord or Christ is King when we wholeheartedly reject the concept of Lord and King in our own political governance? How can the affirmations Jesus is Lord or Christ is King become more than churchy-sounding, theologically correct clichés for Christians like us? How can the subversive hope these titles originally communicated resonate with power in our contemporary hearts and minds, and fuel our passion for bringing healing, reconciliation, justice, and peace to this world? The UCC resolution doesn't address any of these questions.
Since today is Christ the King Sunday, and since both of our scripture lessons deal with the image of King, I'd like to at start a discussion on the meaning of the Christian affirmation, Jesus is Lord. It's a discussion Whit Bodman and I will hopefully continue with many of you in the New Year as we reflect together on the identity of Jesus Christ.
We begin our discussion with the observation that the first "Christians" were Jews who believed Jesus had fulfilled, and in some ways, had redefined their expectations for a divinely anointed king. The Jewish prophet Ezekiel helped fuel these expectations. In his prophecy, Ezekiel pronounced God's judgment on Israel's kings for neglecting and devouring the Israelite people, and God's promise to personally search for, restore, and care for the Israelites, and to install a new David on the royal throne to rule them with a just and fair hand.
The earliest Christians believed God had fulfilled both of these promises in Jesus. God had personally come to them in Jesus to search for them, care for them, and restore them, and God had anointed Jesus as the sovereign Lord of God's Kingdom.
For these early Christians, Jesus is Lord or Christ is King meant Jesus wielded power over every other force in the heavens and on the earth. The clearest and most dramatic manifestation of this claim was Christ's victory over death in his resurrection. But he exercised his power in other ways as well prior to his resurrection: his exorcism of evil spirits, his healing of physical infirmities, his feeding of the multitudes, his ability to control the forces of nature, his raising of others from the dead, and his indifference toward powerful men like Herod, Pilate, Caiaphas, and even Caesar.
In other words, early Christians believed Jesus Christ was more powerful than all the forces that enslaved people or brought suffering upon humanity--more powerful than sickness, more powerful than Caesar, more powerful than death. With his resurrection, they believed Jesus Christ had defeated these powers once and for all. Now they eagerly awaited his return so he could use his power to fully establish God's reign over all the earth.
Jesus Christ's descriptions of the Kingdom of God and his deeds enacting it illustrated the radical difference between life under his rule as king, and life under Herod or Caesar as king.
Unlike the kingdoms of Herod or Caesar, the kingdom Christ proclaimed did not belong to the rich and the powerful, the ambitious and the greedy. Rather, it belonged to the people who were currently poor, suffering, mourning, persecuted, seeking peace, and hungering for righteousness. With Herod and Caesar deposed, and Christ ruling as king, these people would no longer be poor, no longer suffer, no longer mourn, and no longer be persecuted. With Christ as king, their hunger for righteousness would be satisfied, and they would live in peace.
Unlike the kingdoms of Herod and Caesar, where the doors of opportunity and privilege were wide open to those with wealth, and tightly shut to those who were poor, wealth would function as an obstacle to entering the kingdom Christ proclaimed. To enter the kingdom Christ ruled as king, one had to let go of wealth and privilege. One had to become humble, to become a servant, to become like a child.
Today's gospel lesson provides one of the richest and most subversive illustrations of the kingdom Christ proclaimed. Jesus Christ will come as king to judge who gets to live in his kingdom and who does not. Those who have fed the hungry, given water to the thirsty, clothed the naked, cared for the sick, and visited the imprisoned enter, those who have not do not.
But there's something far more radical and subversive going on this passage. Christ the King identifies himself with the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned. He identifies himself with the least of these and says, "when you respond to them then you are responding to me."
In other words, Christ gives the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned a royal identity. The least in this world--the despised, those at the bottom, those most often ignored, those who are reviled and treated like garbage--are in fact royalty. Christ gives them the highest status. Christ announces that they get priority treatment. They are the ones everyone else must serve. Unlike the kingdoms of Herod, Caesar, and Bush, where wealth, health, and well-being is concentrated at the top, under the rule of Jesus Christ, wealth, health, and well-being is dispersed to those at the bottom.
As I preached last week, we may not believe, as the earliest Christians believed, that Jesus Christ is going to return suddenly on clouds of glory to judge between the righteous and the unrighteous, and quickly establish God's kingdom.
However, we can believe, as I do, that Christ is present with us in all times and places, and that he is calling us to live our lives in accordance with his kingdom right here and now. We can proclaim, as I do, that Jesus is Lord, and that it is in his kingdom, not in Herod's, Caesar's, Bushes, or anyone else's that we desire to live
I believe that proclaiming Jesus is Lord is one of the most hopeful and subversive things we can possibly do. To proclaim Jesus is Lord is to proclaim:
- that we look to Jesus Christ for vision and leadership.
- that we follow Jesus Christ and fashion our lives in his manner.
- that we resist those who seek to build a world that benefits the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and the vulnerable.
- that we actively create alternatives that prioritize the needs of the people to whom Christ gave a royal status--the poor, the least, the ignored, the despised.
You didn't know that proclaiming Jesus is Lord meant all that, did you?
If people ask me if I support cutting food stamps, Medicare, and student loans for the poor, and extending tax cuts to the wealthiest people in our nation, I say no I do not, and the reason I do not is because Jesus is Lord.
You didn't know Jesus is Lord was a response to policies that hurt the poor and benefit the rich, did you? And that's what bugged me about the UCC resolution.
There was no effort to translate the affirmation Jesus is Lord into an affirmation that would fuel the passions of contemporary Christians the way it fueled the passions of Christians 2,000 years ago. There was no effort to communicate how affirming Jesus is Lord sets the entire agenda for the United Church of Christ's long-standing commitment to justice in this world. And because this effort was not made, Christians in UCC churches like ours get hung up on the archaic language, on words like Lord or King, and think they cannot affirm that Jesus is Lord.
My hope is that we ourselves can make the effort, that we can look at words like Lord and Savior, and that in understanding their original meaning and context, we can look through them to see the reality they were trying to convey. My hope is that words like Lord and Savior can fill us with a subversive hope and once again fuel our passions the way they filled Christians with hope and fueled their passions 2,000 years ago.
My hope is that Jesus is Lord will become the rallying cry for all of our ministries that seek to bring healing, reconciliation, justice, and peace to this world.
