Scripture: Revelation 1:4-8
Given on Reign of Christ Sunday 2018
I’d like to believe that I enjoy the holiday season about as much as anyone can. Just thinking about this next month or so the precipice on which we now rest, conjures up images and memories in my mind of these times in years passed. Time with my grandparents, when all of them were still with us and both sides of the family would gather together. Remembrances of going to aunts’ and uncles’ houses to share holiday meals. Of playing with my cousins outside while the adults talked about adult stuff on the inside. Of going to church for special services. Growing up, one of the ways that my family set its internal calendar around this time of year was with the church service that took place each year on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. It never felt like the holidays had begun until we, as a church family, gathered in the sanctuary of my home church where we would triumphantly sing, “We Gather Together to Ask the Lord’s Blessing.” Each year the service would conclude with people offering up what they were thankful for and, at some point, without fail the elderly matriarch of the congregation would stand and solemnly say, “salvation,” and we would all know that meant there was nothing else that needed to be said and we could now enter our nation’s day of Thanksgiving. These times spent in church, times spent with kith and kin, times spent in great joy paint the mural of my life in ways that continue to draw me back to that place in my mind time and time again. I love the holiday season. And I think this time of year says much about the human condition and the need to believe in something greater than our collective selves. It is that drive that pushes the start of the holiday season earlier and earlier each year. While this effort to capture the holiday moment sooner and sooner is surely helped along by businesses that want to know that they will end up the year in the black, I am firmly convinced that they only go where each soul longs to be taken and apart from that burning desire to inject the magical and mystical beauty that emerges around Thanksgiving tables and Christmas trees, not one person would be drawn into the rigamarole that too often makes up the holiday shopping season. And I believe this to be true, because, near as I can tell, the first thing to arrive before the Black Friday sales, before the Thanksgiving cornucopia, is the holiday music. Music that seeks to transform and transplant the soul in another place in time, to a manger, to a sleigh, to the magic that surrounds us when we are blessed with eyes to see. This year, the day after Halloween, I was driving Jameson to school and an advertisement came on alerting us to the fact that we could now listen to holiday music 24 hours a day on some other channel and while that’s not my cup of tea, I understand that just the hearing of familiar strains of Christmas music does transport some back to those earliest days when we rushed into the living room to see if Santa did indeed come, when we all piled into churches to hear the story of the messiah born to all of us in the City of David. This push to enter into the holiday season deeply resonates with the needs and desires of many within this world and it is this yearning that fuels the stores and restaurants to move towards such an early inception. For I am convinced that deep down, each of us want to experience a profound and abiding joy. Each of us want to experience the care and concern that accompanies the in-breaking of God into the world that comes each year with the birth of the Christ child. Each of us wants to know that in the end, even in spite of the brokenness, the hurt we inflict upon one another, the anger and the violence that we too often mete out against each other, we want to know that love wins, indeed, that love has already won. Because, at least within the Christian world, this time of year sits on the edge of the time of preparation for the coming of the Christ child. It sits at the edge of a time of great expectations of what such an appearance can mean for a world like this one. We gather together in this place, just as our sisters and brothers in Christ do in places like this around the world, just as our ancestors did, just as the faithful in the earliest gatherings of the church did, and, as we link up with this great cloud of witnesses, we all, for a time, take on the guise of the people who dwelt in darkness, the people who continually bump into one another, who continue to be blinded to the presence of God in our midst, who continue to seek but not find. And in that regard, we, who find ourselves in this holy space on this holy day are really no different from those who wander the earth out there in search of hope overcoming despair. They, too, seek something, anything to fill in the hole that rests at the very center of their being. They, too, seek something that will bring an end to the pain of rejection and despondency that too often accompanies the human experience in this life. They, too, want to see the Christ child born in a stable in Bethlehem, because there wasn’t room for them in the inn. They, too, want the God that rests at the base of time to radically break into the course of human history again, forever altering the trajectory of the world through the appearance of one so meek and mild, who slipped into creation so silently as to almost be missed. They, too, want what we want, they just don’t always have the language to express it. And so, instead, they and, at times, we, react as any who searching for some measure of comfort and respite from distress and angst. Virtually all of our lives are cycles of inserting different things into that deepest discontent in our souls to see if it will bring the peace that surpasses all understanding for which we strive. We seek to amass all we can hoping in the security that come with possessions. We seek the gospel of Jesus Christ for ourselves but are slow to share it with the one that we encounter on the road, or in the store, or on the street corner. We search for that little spark of light that continues to burn unabated in each of us, but we fail to let it dispel the gathering darkness of that world. We are too often blinded to the reality that all are made one in Christ Jesus and we are united with one another, brother and sister, a familial relationship that cuts across all that which the world would declare divides us. We are united with one another in darkness, but we are all the more bound together by a single source of light that emits in the souls of each of us, like a candle whose wick may never be extinguished. Just as the ancients were, we are all, everyone of us, the people who dwell in darkness, and Christ is the light that shines in each of our souls that allows us to have hope, to experience love, to find ultimate peace and rest for our spirits. That’s where we find ourselves on this morning.
And it is in this temporary darkness that we come on this day. This day when we recognize, and place our trust in, and celebrate the reign of Christ over all the world. We recognize it because it is at the heart of the entirety of the biblical witness. We place our trust in it because we have already seen that in Christ is the power to overcome all the brokenness of the world even death—even death on a cross. And we celebrate it, because when we recognize it, when we place our trust in it, we see that nothing else in all of life can separate us from the love of God that we encountered in Christ Jesus and that nothing that happens within the temporality of this life can overcome the eternity of life that is in God. It is this truth that is found at the end of the Christian calendar each year.
“Grace and peace to you, from the One who is, who was, and who is to come,” said the author of the book of Revelation.” “To Jesus Christ be glory and power forever and ever! Amen.” This is a message straight from scripture for each of us this morning. A message that we can take and tell everyone we meet about, everyone we see in pain, everyone you see that is struggling, everyone you see that needs to see even the most minute light piercing the darkness. Everyone you see. Tell them, “Grace and peace to you, from the One who is, who was, and who is to come.” We are told the the Revelation of Jesus Christ was written by an early follower of the way named John of Patmos, not to be confused the tradition from which the Gospel of John emerged. And we know from the text that John was something of troublemaker with the Roman authority because he had been separated from his community of believers, separated from his family and friends, and exiled on a tiny island off the coast of Greece. And surely he was one who had to feel as if he will never see redemption, one who has to feel as if God has abandoned him away on this tiny island, one, perhaps, to whom we can relate in the midst of dark times in our own lives. And so, when we hear his words of grace and of peace, and we see his vision of the appearance of Christ again in history coming in glory and coming in might. We see the one who will bring about an end to brokenness, an end to pain. We encounter on the journey one who is a balm in Gilead and one who wipes away every tear from our eye. One in whom the redemption of all the world is complete. Grace and peace to you, from the one who is, who was, and who is to come.
And here’s the good news. You don’t have to look on the clouds for the second coming of the messiah. You don’t have to look on some distant start cluster or in the sun that rises in the morning, nor in the sun the recedes in the evening. Not on the new fallen snow, nor the rivers and oceans that bathe the world in holy water. You merely have to look within yourselves. Your hands, your feet, they are the hands and feet of Christ. Your eyes, your ears, trained to see and hear the voices of those who struggle within your midst, to look deep into their countenance. The spirit of Christ dwells deep within each of you, deep in that part of the soul that you have to work to get down to, after you shoved aside the muck and the mire of living within a broken world, that place that remains uncorrupted by sin and hatred, by cynicism and despair, deep in that place, Christ shall and does reign. We, in this place and at this time are the body of Christ and there has never been a more important time in the history of our species for that to be shouted from the rooftops.
For outside these walls, just past these doors, is a land that is teeming with people who are desperately searching for something, anything, on which to ground their entire lives. Outside these walls, just past these doors is a spiritually parched desert yearning for the justice and mercy to roll down like mighty streams. Outside these walls, just past these doors, are the lost and the lame, the blind and the naked, the ones who hunger and thirst for the righteousness of Christ and it is we who must bring it to them. Christ is already in each one if we will but look deep into ourselves and see, and know, and believe. But once we have had that experience, once we have come to that knowledge, once we have felt the presence of Christ again and anew, we cannot, cannot, cannot contain it. Our response can not be to hold on, but, rather to share. To share with those in our midst and throughout our community and tell them of this good news of great joy that has been released and will soon cover the whole of the planet. “Fear not!” we are told over and over again because Christ is with us, Christ dwells in us, propels us to move courageously into the future, and Christ meets us at the end, seated on a throne, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, now and always. Christ reigns. Share that message with everyone you meet. Alleluia, amen.
Image-Christ Pantokrator, Cathedral of Cefalù, Sicily, 1170