Mailout for 20 November 2022 (Christ the King, Year C)

Dear People of God

It’s a rather shortened mailout for this week. I am working from home while I recover from what a specialist called “a routine procedure”: I disagree as I have had a very uncomfortable week since and am in no fit state to take the services on Sunday. Gail will stand in and take a service for Distribution of Communion in a form authorised by the Bishop for use by Deacons. I am grateful for her assistance in this matter. (I will not be at Parish Council either!)

If you are still looking for Raffle tickets I think that Wilma still has some books available.

Bishop Sonia will be visiting the parish on December 18 and will confirm four young people at the service in Beresfield.

Parish Council meets today after the 9:30 service.

Grace and peace

Fr George

gmainprize@bigpond.com 0410 586 119

Collect and Readings for Christ the King

Collect

Eternal God, you exalted Jesus Christ to rule over all things, and have made us instruments of his kingdom: by your Spirit empower us to love the unloved, and to minister to all in need, then at last bring us to your eternal realm where we may be welcomed into your everlasting joy and may worship and adore you for ever; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen

Readings

Jeremiah 23:1-6 Restoration after exile

Psalm: The Song of Zechariah at the naming of John the Baptist

Colossians 1:11-20 The supremacy of Christ

Luke 23:33-43 The crucifixion of Jesus

Sermon (Fr George)

In the Name of God. Amen

Christ the King. Just think about that for a minute.

In an age when kings and queens are passing away, in some cases quite literally (are you used to the idea of King Charles lll yet”), when a Republican movement seems to be gathering strength in Australia, but when in several other societies we see “popularly elected” Presidents, Party Secretaries, or First Citizens acting in ways that would make the most heavy-handed mediaeval monarch go green with envy and where popular disobedience is the name of the game, we Christians persist in referring to Christ as King. Why?

There’s a hymn that I recall from one of the collections of 20th Century Hymns, but can’t locate it right now, which has as its first verse “O Lord, all the world belongs to you

And you are always making all things new

What is wrong you do forgive

And the new life you live

Is what’s turning the world upside-down”

It goes on to describe just how much “living in Christ” changes how we see and interact with the world in which we live.

Jesus fell foul of the Jerusalem and Roman authorities who felt threatened by the radical interpretation of God’s commandment to love. Not that it was radical: it’s just that a commandment that we love one another does not, in their view, to extend to those who are “not like us”. It’s OK to be poor, disfigured, non-kosher, “different” in any way, but just don’t expect us to love you as one of our own. But here’s this Jesus who goes out of his way to express God’s unqualified love to those people! That would disrupt the whole established order!

When he was challenged at his condemnation (it wasn’t a “trial”) with the accusation “so you are a king”, Jesus reply, with which we will all be familiar, was “my kingdom is not of this world”. We can interpret that in many ways (and generally do!), but it literally turns the world upside-down.

There’s another comment of Jesus that is of great importance when we consider him as King. He takes a towel to wash his disciples feet and Peter objects: Jesus tells him that unless he washes his feet he has no part in the community because Jesus is “amongst you as one who serves” whereas the kings if the earth lord it over their subjects. Now THAT is turning the whole order upside down!

King indeed!

You may remember that my model of the Church, and for the redeemed world for that matter, is not of a cone where the “head”, call it bishop or king or whatever, sits at the peak and their authority flows to one extent or another to the level below, and below that until at the very bottom it is the lowest of the low that supports the whole structure. A cone like that is very stable and will over time corrode away to nothing. I see a dynamic model of an inverted cone, balanced on its point. The pointy bit is the bishop, or the king, or whatever you wish to call him or her. Their role is to support the level above, who supports the level above that and so on until you get to the “hoi polloi” the ordinary, common people.

Now a cone on its point is very unstable unless it keeps spinning. You are familiar with the childrens’ toy top: pump it and it spins. The Church is like that: what keeps it going is what we call “the grace of God”.

Unfortunately the Church doesn’t do a lot to reflect this model. We have seen the excesses of Pope’s wearing a triple tiara and being carried on a portable throne with about eight men to carry it, Archbishops and others arrayed in all manner of ecclesiastical haberdashery, but it’s a man (mostly) inside all that. We respect the office and set it around with features to stress that importance, but it’s still a human being inside it all. The Pope may be installed in the Vatican, or the Archbishop of Canterbury in Lambeth Palace but the Archbishop, like the Pope, lives in a flat inside that palace and generally does their own cooking. Bishop John Sadiq, of blessed memory, told us about his successors in Nagpur diocese in the Church of North India, who walked around their diocese aided only by their pilgrim’s staff.

So we come to Christ the King, whom we also describe as Victim, Priest and King. You may have seen a Christus Rex such as the one hanging above the altar in Raymond Terrace or behind the altar in the St Christopher chapel in the Cathedral and such as I would like to see here on the wall behind the altar, where the figure is crucified, crowned and vested as a priest.

Christ the King. Some throne! Some King!

As the hymn says

“All the world belongs to you and the new life you give is what’s turning the world upside down”

He challenges us day by day to go and turn the world upside down and to pray “Your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth…..” Now go and turn the world upside down, one step at a time.

Now to him be, as is most justly due, all honour, might, glory and power now and to the ages of ages.

Amen