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Advent III

The Feast of Christ the King: 2 Samuel 23:1-7; Psalm 132:1-13 (14-19)

Revelation 1:4b-8; John 18:33-37

The Rev. Stephen Siptroth

November 24, 2024


When I was 23, I was planning on attending seminary in the Roman Catholic Church. The Diocese of Orange had offered to send me to Europe, to the now closed American College in Leuven, Belgium. And, so, I decided to go for a visit, to meet some of the faculty, and to get a look at the wider University of Leuven where academic courses were held. During my trip, I worked in a few side trips, including one to search for a family grave.

My grandmother’s uncle, John Harold Hamilton, was a Canadian soldier sent off to Belgium to fight in World War I. He died before my grandmother was born, but the family remembered – and re-membered for my grandmother – who my uncle was and what his loss meant for the family.

I took the train up to Ieper and followed the map on a good walk out to Duhollow Cemetery. Tucked in between residential neighborhoods, I found the cemetery gates and the grounds well cared for and preserved, the marble headstones clean – monuments to those lives cut short. Thanks to the directory, I found it rather quickly. And, at age 23, I stood before the marker of my great-great uncle, killed at the age of 23 in the trenches of the Great War. His headstone surrounded by others near the same age. Young people killed as great armies fought one another for domination.

The Feast of Christ the King is relatively new in our liturgical calendar. Pope Pius XI established the feast day in 1925 in the aftermath of the Great War, which claimed somewhere between 15 and 22 million soldier and civilian lives, including my great-great uncle’s. It was a war born out of unbridled nationalism and fascism. And it has been described as a “holy war.” Many of the nations that fought in World War I used Christian imagery and rhetoric in propaganda to inspire their people, and to make the war seem like a righteous religious cause – a righteous crusade – effectively intertwining nationalistic fervor with religious beliefs, particularly in Germany and Britain.

Pope Pious issued his decree establishing Christ the King Sunday the same year that Adolf Hitler issued Mein Kampf and Mussolini declared his absolute power in Italy, and soon after Stalin succeeded Lenin in Russia. Pope Pious’s aim in establishing the feast day was to remind people that their first allegiance as Christians was not to the kingdoms of this world, or to any earthly rules, but to Jesus Christ.

Of course, even Pope Pious would need to do some introspection. Because the feast day was established in the aftermath of the rise of a secular Italian state that divested the Vatican of control over the temporal affairs of Rome. In the aftermath, the pope’s authority was confined to the Vatican, and the Roman Question emerged: what would a papacy mean without temporal powers in Rome?

All through the story of the establishment of this feast day – the spoken and unspoken motivations of Pope Pious – we see a reaction to the deep intermingling of state and church, of religious devotion intermingled with nationalist fervor, nationalist dreams. It is a marker of the dangers of confusing any king or ruler with the one who reigns over all creation and whose dominion is everlasting.

Almost 100 years later, I wonder if we’ve really changed? The intermingling of nationalist dreams and religious language has never left us, really. Indeed, nearly 100 years later, we see a continued rise in Christian nationalism and a kind of seduction taking shape among us in the form of a narrow understanding that the Christian story being bound up with a very narrow and exclusionary interpretation of the American story.

I think there is room for some discomfort in this feast day. The language of king and kingdom can make some uncomfortable, and rightly so. Yet we are reminded that Christ’s Kingship is not about power over others, like any kingships of this world, but about empowering others and embracing others, and establishing a radical inclusivity found nowhere else, and in no one else.

I dare say that, as we sit almost 100 years later in observance of this feast, the same problem remains with us: we may be able to proclaim Christ’s kingship. But are we living it? Are we living in ways that show our shared belief that Christ is king?

We are tempted to confess Christ’s kingship, but to deny with our lives and decisions that Christ is King. Especially now. We are surrounded by language, and imagery, and iconography of a triumphant imperialism, of radical individualism, of the value of unbridled capitalism, and of American superiority. And if we place our ultimate hope in any of those things, if we place all our trust in any of those temporal promises, we deny what we proclaim.

Because to live in a way that recognizes what we proclaim – that Christ is King – means to question all of those temporal actors and forces that promise us good things, that promise us they alone can provide for us, if only we’ll hand over our power and allegiance follow. To live as if Christ is King means that we must follow the King who walked the dusty roads with us to strengthen the weary, lift up the broken, sit with the social outcast and shift the margins; the King who consoled those who mourned, who cured the sick, who gave food to the hungry, and gave life to the dead. The King who helped remind us to care for the least of these, who dined even with tax collectors. The King who sat with his friends before he died, to share a meal and leave us with the nourishment that would sustain us beyond his death. And the King who wore a crown of thorns, who was mocked and beaten, who walked the long way to Calvary carrying his own cross; the King who promises good things to the thief beside him, and then died, was buried, and rose again.

This is our King. This is the King who asks only of us to be our authentic selves and to seek more and more to follow in his ways of love, mercy, and justice. A King who suffered and died that we might live through the power and mystery of the resurrection, and also that we might bring light and life to others, not through triumphalism, but through quiet, lasting, and sustained works of love, mercy, and justice.

On this day we pray, in the words of Steven Shakespeare: “You who are, who were, who are to come, before whose judgment all fades away that is not love: save us from the violence that seeks to claim our hearts so we might hear a different voice and belong to you in truth, through Jesus Christ, the wounded King of all. Amen.”

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