Reign of Peace

Advent 3 / Christ the King

Proper 29C: Jeremiah 23:1-6; Psalm 46

Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

November 23, 2025

Every time I encounter the Psalm assigned to us this morning, Psalm 46, a flash of memory immediately surges. It was the fall of 2001 and a combination of personal and national events cascaded. I was starting my doctorate in Massachusetts, Kateri was coming out here to do her postdoc, September 11^th occurred, I was coming out as trans. All of these things filled me with anxiety. During that year I also worked very part time in the downtown offices of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, assisting the office of our Canon to the Ordinary. As I rode the subway – the T – into Boston, I would listen to music, something I almost always do when I’m on the move. That fall I remember listening on my Discman to a “best of” the Moody Blues collection, Suzanne Vega, and particularly a collection of the Psalms sung in Anglican Chant by various choirs of the Episcopal Church. The CD was titled Refuge and Strength.^[1] I vividly remember sitting on the T, headphones on, letting the harmony of these words soak into my whole being:

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be moved,

        and though the mountains be toppled into the depths of the sea;

Though its waters rage and foam, and though the mountains tremble at its tumult.

The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our stronghold. (Ps. 46:1-4)

The raging and foaming of the waters, and later the phrase, “the nations make much ado, and the kingdoms are shaken,” spoke to what felt like every facet of my life at that time (Ps. 46:7). The antidote to that tumult, its medicinal balm, was God’s strength and solidity, God’s refuge. Sometimes I would hit repeat to soak it in some more.

But what newly strikes me this morning is how this Psalm, together with the other readings assigned for today, grounds us in a vision of God’s reign, calling it a divine city: “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be overthrown; God shall help her at the break of day” (Ps 46:5-6). God’s city is a place without war or strife. It is suffused with divine peace. That peace is not simply a place without war, though as our Psalm states, God “makes war to cease in all the world.” In and from this city, God actively eradicates the instruments of war. God “breaks the bow, and shatters the spear, and burns the shields with fire” (Ps. 46:10). This vision aligns with words from the prophet Isaiah envisioning God’s mountainous home as a place to which the nations stream and from which God will arbitrate between warring peoples. God will inspire them, Isaiah proclaims, to “beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more” (Isaiah 2:4). Even as God eradicates war, God calls upon human beings to join in that dismantling, to transform their instruments of division into tools for cultivation and creation.

The foundation God’s reign is peace. And not simply in the sense of an absence of fighting. God’s reign is grounded in a vision of shalom, the Hebrew word for peace. As we discussed last week in our Advent series, “People of Peace,” former Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori has described divine shalom in this way:

Shalom is a vision of the city of God on earth, a community where people are at peace with each other because each one has enough to eat, adequate shelter, medical care, and meaningful work. Shalom is a city where justice is the rule of the day, where prejudice has vanished, where the diverse gifts with which we have been so abundantly blessed are equally valued.^[2]

God’s shalom is the divine dream, as theologian Verna Dozier called it.^[3] It is our grounding, balm to our fear, the voice of God saying, “be still and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:11). I and not you. And from that stillness, from that sovereign shalom, God activates us, limited creatures though we are, to take up the practices of God’s reign: the sharing of resources, the healing of the wounded, the clothing of the naked, the feeding of the hungry, the transforming of weapons into tools with which we join the Creator in reverently honoring, collaborating with, and safeguarding creation.

Today, the third Sunday of our extended observance of Advent, is the Feast of Christ the King, also sometimes referred to as Reign of Christ Sunday. It proclaims Jesus Christ as God the Son who came among us to proclaim and embody the arrival of the divine kingdom proclaiming good news to the oppressed, the binding up of the broken hearted, liberation to the prisoners, the comforting of all who mourn. Christ the King reveals divine strength not in vanquishing prowess but poured out in creaturely frailty, healing our hurts through God’s own wounds. He shows the kingdoms of this world reacting with violence to the peace-soaked sovereignty of God’s reign. For Jesus was not lauded by the human powers of this world but condemned by them. Our gospel passage from Luke’s passion narrative is assigned only once on this Sunday, every three years. It dramatizes how imperial authority, obsessed with maintaining its own oppressive sovereignty and control, seeks to snuff out all that would challenge it, even the Redeemer of all creation. Leaders scoffed, soldiers mocked, and even a fellow condemned prisoner derided him: if you are a king as the sign over your head proclaims, come down from the cross, refuse this abjection, show your might. They could not imagine a strength that would pour itself out in weakness, would stand so fully with the vulnerable as to die alongside them, on their behalf. Yet from the cross another condemned man saw in Jesus the coming of the divine reign: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Lk 23:42). Today we celebrate the coming of that kingdom, God’s refuge and strength, the shalom of God that cannot finally be snuffed out by any human force, the power of God poured out in a strength make visible amid shared vulnerability, in profound solidarity. “Today,” Jesus says to all in earshot, “you will be with me in paradise” (Lk 23:43). Already, God’s reign is breaking into this world. You are transferred into it, as the letter to the Colossians proclaimed (Col. 1:13), even as it has not yet arrived in all its fullness. Already and not yet. And in this threshold, I will be with you, calling you into shalom, the peace that the world cannot give but that I give you. Today, receive that promise. Be fortified “with all the strength that comes from God’s glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything…” (Col. 1:11) share the Good News of God’s in-breaking reign in hope and in life even in the face and the midst of death. God’s sovereignty cannot be quenched by human folly. God’s shalom shines into every shadow.

^[1] Refuge and Strength: Selections from the Psalter of the Book of Common Prayer. (New York: Church Publishing, 2000)

^[2] Katherine Jefferts Schori, A Wing and a Prayer: A Message of Faith and Hope (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2007), 33.

^[3] Verna Dozier, The Dream of God: A Call to Return (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1991).