This is Rev. Graham Crawford’s sermon for “Christ the King” Sunday – 22 November 2015:
According to one writer:
“The Sunday of Christ the King is the day for all us disobedient ones to repent; and to renew our obedience. Then we may prepare for Christmas, and the birth of great David’s greater Son.”
It is the last Sunday of the Christian year. It is the climax of all that we have been thinking and learning about over the year. It is a time when we celebrate that Jesus is not just our Saviour but Lord of our lives, our King and head of the church.
It is a time for celebration, a time for rededication, a time to refocus ourselves on the important matters of life.
Never in history has that been more important than today.
There are so many things that are vying for top spot in our lives.
A quick trawl through Facebook after last weekend’s attacks show fear, hatred, suspicion, discrimination, bigotry and racism trying to gain the upper hand. Advertisers on TV try to make greed the king as Christmas approaches and underlying all of culture is an atmosphere of self-preservation and self-interest.
And yet standing against all of this is a man who said, “ My kingdom is not of this world. I came to bring truth to the world. All who love the truth recognise that all I say is true.”
A man who was more than a man, who is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. A man of whom it was said that, at his name, every knee shall bow, in heaven and on earth, and every tongue confess that he is Lord.
This is who we recognise and celebrate. This is who we are called to recommit to today and to reflect on as we bring this year to an end and begin to look forward to another year preparing to celebrate his birth again in the most humble of circumstances.
So let us start by hearing John’s great account of the Lordship of Christ from the beginning of his book of Revelation (Revelation 1: 4b – 8):
Grace and peace to you from him who is, and who was, and who is to come, and from the seven spirits before his throne, 5 and from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.
To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, 6 and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father—to him be glory and power for ever and ever! Amen.
7 “Look, he is coming with the clouds,”
and “every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him”;
and all peoples on earth “will mourn because of him.”
So shall it be! Amen.
8 “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.”
As usual with Revelation, this passage is full of language which is difficult for us to really come to terms with.
There are images and concepts that were well understood at the time and place of writing that have become mysterious and confusing in our own day. This is not helped by translators who love to take things literally instead of asking: “What did it mean to the writer?”
Nowhere is that more apparent than in the writer’s description, in this first verse, of the Holy Spirit. The translators of the NIV do us a disservice by translating it as the Seven Spirits. The New Living translation gets closer to the essence by calling it the Sevenfold Spirit. I know I have said many times before that in the ancient world numbers can have a deep significance, no number more so than seven.
It is the number that denotes completeness, wholeness, perfection. So, in calling the Holy spirit the sevenfold spirit, the writer is really telling us that the Holy Spirit is the perfect Spirit, the complete Spirit, indeed you could say Holy Spirit.
For anything that is Holy is perfect, complete and whole by definition.
Thus, what the writer is doing at the beginning is saying, in his own terms, grace and peace from the God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. There is nothing particularly mysterious or odd about what he is saying.
He goes on in his description of Jesus Christ to call him a faithful witness, the first to rise from the dead, never to die again and the ruler of creation.
Christ witnessed to what he knew and was. Many of us are afraid to witness. We hesitate because we hear other people speak, people who maybe were helped in the addictions by the saving grace of Christ or had some other very dramatic and spectacular turnaround and think, well, what have I to offer? I’ve been to church all my days; it was just a slow dawning to me of the truth of scripture. Either that or we are afraid that people will poke holes in our story, ridicule our beliefs or accuse us of hypocrisy. And yet we all need to remember a very simple truth about our witness. We do not witness about what we have done. We are witnesses to the saving grace of Christ because of what Christ has done for us, not what we have done for him.
Remember this, if you remember nothing else this morning: Christ demonstrated his great love for you, and you, and you, by setting you free from your sins on the cross, guaranteeing you, and you and you a place in his Kingdom and by making all of us priests to administer his love, his Father’s great love to others through acts of mercy and ministry.
The fact – the undeniable fact – that God, in Christ, has chosen you to be the recipient and administrator of that love is nothing short of miraculous. It is truly spectacular. Surely we can witness to that? Surely we are each one of us able to tell others of that love and of that commission? Others may try to deflect us from that message, they may try to send us down dead end alleys of philosophical debate. Do not be sidetracked. Do not let their unwillingness to face reality deflect you from your task.
Like the hymn writer, I admit I do not know any of that, but this I do know: that Jesus Christ died to save me from myself and to guarantee me a place beside him in his Kingdom because he loves me and I want to now share that love with everyone I meet.
Sure, I’d like you to come to my discipleship classes. Sure, I’d like you to grow in your faith and understanding. But the basic reality of your salvation is enough to make you a witness to Christ’s saving love and your willingness to let him be the Lord of your life.
For John goes on, in his description of Jesus, to portray him as the all-powerful king, victorious in battle, glorious in peace.
Those people who say that they are Christian, not because of his grace, but because they admire him as a teacher surely miss the point.
John is quite convinced that Jesus is more than an earthbound teacher: he is God, incarnate, all-glorious above.
When you read John’s words, they are not simply good advice; they are truth given from God above, from the King of Kings! John is not writing simply for his own health or to pique your interest. He is not writing to give you a blueprint for what the future might hold. He is writing so that you will know the truth and that the truth will set you free. He is writing so that you might recognize again Christ’s call upon your life as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
John is writing so that, as you look forward again to the most humble of births in the stable, you might consider how great is God’s love for you, that he would humble himself to that extent in order to bring you into his love.
And so, as a sign of our penitence, rededication and commitment to demonstrating Christ’s lordship to the world let us stand and confess our faith using the Apostles’ Creed:
I believe in
GOD THE FATHER ALMIGHTY, MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH
and in
JESUS CHRIST HIS ONLY SON OUR LORD
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
Born of the Virgin Mary,
Suffered under Pontius Pilate,
Was crucified, dead, and buried;
He descended into hell.
The third day he rose again from the dead,
He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead
I believe in
the HOLY GHOST; the HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH;
the COMMUNION OF SAINTS;
the FORGIVENESS OF SINS;
the RESURRECTION OF THE BODY;
and the LIFE EVERLASTING.AMEN
