Sermon by Shannon Kershner | November 20, 2022

Reign of Christ Sunday
November 20, 2022 | 10:00 a.m.

Sermon

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 46
Luke 23:33–43

When I was serving a church in Texas — the one that put up with all my liturgical experiments — we typically had a Fourth Sunday in Advent service that was a combination of special music interspersed with scripture readings and poetry. The purpose was to help move us from the season of Advent to the time of Christmas. After I had been at that church around five years, I decided it was time we spiced it up a bit.

But in addition to wanting to keep things fresh, I had also just attended an Advent workshop for preachers at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. At that workshop, I heard pastors bemoan the fact that so many of the people who come to worship during Advent and Christmas are not necessarily around during the season of Lent or at the service of Good Friday. So those disciples might never feel the weight of the whole of Jesus’ story from the cradle to the cross.

We talked together about how we really cannot fully grasp the enormity of God’s gift in the baby Jesus until we contemplate that we ended up killing that same gift. You heard that piece of the story today in our reading from Luke. (Today is one of those rare times we read about the death of Jesus outside the season of Lent.)

So in my head, lo those many years ago, I was thinking “Keep it fresh; tell the whole story.” Thus we planned a service that had special music, readings from scripture and poetry, as well as for both the first and the last time a drama troupe who enacted different tableaus — still shots representing what we were reading. For instance, as we read the story about Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem, they enacted a tableau of a very pregnant Mary with Joseph poised to knock on the door of the infamous inn.

Then, as we read the part of the story about the shepherds in the field, they showed us a tableau of those terrified and confused shepherds alongside the radiant and delightful angels. You get the picture. As we moved through the service, each scene, each reading, each poem, each piece of music built on the energy from the one before. You could tell that folks were really getting into the Christmas spirit. The whole sanctuary was abuzz with energy — until we came to the last scene, the last tableau. Remember I wanted to do my part in making sure the whole story was told, even on the Fourth Sunday of Advent. Therefore, the last reading in the service was a special poem that was both written and read by a church member, one of our elders, Dr. Gary Swaim.

The poem begins with an image of one of the magi carefully carrying the offering of myrrh. He is walking slowly across the sands of the desert, trying not to spill any of it, making his way to the stable so he and his friends could worship the baby Jesus. But then, in the final stanza of the poem, the writer makes a move and says this: “On this Advent Day, the day of the Child, I remember the Man. Walking sands, hot to the touch of his feet, in the direction of Golgotha, carrying in his body a rich, red gift to be spilled freely over the earth. When spikes tear through flesh, tears fall. And in all the valleys of all the trees, there is a sweet smell.”

While the poet spoke those words in worship, the tableau up front changed. It quickly morphed from the sweet picture of the stable scene with Mary cradling her sweet baby Jesus, into Michelangelo’s “Pieta,” the depiction of mother Mary cradling the dead body of her adult son Jesus. And at that moment when the tableau switched as the poem was read, so did the energy in the sanctuary. People became upset and let me know later that a depiction of violence and death had no place in the church, especially on a day that was full of families and visitors.

But as someone also told me, it also went deeper than that. It was that “no one wanted or needed during the season of Advent to see a depiction of Jesus crucified.” We were there to prepare for the baby, the picture of innocence, all promise and light. That picture, the tableau of the stable, was why they were all in church at Advent, she stated. I was told I should have waited until Lent for the ugliness of what happened at the end of Jesus’ life. No one wanted to be reminded of that part of God’s story so close to Christmas.

I understood why they were upset. I disagreed but understood. But since that experience all those years ago, I have wondered what those reactions might indicate about how at least some of us really feel regarding the strange and disconcerting way God decided to do God’s work in Jesus. Might it be that the deeper reason we wanted to ignore Jesus’ pain and death is because it still bewilders us as to why God would choose to do it that way?

It certainly bewildered those standing at the foot of the cross. Luke tells us that as Jesus hung there, those who were watching started to shout at him. “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” they yelled. Even one of the criminals hanging next to him got in on the act: “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us.” And though I have always read those words as malicious and teasing, this week I have wondered if there was also a pleading undertone to them.

Perhaps those shouting at Jesus with anger and mocking also hoped deep down that their words might motivate Jesus into action. Maybe they hoped they could make Jesus angry enough to actually do what they were saying: to save himself, to come down off the cross and to act like a real king by taking on Rome and the religious authorities with a power and might they understood — a power that looked like a sword rather than a cross, a crown rather than thorns, a conquering Messiah exacting vengeance rather than a suffering Savior pronouncing forgiveness. I’ve wondered if those thoughts crossed their minds as they stood there watching Jesus die.

But even if they did not have those thoughts, have you ever wondered any of those things? Have you ever wondered why Jesus did not fight back? A member of the House of Representatives quipped over the summer that if Jesus had had an AR15, none of that crucifixion stuff would have even had to happen. And while I was stunned by that statement, since it directly contradicts the entire story of Jesus, it might lead us to ponder the question: Why did God choose to save us, to make us whole, like that?

Why did God choose to show us God’s love in such a, well, seemingly weak way? Jesus, our King of kings, Lord of lords, the fullest revelation of who God is, the one whose reign we honor this day, that Jesus just hung there. He hung there, spoke words of forgiveness and welcome, and died. Why? God could have done it in a grander, more easily translatable way.

There are some pastors who have been trying to more easily “translate” Jesus for the last decade or so. In particular, there are some well-known preachers who are upset about why more men are not in church. One of these pastors claims that “real men” avoid the church because it projects a kind of weak Christ that is “no one to live for [and] is no one to die for.” He also claims that surely Jesus had “callused hands and big biceps,” resembling more of a kind of “Ultimate Fighting Jesus.” That kind of Jesus is the sort of Christ men are drawn to, he has repeatedly stated. And finally, most interesting and disturbing to me, is this statement: “I cannot worship the hippie, diaper halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up” (quotes taken from an article by Brandon O’Brien, Christianity Today, 2008 and from the blog of Rachel Held Evans). Proclaiming that kind of toxic masculinity Christology makes me wonder what he does with texts like this one from Luke, in which, as theologian F. Scott Spencer writes, we find one more example of “how God rules through Jesus the Christ: in redemptive love, not in vindictive terror” (F. Scott Spencer, Luke, p. 594).

Now, I realize that most of us probably do not share that particular pastor’s views. But I do wonder if sometimes even we carry around this tension between the way we wish Jesus would be Messiah, Savior, King and the way he actually was and is all of those things. As Father Richard Capon has written:

The human race is, was, and probably always will be deeply unwilling to accept a human messiah. We don’t want to be saved in our humanity; we want to be fished out of it. We crucified Jesus, not because he was God, but because he blasphemed: He claimed to be God and then failed to come up to our standards for assessing the claim. It’s not that we weren’t looking for the Messiah; it’s just that he wasn’t what we were looking for. Our kind of Messiah would come down from a cross. … He wouldn’t do a stupid thing like rising from the dead. He would do a smart thing like never dying. (Robert Capon, Hunting the Divine Fox)

And yet, according to the witness of scripture, God in Jesus was not interested in doing things our “smarter” way. God was not interested in fishing us out of our humanity. God was not interested in being the Ultimate Fighting Jesus. God was not interested in being the kind of Messiah we were looking for or in proving anything to anybody. According to Luke, God was only interested in holding absolutely nothing back in God’s demonstration of divine love.

God was only interested in helping us see and know that because of Jesus’ willingness to be one of us in every way — including the very human experiences of suffering and death — nothing we experience would ever be outside of God’s mark of divine love and presence again.

As we have discussed before, this is what we mean when we say in the Apostles’ Creed “He descended into hell.” We are not making a spatial claim when we affirm that. Rather, we are making a theological claim. We are claiming that we worship a God who is powerful and sovereign, whose reign is over all, but who shows that sovereignty, that reign, that power, by being bound and determined to show us there is no where we can be, nothing we can experience, no way we can feel that has not been marked by divine love and presence — not even the sense of hellish abandonment and pain. As Anne Lamott has written, “What a paradox: that we connect with God, with divinity, in our flesh and blood and time and space. We connect with God in our humanity” (Anne Lamott, Stitches, p. 19).

It is paradoxical. It doesn’t make worldly sense. It is actually rather staggering. Martin Luther, the reformer, once said something to the effect that if you want to understand God you must run to the cradle in Bethlehem where the baby Jesus lies helpless and you must rush to the foot of the cross where a man hangs broken by the powers of this world, for we believe that God reveals who God is not in an Ultimate Fighting Jesus, but in the helplessness of an infant and in the brokenness of an executed man (Michael Jinkins, Called to be Human: Letters to My Children on Living a Christian Life, p. 32). It is stunning.

And it is also life-giving. At least it is for me. I have to tell you that this understanding of God’s “holding nothing back” love, this promise that we connect with God not in a denial of our humanity but precisely in the messiness of it — this is what keeps me going each day. It is what I stand on whenever I pray in the emergency room or with someone in physical crisis. Because God chose not to be God on our terms, I can say with confidence that God knows firsthand what it is to hurt, or to be cut, or even to die. Therefore, nothing they will encounter in that scary experience will be outside of God’s mark of love shown most clearly in the cradle and on the cross.

It is what I stand on whenever I gather with family who has a loved one in hospice care. Because God chose not to be God on our terms, I can say with confidence that God knows firsthand how it feels to have a loved one die, to withstand a broken heart, and to be full of sorrow and tears. I’ve been thinking about that after hearing the news about the Colorado Springs shooting last night at the LGBTQ club. Nothing they will encounter on that long road of grief will be outside of God’s mark of love shown most clearly in the cradle and on the cross. It is what we stand on when we volunteer at Shower Ministry or participate in the adult education class on housing in Chicago or teach Sunday School with kids. It’s what we stand on when we speak out against the powers and principalities of racism and domestic violence and homophobia and transphobia. It’s what we stand on every time we treat each person we encounter as a worthwhile human being.

Because God chose not to be God on our terms, we can say with confidence that God knows what it is to be marginal, to be poor, to be oppressed, to be seen as dangerous, to be unwelcomed. Therefore, nothing anyone experiences, nothing we experience, will ever be outside of God’s mark of love shown most clearly in the cradle and on the cross.

So yes, God’s way of being God in Jesus is paradoxical. It does not make much worldly sense. It is rather staggering. And it is absolutely what can give us the breath and the courage we need to keep following God in the way of Jesus, as we seek to be part of God’s transformation of this church and a part of God’s transformation of our world. Amen.