“The King of Love My Shepherd is”
24 November 2024
Solemnity of Christ the King
Sunday Next Before Advent
Homily preached at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
Grants Pass, Oregon
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
9:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24; Psalm 95:1-7a; Ephesians 1:15-23; Matthew 25:31-46
God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen
In 1925, the world was in turmoil. The Christian kingdoms of Europe were at an end, or collapsing. America had thrown out monarchy 150 years before; France had guillotined its King and Queen and hundreds of priests and bishops 125 years before. The great socialist revolutions of Europe in the mid-1800s had been quelled, only to see a corrupt return to the rule of the wealthy few. One victim of the turmoil had been the kingdom of the Bishop of Rome, the Papal States, that were abolished in 1870 with Italian national unification under its own King. After a short period of prosperity, the powers of Europe—the few kings remaining, their governments, and the Church—failed to prevent the world from sliding accidentally into the Great War of 1914-18. Once the horror settled, this killed Christendom, the union of faith and governmental power that had reigned there for 1,500 years. A whole generation, traumatized, left the churches never to return. The Bolsheviks took over Russia in the name of justice and freedom from religion for all people. They then promptly killed the Tsar and his family, turned on each other in bloody purges, and then on the people they ruled.
As post war economic depression set in, Italy’s King, Victor Immanuel III, watched on helplessly as a young former socialist and wounded WWI veteran named Benito Mussolini rose to head the government through vicious street fighting, appeals to return Italy to the glories of the Roman Empire, and baiting and attacking those he believed to be subhuman. In Germany, a young failed artist named Adolf Hitler, also a wounded WWI veteran, had just gotten out of jail for staging an insurrection in Bavaria, and was clearly on his way to becoming Germany’s leader through even more brutal and violent bullying tactics.
Looking on this scene, Pope Pius XI did some serious theological reflection on the failure of the monarchial system and Christendom, and the future of Christianity. He issued an encyclical that encouraged Christians to celebrate a feast near the end of the liturgical year celebrating Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. The Feast is now celebrated by not only Roman Catholics, but also Anglicans and Episcopalians, Lutherans Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Moravians.
This is not because we accept all the goals that Pius had. He was arguing not only for the independence of the Church from the state, but also for its immunity to secular law. Just 4 years after the feast was initiated, Mussolini ingratiated himself with Pius by granting the Vatican independent sovereignty as a city state with the Pope as its ruler, a status it enjoys to this day.
The reason we have all seen fit to celebrate this feast is found in an idea that is indisputable: human governments—whether they are monarchical, despotic, socialist, nationalist, republican, or democratic—all fail, in greater or lesser degree, to measure up to the goals of justice, security, and prosperity.
The idea is similar to the idea discussed by Augustine of
Hippo in The City of God: human politics, even when they are as good as
human politics can get, fall short of the ideal. This is because they are all based in human
self-interest. And where there is
self-interest, there is rivalry. And
where there is rivalry, sooner or later, there is favoritism for some and
alienation or abuse of others.
For the ideal, we need to look to the reign of God.
This is not to argue for a theocracy, whether dressed as a monarchy or republic. There is no such thing as a good and just theocracy--power corrupts, and absolute power like that claimed by those who represent God, corrupts absolutely. And as we have seen in the horrors of sexual abuse by the clergy, covered up and enabled by the church, it is a truly good thing to make the Church responsible to the law.
I think all of us have had the experience of being led by a charismatic political leader who knew how to play the right chords of our hearts, and inspire our hope. We then had the experience of that leader failing us, of disappointing our hope, and sometimes, even disgusting or frightening us. One of my mentors in the ordination process told me his wakening as an adult Christian came when some of the religious socialists (including priests) he had supported in Nicaragua as a young man in a hope that they would help usher in the Reign of God, in some small way, turned out in office to be petty tyrants and corrupt officials.
I am not saying that all political systems and leaders are equally corrupt or tyrannical. Some indeed are more egregious than others, usually those that build power by identifying enemies of the good and then persecuting them.
The prayer book teaches that in our democracy, we are responsible to seek out good leaders, honest leaders who will serve the common good. We pray that they serve in the fear of God, or at least, of popular approbation.
As the popular meme puts it, “No matter who President is, Christ is King.”
I once met a king. When I was living in Africa as a U.S. diplomat, I was honored for my work with villages and traditional leaders. Together with Roman Catholic priest and sustainable farming advocate Father Godfrey Nzamujo, I was named an honorary prince of the Yoruba Kingdom of Kétou, ruled by a hereditary ruler, a monarch called the Oba. I have to confess—I was nervous, since the ceremony was partly religious, and the closest thing to a state church there is what we in the West dismissively and ignorantly call “Voodoo.” My staff at the American Cultural Center was excited to have their boss thus honored, and told me to obey exactly any instructions from the King or his ministers. They assured me that we would not be asked to do anything dangerous, immoral, or compromising our Christian faith. The Oba, after all, governed within the context of the larger Nigerian and Beninese states.
Fr. Nzamujo and I were received at the palace of the Oba and unceremoniously ushered into the basement while dancers and singers performed for the assembled crowds in the palace courtyard. Three elderly women looked us carefully up and down, and left. Then the King’s chamberlain evenly commanded, “Mettez-vous à poil (strip naked).” We proceeded to do so under the watchful eyes of the king’s security guards.
We waited together in the dark naked for a few minutes, feeling vulnerable and a little silly, until the chamberlain returned. He looked harshly at us, and had his assistants produce three items in sequence. “This is water from the Oba’s well. Let him quench your thirst if you are to become his sons.” We drank deeply from the gourd. “This is manioc from the Oba’s table. Let him satisfy your hunger if you are to become his sons.” We ate the gray paste. And finally, “These are ashes from the King’s pipe. Taste bitterness with him if you are to be his sons.” We tasted the ashes. Then, producing a small bowl of palm oil, he had a vodun priest anoint us as he translated the Yoruba chanting into French for us: “I anoint your brow that you may think as the King thinks, your eyes that you may see as he does, your arms that you may defend him and his people, your legs that you may always hurry to heed his call.” Then he clothed us with exquisite royal robes and hats, hemmed to our exact bodily dimensions in the minutes while we waited in the darkness. The elderly women who had scanned us were expert tailors. We then were ushered up a stairway into the bright light of the tropical courtyard. We were told to approach the Oba, seated on a high dais. who then took a full mouthful of gin and sprayed it over us and said, “You are my sons, princes of Kétou.”
The Oba of Kétou
After a long ceremony, we were handed plastic bags containing our clothes and escorted back to our car. I didn’t really realize how much all of this meant to the Yoruba until what happened next: On the long drive back to the city, we stopped to have a late lunch at a roadside restaurant. Not having the chance to change back into our western clothes, we were both in the royal robes as we walked from our car. A group of 20 or so market women--that primary economic engine of most of Africa--came around a corner and, when they saw us in our robes marking us as royalty, all fell prostrate before us, faces in the dirt. They remained motionless until we had passed and entered the restaurant.
This experience taught me that a king is the object of love, awe and fear. He embodies the well-being or woes of his people, and is responsible for them. A king reflects in some way—however dim—God’s relationship to us: a parent, shepherd, and trusted teacher. God in the Bible is called a King, and even the “King of Kings.” The Royal Psalms say the King of Israel is “God’s Son.”
The fact that human kings so often fall far from this ideal is the reason that Europe mostly threw out kings along the church that supported them. It’s why other parts of the Bible speak against kings: seeing them as an unfortunate concession to the ways of “the nations round about us.”
These very passages were used by American Revolutionaries against George III and earlier by the Puritans during the English Civil War against Charles I, whom they beheaded.
One of my ancestors, puritan Colonel John Hutchinson, learned the hard way that politics leads to evil on all sides. He was one of those who signed the death warrant for the King, believing Puritan propaganda that he was but an “ungodly man of blood.” But he soon realized that his own Puritan leaders could be every bit as tyrannical as Charles. He fell afoul of Oliver Cromwell when he disobeyed orders to massacre Cavalier prisoners of war in retaliation to Charles’ summary executions of Roundhead prisoners. As a result, the Commonwealth leadership cut him loose, and excluded him. But also in part due to this, after the restoration of the monarchy, he in the end escaped execution as a regicide.
My ancestor John learned the hard way that you should never wholly believe your own nation's or party’s propaganda. He often recited Psalm 146:
Put no trust in princes,
in humanity’s children, powerless to rescue.
Who when they breathe their last, return to the earth;
at that moment, all their schemes come to nothing.
Blissful are those who find their help in Jacob’s God,
who base their hope in Yahweh, his God. (The Ashland Bible)
So what does this have to say for us, hopefully good citizens of a Republic that we are--however divided and rent by mutual hatred and fears it may be? Why celebrate Christ as King?
Christ as king means we have a personal loyalty and devotion to him above all others. It means we trust him and try to follow him, the one who said that leaders above all must be servants, that we mustn’t let religion, patriotism, ethnicity, gender, moral concerns, or party get in the way of being kind and loving.
I pray that we all may be faithful and fearless followers and subjects to such a kind king as this.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
