I am too young to be a hippie, too old to be a hipster, and I’m not quite at the broken hip stage of things yet, but I have always tried to be a little hip, have always had a slightly funky edge, despite my upbringing in the Stars and Bars-waving working-class South.
As a young adult, I managed to lay my hands on a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog, about as granola and Birkenstock as you can get, and even had a copy of Buckminster Fuller’s “Critical Path,” published the year I graduated from high school and the source text for today’s first reading. Though I’ve often yearned for the comfort and respectability of the establishment, which is to say for the benefits of being a white male in a racist patriarchy, I just wasn’t wired that way, so when someone like Bucky talked about a better world, I was ready to listen. I am still sometimes tempted by that comfort and respectability, by privilege, and I’m still not wired that way.
Fuller is an interesting figure. He’s best known as the inventor of the geodesic dome, though a German inventor beat him by more than a quarter century. In fact, he invented little that was of real use despite a slew of patents. His Dymaxion houses and Dymaxion cars look like something from the Jetsons rather than the real world. Comparing him to someone like Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, well… there isn’t really a comparison in terms of impact. Berners-Lee gave us Amazon one-click ordering and the rise of Donald Trump and neo-fascism. Fuller gave us some odd buildings and a way of thinking, one rarely used by most folks.
But this latter, this new way of thinking, turns out to be his real legacy, for synergetics was one of the earliest expressions of “whole systems” thinking, complexity science before we called it complexity science, the first real understanding that there was an actual world wide web, not just electrons and light pulses pushing data, but invisible and mysterious connections between all things. This is why people are still talking about him, at least some people, why he was given the label “futurist.”
He also left us some really great quotes, some real zingers, another of which you’ll hear at the benediction.
Fuller’s gift was looking at the current situation as a whole, discerning patterns, and suggesting paths forward. He operated at the intersection of values, intuition, and reason. Like every human who has significantly advanced the human project, he was someone who was dissatisfied with the “is” and striving for the “might be,” much like the figure and feast we celebrate this particular day.
Because satisfaction does not change the world. Comfort does not change the world. And while fear may change the world, and often does, it is never for the better. But discomfort and dissatisfaction can change the world in a good way. In fact, wanting the world to be a better place and believing that you can actually contribute to that goal requires a healthy dose of both hubris and humility, the former to believe your vision is the right one, the latter to realize it might not be.
Dreaming of a world requires that you be a little cranky and a little crazy. And Jesus was both.
You will find two titles for today’s feast on the Christian calendar at the top of your Order of Service, and neither is the traditional title, which is the Feast of Christ the King.
The feast itself was established by the Roman Church a century ago in response to the carnage of the Great War and signs of rising authoritarianism. It was a re-iteration of the Christian claim that God’s rule was more important than the rule of earthly kings, of human nations. Other Christian communions, including many Protestant communions, joined in adopting the feast, for it was an age of ecumenism, and all could agree that the horrors of the First World War must not be repeated. Of course, you don’t need an actual king for evil to take root, as the world would soon learn.
Humans always map what we do understand onto what we do not understand, like Paul trying to apply the sacrificial system of the Second Temple onto the crucifixion of Jesus and giving us the twisted theology of blood atonement, or the Hebrews and the Christians both mapping human notions of rule and royalty onto the un-tamable mystery of their encounter with the holy, both before Jesus in the Mosaic tradition and especially in the Christ event itself.
And since some Judeans longed for the restoration of a literal Hebrew monarchy in order to escape the crippling and brutalizing Roman-occupation, and the Roman-occupation forces were determined that this should not happen, the question of Jesus as a potential “king” is conveniently there in the text, the INRI above his head on the cross an acronym for Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.
If Christ as King was a revolutionary idea in the face of the mighty Caesar, it was much less so when the Caesar’s and their successors converted the table-turning trouble-causer into a tool for the status quo, when they changed Christianity from a religion about revolutionary living in this life into a trade-off where injustice and suffering in this life were the price the poor had to pay for eternal bliss in the next. Christ the King became the pawn of kings, divine permission for greed and power. No wonder Marx railed against religion!
Of course, though most American girls and quite a few American boys want to be a princess, we don’t actually do royalty here. In theory, at least, America is a meritocracy, where your success is based on effort and talent, not the accidents of birth, even if we fail utterly at living into that ideal.
So the Feast of Christ the King doesn’t really resonate in our secular space, nor does it cohere with the model of church governance or polity in our particular branch of the Reform Protestant tradition. We may proclaim Christ as the only head of our church, as we historically have done, but it is an abstraction, not an operational reality, for in truth our church is members and councils, pastors and boards, and God help us, meeting after meeting.
Next week we will start again with the traditional Christian liturgical year. We’ll begin, as do two of the gospels, by setting the stage for the Incarnation, the four Sundays of Advent being about anticipation and preparation. This week, as we close out a liturgical year, we end at the ending, the idea that Jesus was pointing toward a time when love and justice would prevail, the Reign of Christ, still mapping the idea of royal-rule onto the human context, or more comfortable in our tradition, the kin-dom of God, a play on the word Kingdom, but acknowledging that Jesus thought of his followers as sisters and brothers, children of a loving Creator he called “Abba.”
Jesus was dissatisfied with the world he experienced every day. He was dissatisfied with the greed and corruption and smug-self-righteousness he encountered every day. He was dissatisfied with the cruelty and callousness. He was a little cranky and a little crazy by human standards. And here we are, among millions who are speaking about him, who are dreaming of the sort-of world he dreamed of, a world where the broken are loved back to health, almost two thousand years after he was murdered by the state, for organized religion didn’t want change, the elite did not want change, law enforcement did not want change, but he saw the might-be, and getting there required change.
Jesus looked beyond now to tomorrow. And, done well, so does this feast, this moment when, symbolically at least, the baton is passed to us, our time being the time in-between, in-between Jesus and the fulfillment of his vision. The baton we receive is the good news of the gospel that tells us God is not a temperamental egomaniac in the sky, but is instead a loving parent, and that what God seeks is human thriving, all humans thriving, that we treat each other with the same extravagant love the holy bestows on us.
Here is the baton. You are the next part of the relay team. The kin-dom of God is still potential, still might be.
And as Buckminster Fuller pointed out long before we recognized our current climate crisis, long before we recognized that extreme wealth is at war with democracy, time is short, this is the hour, for the forces of evil and destruction are winning.
We may well be sitting for our final exam, and we are failing miserably. Evil is patient and strategic, is aligned with our original sin of fear, which is inward facing and quick to scapegoat. Those of us who believe in the possibility of a better world rarely articulate what that world should look like, being half-hearted in our comfort.
Besides, how can we possibly engage the outer world when we are so busy with our lefty-inquisitions designed to root out any impurity or imperfection in our midst? We don’t need neo-fascists to destroy progressive leaders. We can take care of that on our own.
If you are committed to what is or what was, you are not committed to Jesus, for Jesus leans into what might-be, the woman touching the hem of his cloak might be whole, the mentally ill man he has been told is in the cemetery might-be part of society again, might be loved. Jesus is about the next, the in-breaking kin-dom of God, where there is healing and justice.
The Feast of Christ the King is not a surrender to earthly powers and principalities, no matter what powers and principalities may claim.
The Feast of Christ the King, the Reign of Christ, the Kin-dom of God, is about what comes next, the better world that comes next, the might-be of next, and the hard work we need to do to get there, not looking at one another, as we so often do, but looking out at the world, seeing, really seeing what is broken, seeing the mentally ill man driven out of society and always at risk of being stoned.
Being part of the might-be, being part of the solution, means the sort of pattern recognition Buckminster Fuller practiced, it means the synergetics-approach that understands that it is the system itself that is chewing us up, that is destroying the planet, and we have the power to throw a monkey wrench into the gears of that machine, to stop riding that death machine toward oblivion, to instead imagine what might be, then, patiently, strategically, to get about the business of building it, whether you are a one-time hippy now worried about your hips, a hipster who decides there is more to life than over-priced coffee, or some not-quite-cool dude who is dissatisfied with the world, a little cranky, and just crazy enough to believe we can do better.
Amen.