John 18:33-37
It is the year 5785 in the Jewish Calendar, 1446 in the Islamic Calendar, and 2024 Anno Domini in the Christian Calendar, now known as the Common Era since European colonialism imposed it on so many cultures. Each of these calendars in the Abrahamic traditions starts on a different day, moveable for Jews and Muslims, always January 1st for Christians. But some Christians have a second calendar based on the seasons in church life. This calendar, called the liturgical calendar, begins with the first Sunday in Advent, as Christians prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Liturgical churches then use a three or four year schedule of readings for each Sunday called a lectionary.
Protestant churches have mostly thrown off the Marian devotions and feasts of the saints so central to Roman Catholic practice, though the liturgical calendars are otherwise the same. Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, the United Church of Christ, and many other Mainline traditions will all start Advent next Sunday.
Jews in the Rabbinic tradition conclude their annual cycle of readings, their version of a lectionary, with Simchat Torah, carrying to Torah Scroll around the sanctuary and sometimes into the streets, with much singing and dancing. We are not nearly that cool. We close our year with the Feast of Christ the King, or as we prefer to call it, not being monarchists, the Reign of Christ.
What is surprising is that the Feast itself wasn’t invented until 1925, by the Roman Catholic Pope Pius XI, and it was not moved to the end of the liturgical year until 1970. Still, Mainline Protestants adopted it, and placed it in the liturgical calendar. So here we are, doing something 99 times because a pope thought it was a good idea. Admittedly odd.
The encyclical letter establishing the feast appears to have been a response to the horrors of the Great War, known to us now as World War I, the collapse of several monarchies, including the Hohenzollerns, Romanovs, and Habsburgs, and the rise of secular ultra-nationalism, which would plant the seeds for the rise of Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler in Germany, though those trees of evil were yet to bloom when Pius created the Feast of Christ the King.
We are meant to use this Sunday to celebrate Christ’s eternal rule today, a common cause that transcends nations, and therefore promotes world peace.
About that…
But given the recent election, it might be best to skip our usual reflection on why we don’t do monarchs, why Congregationalism and the United Church of Christ are democratic, with a small “d,” and instead focus on the relationship between the religious and the secular.
We provisionally use the term Jewish for the people living in Canaan, modern Palestine, around the year 1100 B.C.E. It might be more accurate to think of them as proto-Jews or at the very least pre-Rabbinic Jews, for it will be more than a thousand years before we get to anything we’d recognize as Judaism today.
A new population arrived on the Mediterranean Coast. The Philistines had better technology, and were encroaching on Jewish land. The Jews responded by organizing under a single warlord, known to us today as King Saul. Saul’s rule and the conflict with the Philistines is the context for the story of David versus Goliath.
Human monarchy sets up a tension that continues to this day, one captured in scripture’s history of this period, written centuries later.
Pre-Rabbinic Judaism had incorporated several religious innovations. While other cultures had human god-kings who inevitably died, and worshiped statues of human and animal gods, Yahweh could not be depicted, and was the only proper ruler for the people. The tension between the very human kings of Israel and Judah and the sovereignty of God would drive much of the conflict in the Prophetic Age.
By the time of Jesus, there was no Jewish king. His gospel was the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God, the restoration of divine rule. Of course, that challenged secular rule, including that of Imperial Rome, so he was executed.
The message of Jesus is clear. God is the only proper ruler, and is good. Being part of God’s kingdom was a decision. You could opt-in.
The Christianity we know today is largely a product of the converted Pharisee, Paul of Tarsus.
Paul was unique in that he was a Jew in the eastern Mediterranean who had a form of Roman citizenship, which offered him some legal rights most figures in the Christian Testament did not enjoy. Paul urged those on the Way of Jesus to obey secular authority, believing that secular authority was benign. Tradition tells us he was wrong, that his citizenship did not protect him, and that the secular state would sporadically persecute Christians for the next several centuries, until the Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 C.E. with the Edict of Milan.
Christianity became first a legal religion, then a state religion, then in some cases became a religious state, which would lead to the same conflicts we see in the Jewish Testament prophets, despots claiming divine authority, with corruption and confusion.
Fast forward almost twelve centuries, and you have tension between the Roman church, which is both a religion and a state, and the rise of the modern secular nation-state. This is the context for the Protestant Reformation.
Emboldened by liberation from papal autocracy, some even dreamed that they might be liberated from secular autocracy, from nobles who hoarded wealth and exploited the poor, from the Elon Musk’s of the Middle Ages. The 1524 Peasant’s War would spread across Germany, and into modern Switzerland and Austria. The well-trained and well-equipped forces of the nobility crushed the rebellion, slaughtering as many as 100,000 peasants. Luther, horrified, would turn to Paul, not in support of equality in Christ, a dominant theme in Paul’s letters, not even in support of the economic justice in the teachings of Jesus and the prophets, but instead to echo Paul’s misguided trust in the secular state.
Luther articulates an idea that came to be known as the “two kingdoms,” drawing a line between the affairs of the church and the affairs of the state. He urges peasants to obey the state.
The positive spin on this is our tenuous religious liberty and the religious diversity in developed nations. The negative spin is the idea that there are parts of your life where key religious values like compassion and justice do not apply.
Scholars view Luther’s “Two Kingdoms,” as well as his virulent antisemitism, as key factors in the Holocaust and what Hannah Arendt would come to call the “banality of evil.” After the Second World War, there were no Nazis in Germany, just good Christians who followed orders, as Paul and Luther had advised.
The “two kingdoms” has also been incredibly useful in the development of neoliberal capitalism. The free market need not concern itself with compassion and justice, which belong to the other kingdom of religion. In fact, free market neoliberal capitalism is a sort of religion that makes the market a self-regulating god that will always achieve the greatest good for the greatest number.
About that…
We live in an age when some wish to impose the restrictive and primitive parts of their religion on others, whether it is the Taliban in Afghanistan or our homegrown American Taliban in fundamentalist white nationalist churches, while ignoring the compassion and justice so central to all three Abrahamic traditions. They bring all of the hate, and none of the love.
We might be inclined, then, to imagine some way in which our religion is walled off from other parts of our lives, from business or from politics. In fact, it appears many Americans did exactly that several weeks ago, convincing themselves that they could still be good Christians while supporting someone who embodies the exact opposite of Christian values.
And I want to suggest that Paul ended up dead, Luther was wrong, and that the very idea that religion was a thing you did for a few hours a week would be incomprehensible to Jesus and his followers.
Religion was your way of life. The kingdom was present to those who chose to see it, to opt in, to make the decision to live a different way.
Jesus understood that you could not impose religion on others. When he challenged the righteous and rich young man to give up everything for the kingdom, he let him walk away. But the religion of Jesus was not performative, like the performative Christianity and performative patriotism of so many today. It was who he was.
To borrow words from more traditional forms of Christianity, there is no part of your life that does not belong to God. For while we may reject the old puppet master in the sky, every moment of our lives in contingent, our being utterly dependent on things we do not control and do not understand, a force of serendipitous creativity I choose to believe is fundamentally good.
So whether it is 5785 or 1446 or 2024, this is the day God has made, the whole day, every part of the day, from dawn over the Ganges to dusk on Mount McKinley. May we walk with God in every part of this day, of our contingent lives. May we rejoice and be glad in it. Amen.