The Reign of Christ is Here - Rejoice! by the Rev. Dr. Bennett A. Brockman
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Trinity Episcopal Church Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24
Hartford, CT Psalm 100
Christ the King Sunday Ephesians 1:15-23
November 23, 2014 Matthew 25:31-46
The Reign of Christ is Here—Rejoice!
Many of you know what it’s like traveling with children, and you know their eternal question—are we there yet? So it is with the Reign of Christ that we celebrate today. We see the fat sheep, to use Ezekiel’s metaphor, still butting aside the hungry skinny sheep, the one-tenth of one-percenters continually getting richer, and everybody else struggling, finding their road steeper and their journey harder. We look around our city and our nation and our world and are distressed that violence is for many a daily fact of life.
The day will come, Jesus says, when the Son of Man will return in great glory and sort out those who have acted with compassion from those who have not, dispensing eternal reward or eternal punishment. But we’re still waiting. There are still more hungry people than we can feed, people dying of diseases we still can’t cure, people suffering injustice because of the color of their skin or the place on the planet they come from, or because of the gender of the person they are drawn to love, or simply because they’re poor.
Has Christ’s Realm arrived? Are we there yet? Clearly not. And it often seems like the hard rock group of the early 1990’s, Guns ’n’ Roses, had it right when they sang, “Welcome to the jungle, it gets worse here every day.”
Actually, it’s better than the rock group thought. The Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker demonstrates persuasively in his recent book Better Angels of our Nature that in fact the 20th century was the least homicidal one in human history, when homicides are calculated as a fraction of the entire human population at the time. And Pinker, no friend of religion, and in fact hostile to religion, very grudgingly acknowledges that religion has had a positive impact in that measurable progress.
The reason is clear. We’ve been trying to do what Jesus tells us to do in this last great parable before he goes down to Jerusalem and enters into the events of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. We must feed the hungry, clothe the ill-clothed, visit the sick and imprisoned, welcome the stranger. Attend in his name to human need. And that is precisely what Christians have been doing, and in this parish are doing right now so very well.
The good news I want to offer you this morning comes from stopping to look back and notice what we’ve done AND ARE DOING. And when you stop and notice you will find joy in that. When winter coats and jackets were needed for schoolchildren, what happened? Lo and behold, winter coats and jackets appeared. Now that food at Thanksgiving, and gifts at Christmas for children who otherwise won’t have any are needed, you know what will happen: food and gifts will appear from this congregation. Recall the Rite 13 youngsters celebrated last week, and notice the acolytes serving at the altar. Pay attention when the young children come in from Godly Play, and when older children remain after the service for Church School. Listen to the Choir sing and the great organ play.
Rejoice in what we have done, and are doing, and find energy for your soul by noticing. And today, notice in especial the two new schools founded in this parish. One, the Choir School, presents beautiful music that we hear every Sunday and instructs children every day. And the other, Trinity Academy, will be the subject of special reports in a few minutes from Mark MacGougan and Louise Loomis, with a school open house to follow the service.
Paul talks about the power of God that raised Jesus from the dead working in us through hope. I want to suggest that the resurrection power of God is also visible and mighty and life-giving as we do the work Jesus enjoins in today’s parable of the sheep and goats. Sheep-work, let us call it, this feeding and clothing and visiting.
In fact, I deeply believe that doing sheep-work expresses the power of the Resurrection and gives us more than a glimpse, more than a foretaste, of the Realm of God. Doing that sheep-work IS TO DWELL ALREADY in eternal life, in the realm of God, and that is nothing short of glorious. Even when the work is messy, when the rewards are modest at best, when the thanks fail to arrive, even when you’re tired out, look around you, rejoice, and find restoration for your spirit. One of the great gifts of worship is the great hymns and anthems that irresistibly call us to rejoice—you can’t sing or hear them and NOT rejoice! Another gift is silence, in which we can dwell and take stock of all the good that surrounds us, and rejoice and be grateful.
Toward the end of Luke’s Gospel Jesus replies to people wondering about when God’s triumphant reign is going to occur. He replies (17:20-21) that it won’t be arriving like a Roman emperor, but in fact is already here: “The kingdom of God is in your midst,” he says. It’s here already.
The simple truth is that when we do the sheep-work that Jesus requires of us, we bring in the Reign of Christ, we live in it, we embody it, we embody the resurrection hope, we make it present for other people to touch and see, and to be healed by that experience. Bringing in, living in, this Realm of God—that is what our time and talent, our tithes and offerings, our work in and through this parish church is directed toward.
We are there already, and we’re still on the way, and we celebrate those simultaneous realities in special ways today as we lift up the work we do with the young people of the neighborhood. Notice that, rejoice, and find your spirit restored!
Amen.