Daniel 7:9–10, 13–14
Psalm 93
Revelation 1:4b–8
John 18:33–37
Year B
I.N.I.
What is this place where we are meeting?
Only a house, the earth its floor.
walls and a roof, sheltering people,
windows for light, an open door.
Yet is becomes a body that lives
when we are gathered here,
and know our God is near.
--Huub Oosterhuis
Some fifty years ago, I’m told, the place where we are now was all woods. The site of the Nashua Mall down Broad Street was pasture for milking cows at Heyward Farms. And in South Nashua, the prominent landmark was not the Pheasant Lane Mall but a Turkey Farm restaurant.
The story goes that around that same time Betty Callahan, of blessed memory, was drinking coffee with Dot Blanchard and together they dreamt up the idea that there should be a Lutheran Church in Nashua. Gathering other folks that would share the dream, like Effie and George Hall, Bev and Gene Provost, Charlotte and Arnie Johannesen, then calling Mission Developer Pastor Everett Kalin, a small band began assembling in Charlotte Avenue School and later after it was built in the woods, Broad Street School. After purchasing this whole neighborhood which remember was all woods, beginning in 1964, church council meetings and Sunday School sessions were held at the first house built in these here parts, the parsonage at 3 Chapel Hill Drive. Some three years later, in 1967 the worship place where we are meeting was erected along with the administrative wing, back then connected by a passageway with a low-hung ceiling.
Planting the church community and its subsequent building meant it had to have a name. Pioneers that they were, the charter members did not pick a commonly used Lutheran identity like Redeemer, St. John’s, Immanuel or even Reformation. No, instead the good people who cleared the trees and staked a claim that this would be holy ground landed on the strong, regal appellation: Christ the King.
Words from afar, stars that are falling,
Sparks that are sown in us like seed:
names for our God, dreams, signs and wonders
sent from the past are all we need
We in this place remember and speak
Again what we have heard
God’s free redeeming word.
--Huub Oosterhuis
Ancient One is one name for God on a day like this, older than dirt, weighty, ruling over the universe, for all time. Daniel was watching the scene in front of him with fantastic figures as ugly and terrible as in Where the Wild Things Are, one a bear with three tusks, another a leopard with four wings on its back and four heads! And the most frightening of all had iron teeth, ten horns, and another little horn upon which were eyes like human eyes and a mouth that was spouting trash talk.
In Daniel’s dream, the Ancient One trumps all, puts the beasts in their places, as if to say that under the reign of God all oppression will cease, and all despots who put the screws to their citizenry and its immigrants will be overthrown. And as the dream unfolds the emissary, the mediator between this world’s troubles and the ethereal world of the Ancient One is someone that looks like one of us, coming out of the clouds, and the scepter, the executive power, the royal and just rule is given to the one looking like a human.
Our words cannot contain God in all God’s glory. T.S. Eliot says
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. –Liturgy Sourcebook, p 60
Yet words are all we have, and we use them to give voice to the holy, to pay homage to the Ancient One, and to describe as best we can how the heavens broke open and continue to crack with the presence of one named Jesus.
This human being which we call Christ, like us, was best described by the writer John as truth, as in the way, the truth, and the life. On trial for threatening this world’s powers and dominions, for stirring up holiness in the face of hatred and fear, for bringing God’s ways for healing in disease and God’s ways for life and life abundant in the face of poverty, Jesus’ truth is that God loved the world so much that the heavens were opened and the earth was gifted with God’s Son.
Here in the scene of today’s Gospel the irony is palpable. Pilate has all the power, but it is he who feels threatened. Pilate serves under a Roman King, Caesar, but puzzles about how kingship might be assumed by the man before him. Pilate is the prosecutor, but he ends up looking like the one on trial.
So Jesus becomes the truth that is ultimate, life-giving, life-saving, even and most vividly on the way toward and on finally nailed to the tree marked for death. This “king,” on the throne of the cross, weds heaven to earth, the past to the future, and speaks the truth that sets free. To the Ancient One he says, with us overhearing, “Forgive them.” “It is completed.”
The end is the beginning. The king breaks open life in his own dying. The crown of thorns sprouts fruit for the healing of the nations, redeems Eden’s tragedy and present company who seem to live without dreams but only nightmares.
The truth is that God in Christ spills into conversations over coffee, into coins thrown that jingle cans for World Hunger, at the reverence and awe in spaces like this promote, and as today in 2009 we listen and speak, tell stories and act faithfully in the name and for the sake of the truth that our fleeting words in poetry and song, in ritual and service, in learning and loving call Christ the King.
What is it about this community of faith that inspires you? What are your stories of Christ the King that you might share? What are ways that we can live into God’s promised future, while we celebrate fifty years of dreaming in this place, fifty years of singing, breaking break, being shaped by the Word, and serving and loving the world in the name and for the sake of Christ, the King?
Could you write it down? Could you share it with a friend? Could you stand in holy reverence as you recognize the servant king offered in communion?
And we accept bread at his table,
broken and shared, a living sign.
Here in this world, dying and living,
we are each other’s bread and wine.
This is the place where we can receive
What we need to increase:
our justice and God’s peace.
--Huub Oosterhuis
I.N.I.
The Rev. Timothy J. Keyl, Pastor
Christ the King Lutheran Church
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