11/24/19
(Jeremiah 23:1-6; Canticle 16; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43)
The documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is a magnificent chronicler of American history and culture, and has given us works on a wide variety of subjects: the Civil War, baseball, Prohibition, World War II, among others. His latest effort, which first aired a couple of months ago, is called “Country Music”, and describes the origins, and growth, of all the varieties of what we in America lump together under the single term “country music”. Like most of his work, it’s a series of films, and it’s absolutely wonderful. There are eight episodes, with titles like “Hard Times” (about country music in the Depression) and “The Hillbilly Shakespeare” (about the era of Hank Williams). But the title of the last one in the series, which covers the period from 1984 to 1996, is “Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’ “.
When I saw that title on the screen I was kind of nonplussed: what do raisins have to do with country music? Is a “raisin” a euphemism, or a symbol of something? But very soon someone in the film used the phrase and I saw that I had misunderstood, because I hadn’t seen there was an apostrophe after the “n” in “raisin”. So it was a countrified way of saying “raising”. So the statement “Don’t get above your raisin’” meant, Don’t forget your roots: don’t forget how you were brought up: remember what your parents, your family, your community taught you about how life is to be lived.
In the documentary, Burns applied this principle to musicians of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s like Garth Brooks, Randy Travis, and the Judds, people who were taking the musical heritage they had received from the great stars of the past, which had inspired them to become musicians in the first place, and making it their own, refreshing and renewing it for the world they lived in.
And of course the principle “Don’t get above your raisin’” applies in the same way to the life of faith as well. And it’s important because it’s about how we live our lives, every day. We live in the Christian tradition. The Latin root of our English word “tradition” is a verb that means “to hand on”; and that’s certainly one of the things we do here in church: we hand on the truth of Jesus Christ. But it’s not just about teaching our kids. Wedon’t get above ourraisin’: we remind ourselves of the truth, we grow into the truth of Jesus Christ: we refresh and renew that truth in our lives, every day, our whole lives long.
I’m lifting all this up especially today, the last Sunday of the season of Pentecost, the final Sunday of church year, which we celebrate as the feast of Christ the King. This feast is a relatively recent addition to our church calendar: it was created in 1925 by the Roman Catholic Church in response to the rise of fascism in Europe and to the secularism which was mushrooming throughout society after the horror of World War I, a war which seemed, to many, proof that God had disappeared: God was a myth, and humanity was on its own.
Secularism is a tendency of spirit which leaves God out of our thinking, and our living: it organizes life as if God did not exist; or as if God were a being like any other being, an optional concern, and belonging to a church was like being a member of the Bicycle Club in high school, it’s a pastime, at best, and you can take it or leave it. The Feast of Christ the King was created to work against that way of thinking by focusing our attention in a particular direction: that when we call Christ our King, we are saying that God – the Creator of the universe, is alive and at work on this earth; and that if we want to live truthful lives, in the real world, it is God in Christ to whom we turn; and do so with joy, and thankfulness: because it is there that we are most fully ourselves, that we are who God created us to be.
But of course there are problems today with the language of kingship. In the first place, we hear the word “king” and we think, history, museum piece, not part of our world. So when we talk about Christ the King, we seem to announce ourselves as stuck in the past, heads in the sand.
In the second place, in the words “Christ the King”, there are unfortunate overtones of the kind of imperialism and triumphalism that, over the centuries, have deservedly given our church a bad name. “Christ the King” represents an attitude that, for many centuries, has announced, We’re Christians, and we’re better than anybody else, and God wants everybody to be like us, inside of every heathen is a Christian trying to get out, so therefore we’re going to go forth and make disciples of all nations (which means get people to behave in church the same way we do), just like Jesus told us to do, whether they like the idea or not.
This, of course, has nothing to do with the church of Christ.. It has nothing to do with the kingdom of God Jesus talked about.
So what does it mean today, to proclaim Christ as King? Why do we maintain this tradition? Why is it part of our raisin’?
We first have to ask: what’s a king? What do we mean by that word? What was a king, back when kings were kings?
A true king was not merely someone who had power, who could compel you to do his will. A true king was the representative of what his people considered to be best in life: the best kind of order, justice, virtue; who exercised the benevolence that he understood came with power: a king in whose kingdom his subjects lived in peace, and harmony with each other. And because of all that the king was someone who inspired not only loyalty, but reverence: the king was someone whom people followed, because they knew that where that king led, they would find their truest good, their highest destiny, the fulfillment of who they really were as human beings: each of them individually, and together as a people.
And that is why we proclaim Christ as our King. Because that is what Christ does. And does it in a way that utterly transcends the power of any other king. That’s the message of today’s gospel story. It’s why we read this story on this day: a day on which, in any other tradition, we would hide such a story: throw it out, delete the file. The one we proclaim as our king in this story is dying – naked, bleeding, beaten literally to within an inch of his life – and dying on the cross: the means of execution reserved for the lowest, most contemptible criminals. And most of the people in this story who are witnessing this scene are raucous in their mockery, of this man whom others have proclaimed to be the Messiah, God’s Chosen One, the King of the Jews. This, sisters and brothers, is secularism, distilled to its bitterest essence: You say that God comes among us? And saves us? And this man is the proof? I…don’t think so.
But in this story, in the little exchange between Jesus and the two thieves, we see our King, the one true King, whose reign is universal. The first thief jeers at Jesus along with the others, but the second stops him, saying, Do you not fear God? God whom you’re just about to stand in front of? And that thief acknowledges the truth of who Christ is: he turns to Jesus and says, Remember me when you come into your kingdom. And with the last ounce of strength he possesses – he dies right after this – Jesus lifts his head, looks at this man, and tells him, Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise. Those are the words of eternal life. That’s the love of God in Christ, in the face of which all earthly power is powerless.
This is God in Christ, in whose love we are made whole: Christ who comes to us in the darkest depths of our suffering, and despair, and hopelessness, and tells us, I am with you, and I will never abandon you. That’s our raisin’. This is Christ our King. We live out of that knowledge. By the grace of God, may we never get above our raisin’. Thanks be to God.