Reign of Christ Sunday

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God.

Let me start by saying what a joy it is to be back in this parish. Steph and I have really happy memories of being here with you all and with Steve, and I was simultaneously delighted and devastated when my dear colleague Paula decided to finish with Anglicare so she could come and be your priest here. It’s lovely to be back here and to be worshipping with you and with Paula today.

We have a problem every time we talk about God. Anything we might try to say about God is wrong. Because no matter what words we use, they are always inadequate for God. God is always bigger, and stranger, and simpler, and more beautiful than any words that we can find to use.

And so when we talk about God we can only use the language that we have. But we need to remember that God is always beyond that language.

As a kid, I rather enjoyed the CS Lewis Narnia books. In those books, there is a magical lion figure called Aslan who, fairly obviously, is a symbol of Jesus/God. And one of the things that gets said several times about Aslan is, ‘remember—Aslan is not a tame lion!’

And we need to remember that about God. God is not a tame creature we can mollycoddle and look after like a pet cat. God isn’t confined by the limits of our language, or the wildest stretches of our imaginations. God is always beyond.

So when we talk about God as a king, and when we talk about God’s reign or God’s kingdom, we need to remember this is a metaphor, an image that communicates some important things but that doesn’t tell us everything.

I know there are many Anglicans with a deep affection for our own monarchy, and there are many Anglicans who have negative or quite complicated feelings about monarchy, and its impact in this country and others.

Jesus is a monarch and God has a kingdom, but that monarchy and that kingdom are nothing like the monarchies and kingdoms of this world.

On Palm Sunday, Jesus the king rides a donkey into his capital city.

On Good Friday he is crowned with thorns and given a broken reed for a sceptre.

And finally, as we read in today’s gospel, this king is enthroned on the cross, an instrument of torture and ridicule.

This is a completely paradoxical, even nonsensical story.

Paul said that Christ crucified was a stumbling block for Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. It didn’t make sense to anyone.

I think it’s good to remind ourselves sometimes that Christianity is weird!

We worship a God who became a baby at Christmas, and a God who at the end of his earthly mission seems to have failed.

When I first started studying theology, I came across a wonderful theologian called Jürgen Moltmann, a German who was captured by the British in the 2nd World War and detained in a prisoner of war camp in Scotland. When he was in the depths of depression and despair, a well meaning chaplain gave him a copy of the Gospel of Mark. He’d never been very religious but he recounts that when he got to the story of Jesus on the cross crying out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!?’ he was deeply moved—here was a human who shared Moltmann’s own experience of despair and Godforsakenness. And it was this God, that Moltmann found he could believe in. This God who, as atheist philosopher Slavoj Zizek once quipped, ‘himself becomes an atheist on the cross.’

And in that moment where Jesus himself felt abandoned by God, there is one person in this scene who still has faith—the criminal who says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” somehow this criminal sees something in Jesus that no one else in that scene can see—a king who is about to inaugurate a kingdom.

It is the abandoned, the ignored, the criminalised, the poor, the children, the homeless, the sick that Jesus calls into God’s kingdom.

These are the people God cares about most. And so often, these are also the people who care most deeply and truly about God!

This is why it’s such a great Sunday for us to be acknowledging a couple of absolute standout Christians, who have been playing their part in supporting people in need for many, many years.

Kate and Alan haven’t just been donors and volunteers, they have been advocates. Not only have they made personal contributions to the work of Anglicare, they’ve also rallied other to the flag. They’ve done the regular dropoff, they’ve collected donations from around the community, and they’ve shown up regularly and reliably because they love God and they love people.

This is exactly what God’s alternative kingdom looks like—it looks like people who give, and people who care. It’s not about how hard we work or how rich we are, or how famous. In God’s kingdom, what matters is our love.

The reign of Christ heralds a different kind of economy. It’s an economy that doesn’t work by wages and taxes and political machismo. In Romans 6, Paul reminds us that wages and getting what we deserve is sin talk, ‘the wages of sin are death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.’

God’s economy is not about who deserves what. God’s economy is all generosity, all grace, and all gift.

This is at the heart of what Anglicare strives to be. In the words of our Constitution, Anglicare is, ‘a Christian organisation which seeks to express God’s love and care for the needs of individuals families and communities.’ Our vision of, ‘Justice, Respect, and Fulness of life for all’ speaks to that aspiration. A lot of what we do these days is funded by government, but some of the most important things we do are not.

Some of you may be aware that we recently lost $2 million dollars of federal funding for the work of emergency assistance that we’ve carried out for many years at the Magdalene Centre as well as in Playford, Christies Beach, and in Wallaroo. But we believe in an alternate economy where we can do things that matter regardless of whether the government chooses to fund us. We’re having an important conversation about this particular area of emergency assistance in a couple of weeks, so please come and talk to myself or Jill if you’d like to be involved in that.

This alternate economy operates at corporate collective levels through entities like Anglicare, schools, parishes but also in the individual actions of each of us. Every group is made up of individual members, just like our Colossians reading reminds us—we are one body with Christ as our head.

And so it’s in these moments when people individually or collectively show God’s love, when they model God’s generosity and grace, when they bring healing to others, when they offer some solidarity in a situation that seems hopeless, these are the moments when, to quote Jesus, ‘the kingdom of God has come near!’

Amen.