Sermon for Sunday, November 24, 2024 || Reign of Christ B || John 18:33-37

Today, on the last Sunday of the church year, we celebrate the Reign of Christ. We celebrate the universal scope of God’s presence breathing life and meaning throughout creation. We celebrate that the true God is always bigger than our cramped understandings of God. And we do more than celebrate today. On this day, we renew our conviction to participate in the Reign of Christ as we pray for God’s reign to be present on earth as it is in heaven.

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We can begin our thinking about the Reign of Christ by acknowledging that every thought we’ve ever had about God is too small to contain the uncontainable truth of who God is. There are some very confusing theological treatises that I had to read in seminary that tried their darndest to define God in the biggest way possible. And they still failed due to the limits of human language.

When we realize that God is so much bigger than any of our thoughts, one of two things can happen. Either we completely stop trying to understand God at all. Or we consciously reduce our understanding of God down to something that we can understand, no matter that this smaller interpretation is incorrect.

In the first case, we stop trying to know God. We push God so far into the distance that God becomes a speck on the horizon. God may have gotten the universe going but since then has left well enough alone. There’s a fancy word for this inscrutable divinity. The word is “ineffable.” Beyond description. The challenge with this line of thinking, though, is that if you take it to its logical conclusion, then we should not have any understanding of God at all, let alone a limited one. If God is truly ineffable, then why do we have a concept of perfect divinity inside us?

I’ll get back to that question in a minute, but first let’s look at the other case. God is too big, so we reduce our understanding of God until it fits our limited worldview. So instead of God being perfect love, we imagine God loving us in the conditional way our parents did, with all the baggage that can entail. Instead of God being perfectly just, we imagine God through the lens of the Church’s idea of justice, which has often led to the death and domination of entire peoples. You get the idea here. Because we can’t imagine the God who truly is, we resize God to fit our limited imaginations.

Or think of it like this: if you’ve only ever watched a tiny, grainy black-and-white TV from the 1950s, then you would have no idea what it would be like to watch a movie at an ultra high-def 4K IMAX theater. Our understandings of God are like the black-and-white TV.

But here’s the thing. The black-and-white film is just a poor video recording of something that actually happened in living color, in three-dimensions, in real life. God lives and moves beyond and within creation independently of our ability to comprehend this movement. When we catch a glimpse of God’s movement, our limited natures can only capture it as if on a grainy recording. And so our challenge as people of faith is to remember our limits and recognize that God transcends them, rather than boxing God within the confines of those limits.

Okay, we’re halfway through the sermon, and I’m going to bet your heads are spinning a little bit. Let me change gears for a minute and talk about today’s Gospel reading. The famous scene in John’s Gospel between Jesus and Pontius Pilate happens in the middle of Jesus’ trial. Pilate brings Jesus into a private room and questions him. “Are you the king of the Jews?” Pilate asks. This is the limit that Pilate’s imagination goes: this man in front of him might be a political rival for control of the Roman province that Pilate governs. But Jesus immediately takes Pilate on an visionary journey. Jesus’ reign is something so much bigger than the petty earthly dominions that humans fight over. Jesus’ reign transcends imperial boundaries, transcends ethnic and tribal boundaries, transcends every human attempt to separate groups into USes and THEMs.

This, by the way, is why the modern manifestation of Christian Nationalism is a heresy. Christian Nationalism falls into the second trap I talked about above. Christian Nationalism takes the Reign of Christ over all Creation and reduces it all the way down to Christ reigning over one particular territory on one continent on one planet in a single solar system of a vast and ever-expanding universe. And in this heretical reduction, all the violent baggage of death and domination flood back in.

And so, when we proclaim the Reign of Christ over all Creation, we thwart the power of Christian Nationalism that attempts to claim that God blesses one nation uniquely over all others. Because inherent in the idea of God’s blessing is that it is abundant enough to cover all beings everywhere and not just some beings by virtue of geography.

With that said, let’s get back to the first case – our conundrum about God’s ineffable nature. How do we know God at all if God is inherently unknowable? The answer returns us right back to the Reign of Christ. What does Christ Reign over? All of creation. Therefore, all of creation has the opportunity to reflect back, if however poorly, the glory of God. When we turn the eyes of our hearts to the wonderful works of God, seen and unseen – concrete works like the ocean at sunrise and abstract works like endurance in the face of injustice – When we turn our hearts to these things, we know in a place beyond normal knowing that God is. This is the first incarnation – the love of God overflowing the banks of the Trinity to form Creation. And then the Incarnation of the Word made flesh in Jesus points us, even as he tried to point Pontius Pilate, towards the universal Reign of Christ, for his kingdom is not of this world.

The only ways humans have ever invented to get close to describing the true God are artistic ways: poetry, music, painting, dance. As we end this church year celebrating the Reign of Christ, I’d like to share with you one of my favorite poems. In two simple stanzas, the poem sums up the Reign of Christ better than this sermon ever could. The English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote these words in 1877:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

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Photo by Sophia Kunkel on Unsplash.