My father-in-law was a tile mason by trade. But by vocation, he was really a man who made things with his hands. Tile work was just the particular way he earned his living. He could make all kinds of things with his hands—out of wood, block, and tile. He was gifted that way, the way Joe McKell could make things with his hands, or the way John Hier could make things out of wood. Joe Derenthal could make things out of wood and tile. Beautiful things. Enduring things.

 

All of the nicest pieces of furniture in my house, he made. He made the big clock above our fireplace. He made the cedar chest, the hope chest, that sits at the foot of our bed. He made it for Emalee before she graduated from high school, before she had ever met me. It is a beautiful piece of work. Seamless, at least to my eye. And strong. Every piece of it tight. Strong enough to support me when Emalee was out of the room and I climbed on top of it to change the light bulb in the ceiling; to her horror, to my shame, when she came into the room and caught me standing on “Daddy’s cedar chest”.

 

He made the rocking horse. He made one for each of his children, at the arrival of their first child. It seems to me that it’s all one complete piece of wood, as if he carved it out. Pieces hold together and mold together so well. It’s just a beautiful work of art. It may be the most valuable material thing we have.

 

If you looked in his garage (which he built with his own hands), which was his workshop attached to his house (which he built with his own hands), the garage was, at least to the untrained eye, kind of a messy place. All sorts of things here and there, gathered about saws and tables, and all of these jars and pots in which he held glues, bonding agents. I was surprised, as I watched him in the process of making things, to discover how much glue or bonding agent was a part of the making of things. He would mix glues together to make something stronger. Something that would particularly hold tile in place. Something else that would hold wood in place, and something that would hold a particular kind of wood in place.

 

When he put things together with glue or with nail, they held the spot. He had something on a marble table once that I wanted to move. I said to Emalee, “I think I’m going to move that.” She replied, “Daddy glued that there.” I knew that meant not only that it was sacred, but also that anything I did was not going to be able to move it. When Joe Derenthal glued something in place, it stuck. He could hold stuff together.

 

As different family members gathered in our home for Thanksgiving, one of the things they did late Thanksgiving night was to get out a photo album. It’s a photo album that Emalee and I started putting together 28 years ago, when we first got married. I started putting it together back then, when we had pictures that you put into albums. Now we digitally affix them in a folder on the hard drive. They stay better that way, I think. But there, in this photo album, these pictures that I had glued in place were all coming apart. Twenty-eight years later, the glue was coming undone. And the pictures were sliding to and from the pages, so that baby pictures that should have been on one child’s page were sliding into another child’s page, looking like we didn’t know which baby belonged on which page. And family members from the Derenthal clan were slipping over and fraternizing with family members out of the DeBevoise clan. It was just all disordered. When I glue things, they come undone. They don’t hold together that way.

 

I wanted to make a piece of furniture once. Maybe out of envy of my father-in-law. Or maybe out of the good motive of wanting to be a little bit like him. I told Len Conley this, back in the early 1980s. He was a saint in this church who has now gone on to be in glory. He could make things with his hands, also. I guess he took pity on me, and he said, “I’ll help you.” That was the saving grace of it. Together, we built a coffee table. It’s a good, solid table, mainly because he led in the building of it. One of the things we did when we made it was to start with glue. “This kind of glue”, he said, “will really hold stuff together.” That coffee table is still held together now. It’s consigned to my son’s apartment in Tallahassee, but it’s holding together.

 

The Colossians text this morning lifts up Jesus as the glue. Paul says that Jesus is the thing, the substance, the person, the glue through which God holds all things together. Paul says Jesus is the glue that God uses to hold you together with one another, in the body of Christ. Paul says that Jesus is the glue by which God holds you together with the communion of saints across the ages. Paul says Jesus is the stuff, the glue, the person, by which God is holding the full universe together.

 

In Colossians, Paul says like any good craftsman, God knew that the starting point was key. Joe Derenthal knew that about tile work. That first piece of tile that went onto the floor, it had to be sure and stay solid. If not, the whole floor would shift forever.

 

Paul says that at the beginning of creation, in ways that we can only seek to try and understand, God used Jesus as the starting point. Everything else is held together through him.

 

You may in some way, in your own journey, have known someone who for you was a kind of a glue. Have you had somebody in your own life who sort of, in one read or another, held things together for you?

 

A good high school principal can do this. A good high school principal can hold together the teachers and the students with a kind of a leadership and a vision for who they are trying to be as a community. He can serve as kind of the glue that bonds the community together. Even better sometimes, a good assistant principal can do this. With an eye for detail and an attention to what has to be done, a good assistant principal can be the substance that keeps all of the parts in connection with each other, held together.

 

Who has been glue for you in your life?

 

This is Christ the King Sunday. I know you’ve been looking forward to it. (I’m teasing you.) It happens every year. Christ the King Sunday is the last Sunday of the church’s liturgical year, the church’s calendar, the church across the world. It doesn’t have the same calendar as the world. The start of the church’s calendar is not January 1, but the first Sunday in Advent. The church’s liturgical year begins with the journey towards Bethlehem. So the last Sunday in the church’s year is always the Sunday before the first Sunday in Advent, which is this Sunday. And this Sunday is called “Christ the King Sunday”. The Sunday when we remember in the hymns we sing, and the anthems we proclaim, and the scriptures we remember, that Jesus is King. Jesus is King.

 

And you thought Tebow was king? He does look undefeatable. And you thought that University of Tennessee was king? They are amazing. And you thought, at least out of this weekend, that the University of Arkansas was king, but LSU may still have something to say about that.

 

But the church says Jesus is King. Once a year, on this Sunday, the Christian community, your brothers and sisters in the faith before you across the ages, in their collective wisdom to you, want you to remember that Jesus is the King. And this is the Sunday, as we end the year, when we remember it and recall it and say it to one another, and proclaim it to the world. Christ is the King.

 

Why? Well maybe because when we end the year and we see the disorder of the world around us, the world that looks like things are coming apart, that looks like things are in a million little pieces, it’s important as a way of nurturing faith to the church to proclaim to the world and itself, Christ is the King.

 

Why? Well maybe because on the threshold of Advent, the right positioning of ourselves is to remember that Jesus is the King, and that the One who is coming is the One who is going to serve as King.

 

Now you are Americans. I know in part that means that your own political historical heritage has preconditioned you to kind of be leery of kings. You’re a people who threw a king out, right? You got rid of a king. Nevertheless, your faith heritage is that Jesus is the one in charge. Jesus is the authority. And it is this vocabulary that served the world, in the largest parts of the world, for the longest time. Jesus as King is the one who performs those functions that the good king performs, that brings order to the kingdom. Who, like the good king (not the bad king) brings benevolent service to the people. Jesus as King is the proclamation that Jesus is the one whose vision gives purpose to the land. Jesus is the king who, like the good king could do for a people, brought a sense of identity to the people, so that they were inspired to service and to action.

 

Jesus is the King. And he does those things for us. The gospel tells us today that Jesus is the King, albeit in a different way than people usually sees kings. Jesus is the reliable and welcome antidote to the disorder and chaos that we may see in the world. Jesus is the bonding agent, the glue, that holds everything together. Including you. Including your lives and your relationships with one another.

 

Colossians says at the very beginning God used Jesus as the key starting point.

 

In this new order, this order that Jesus brings, this healthy way of living, you will find the old things displaced: death, fighting, and poverty. Jesus’ reign ultimately will push these things aside, and his will and his way will be toward us. Verse 17 says, “All things are held together through him.”

 

This passage from Colossians is more poetry, I think, than reasonable explanation. It’s a beautiful sweeping passage in which it says that God has reassigned you as citizens. God has reassigned your citizenship with the Jesus event from this world into the time, the place, that Jesus is ushering in. You’ve been transferred. That’s the language here in Colossians. You’ve been reassigned now to the authority of Jesus. And it is Jesus who motivates you and who gives you your marching orders. And it is Jesus you look to for your direction. Jesus takes you out of the arena of death and disorder into the new arena of the resurrected and renewed and reconciled life.

 

The world needs this. The world is thirsty for this reordering. This purpose that brings order out of the chaos and the death that the world so often sees and has to contend with.

 

Here’s the interesting part, for me. In the gospel passage that Nicole read, Jesus is talking about this kingdom to the people around him, Jesus turned to them and said, “The kingdom begins within you.” Within you. This is where the glue holds first—within you. This is where the centerpiece first adheres to start the ordering process—within you. In the inner confidence and the inner guidance. In the comfort that it brings to your own life intentions. In the serenity that it can bring you in the midst of trouble. In the confidence that it can bring you to face the future. In the self-esteem that it can give you to know that your identity comes from being someone who is loved by God and claimed by God and commissioned by God to follow the authority of Jesus Christ. That is where the glue holds first, within you.

 

Seeing Joe Derenthal’s garage, his workshop, at times it looked to me like it was all chaos. I remember I got to see him making this rocking horse, and I wondered at times, “Does he know what he’s doing?” It’s a silly question to me, because he demonstrated it again and again. But the wood wasn’t bent the right way. And I didn’t see the shape of a rocking horse in there anywhere. Some pieces were on one side of the garage and some on the other. For plans, he would take the thickest old pencil and just sketch stuff out in scribblings that I couldn’t even read. But as I watched that rocking horse come together, all of a sudden one day what looked like chaos in that workshop suddenly began to look like a piece of art. A work of art. It suddenly took shape, and it hadn’t been chaos at all. But in the glue, and the wood, and the work of his hands, it always had purpose.

 

So it is with the kingdom of God. And Colossians says God will prepare you with the patience to live this way. Even in the midst of the chaos, to live with the kind of order that God is bringing you through Jesus’ authority in your own life. God will equip you with the patience you need to do this.

 

You know, I learned something about patience from Joe Derenthal. I always thought that patience was something you had to bear. Something you had to endure because you couldn’t get things done as quickly as you wanted to get them done. So you had to be patient. But in retrospect, it’s clear to me now that in the workmanship of his study, of his office, of his workplace, he was patient not because he had to be, but because it was better that way. It just was better. When it was done with patience, it speaks to the intentionality and the purposes that the Maker intends.

 

The woodwork took shape in the garage, and what looked like chaos began to be ordered until even old pieces of wood shown with a new glow. And then slowly, patiently…perfection.

 

In the Colossians text, the faithful (that’s you)… the saints, the apostle says, and we’ve been trying to tell you since the first Sunday in November, that you are the saints. The people that God is calling to be the body of Christ in the world. In the Colossians text, the apostle says that the saints are prayed for, they are encouraged, and they are called to live as witnesses to the world around them with patience that God’s order is breaking in. That in the midst of the chaos where things may seem like they are flying apart, God is shaping things into the workmanship that reflects his authority and his rule.

 

Your living is a kind of a proclamation of that truth. And the saints are called to live that as a kind of witness and a testimony, as if they are already being built into the new creation, which indeed they are. As if their citizenship belongs to a different authority, which indeed it does.

 

With patience and with time, God’s work becomes apparent in us.

 

Seminarians know this. As they live through the last semester of their final year, they are called sometimes to churches, and then they know where they are going to go and serve. But until they do, they don’t know where they are going to be. But once that search committee has come and knocked on their door and said, “We feel God calling you to come and work amongst us,” and the seminarian can say, “So do I….” Then for the rest of the year, regardless of what they are doing at the seminary, they are living in Greenville, or in Atlanta, or in Tampa, or in wherever it is they are going to be serving. They are living already in communication with those people and that place.

 

High school students know that as they wait and see where they are going to be the year ahead. They feel the burden of people asking them, “What are you going to do? Where are you going to go?” And then one day the letter arrives that tells them that they’ve been accepted to a certain school, or to a certain academy, or to a task that they want to go and be a part of, with their hands and minds. And then all of a sudden, they are in that new place. It’s as if they are living there already. As if they are already part of that new order and that new identity.

 

You are the advanced guard. You are the people who are the first citizens for the order that God is bringing out of the midst of chaos. Colossians tells you that as you live this out, in the world of living out Jesus’ kingdom, you will meet resistance, both from the world and within yourself. And it will be work to make this witness. But it is good work. It is the Master’s work. It is God’s work.

 

Today we celebrate Christ the King Sunday. Celebrating it on Sunday morning is easy. Living it out in the week, that’s where the work begins. May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power. May you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. He has rescued you from the power of darkness and transferred you to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, though visible or invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Including you.

 

 

©John T. DeBevoise 2007