I am really grateful for this Sunday. This is the Sunday after Thanksgiving and it is not the first Sunday in Advent. It doesn’t have to be that way. Sometimes the first Sunday in Advent is immediately the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and then when it happens that way, we are decking the halls and all that jazz pretty quickly while we are still putting away the turkey and the stuffing into the refrigerator. But this year, and next year as well, we have a Sunday between Thanksgiving and the first Sunday in Advent, and it feels like there is a little more space in my life. And that feels good. I hope it does to you, as well.

 

But don’t let your calendars be dictated solely by the secular world, who would try and fool you into believing that Christmas begins immediately following Thanksgiving. Lean on the Church’s calendar, which says that you still have another week of grace.

 

We are able to focus, on this the last Sunday in the liturgical year, on the Sunday which is called “The Sunday of Christ the King”, the Sunday that lifts up the notion that Jesus is the King. The first Sunday of Advent begins the Church’s year, and the readings enter a new cycle. The Gospel reading will change to the Gospel of Mark as we bring that to a close, having concluded, really, with reading this text about Pilate and Jesus as King on this Sunday.

 

This last Sunday of the year focuses on the notion of Christ being the King. That’s a good thing to focus on at the end of a liturgical year.

 

That’s why it is sort of a surprise to me to have learned from Bill, at the end of the week, really just this morning, that the notion of liturgical practice of the last Sunday of the year being Christ the King Sunday didn’t really get instituted until the first part of the last century, around 1920. That’s fairly recent in the life of the Church. It’s a surprise to me that the Church began to together embrace this emphasis on the last Sunday of the year, Christ the King, because that’s about the time that we really kind of got done with kings, isn’t it? You all don’t live with kings any more. Not in this country, anyhow. You’ve reduced the notion of kingship to a mechanism for selling hamburgers.

 

If I say “king” to you, you’re likely to say “Kong” back to me. You got rid of kings back in 1776, didn’t you? You don’t suffer kings any more, do you?

 

The Christian year says Christ is King. But you speak of a personal relationship with Jesus. Isn’t that the vernacular that we have used over the last hundred years? You don’t talk about Christ being the King; you talk about having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I know you are familiar with this phrase, and it seems particularly a relatively modern one to me.

 

“Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus?” we are inclined to ask one another. What do you mean, you modern people, when you say that?

 

Now when you said “Jesus is King,” I knew what you meant then. But what do you mean when you just ask, “Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus?”

 

I want to tell you, as one of the Biblical students in what I hope is a fellowship of Biblical students, this is not the way the Bible speaks. You tell them, Pete. Tell them if you go to any electronic Biblical search engine (which have sort of replaced most of the book concordances now), go to biblegateway.com, for example, that’s a very popular one, and type in the word “personal relationship” and see how many hits you get for it in the Bible. In fact, I was only able to find, out of all of the translations of the Bible that I could get access to, which was a bunch (I’m talking translations here, not paraphrases. And remember, a translation is where they seek to accurately translate the Word.), I could only find one translation that had any hits for the word “relationship” in the Bible at all. That was the NIV, the New International Version, and it only had “relationship” show up four times in the scriptures. Only four times, and three of those were in the Old Testament. And one of those was about sexual relationships and two of them were about learning to be good neighbors. In fact, in all of the translations, there is only one translation that has one reference to this notion of personal relationship with Christ or God in the way in which you use it all the time. And that’s the NIV in the Letter to the Romans, in the second chapter verses seventeen and eighteen, and it says, “Now if you rely on the law (this is the apostle speaking to the Jewish community around him), if you rely on the law and because of your adherence to the law, brag about your relationship with God, aren’t you really breaking the law by bragging?” Maybe you should have held onto kingship.

 

Maybe you should have held on to kingship. I mean, it’s only used once that way in the entire scriptures, that I can find. But when speaking of the encounter with God as the Kingship, or Lordship, now this is a scriptural basis. The Bible prefers “king” to “relationship”. If you type the word “king” in the NIV, the same version, you get 2,559 hits. If you type in “lord” or “lordship”, you get 6,712 hits, usages in the Bible as the four for “relationship.” The Bible wants to talk about a “Lordship.” The Bible wants to say, “Jesus is King.”

 

But I keep hearing you talking about your “relationship.” What’s the difference?

 

Well, “Lordship” is about a ruler. “Kingship” is about understanding who is in charge. And that’s why we have Christ the King Sunday at the end of the liturgical year, and not Personal Relationship Sunday. It makes a difference, doesn’t it? Because ultimately we need a God who is in charge. Ordering, sustaining, reconciling, redeeming.

 

So the Creed says to us, the creeds of the last century even, “Jesus is Lord. He is Lord at the beginning. He will be Lord at the end. Even now, He is Lord.”

 

Jesus is King. And yet, let me cut you a little slack, because I’m a modern, too. I’m maybe a little more human than most of you. And yet, we are not wrong to desire the relational, you moderns. You of high technological sophistication understandably desire high touch. There is great truth in the warm evangelical piety which describes salvation as “coming to know Jesus.” Coming into personal relationship to him. Reaching for the metaphor in which we know Jesus as a person, and in which Jesus knows us as a person. The truth is, we experience a personal encounter in our relationship with God. The truth is, out of our own spiritual journey, our own spiritual walks, we experience a personal encounter with God.

 

And that’s why the scripture may give us clues to this not in the word “relationship”, but in other kinds of phrases. Like the psalmist saying, “Yea, though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, Thou art with me.” There is the personal relationship.

 

Or in the resurrected Jesus meeting Mary in the garden, calling her by name. “Mary…” and her responding, “Rabboni, Teacher…”

 

Is not the incarnation the story of a God who personally is becoming known to us, connecting with us? Indeed, it is. And so Jesus says to the thief on the cross, in a highly personal statement, “Today, thou shalt be with me in paradise.”

You’re not wrong. The Bible does speak of this connection. Of this highly personal known-and-being-known relationship. It just doesn’t use the word relationship. And it insists on saying, “Jesus is King.”

 

So here’s the truth, I think (and you knew I was headed this way, didn’t you?). It’s not either/or relationship or lordship, but both/and. A relationship with the Lord. Christ is the King, and Jesus is our friend. Both these things are vividly true.

 

We rejoice at the ordering Lordship of Christ. We rejoice at the personal care of Christ. Both of these things are true.

 

But here’s a caution for you, and maybe a reason to end the year focusing on Christ the King Sunday rather than Personal Relationship Sunday. Here’s a caution for you. Your relationship with Christ is not your possession.

 

Sometimes it seems to me that it can become kind of popular or a temptation for us to list a personal relationship with Jesus as one of the things we have, one of the things we need right after a good pedigree, and a bright education, and a safe bank account, and a personal relationship with Jesus. That’s kind of what secures one in the fellowship of the community around us, isn’t it? It makes me shudder a bit.

 

You don’t have relationship with Jesus in the same way that you have a Toyota. You don’t have a relationship with Jesus in the same way that you have a measles inoculation.

You don’t have relationship with Jesus in the same way that you employ a cook.

 

Virginia Brown’s father, Aubrey Brown, was a great Presbyterian writer. A great Christian thinker, really. He’s gone on to glory now. But he used to edit a periodical that many pastors and ministers read every week in the life of the church. He wrote this once, and I clipped it and saved it in my files, for this day I think. “The Christian faith is not just the system of doctrine, but rather an acknowledgement of a personal presence.” A vast personal presence. A transcendent personal presence. But a very certain personal presence. There must be behind, and in, and amongst, and through all of the goodness we encounter in the universe, something personal. Something supremely personal. Certainly a sovereign presence. Certainly. But nonetheless (and this is the miracle of the incarnation that brings us Jesus Christ), a personal presence.

 

No one is going to ask you, Do you have a personal relationship with Julius Caesar? There lots of historical figures. But no one is probably ever going to ask you, Do you have a personal relationship with George Washington? No one expects it.

 

But they do expect it as a possibility that you might have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. And that is because we understand it to be a present relationship. A living relationship. Again and again and again, in every century, across two thousand of them, and with God before that, people have experienced the phenomenon of this relationship with Jesus Christ. This demonstration of God’s love in the life of Christ as we encounter it there elicits a relationship from us. It calls forward a relationship for us, so that it is more accurate, rather than to say, We have a personal relationship with Jesus to say that In Jesus, God has pulled us back into relationship with God’s self. Christ was in God, reconciling the world to himself.

 

Do you know who I think got this really right? It was Francis. You know Francis. You’re singing his stuff every year about this time. Francis had everything and gave it up because he thought those things were getting in his way in trying to follow God. As he walked through the world, trying to follow God by helping hurting people, he connected particularly with the beauty of the world around him. He saw this relationship with God in nature around him. It’s not the only place to see it. And he doesn’t always reveal it fully, but he saw God there again and again and again.

 

When he saw the sun shine on oranges a certain way, the way I did yesterday running along Swann Street. It made him feel like he was close to God. And when he heard water running down to the stream, or perhaps along the shore, it made him think of being in relationship with the Creator.

 

And when he saw the birds fly across the sky, or the goodness of the earth, it made him feel that he was connected with God. So he wrote this song, this poem, “All Creatures of our God and King, lift up your voice and let us sing. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!”

 

And the point is, you see, that when we are aware that God is reaching out and encountering us, then suddenly we can’t help but be aware that God is bringing us into relationship with our brothers and our sisters and the world around us.

 

There is no relationship with God unless there is relationship with all of God’s creatures.

 

©John T. DeBevoise 2006