Christ the King, Sunday 23 November 2008

Like a refreshment stall temptingly positioned somewhere in the twenty-fourth mile of a marathon, the feast of Christ the King beckons the unwary as they enter the last week of the Church’s year. Its imperious title suggests that the last seven days can be run with omniscient warmth in the heart and a royal spring in the step. Christ is King, after all, and with that dynamic assurance the purple wastes of Advent are so many puddles to be vaulted over on the way to the rapture that indubitably awaits. However, if a long-distance runner succumbs to the lure of the refreshment stall, takes a rest and enjoys a long cold beer when he has a mile of his course still to run he’ll find that last mile longer than all the preceding miles put together. A similar fate awaits those who too readily take refuge in the seductive promise that because Christ is King all is necessarily well. And maybe I’m becoming wise, or maybe I’m becoming cynical, but I am refusing the comforting blandishments proffered by today’s feast and, feeling neither omniscient nor royal, am approaching the end of the year with a sense of dissatisfaction.

I am at risk of sounding more like a chairman giving an end-of-year report than a priest proclaiming the Gospel, and I apologize, but it’s me preaching today rather than James or Mark because it had been our hope that today we would bring to an end our Giving Campaign for 2008. You all know the facts. Increased basic costs mean that for St Peter’s simply to keep going as it always has we need to find an additional £30,000 in 2009. If we want to achieve the relatively modest new ambitions we have set ourselves then we need to find an additional £38,000. The need is therefore urgent: but I am unable to tell you today that we have met it. Circumstances that no one could have foreseen or overcome mean that the Campaign’s mailing has only just gone out. I remain very confident that we will raise our income and plug the hole in the budget, but at the year’s end I regret that we have not done so already and as we had planned.

It had also been our hope that we would go into Advent with a new sound system in Church, one that would enable the many people who will worship here in the next month to participate in that worship in a more effective way, perhaps even by actually hearing the preacher. This is occasionally thought to be a good thing. Although we have identified the system and the supplier that we would like, we have also discovered unexpectedly that its introduction into our building will require a faculty from the Chancellor of the Diocese. Again, I am confident that we will obtain the faculty and that the system will enhance what we do here, but I regret that it will be 2009 before I am able to address you without the risk of the microphone dying or the speakers booming.

I could go on, and point to other areas of our common life where we have not achieved what we have set out to achieve within the time-frame we had set out to achieve them: hence springs my year-end sense of dissatisfaction and of a job only half-done. But if we cannot help how we feel, we can help what we do with our feelings. What might I do with my sense of disappointment?

Ignore it, I suppose, and preach a different sort of sermon, telling you that the plan all along had been to delay the Giving Campaign until Advent when people are in the mood to spend money, and that the new sound system was always destined to be part of our Lenten adventure. Or get angry, blame the PCC, blame the printer, blame the Diocese and inform the Assistant Priest that he will be preaching on Christ the King.

Or, or – draw breath and think for a moment about today’s claim. Christ is King. Of course he is: every breath in our lungs, every sinew in our bodies, every drop of blood in our veins compels us to this conclusion: that in Christ is all authority ultimately vested; that in Christ all history finds its meaning; that in Christ the nations will be one. Christ is king. Yet look at the chaos and agony of the world which is his, a world stalked by injustice and violence, a world where evil runs unchecked, a world where innocence is put to the sword every hour of every day. Look at all that and acknowledge that while Christ is King his kingdom is not yet Christ-like.

To commit to the proclamation that Christ is King is to commit to dissatisfaction, to disappointment, and to a sense of a job half-done. To proclaim that Christ is King is perpetually to reach the year’s end unfulfilled. For to proclaim that Christ is King is to proclaim that the kingdom has not yet come and that in the forests of the Congo and on the streets of this very city it sometimes seems an awfully long way off. And to proclaim that Christ is King is to respond to our dissatisfaction at that distance not by ignoring it and not by getting angry with it, but by learning humility in the face of it. Christ is King is a shout of triumph, but it is also a call to action. It is a defiant statement of hope in the face of human sin, but it is also an indictment of human sin. It starkly holds before us the scale of the task that is ours, the task of working alongside the God who was, who is, and who is to come, for the Earth’s redemption.

The year is ending, there’s no shiny new PA, and we face a deficit next year. I - we - must learn to plan better and to deliver on the expectations we raise. But Christ the King convinces me of disappointments and dissatisfactions which dwarf mine ten thousand times over. Christ the King propels us into the season of Advent and compels us to pray the Advent prayer with greater urgency than ever: ‘Come, Lord Jesus’. And Christ the King bids us transform this world to make it one fit for a King.

Stir up, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people… Amen.