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A weekly sermon podcast from Ojai, California. Grounded in scripture and open to the world, these reflections invite you to listen, wonder, and live the story.
There is a strange and tender paradox to this feast day:
We celebrate Christ the King, the Reign of Christ.
And yet the Gospel we just heard
does not shine with gold or power or triumph.
We hear no coronation trumpet,
only the rough scrape of hammer on iron,
the murmur of soldiers dividing clothing,
the desperate breath of a dying man.
The Church, in her deep wisdom,
doesn’t protect us from this contradiction.
She puts the word king on our lips on the same day
she puts the cross before our eyes.
It’s as if she’s saying: Look again.
This is what the Holy One means by sovereignty.
Luke takes us straight to the skull-shaped hill.
There is no escape hatch of triumphalism here.
Just three crosses, three dying bodies,
and the kind of silence that falls in the presence of terrible things.
And yet -- here is where kingship is revealed.
Jesus is mocked with a sign: This is the King of the Jews.
They mean it as a joke. A taunt. A little graffiti of empire.
But Luke lets the irony stand, because on Golgotha,
God is rewriting the definition of king.
A true king is the one who refuses to save himself so he can save others.
A true king reigns not from above but from among.
A true king does not take thrones; he takes wounds.
And it’s not only Luke telling this story today.
Jeremiah stands beside us,
shaking his head at the shepherds who have failed the flock –
leaders who scattered, neglected, devoured.
He has seen it all: kings who hoarded, kings who fled,
kings who sold their people for advantage.
And into that shattered landscape,
Jeremiah dares to speak a promise:
A righteous Branch…
a shepherd who will gather…
who will execute justice and righteousness.
Not a king cut from the same cloth as the others.
Not another ruler with a fragile ego.
But One whose reign is rooted in God’s own steadfastness.
If Jeremiah gives us the yearning, the ache for a true shepherd,
then Paul gives us the scale.
Because by the time we reach the letter to the Colossians,
the Church has begun to understand something staggering:
that the shepherd promised by Jeremiah, the crucified king of Luke,
is also the cosmic Christ --
the image of the invisible God…
the one in whom all things hold together.
The Gospel says he is lifted up on a cross.
Colossians says he is before all things,
through all things, sustaining all things.
We hold both at once, trembling a little,
because this is the mystery at the core of our faith:
the One who flung the stars across the sky
is the One who wears a crown of thorns.
And the Psalm gathers it all into a single breath:
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
Not a distant help. Not theoretical.
Present -- especially in the trouble we would rather not face.
Friends, I don’t know what “kingship” calls up for you.
In our world, that language can feel anachronistic, even problematic.
Monarchies still wound. Power still corrupts.
Authority is still used to intimidate or exclude.
So if “king” makes you flinch,
I want you to hear the redefinition happening in these readings.
For Christ, kingship looks like:
the refusal to abandon the vulnerable,
the rejection of violence as a solution,
the courage to forgive even while nails are still in the hands.
Christ’s throne is not elevated.
It’s dug into the earth.
Christ’s power is not in domination.
It is in self-emptying love.
That’s the kind of ruler humanity has never been able to produce --
which is precisely why God chose to reveal divine sovereignty in this way.
And then there is the thief.
The one who saw all this clearly.
While the crowd jeered and the soldiers mocked
and the other condemned man flung curses,
this one stranger turned his bruised head toward Jesus and said, simply, “Remember me.”
There is so much theology in those two words.
He does not ask to be rescued, or vindicated, or granted a favor.
He asks to be remembered.
To be gathered.
To be held in the heart of this dying king.
And Jesus, in the midst of pain,
speaks the most royal thing he ever says:
“Today you will be with me in Paradise.”
It is a promise spoken from a cross, not a palace.
A promise given to someone with nothing to offer.
A promise that reveals the real location of the kingdom:
with me.
Wherever Christ is, the kingdom is dawning.
Which means the kingdom is not only ahead of us.
It is unfolding in the very places we think are godforsaken --
the ICU waiting room, the immigration hearing,
the flooded town, the lonely apartment,
the place in your life where something feels crucified.
Christ reigns from there.
The cosmic hymn of Colossians presses this home:
This Jesus, nailed to wood,
is the One in whom “all things hold together.”
Not some things.
Not the spiritual things only.
All things -- atoms, galaxies, human hearts,
fractured communities, wounded histories.
He is stitching all of it toward reconciliation.
And here’s where it lands for us,
this last Sunday of the church year:
If this is what God’s kingship looks like,
then the shape of our discipleship must be different too.
We do not follow Christ by clinging to power or certainty or prestige.
We follow by standing where he stands --
in solidarity with the hurting,
in compassion for the forgotten,
in defiance of the forces that crush and scatter.
We follow by practicing the kingdom:
quiet mercy, steadfast hope,
courageous truth-telling,
hospitality without calculation,
forgiveness that reopens the future.
In a world obsessed with winning,
Christ teaches us to love.
In a world hungry for spectacle,
Christ invites us to hidden faithfulness.
In a world that crowns the strongest,
Christ blesses the meek.
This last Sunday of the church year is a hinge.
Next week we start again with Advent --
with longing, with waiting, with a sky about to open.
But today we stand at the end of the story,
looking back at everything Jesus has revealed,
and ahead to everything he is still doing, and we say:
Yes.
This is our king.
This crucified one.
This cosmic one.
This shepherd who gathers, reconciles, remembers.
So let the world do what it will.
Let the nations roar and the mountains shake, as the psalm says.
Our refuge is not in a system, or a party, or an empire.
Our refuge is the One who reigns from a cross
and rises with the whole creation in his hands.
And the kingdom -- his kingdom -- is already breaking in.
Quiet as breath.
Steady as mercy.
Strong enough to hold all things together.
Amen.