Sermon on Daniel 7:9–14, Revelation 1:4b–8, and John 18:33–37. Preached at Becker’s St. Peter’s Lutheran, Fleetwood, PA.
The people of St. Bartholomew Lutheran Church knew exactly what they wanted in a pastor. Good preaching, engaging worship, children’s ministry, and tending the old Swedish traditions of the congregation. What they got was Pastor Jane. She looked right at first. But preaching wasn’t really her strong suit. Children liked her, certainly, but she didn’t really know what she was doing there either. Her idea of engaging worship was a little out of the ordinary. And those old traditions? Well, Jane noticed that the church’s neighbors didn’t know those old Swedish traditions. They brought other traditions from Mexico, and if we wanted to attract them to church, we’d better think about replacing the Santa Lucia pageant with Las Posadas.
If she’d had some tact, Jane might have had an easier time with new ideas. But subtlety wasn’t in her vocabulary, so it always felt like she was running uphill. The congregation tolerated her, mostly, because they knew how things would go. They’d done it all before. Saint B’s was a notoriously difficult congregation, and every five or so years, their pastor would start looking at greener pastures, and they’d be back to the search once again. So there were plenty of folks who didn’t like Pastor Jane much, but they knew they could just bide their time.
And sure enough, in January of her fifth year at St. B’s, Jane wrote out her resignation letter. An angry battle had broken out over something so unimportant that nobody remembers what it was anymore. The church threatened to split. And the way battle lines were drawn, Jane knew that if she just left, the problem might fix itself. She had a vacation scheduled, so she decided to leave the letter unsigned until she had some time to think about it. She would make the decision after her vacation.
What an ugly mess. Same with our world and its politics, our lives and their conflicting needs: Everything seems to pull and tear at us until we can’t even breathe. We need some hope. So unhelpfully, the Bible gives us today’s readings, confusing visions that make little sense.
There are many frameworks that can help us understand what is going on in the Bible, and one of the most important is the promise of the Messiah. Now, we know what the Messiah is: The one who came to save the world. But we have the benefit of hindsight. We know the whole Jesus story. But the disciples, and the rest of the ancient community of Judea, had a very different idea.
See, Judah was such a small country, in the scheme of world politics. It had no power, no wealth, no greatness as far as the nations were concerned. Among the hundreds of thousands of records dug up by archaeologists, there are perhaps less than a dozen that refer to the Israelite nations. They are barely a footnote in history books. It is no surprise, then, that shortly after the year 600 BC, when Babylon was looking for a better trade route to Egypt, it decided to take this useless land for its own.
Its own people would never rule it again. The Babylonian Empire became the Persian Empire and the Ptolemies and Selucids and Hasmoneans, the Greeks gave way to the Romans, and the Byzantines, and the Ottomans. One oppressive kingdom followed another. That’s the problem the books of Daniel, and later Revelation, address.
Imagine what it would be like, living a miserable life as a poor peasant in a forgotten corner of someone else’s empire. No wonder stories of people like Moses and Ruth and the great Israelite kings became so important. They reminded us of better times. If only those days could come back, when we had the strength and power of David, or the wisdom and riches of Solomon. The days when God loved us and cared for us. The days before we sold ourselves out to the values and gods of other lands. Oh, then life would be good again!
And so the author of Daniel writes about an Ancient One, God’s own self, pure like wool and powerful like flame, taking up the throne in the midst of thousands of thousands of thousands of loyal subjects. God would judge the kingdoms of this world and find them wanting. And where one oppressor one gave way to another, now God would appoint a new ruler over all nations and peoples and languages, uniting them in one great kingdom, a kingdom which would never end. What a hopeful vision that would be!
So the people hoped for God to bring “one like a human being” that Daniel promised: The Messiah, the savior, the actual LORD. And Jesus’ followers hoped that he would turn out to be that Messiah, defeat the Romans, drive them out of Israel, set up the throne of old King David once again, restore the temple to its old glory (getting rid of those false priests in the process), and bring God’s people back to a perpetual golden age where hope would never run out.
And so Pilate turns to him and asks, “Are what they claim? Are you the King of the Jews?” This is the moment, the ultimate showdown, where Jesus is supposed to rise up and defeat this Roman governor, the beginning of the end. He has been handed over, and why? Pilate challenges him. “What have you done?”
What has Jesus has done? He walked on the sea, and quieted a thunderstorm. He fed great crowds with almost no food. He taught with great authority, and was able to answer any question his enemies asked. He was powerful. And he used that power to…
Well, not to get rid of the Romans, no. In fact, occasionally it was a Roman centurion or the like who benefited from his work. He cast out demons and healed the sick. He raised people from the dead. Shouldn’t this Messiah, the leader of the new kingdom, be gathering the troops and preparing to rout the enemies?
“Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answers, “My kingdom is not from this world.” The kingdom that Jesus represents doesn’t follow the world’s rules. It ignores power and wealth and wisdom. It pays attention to those who are weak, or poor, or foolish. The great crimes Jesus committed that got him arrested? He refused to follow worldly expectations, used his power to benefit others instead of himself, rejected worldly wealth and instead surrounded himself with friends and with love.
It is precisely this inversion of kingship that makes him the Messiah, the savior of the people of God and of the whole of creation. Had he been the king that we expected, that we wanted, that we begged for, Jesus would have been just another tyrant, gathering wealth and power for himself, like every other king or emperor or president or prime minister or senator humanity has ever had—even the ones with the best values and intentions. For God knows well that power corrupts, and so only through giving up all the power and glory and wisdom and might can God truly defeat the powers of corruption once and for all. And we who are in love with corruption and power and greed do indeed condemn him to death. And even then, God does not behave the way we expect.
St. Bartholomew’s knew exactly what to expect. Just like the eight or ten pastors before, Pastor Jane would pack up her things and let them look for some new leader to dislike. But when she figured out what was going on, she knew why God had sent her there. She knew her own shortcomings, but she also knew that pastoral care was her real gift. And so she stayed, and allowed people to fight, and just loved and cared for them while they did. It got worse before it got better. But she started going to people’s homes, acknowledging her part in the fighting, asking for forgiveness, offering forgiveness, and always dwelling in love. To have a pastor admit imperfection was uncomfortable for most, and they didn’t know what to make of it. It certainly wasn’t what they expected. But that fact alone changed things.
That was five years into her ministry. After twelve years, Jane retired, leaving the congregation in a much stronger place. She showed them that even when things get difficult, they are worth loving, and of course, that God’s love for them won’t ever leave. God who is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, who is and was and is to come, will ultimately defeat their expectations, and maybe, just maybe, they can love in unexpected ways as well. As they have. It wasn’t an easy decision, but their new pastor is bilingual, and they’ve starting a Spanish-speaking service, and they are growing.
In the earliest days of the church, the creed, the statement of faith that we shared, was all of three words long: “Christ is Lord.” In an independent society, we’ve forgotten what that means. We think sometimes that it means adhering to the values and ideas of some generation past, returning to a golden age of morality where God’s Law reigns supreme. But there is no golden age. There is is only one age: God’s age, in a kingdom where God’s Law is simply God’s Love, ruled over by Jesus Christ, a living Lord, a God who constantly defeats our expectations, telling us that our neighbor should matter more to us than our own success or wealth. That earthly values are being replaced by a heavenly kingdom of love that, if we look carefully, we can already see. That death has no power over us, and so we have the freedom to live without fear, in hope, working not to turn the world upside-down, but to show the world it has already been turned upside-down by the royal rule of Jesus Christ.
I would challenge you, as we move into the Advent season this week, to consider what expectations you might have about God’s kingdom, that Jesus might be asking you to release. And how might you live in a way that forces others to question their worldly assumptions, and start to see God’s kingdom breaking forth all around us?