Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Beatrice, Neb., marked the end of the Church year on Christ the King Sunday, Nov. 21, 2010.

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Readings

Jeremiah 23:1–6
Psalm 46 (antiphon v.10)
Colossians 1:11–20
Luke 23:33–43

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Prayer

Gracious Father, you sacrificed your Son to cleanse the world of sin, to conquer the power of death, and to counteract the forces of the Devil. By your Holy Spirit make us live with joy in this victory and walk in obedience to our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

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Message

This past week in Confirmation class,
we got into a conversation about the Bible.
We talked a little about how long it is,
and so we checked the number of pages
in different translations.

We won’t read the whole book in class,
but we’re making good progress
in our study of the central passages
of the Old Testament.
We began with Exodus,
which doesn’t seem like the normal or natural choice,
because it’s the second book of the Bible and not the first.

But we had a reason.
Exodus tells us about what’s behind its own title:
the dramatic and mighty work of God
to liberate his chosen and precious people
from their centuries of bondage in slavery to the Egyptians.

We started with the birth of Moses
and his mother’s plan to hide him
in a basket floating in the bulrushes,
saving him from Pharaoh’s slaughter
of the young Hebrew boys.

And we read and talked about Moses’ murdering the Egyptian,
his sojourn to Midian to escape arrest,
his strange encounter with the burning bush,
and his life changing conversations with the God of his ancestors,
That God spoke to him from the flaming bush growing on holy ground,
revealing both his name and his plan for his people.

Then we made our way through Moses’ confrontations with Pharaoh,
the ten plagues and the preparations for flight,
the final exodus from Egypt,
the parting of the Red Sea,
the deliverance of the Hebrew people through the waters on dry ground,
and the drowning of Pharaoh’s army in the sea’s churning waves.

And then we heard how God called Moses to come to him,
to climb Mount Sinai and to receive the Ten Commandments.

And right there is where we encountered
one of the key sentences in the whole Bible,
one that we all ought to know well,
even if we do not have it committed to memory.
In Exodus 20:1–3, we read:
“Then God spoke all these words:
I am the LORD your God,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of slavery;
you shall have no other gods before me.”

We hear three crucial messages in this one sentence.
First, God gives us his name,
the one he first shared with Moses from the bush.
When we look at the verses in print
we see that the word “LORD” is printed in capital letters.
That’s not because we should emphasize it when we read it,
but because it’s a way of representing four characters in Hebrew.

These are sometimes transliterated as YHWH.
And because Hebrew is written with no vowels,
those four consonants simply represent the name of God.
On occasion, we see them referred to
as the Tetragrammaton—the four letters.
The practice of the Jewish people is not to speak this name,
because it is holy, and so they replace it in conversation and worship
with the phrase, “The Name.”

So first, we hear God tell us his name:
“I am the LORD—the Name—your God.”
And then he tells us his history,
so that we can be sure who he is.
Which god, from among all the gods that people worship,
whether in Moses’ day or ours, is he?
He is the one “who brought [Israel] out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of slavery.”

That’s the second part, God’s unique history with his people.
No other god has this history—
The LORD alone is the one who rescued Israel.
And then right on the heels of this gospel of grace
comes the third crucial part of these verses.
God gives the people the first and central commandment:
“You shall have no other gods before me.”

In a way, all the rest of the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments,
is just commentary on this first command.
And the other 603 laws and rules in the Old Testament
merely work out the details of this first and great commandment.

So, remember what God tells us:
I am the LORD who rescued Israel from slavery.
No pretenders shall take my place as God.
This Name and the history together tell us who is our God.
The commandment proclaims his place in our lives.

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Today is [the eve of] Christ the King Sunday,
the last Sunday in the church year.
And while the world begins to gear up
for the holiday season with all its lights and festivities,
we come face-to-face with the cross of Christ.

There’s no easing into it, no sugar-coating it.
Two criminals flank Jesus on the road to Golgotha.
The Roman centurions nail him to the cross,
lifting him up to die a cruel and slow death.
Almost everyone mocks him,
taunting and ridiculing him.

And in the face of these final pathetic acts of defiance,
thrown at him by people not so different from you and me,
Jesus has two brief conversations.
One is a short prayer offered up to his Father in heaven:
“Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34, NRSV)

The second is a brief encounter with one of thieves crucified with him.
The thief says,
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
And Jesus replies,
“Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:42–43, NRSV)

Together, these sayings tell us what kind of king Christ is.
He is not a king with a golden throne in a great and vaulted palace.
He does not wear a crown encrusted with jewels.
No crowd bedecked in fine clothes surrounds him.
He does not feast upon the exotic abundance of field and forest.

Instead, he is the king because he is the Son of the Father.
He is a king whose throne is the cross,
whose crown is plaited of thorns,
whose robe is simply a dirty and bloodied loincloth,
whose retinue numbers only a few scared followers, mostly women,
whose feast is the sacrifice of his own body and blood.

And yet, the thief recognizes him
and asks the Lord for grace, for redemption, for rescue.
He says, “remember me,” using the word
we use in the Eucharist,
the word that means not only to recall, to recollect,
but to recall in the way that makes
the past come alive, literally, and to share in the present moment.

This is remembrance—the theological term is anamnesis—
that conquers death through the Lord’s power
to make one reality present and alive to another.
By remembering the thief,
our Lord will make him to live even though he dies.
That is true rescue from death:
life after death and not life that merely postpones death.

And that gets us to the connection
between God’s word from Mount Sinai in Exodus
and our Lord’s word from the cross on Golgotha in Luke.

The LORD God rescued his people from bondage to slavery
and the Lord Jesus Christ rescues his people from sentence to death.

The Exodus of God in the Old Testament
and the Passion of Christ in the New Testament
are the two central parts of God’s history with us, his creatures.
This history tells us who he is and what he does for us.

In a compact and powerful way,
St. Paul summarizes for us this good news in his letter to the Colossians,
chapter 1, verses 13 and 14:
“[The Father] has rescued us from the power of darkness
and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son,
in whom we have redemption,
the forgiveness of sins.” (Colossians 1:13–14, NRSV)

It’s all right there in one sentence:
Rescued, transferred, redeemed.
The Father breaks the bonds of our slavery
and brings us to his Son, Christ the King,
who forgives us our sins,
even though we do not know what we have done to him.

This is what we celebrate today.
This is the kind of king before whom we bow.
This is the nature of his kingdom.
This is the gift he gives to us:
we have been rescued, transferred, and redeemed.

By his grace, we can live peacefully under his rule;
we can bend the knee to Christ the King.
As St. Paul reminds us,
“For in [Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,
and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things,
whether on earth or in heaven,
by making peace through the blood of his cross.” Amen. (Colossians 1:19–20, NRSV)