A sermon for the last Sunday of the year for two small congregations in rural Warwickshire
November 24th 2024
This is the last Sunday of the liturgical year. Next Sunday, Advent Sunday, begins a new liturgical year with a new cycle of readings. The whole lectionary cycle comes to this – the conclusion of all the readings, all the prayer of the year, all the praise we have sung, all we have learned – it all leads us to the conclusion that Jesus Christ is Lord and King. So today is known as Christ the King Sunday.
Our worship is structured the same each week. What changes are the readings appointed for each week. Those readings inspire us to sing different praises each week. Those readings affect the way we pray each week and those readings inspire different preaching for each week. They give us our seasons: seasons of Christmas, Epiphany, Lent and Easter. They give us “Ordinary Time” and they give us this time which is slowly being recognised as “Kingdom time”.
I don’t know how the readings have been chosen but the pattern of readings has become so established that we can say that the lectionary we use is the same as is used throughout the Church of England and within the other denominations including the Roman Catholics across the world with very little variation and few exceptions. We can be confident that the readings we’re taking to heart today are the same ones worshippers in Coventry Cathedral, at Our Lady & St Wulstan Church in Southam, in the churches in the Netherlands, in Jerusalem, Hong Kong, Africa etc. Joe Biden, King Charles, Archbishop Justin, will all be engaging with the same texts alongside worshippers in Ukraine and Russia. And all of us are coming to the same conclusion today – that Jesus Christ is Lord.
The lectionary follows a three year pattern. The years are A, B and C. Each year focuses on a particular gospel. Today is the last Sunday of year B when the focus has been on Mark’s gospel. Next year (next Sunday) we will turn to Luke’s gospel, and the following year we’ll be with Matthew again. Readings from John’s gospel are interspersed throughout the three year cycle.
The readings account for our faith. They describe our faith journeys and our life journeys, from beginning to end, from alpha to omega, from the germ of faith, from being strangers to becoming friends – all the way to being his beloved followers, choosing the way to live for the kingdom of God, letting the way of Jesus be the governance for our lives. We’ve turned to Christ. The liturgical year accounts for how we got to that point and helps us to get to that point of acknowledging that the king of love my shepherd is.
The king of love is not like any other king. We have a king – Charles. We can’t help having him as king. Without him there would be no United Kingdom. The government is his. Keir Starmer is his Prime Minister. He’s king for all of us whether we like it or not. We pray that the king of love will be his love so that he may be a king of love himself. We have history to show us the dreadful consequences of the rule of those who aren’t ruled by love.
The king of love never forces his rule on us, and neither does he force his rules on us. We can choose to follow them or not.
We can choose him, or choose the rule of others. And when we do choose him we choose a rule unlike the rule of any other kingdom. The rule of the kingdom is love which puts the last first, which finds the lost, which treasures the least and smallest and promotes them as the very model of discipleship and faith. The entry requirement is that we have to change and become like little children to enter the kingdom of God. Jesus pictures entry the size of a needle and only the smallest get through.
These are the rules we discover in our reading of scripture day by day, Sunday by Sunday – making new discoveries all the time about the ways of the kingdom of God and the way of the king of love. He’s the king who insists on service, not lordship. He’s not spared suffering – in fact he embraces suffering for our sake. He goes to the heart of the suffering of his people, taking on their wounds, persecution, oppression and pain, showing his way through them – the way which refuses the use of the sword, which endlessly forgives, which subjects enemies to his love.
This is the way that took Jesus to Jerusalem – on a donkey, not a motorcade. This is the way that ultimately sees Jesus’s throne on the cross, just like other criminals and enemies of state, pilloried and crucified. And there on the cross, reigning supreme to the last divine breath, and suffering agony and torture, he is ironically crowned, “KING OF THE JEWS”
This is the way through it all. This is the way of the king of love who shepherds us through the valleys of our lives when death overshadows us. This is the way of the king of love “whose goodness faileth never”.
This is the rule we follow, the way we follow through our lives when we follow the way of Christ the King, when we follow Jesus as his disciples.
So we come to the end of the year full of praise for Jesus and prepared for committing ourselves afresh to live for the kingdom of God and all its ways of love, on earth as in heaven.
In this week’s newsletter Margaret has drawn our attention to the collect from a time before this Sunday was ever called Christ the King Sunday. It’s the collect which gave this Sunday the name “Stir up Sunday”, the cue to start stirring our Christmas puddings. It would be a strange thing if our year’s work culminated in the first stirrings of a pudding! It’s not about stirring our puddings, but stirring our wills to live for the kingdom of God with Christ our king. “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people”
Let’s sing.
Grits and Grains 