BIGGER AND STRONGER

Feast of Christ The King

John 18:33-37

November 24, 2024

Jesus replied, “You say that I am a King. I was born and came into the world for one purpose — to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who seeks the truth hears my voice.”

When I ran my business, I always resisted the urge to have a “Customer Appreciation Day.” Now, don’t get me wrong! I really appreciated my customers. They paid the bills, they paid my employees, and they put food on my family’s table. And that’s why I didn’t want to have only one special day to show my appreciation. I feared that in the minds of my customers, as well as my employees, that if only one day a year was set aside to say thank you, then what did we do the rest of the year: NOT appreciate them? I don’t think so! I would tell my employees that EVERY day was Customer Appreciation Day. And that made a big difference in how we conducted our business.

So, pardon the little smirk on my face, when the church announces that today is a special day to honor Christ. Oh really? What about the rest of the year? In my daily life, I work hard to recognize Jesus the Christ is all around me. In all the little things I see and do, I want to know Christ and know him in a continually deeper way.

But I have not always thought that way. Like many people, I suppose, for a long time I thought Christ was Jesus’ last name. I thought that God had created the world many billions of years ago, and then decided to “send” Jesus down here to straighten things out. The truth of course is that the Christ is God and has been active in our world since the very beginning. Christ was with the Creator at the Big Bang and continues to move and have meaning in this veil of tears.

Jesus is the embodiment of the Christ. Jesus came into this world to show us how God, the Christ, wants us to live and love. And he even went so far to accept a death on the cross, only to rise to show us that God’s love cannot be constrained by evil. Love wins.

But (why is there always a ‘but’?) the world has not quite lived up to its end of the deal. Jesus the Christ showed us the way, and yet war, violence, greed, hunger, loneliness, prejudice and all sorts of evils persist. Throughout history, humankind has attempted to put God in a box. Instead of celebrating that we are each made in God’s image, we tried and tried to make God into our image. That never has worked out very well, but it hasn’t stopped us from trying.

Dr. Barbara Holmes once said, “The Creator does not come as we expect. The Spirit does not move under our command. When we expect divine intervention in one way, it usually comes in another. We expect the warrior king to set things right, God sends a baby in a manger. We expect wrongs to be punished, God extends grace and mercy to all.”  1 

I try to embrace that unexpected advent of God. I’ve learned to look for the unexpected and to see Christ’s hand in it. It has allowed me to have confidence that the world my grandchildren will inherit from my generation has a good chance of being a better place than the one I live in now. That may sound rather pollyannish, but I really do believe that. Because I believe that the love of Christ is bigger and stronger than anything out there that may be strutting around.

Richard Rohr, in his Essential Teachings on Love, wrote, Faith in God is not just faith to believe in spiritual ideas. It’s to have confidence in Love itself. It’s to have confidence in reality itself. At its core, reality is okay. God is in it. God is revealed in all things, even through the tragic and sad, as the revolutionary doctrine of the cross reveals!  2

Having confidence in love and hope is what gets me through the day. Knowing that Christ became the embodiment of love and walked on this earth gives me optimism that I can do little things to make this world a place where love can, and will, grow. I want to bear witness to the Good News that is Jesus the Christ and find a way to connect with others in a quest for solidarity. In all the little things I see and do, I want to know Christ and know him in a continually deeper way.

Every Day.

1.     Adapted from Barbara Holmes, “Ancestral Wisdom, Community Wisdom, and Discernment of the Spirit,” Wisdom in Times of Crisis, May 6, 2020, Center for Action and Contemplation, YouTube video, 8:06.

2.     Adapted from Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, selected by Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), 25. 

© 2024 by Timothy J. Doppel

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