This week people, religious or not, are reminded to give thanks. We may or may not take time for this, but gratitude is a wonderful and transformative practice. Recently, early one morning, I sat down with my coffee and my phone on our cream colored couch. This was, admittedly, a terrible idea for a guy like me. Thankfully, our couch is still the same color it was before I sat down. As I sat there scrolling, I felt the strong urge to put my phone (but not my coffee) down and begin to recall things in my life for which to give thanks. I wasn’t thinking of Thanksgiving, rather I was feeling overwhelmed. I had a lot to do but had been sick for about a month and lacked the energy with which to do it. But while my do-to list was long, the truth that became apparent the more I sat there in silence was that I have a very long list of things for which I can and should give thanks. I’ve been given so many gifts. So many. I could have missed that transformative moment, however, because gratitude often requires silence and memory. But the longer I sat, the longer my list grew and the more my perspective shifted.
Today, according the American secular calendar, is Thanksgiving. (Canadians celebrate in October. We’re ahead of the curve). If we’re lucky, we will feast with family and friends today. But it’s important to realize that this coming Sunday, according to the church calendar, is a different kind of feast – it is Christ the King Sunday. Yesterday Marisa went through the sanctuary of our church and changed the liturgical colors from green to white to prepare for the feast. Aside from being a feast day, it is also, for Christians at least, the last Sunday of the year. Our New Year begins on the first Sunday of Advent, not January 1st. As Stanley Hauerwas succinctly writes:
"Christians live in a different time than those who do not share our faith."1
Among other things, this is a political declaration. Our watches, spiritually speaking, are not set to the time of the ‘powers that be.’ We are a people, therefore, who can speak a different word about what time it actually is. Hauerwas one more time:
“Too often the political significance that Herod understood all too well, is lost because the church, particularly the church in America, reads the birth [of Jesus] as a confirmation of the assumed position that religion has within the larger framework of politics. That is, the birth of Jesus is not seen as a threat to thrones and empires because religion concerns the private.”2
To speak of Jesus’ birth is, of course, to seasonally get ahead of ourselves. But this coming Sunday, the last Sunday of the year, has its own political implications. As my friend Preston Sharpe (
) points out, unlike most feasts, Christ the King didn’t begin until 1925. And what was 1925 like? He writes:“In 1925, the world was in an interesting place. Mussolini was in the middle of his reign in Italy. A young Adolf Hitler was causing a stir with his recently released Mein Kampf, and the world was experiencing the first stirrings of a ‘Great Depression.’ It is in such a world that the Church declared the need to end the year remembering that Jesus Christ is Lord. There are no ‘lords’ above Him.”3
To speak “Christ is King” is not mere private devotion. Rather, it is to remind ourselves, the world, and each other, that all is not as it appears to be. It is to confess, amidst whatever sadness and heartbreak we experience personally or communally, but also amidst the wars, fires, floods and famines, that:
Christ has died
Christ is risen
Christ will come again
Jesus reigns over all things now.
Preston wisely and with great pastorally sensitivity wrote:
“For many in our congregations, it may have been a tough year, and they may be ready for it to be over. For those, it is appropriate to make that declaration this Sunday.”4
I have a friend who, after a particularly hard year, burns the previous year’s calendar. I’ve been thinking about that as Sunday approaches. There is a kind of resistance in this act. It is a refusal of resignation to what has been. Whatever pain this act represents, it is also an act of hope – what has been is not what is to come. And I wonder, on a week when the world tells us to give thanks, if it isn’t also a good week for some who’ve experienced a terrible year to consider burning the secular calendar (or whatever other practice that sits well with you) when the memories that come in the silence make you weep and instead of smile, and to confess amidst the flames “Christ is King,” as we prepare, together, to enter the season in which we learn to say “Maranatha! Come quickly, Lord Jesus.”
So, let us give thanks and gather around our tables and feast today. This is beautiful and right and good. But let us also prepare for the feast this coming Sunday where we come to the Lord’s Table and confess that whatever has happened this past year, good or bad, Jesus is Lord, and all things, even the most terrible, will be transformed by him. The dictators and warlords of the world do not have the last word. Neither do the dreadful things that happen to us or those we love. Christ, the King, has the last word. Wrongs will be set right, and as Julian of Norwich, who herself lived through times of great distress reminds us:
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
Therefore, let us keep the feast.
Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2010), 174.
Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2006), 38.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/139087123
ibid.