From the Rector

Dear Friends in Christ,

This Sunday is the Feast of Christ the King (it’s also our Kirkin’ o’ the Tartan with the bagpipers). It’s an interesting feast in that it is a relatively new one in our liturgical calendar. It was instituted by the Pope in 1925 in the face of the rising nationalism which would bring Benito Mussolini to power in Italy.

In instituting the feast, the Pope stated that all people and all of the gifts of mind, heart, and spirit are ruled by Christ alone—not by the petty tyrants on the rise and noisome demagogues on the stump.

The Anglican collect for the day begins with the words, “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people…” Second, some old pudding recipes require the pudding to sit for several weeks before being cooked. This Sunday became a day that people would traditionally begin preparing pudding for Christians, which includes “stirring it up.”

Whether it is the challenge to human authority or the call to be stirred up, this is a day—just before Advent begins—when we are reminded that the call of Christ is a call for our whole lives to be lived in obedience to Christ. That is a call that will necessarily and inevitably stir us to live in new and radical ways—in ways that are hardly secure.

In the Church, we often call God a King, or Father, or Lord. We do this not as a way of saying that we expect God to live up to human notions of what it means to be any of them but as a recognition that God is the fullness and fulfillment of all those titles. We know kingdoms will fall even as the Kingdom endures. We know that fathers will too often abuse or abandon their role, yet we have been welcomed to call God Father by Christ as brothers and sisters.

We use these terms because they give us some insight into the nature of God even as we know God cannot be described or circumscribed by those human ascriptions. Being citizens of the Kingdom means that we know the fullness of any definition that we use for God; each of them is swelled to the fullness of their potential meaning in God.

So the use of the phrase “citizens of the Kingdom” must mean not only that we expect God’s fullness to illuminate the words we use for God but that our lives will illuminate the fullness of what it means to be a citizen for the world around us.

Citizens of the Kingdom are called to know the fullness of the promises of God and to make them known.

When we live as citizens of this state we are called to reveal, to work for, to proclaim the nature of justice, the fullness of equality, the essence of freedom. These are terms that begin to describe just what God’s Kingdom might look like—and are a charge to the citizens of the Kingdom to live into.

These terms have their essential promise in the nature of God's call to his people—in how we care for and sustain one another. So we live knowing that we fall short of their fullness and yet we strive to make them realized, lived, and embodied.

The terms do not describe things as they are. They describe things as they might be. They are promises and potential and that we can celebrate even as we get back to the hard, hard work of making them known. This is work being stirred up for those who follow Christ the King.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert