The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ: B 23-24

Daniel 7:13-14 | Revelation 1:5-8 | John 18:33b-37

Almighty, everliving God, whose will is to restore all things in your beloved Son, the King of the Universe, grant, we pray, that the whole creation, set free from slavery, may render your majestic service and ceaselessly proclaim your praise. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

It’s clear that this God that we believe in, the God that created us is a God who has an intense longing for you and for me to find fullness. He created us in a way, I think, to fulfill a  longing of being loved and loving someone like him. Remember Adam and Eve. When God created Adam, he found that he wasn’t enough by himself. He needed a partner. He needed Eve. When God created the universe, it seems that he got to a point where he felt like, “I wanted to create, along with everything else, all the beauty, the majesty of the creation of the universe and the world and the animal world and insect world, all of that —”  But he wanted someone in there to be like him, and then he did something to distinguish them from everyone else. He gave them free will. You can make choices. “I will not force you to do anything. You can do all that I ask you to do, or you can do absolutely the antithesis of what I ask you to do. It’s up to you.” He didn’t give that to any other aspect of his creation. So what does that say to you and me about who we are? We are absolutely a unique gift, given by God who created us and this gift carries an enormous responsibility.  

You often think that it would be easier — at least I often think it would be easier if he didn’t give us free will, and we could just do what we’re here to do.  And like the animal world, we would just exist, but what we wouldn’t have then is — without free will, we wouldn’t have the creativity that we are able to have. To be able to choose is more than making a right decision of whether something is right or wrong, but free will has everything to do with being able to come up with something that no one ever thought of before. And think of the creative energy that has been manifested in the world in mostly recent times. We see human beings being able to do the most amazing feats, whether it’s solving the problems of a pandemic in lightning speed, coming up with a vaccine that nobody ever thought could ever be designed and produced in such a short period, whether it’s the success we’ve had with technology or space travel or whatever you look at. There is just an amazing capacity in human beings to be more than we ever thought we could be. It’s just kind of a wonderful way of imagining human nature, all this potential in seed form inside all of us, and one of the things that we need with a free will, like we’ve been given, is we need direction.  

We need somebody to guide us and direct us in the way that we should go, because we have so many questions. Where did I come from? What’s this world about? Why am I here? What really matters to me? And it would be, I think, cruel of a God that would say, “All right, I give you this capacity to ask all these questions, but I’m not going to give you the answers.” Well, he does want to give us the answers, but not like other answers have been given by other leaders, meaning sometimes we have leaders in our life — sometimes it’s a parent; sometimes it’s a religious leader; sometimes it’s a boss; sometimes it’s a whoever — that could care less about what we think or what we feel — the impact of what they’re saying to us. But they will tell us, “This is what you have to do.”  And I would call that control. And there’s nothing in human nature that responds very positively to control, because it somehow feels wrong, because it denies one most important aspect that God created in each of us, and that’s the freedom to make our own decisions, to create our own world, all of that.      

And so how does God then fulfill his responsibility to take care of us? Not by controlling us, not by telling us what to do. The only real commandments that God gave us are ten very simple rules, and when you look at them, they make total sense to our human nature. Human beings have always needed a power greater than themselves. So to say that we need to believe in a God, we need to spend time with him, we need to use his power in the way that he intended it to, that makes total sense, or that there are things that we need to do in relationship to each other. We should honor the promises we make. We should honor the people that give us life. We shouldn’t steal. We shouldn’t kill. We shouldn’t lie. We should not envy and want things that other people have to the point of being dissatisfied with ourselves. All of that makes total sense. So those rules to me never feel like they’re controlling us. It’s just they’re awakening us to who we are.  

But let’s face it. Living in the world today, more than any other time, we have voices all around us that try to tell us what is real, what is true, and the thing that’s so unique about this Feast of Christ, the King is that we are celebrating the fact that we do have a King, someone who has power over us who could do anything he wants, in a sense, because he created the whole world. But what he does and who he is, is so radically different than we see so many rulers that are in the world today and have always been in the world, where they become tyrannical and completely disregard one’s individual human freedom. Then we have a God that believes and trusts in our human nature that he created, that deep inside of us we have a capacity to make the best possible decision about any situation that comes up.  We have that in us in a seed form, but what he does, what he promises to do, as our King and our leader, is given to us in the gospel when he is standing before Pilate and there is this question: “So you’re a King?” Jesus said, “Yeah, I am a King. You say I’m a King. I am a King, but my kingdom is different from your kingdom. My kingdom is a kingdom of truth, not power over people but truth. What I came into the world to do was to awaken people to who God the Father truly is.” He is a God who has a gift for every one of us, and the gift is he will speak to them, share with them the essence of who he is. He is truth. He is reality. He is the source of everything that is.  

It’s all — all of this is a reflection of who God is, and you and I are reflections of him. But the thing that is so unique about us, that I love so much, is that he has asked us to be co-creators, co-partners with him in the world as it unfolds in the work that he has as a teacher, as one who shares the truth with everyone.  He said, “I want you to be the recipient of my truth, but I also want you to be the one who brings truth to other people.” So we have this flow of — I call it the flow of life. It’s the flow of the truth. If we live in a kingdom of truth, and truth is the thing that is the most core ingredient in everything we do, that’s going to bring us to the place that we, as our very nature has created us to be, that we’re going to find a life of fullness. The fullness of our life is not the way we often think it is. We think fullness might be being the strongest, the most powerful, the most in control, the most effective in controlling other people. All those images that we have sometimes about what it means to be powerful, I guess, needs to be tempered with this voice inside of us, this divine voice that comes in and says, “I want to talk to you. I want to share who I am and who you are with you, and I want to give you the wisdom that you need to make your own decisions.” Isn’t that interesting? In the kingdom of God, God does not want to make our decisions for us. That’s what a lot of leaders do. “You all think this way. You all believe this way.” No, no. He wants you and me to make a decision based on the truth that he shares with us, and what that truth that comes into us through whatever means God is going to use — sometimes it comes through another person; sometimes it comes through an angel. We have these beings all around us that are speaking to us, giving us advice, giving us direction, opening our eyes to see things.  

We also have a community of saints, all these dead people, so-called dead people, that are around us, and one of the things I’ve learned is how wonderful it is to trust in the voice of those that you’ve known who have died. We’ve always been taught to pray to the great saints that we know are in heaven, and there was always this fear of turning to somebody who wasn’t in heaven and asking them to guide us because they’re involved in another world that is, let’s say, in purgatory, or they’re in hell or whatever. Think about it. We were always told to just pray to the great saints that were canonized, but it doesn’t make any sense to me that we wouldn’t pray to my mother, my father, my brothers, my sister that died. Anyone in my life that has died, I would want them to be the one giving me insight, and they want to, and they do. Everyone’s had experiences with the dead that are so real, whether it’s in a dream or in a vision or whatever. They want to talk to us, and all these images that I’m using of talking to someone is the image of the truth — the truth, the truth coming.  

And here’s the thing that I love about our human nature. Our truth, how do you know it’s true? That’s the most interesting thing, and you know the truth, because you are made in a way that is absolutely hardwired to respond positively to truth and to respond negatively to that which is not true. Do we really need to be told it’s wrong to lie or to steal or to kill? No, that makes total sense. That’s what our nature is. We’re just used to that in a really primitive kind of way or a really over-simplified way to say that, when God is — when you’re struggling with an issue, “I’ve got to make a decision. What’s the truth in this situation? How do I adapt to the situation that I’m now in so that I can find peace, or how do I give to another person the peace I wish they had? What do I do? What do I say?” When we have all those kinds of questions, we don’t know what to do. Ideas come in, and they come in from all different places. Different voices are out there all around us. In fact, there’s probably a voice out there on the Internet or somewhere that — it sounds official — that will tell you every conceivable way in which you should handle a situation, and let’s say the majority of those are going to be disasters.  

How is it that you can hear a voice and know that it’s God’s voice, know that it’s God’s voice coming to you through an angel, through a deceased person, through another person, through a situation, through a song you hear, whatever? There’s a million ways in which God will be speaking to your soul when you’re struggling with something that you have to make a decision and you don’t know what to do. And here’s how you know that it’s true: it’s because there’s something already in you that is the truth, and when those two connect, when that voice that comes to you from whatever form that God wants to send it to you, connects with that thing that is placed deep inside of you. That’s when you make the decision.  That’s when you know what to do. 

Jeremiah said it so, so powerfully. When people kept looking for rules and laws to follow and, “How do we know what to do, and who do we turn to, to give us the direction we need,” he said, “Well, look, God’s doing something for you. He’s going to take his rules, his laws.  He’s going to write them on your heart, and if they’re written on your heart, then when you hear them echoed back and it connects with that thing that’s already written inside of you. You know when you have a voice that tells you something, “This is the right thing to do,” and all of a sudden — it’s not because of who they are or their authority. It’s all of a sudden you’ll say, “Oh, my God, you’re right. That’s it. I feel it. I know it.”  What is that? Well, we can call it conscience. A conscience is that gift we have deep inside of us that we already know the truth, and so when somehow the voices come that are conflicting from outside of us, we go to that inner voice. The inner voice says, “No, this is the way this has got to be done.”  Okay, that’s the same thing I’m talking about. We can use the word conscience. We can use the inner voice. We can use the seed of the truth in us. It’s all the same thing. It’s this great, incredible gift that you and I have.

And how do we make ourselves more sensitive to it? What do we do? Well, first of all, we believe that I have deep inside of me a knowledge of what’s real and what’s true in seed form. It needs to be awakened, nurtured, developed. We believe that there’s a God who wants more than anything else for us to listen to his voice. So we have a God, a Father who is speaking to us constantly. If you want a model of what it’s like to be in a relationship with this God, look at Jesus. Whenever things got tough, what did he do? He went away and talked to his Father. Whenever we have a hard decision to make, what do we do? Go to the Internet and look it up. No. No, we go to inside, to the Father’s presence inside of us and just take time, and I think the most beautiful thing that God would ask from you and from me, to be able to listen as openly as possible, is first and foremost we have a willingness to say, “I don’t care what it is that is going to be the answer. I want it to be right. I want it to be the most effective thing.” If you can get yourself in that disposition where you don’t have a prejudice, “Please don’t let it be this, or don’t let it be that,” — no. “I’m open to whatever it is that I am supposed to do in this situation.” And then wait and listen and wait and ask again, and go to authorities that might help you with understanding the issues involved. The church has always been that sort of wonderful source of wisdom when it comes to moral issues, particularly in difficult issues, and you need to get the information that’s necessary to make the right decision.  And that can be done objectively through going to read something or to study something.  

All of that is important, but nothing is as important as believing that you have voices that come to you from God directly, his voice indirectly through other spiritual forces, and they’re there to do the work of awakening you to this kingdom of truth. And there’s nothing like it. When you have a conviction that is so clearly yours and you feel it resonating through your body, you’ll know that you’re in the kingdom of God. And does he keep you there all the time? No. And is there reason for doubt and for struggling to find the truth? Yes, because every time we’re in a struggle and we go back to find it, we discover another aspect of it. It’s like this beautiful diamond that keeps moving and twisting around, and another facet hits your eye and another facet, another aspect. What a gift. What an incredibly wonderful gift to have that promise of our Messiah, our King share his wisdom with you and with me whenever we ask.