Christ the King Sunday Psalm 46
(Last Sunday after Pentecost) Jeremiah 23.1-6
22 November 1998 Colossians 1.11-20
St. George’s Episcopal Church Luke 23.35-43
Le Mars, Iowa
The Rev. Karen Wacome, Celebrant
Dr. Donald Wacome, Lay Preacher

Fear and Loving in Las Vegas

“He saved others, let him save himself!” Luke 23.35a

The last Sunday after Pentecost - the last Sunday before Advent - is the feast of Christ the King: the celebration of the authority of Christ over all creation. So consider our Christ, king of creation. Forever in the depths of the past the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, not the monolithic unchanging deity humans might imagine but a community of love that has always been and is yet always new, a community of mutual giving, sharing, subordinating and glorifying in undivided unity; a great eternal dance of infinite joy. This is the true God who called into being what wasn’t and had no need to be. Our creator had no need or duty to create; he’d have been no less good, no less full and complete had he created nothing. But, because his nature is love itself he chose in freedom to bring our world, and with it us, into being. He intended from the beginning the existence of creatures like us, made selves invited to share in the trinity of everlasting, overflowing love.

Fifteen billion years ago: the creator spoke and bursting out of the darkness there was the Great Light (better to call it that than the ‘Big Bang’): it was for our sake. We were not yet but the world was forming itself to be our home: exploding into shape, cooling and growing, the cosmos giving birth to the elementary particles, then the stars that flamed forth for eons and in dying brought forth the stuff of which we would be made. The subtle interplay of law and chance framing the intricacies from which at last the simplest life formed and then, in the fullness of time, creatures of heart and mind and soul, God’s very image crafted of dust and flesh, ready to know and love their creator. Created to join him in the endless joy. The power of creation is the power of love giving itself.

The glorious creator called this universe into being for our sake, so we could share in the fullness of love that he is. But that’s not the whole truth. We must consider the cosmic Christ, king of creation: we read that it is for his sake that the worlds exist, that all things were created for him and through him...in him all things hold together (Col. 1.16-17). This means we don’t see the aim and purpose of creation until we see that it is created for the Christ. Indeed, while it’s not an ‘official’ part of Christian theology, there’s a long tradition that says the creator’s original intent was always to become flesh, to come to dwell in his creation, to dwell among the creatures for whose sake all that is made is made. God incarnate explains the creation. The incarnation of Christ is not a remedial measure, an afterthought, a second best, but the reason for, the meaning of, the whole. Jesus Christ, God incarnate, the king of creation.

And yet: today’s Gospel reading is cruelly at odds with this vision of Christ the king. We see not the glorious creator Christ but Jesus humiliated. Not God as a human being raising all of us into the everlasting communion of joy, but God as tormented flesh cast into the world, despised and desolate. Not creation honored and glorified by God’s very presence within it, the creator mocked, dishonored, brought down. “He saved others; let him save himself!” God the powerful creator, by whom and for whom all things were made, treated as a thing of no account, good for a bit of sport, then disposed of on the edge of town and forgotten. The God whose love caused the cosmos to well up into being from nothing made powerless and destroyed by fear and hate.

We know, of course, that the power of God’s love was not defeated. We know that the weakness held up for all to see on that cross only hid the power of God’s love. We rightly speak of the power of self-sacrificing love, what Jesus on that cross above all symbolizes, because in the end he’s not only the best symbol of it but the reality itself. If we want to see the God whose self-giving love created all things the best place to look is that horrendous scene from today’s Gospel reading.

We know we cannot separate the love from the power; Jesus abused on the cross from Christ the king of creation. But it is hard to keep them together.

Love that gives itself for the other is a wonderful thing even when it is powerless. I haven’t see it more vividly - more poignantly - portrayed recently than in the film Leaving Las Vegas. This is a hard but beautiful movie. Nicholas Cage plays Ben, a once successful Hollywood screenwriter in the terminal stages of drinking himself to death. Having lost all hope, he leaves L.A. and heads to Las Vegas for a final bout with booze that will complete his course of self-destruction. But in Vegas he meets Sera, a streetwalking prostitute (played by Elisabeth Shue). In her own way Sera is as hopelessly self-destructive as Ben. She seems as bent on selling herself to death in rough trade as Ben is on drinking himself to death. These two lost souls cling together as Ben descends into the abyss in an alcoholic haze against the hellish glare of neon-lit Las Vegas. For a time the viewer thinks their love might save them; for a time their closed worlds of pain begin to open up as they give themselves - despite themselves - to one another. This self-giving love comforts, but in the end it doesn’t heal; it consoles on the way to death but in the end succumbs. The love affair was predicated on the agreement that in the end Sera will not interfere with Ben’s killing himself, but inevitably she begins to hope her love has the power to bring him back from the edge. But finally she realizes it cannot bring life from death. The powers of death overwhelm them both and she says “I love you enough to let you die.” And he does.

Leaving Las Vegas is a great film. Hollywood so often sells consoling fantasy about the human condition but here it unflinchingly shows hard truth. The best we have to give each other is not enough. We can save neither ourselves nor one another. There is loving in the Las Vegas the movie portrays but it cannot cast out the fear. Only the power of God can do that. Only the power that brought the worlds into being from nothing can bring us out of death into life, out of weakness into strength and out of fear into hope.

Ben and Sera’s self-giving love is a worthy thing, fragile and ultimately hopeless though it is. When all is said and done it is perhaps the best thing we humans on our own are capable of. But the love Ben and Sera have for one another is a love that cannot draw on the power of Christ the King. Jesus does not just die for us. He does not just give himself for us. His life and death is a power greater than whatever we fear. Today as the Advent of the Christ approaches we have reason to celebrate him as King of Creation, the resurrected Lord of all that is.

Our faith is not mere consolation. We celebrate the presence of Christ with us this morning because we trust in a love that is mighty in its power, a power that speaks to our weakness and takes away our fear. Christ our suffering savior, Jesus our powerful creator and king, alone has the power to heal all that is broken in us and redeem all that is lost. Let’s ask for ourselves what St. Paul asked for the Colossians: may we be strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power. Amen.