Prop 29b.06.                                                  November 11, 2006

Today, the Church Year culminates
        in the Feast of Christ the King.
But who is this Christ we call the “King?”
Is it the Christ of the Gospels we read about in the Bible,
        the historical Jesus reconstructed by scholars,
        or is it the Resurrected Lord known to the apostles
                and still known to the Church
                        through our ongoing experience of him;
        or is it the prophet Daniel’s eschatological character
                who will come in glory someday

                        – a Jesus we haven’t met yet?

Christ the King is all these.
Jesus is a reality with many levels.
Christ of the Gospels is the foundation of what we know,
        but the foundation is just the beginning.
There’s so much more!

Our knowledge of him has grown with the centuries.
We can see our deepening and expanding knowledge
        in Orthodox icons, in the visions of Julian of Norwich
               and the songs of Hildegaard von Bingen,
in the novels of Shusaku Endo, Edward Hays, and Graham Greene,
        and the theology of Rowan Williams, Kathryn Tanner,
               and Edward Schillebeeckx.

Just as an example, when I returned to the Church,
        I cautiously, tentatively accepted Jesus
               as a shamanic spirit guide.
Years later, through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola,
        Jesus had become my friend, my brother,
               and my personal Savior.

In time, that warm intimacy waned.
And now he has become to me – not a faded memory –
        but a mysterious presence.

I cannot know much about him,
        cannot see him, cannot feel him as I once did.
But I still trust him, still trust in my mysterious friend
        even when the only ties I have to him
               are faith and the sacraments.
As St. Thomas Aquinas put it,
“Humbly I adore thee, Verity unseen,
         whom thy Presence hidest neath these shadows mean.”

That’s how Jesus led me into the mystery of himself,
         became to me “the Cloud of Unknowing”
                  where I can only trust and hope.

Christ, just from my perspective, is deep, rich, and complex.
But my perspective is a drop in the bucket.
I once saw a reproduction of a classic icon

         – the Christus Pantokrator, Christ the Ruler of Creation.

If you glanced casually at the icon,
         you just saw the face of Jesus,
         but if you looked closer, you could see
         it was made up of dots like on a dot matrix printer.
But each dot itself was another icon,
         and not a little version of the big one,
         but each one, a different unique icon of Christ.
Some dark, some fair, of different ethnicities
         from different lands and different centuries.
Together the countless tiny icons constituted the face of Christ.

My Jesus is just one of the tiny icons.
So is yours. So was St. Augustine’s. So was St. Theresa’s.
Christ is vastly more than any of our images.

He is vastly more than the historical Jesus.
He is nothing less than the sacred heart of the world.
Yet, this Christ is not other than the historical Jesus.
The wounds are still in his hands and side.

Christ is high and deep and wide,
         omnipresent like a cosmic force field;
yet he isn’t an abstract principle or an impersonal energy.
He is a person, the same one who forgave sinners,
        ate well at parties, told odd stories,
                  and washed the disciples’ feet.

In this person, we see the form and destiny of creation.
He shapes reality itself as DNA shapes an organism.
The great scientist-theologian,
        Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called him the Omega Point,
                 the end toward which the Cosmos is evolving.

Weigh that if you will.
The destiny toward which the whole Cosmic has been evolving
       for billions of years is not a state, not a principle, not an idea

                 – but a person – a person with a human history –
       even one who has been homeless,
                 one who has been convicted and condemned.

How strange and wonderful is this faith of ours!
We dare to believe the meaning and value of all Reality
       is not a principle, but a person

       – not really a person, but rather the one true person
                 of whom all our individual personhoods
                          are tiny fragments

        – the person from whom our personhood derives,
                 in whom our personhood is rooted.

This Christ-person is the King of Creation,
       and his kingship lies in this:
All our seemingly chaotic selves
       are part of his great Self.
He is the great icon in whom your face and my face
       find their place.

That’s what the Rite 2 Post-Communion prayer means by,

        “We are living members of your Son.”
How strange and wonderful is this faith of ours!

For some of us, it may be too strange and wonderful,
        too paradoxical, too unsystematic,
                too removed from liner logic and common sense.

That’s absolutely ok.
The Christian faith is a feast we don’t have to swallow
        in one huge gulp.
Take a smaller view of Jesus if you must.
Each of our pictures of Christ can find its place
        in the great icon, the Cosmic Christ,
                 beyond any of our reckonings.

Read the Jesus Seminar and learn from the moral teacher
        some of them believe in, if that is the point
                where you can connect right now.
Or let your Christ be the name in the Jesus prayer,
        or the hero of the Gospel stories,
                or the novels of Shusaku Endo or Edward Hays.

Venerate the Son of God in a Greek icon.
If you are more philosophical or scientific,
        maybe it will be the Christ Teilhard called
                the Omega Point.

It isn’t that these images are all right,
        certainly not that they are all equal.
Some visions of Christ are decidedly better than others,
        but we have to start somewhere.
So we start where we are.

But whatever your understanding of Jesus may be right now,
        don’t settle for it.
Christ is a deep and wonderful mystery
        who cannot be fathomed in many lifetimes.
Just stay open and let him reveal himself to you
        in ever new flashes of grace.

                                                     Amen.