Thomas J Parlette
“A Portrait of the King”
Jer. 23: 1-6, Col. 1: 15-20
11/24/19
How about this for an idea – let’s just skip the holidays this year. Sounds kinda tempting doesn’t it? Drop out of sight this Wednesday, right before Thanksgiving – hibernate like the bears do – and pop back up on Thursday, Jan. 2nd of 2020, just in time for the weekend. Avoid the holiday hoopla altogether. No crowded stores, no out of control parties, no stale Christmas letters, no anxiety about finding the perfect gifts, and no stretched to the limit credit cards. And of course, no extra holiday pounds to work off either.
It’s sort of tempting to leap over these next few weeks and simply settle in for a long winter’s nap a little early.
Well that fantasy actually formed the basis for a movie called “Christmas with the Kranks”, based on a book by John Grisham called “Skipping Christmas.” Tim Allen plays Luther Krank, a man who is incensed that his family spent over 6,000 dollars on the previous year’s Christmas, and now they have nothing to show for it. With his daughter in the Peace Corps, he convinces his wife to skip Christmas this year, and put the money towards a Caribbean cruise. They decide to forego the parties, the Christmas tree, the lights, the Christmas Eve bash and any participation in the neighborhood decorating contest – in in which all the neighbors put an identical Frosty the Snowman on their roofs.
The movie revolves around how the neighbors react to their decision to skip the holidays, in particular the Dan Ackroyd character – the man who organizes the streets Christmas lights, and who gets mad at the Kranks for ruining the Frosty display.
But is it easy – or even possible for that matter – to really skip the holidays? The Kranks discover that their decision unleashes enormous consequences for their neighborhood and their own family. I admit, it’s not the best holiday movie out there, but I like Tim Allen, so whenever I run across it, I watch it anyway as part of my holiday rotation,
For us in the pews on a Sunday morning, the idea of skipping the holidays, or at least all the fuss and stress that comes with the holidays, raises a deeper question to consider. The question of what really matters during this upcoming holiday season. How should we approach these next 6 weeks so that we aren’t hurried and rushed, over-extended and stressed out, grumpy and out-of-sorts.
For, truth be told, I don’t think any of us really wants to skip the holidays – we just want to make sure they ARE what they were MEANT to be – that is, Holy Days.
We don’t want these next 6 weeks to be a blur of parties and presents, pumpkin pies and candy canes with only a maxed out credit card to show for it all, do we?
I don’t think so. I think we’d all like these “holidays” to be “Holy Days” – days that find us ready to celebrate the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the Good Shepherd who comes to us as a child in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.
You probably noticed from the bulletin that today is Christ the King Sunday. The last Sunday of our Church year. I’ve always thought it appropriate that we end our liturgical year on this Sunday right before Thanksgiving. It’s good to end the year with songs and offerings of gratitude. Our lectionary passages also mark the passing of the church year in 2 ways.
Jeremiah paints us a portrait – a portrait of the new King who is coming.
And Paul, in his letter to the Colossians, gives us a song – a song to sing while we wait.
God’s word came to Jeremiah – and God was not happy. God was especially disappointed in King Jehoiakim – a monarch who lived about 600 years before Jesus.
Jehoiakim was a bad King. He was a bad ruler, a bad leader and a bad shepherd. He abused his people, he was unfair, unjust and he was a cheat. In fact, 2 Kings tells us a little story about Jehoiakim. When the powerful Pharoah of Egypt demanded that his nation pay 100 talents of silver and one talent of gold, Jehoiakim raised the money by levying a tax on the whole land. Worse yet, he overcharged, and kept some of the money to upgrade his personal penthouse.
Not the kind of King – not the kind of Shepherd – God was looking for. “It is you who have scattered my flock, and driven them away. You have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings,” says the Lord.
God promises to gather the remnant of his flock, and put his people under the care of a new generation of Kings. Good Kings, who will be good shepherds, who will watch over the people, protect them and keep them from getting lost.
Better yet, God will “raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as King and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness, and provide safety for all God’s people.
That is Jeremiah’s portrait of the King just over the horizon. A portrait with no name, not just yet.
Then we skip ahead in our Bibles to hear a word from Paul. Paul writes a name under the portrait Jeremiah has just painted. Paul scratches into the frame the name “Jesus.” And then Paul turns to us – and he starts humming, tapping his foot and clapping his hands – and he breaks into song, like an old Hollywood musical.
Paul Duke tells the story of a white man who during the racial turmoil of the 1960’s visited one of the areas where the bad feelings were erupting the worst. Upon his return, a friend asked him, “It seems those activists down south have everything going against them – the culture, our history, even the law. Even the FBI seems to be against them and their cause. Do you think they will lose?”
And the man replied, “No, I think they will win.”
How can you say that when all the odds are against them?
“I think they will win because they have a song.” (1)
Songs are powerful. Paul understood the power of a song very well. In fact, he chose to use a song to battle some false teachers at the young church in Colossae. To combat those heretics who claimed that Jesus was only an angel, and not the King Jeremiah spoke of, Paul borrowed from the worship life of the church a great Christological hymn – that’s fancy talk for a “song about Jesus.” Paul knew that if the young church were armed with a song, they could do battle with the best of them. The melody is lost to history, but we find the lyrics to this song in this letter to the Colossians:
“Christ is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation…”
And what a great song it is. It boldly proclaims the truth that Jesus was before all creation. Jesus was in Creation and that everything was created by him and for him. Being the first-born of the dead, Jesus is about the business of the re-creation of people individually and corporately in the church. Finally, the song sings about the Jesus who not only created the world as we know it, but who is also creating a new world in which his people shall live forever.
Righteousness and Justice shall be the order of the day. And God’s people will be protected, guided and lovingly cared for.
Hmmm – just the sort of King Jeremiah saw just over the horizon.
You know, back in the fall semester of 1997 at Duke University, there were two sophomores who were taking organic chemistry and who did pretty well on all the quizzes and midterms and labs and such. So well, in fact, that going into the final, they each had a solid “A”. These two friends were so confident that the weekend before finals week, even though their chemistry exam was scheduled for Monday morning, they decided to go up to the University of Virginia to party with some friends. However, with the residue of their good time literally hanging on their heads, they overslept all day Sunday and didn’t make it back to Duke until 7:00 Monday morning.
Rather than take their final then, they found their professor and explained to him why they needed to miss their exam. They told him they went to UVA for the weekend, but left out the hangover part and said instead that they had a flat tire on the way home and didn’t have a spare. They couldn’t get help for a long time and so they were late getting back to campus.
The professor thought this over and then agreed that they could make up the final on the following day. The two friends were elated and studied all through the night and went in the next day to take their make-up final. The professor placed them in separate rooms, handed them a test booklet and told them to begin.
They each looked at the first problem, a very easy question worth 5 points out of 100 – and thought “Great, this is going to be easy.” But then they flipped over to the second page. There was just one more question, worth 95 points. It read, “Which tire?”(2)
Justice does come. It may seem for awhile that the other side is winning. Things may often seem unfair. And they often are. But we have to remember that the final accounting has not been completed, the final exam has not occurred. One day, there will be justice. One day a righteous King will come to rule with justice. That’s what the song says.
Jeremiah looked into the future and painted a portrait of just such a King – a Good shepherd just over the horizon.
And Paul gave us a song to sing while we wait – that we might remember that such a Good Shepherd did come and live among us in the person of Jesus Christ.
That’s what these “Holy Days” are all about. A new kind of King is coming. A Good Shepherd is on the way. His advent is just around the corner.
So let us give thanks and sing –
For we wouldn’t want to skip that.
May God be praised. Amen.
1. Homileticsonline, retrieved Nov. 18th, 2019.
2. Ibid…
