Remember me.

Christ the King Sunday Year C
November 24, 2019
St. Michael’s Episcopal Church
The Rev. Canon Michael J. Horvath
Jeremiah 23:1-6; Luke 23:33-43


Both Roman Catholics and Episcopalians understand that Jesus' death on the cross-and his subsequent resurrection-are pivotal events for our faith. Through Christ's death and resurrection God redeemed humankind from sin, demonstrated once and for all that God's power and love is stronger than all power on earth-even death, and confirmed that God's promise of eternal life is for all who believe. While most Christians can agree with that, we have differing ways of talking about what that means in the way we practice faith.

While both Episcopalians and Roman Catholics agree that the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ are important-we talk about them in ways that put emphasis in different places. It is like an orchestra that plays the same music, but different parts of the orchestra emphasize different notes in the score. Roman Catholics tend to emphasize the healing, redeeming power of Christ's suffering and death on the cross. Protestants, including Episcopalians, tend to emphasize the power of the resurrection as assurance of life beyond the power of death. So, Roman Catholics use a depiction of the cross (called a crucifix) with an image of the suffering Jesus upon it to visualize their way of talking about the event. Episcopalians, who emphasize the resurrection, use a bare cross to say that Jesus overcame his suffering and death and is risen.

As far as I know, there is nothing to forbid the use of a crucifix in an Episcopal Church. However, it is seldom done. Episcopalians tend to display statues of Jesus' life or an image of the resurrected Lord.  So, there’s no one way to think about the death of Jesus.  Indeed, I think both are necessary in our understanding so that we don’t lose sight of a greater understanding.

I was at Holy Cross Monastery on the Hudson River in NY on St. Michael’s Advent Retreat.  And for those of you who went and attended chapel, you could not but notice a large life size crucifix carved out of dark wood on one side of the Chapel.  As many times as I have been to Holy Cross, I am still brought up short by that crucifix depicting an emaciated and beaten Jesus, crowned by thorns.  It is an image that doesn’t jive with the name of this particular Sunday - Christ the King.  There was no sign of royal or exalted status in that wooden image.  There were no jewels or silk lined robes.  It is not the image that corresponds to our understanding of what it means to be royal, what it is to be majestic.  That image doesn’t exist in our Gospels, as much as that would make us feel better about Jesus’ death.  We have lots of depictions in art throughout the ages of Jesus sitting on a throne attended by angels and saints, holding an orb and scepter, but the reality is that our world never knew Jesus in that posture.  The crucifix hanging at Holy Cross monastery is truer to life and to the life of Jesus.  I, and everyone else sitting in the chapel, was forced to see the kind of king Jesus truly was - broken, starving, deserted.

And today’s Gospel passage from Luke shows us that the same expectation of what regal and royal means to us was what was expected back then.  The Roman Empire elevated the idea of form over function and power was directly tied to outward appearances.  The Palatine Hill was where all the bigwigs of Ancient Rome lived.  Leaders of the Roman Empire owned large estates, slaves, ate pearls, covered themselves in gold and precious jewels.  They didn’t walk, they were carried in litters, they vied with each other to have the latest and the best they were and they were held up as ideals much to be admired.  Not much has changed has it?  We are still fascinated by all that glitters - big cars, big homes, big jobs, the Kardashians.  We’re blinded by what we think is real power and prestige.

And because Jesus exemplified none of that for the Roman soldiers, they could only mock him.  But one person saw Jesus for who and what he was.  The Thief - who was given the name Dismas in the Gospel of Nicodemus (an apocryphal gospel).  This thief who has given himself over to a life of crime turns to Jesus, himself a criminal in the eyes of the Empire, and says “Jesus, remember me.” We all like to be remembered, don’t we?  It’s especially heartwarming to receive Christmas cards from people you haven’t seen or heard from in years, lifting you out of whatever state of mind you might be in.  Their act of sending you a card, perhaps with a little note in it, is an act of remembrance of times past, or shared experiences, or best wishes for the present.

In seeking to be remembered, the thief is asking Jesus to look beyond his current state - a body just as broken as Jesus’, a body wracked by the pain of hanging on the cross for hours; a common criminal - and to see him for what he is, God’s Beloved. In asking to be remembered he claims his birthright as a child of God, a person beloved until the end of days, not on the margins, but at the very center of God’s concern.  There is nothing in the passage to indicate that the thief saw anything that outwardly indicated Jesus as divine, or majestic.  Indeed the thief’s request seems to have been made by one condemned man in need of forgiveness and wholeness, to another man, also duly condemned, ready to forgive and ready to make whole.

Just like the thief we want to be remembered and to be made whole. Our desire to be remembered is also a recognition and confession of what we have become through the circumstances of life; loss and grief, shattered dreams, regret, failures – death by a thousand cuts, I think the phrase is. When we find ourselves in this fractured state, we, too, can take on the identity of thieves. We take what is not ours. We fragment others’ lives in an attempt to put our own back together.

It happens in all sorts of ordinary ways: anger and resentment, criticism, judgment, envy, comparison and competition, gossip, bad mouthing another, perfectionism, the need to be right or in control, busyness, excessive productivity and efficiency. Look at your relationships. Wherever there is strain, hurt, brokenness, chances are that you or another are being dis-membered, forgotten, torn apart.

That is not who God wants or desires us to be.  That’s not what it was like in the very beginning, on the day of our creation, when God looked at all of creation, us included, and declared, “It is very good.”  And when we get to a point where we don’t even remember our own selves, we need to be reminded that even within our broken or fragmented selves, the essence of what God calls “very good” still resides within us.  We need to be remembered as more than our shortcomings, our failed relationships, our moments of anger and distrust.  We yearn to be remembered as more than our illness or medical condition, more than our addictions, and as more than our age or gender or physical ability.  We need to be remembered because we are all of those things, and yet we are much more.

Sometimes we can push through the darkness out into the sunshine again and remember who we are and whose we are.  Sometimes, we have to turn to others and say “Remember me because I have lost my own self, I have lost my way.”

That is what our community is for, that is what the Body of Christ must do.  We are called to remember each other into wholeness of being.  And we do that through showing mercy, compassion, forgiveness and love; we do that by sharing hope and encouragement; and we do that by bringing more people into an ever-widening circle rather than pushing them out.  And each time we engage in these acts, we are with Jesus in Paradise in that very moment. A Paradise that has room for the upright citizen and the thief, for the revered and the ostracized, for the rich and the poor, for the famous and the forgotten, for those on a path and for those who have lost their way. A Paradise, the Prophet Jeremiah says today, to which God will gather the remnant of his flock out of the wilderness we have found ourselves lost in, where he will bring us back to the fold, where we shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, a Paradise where none of us will be missing.  That is the promise Jesus makes on the cross today. A ransom for our lives that only a true king - the King of Kings - can offer. Amen.