After a ceremony in Parliament the splendidly robed Lord Chancellor entered a corridor crowded with tourists and spotted his friend Neil Marten MP. ‘Neil’ he shouted and every tourist in the corridor dropped to their knees!
The story captures how intimacy and awe can come together with amusing consequences.
Three weeks ago at St Wilfrid’s I solemnly consecrated a vessel containing altar bread that turned out to be empty. Under COVID rules priests are not allowed to breathe over vessels containing the host so they stay covered until Communion. I wrongly assumed the covered ciborium placed on the altar by the warden was filled. What a surprise when I genuflected before it, took off the lid and found it empty. I had to say Jesus’ words ‘This is my body’ again over the bread box so we could share Communion.
Merriment is a hallmark of Christ’s kingdom. Archbishop Ramsey described a characteristic of hell as being the absence of laughter. Where there’s laughter there’s lack of self-importance. One imagines hell as being an array of tragically disconnected self important beings unable to reach out to God or one another.
We kneel not to the Lord Chancellor this morning but to Our Lord on this great Feast of Jesus Christ the Universal King. The Lord Chancellor incidentally is the one who still walks backwards before the Queen having presented her with the text of her Speech at the opening of Parliament. Outward ceremonies can lose their meaning and eventually fall out of use. My story about kneeling recalls a controversial diocesan news in which Bishop Lindsay berated the lack of kneeling in Church nowadays. Lindsay sent good wishes to Fr Ray through me last month recalling how he presided over Ray’s induction all those years back. Never one for ducking straight speaking the Bishop questioned whether Chichester Diocese was going Methodist in that the only time many kneel is for Communion!
As we get older - Lindsay was nicknamed Boy Bishop as he was consecrated so young - we understand how kneeling can be problematic even when you have a knee replacement! This morning online we have no kneeling unless you want to kneel on the living room carpet for the consecration prayer of the eucharist. No kneeling outwardly but certainly inwardly.
Our intimacy with God is an awesome intimacy. God is God!
Who are we to enter God’s presence as we are doing in this eucharist?
As the passage from Ephesians in today’s epistle expresses it: with the eyes of your heart enlightened, may you know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints,and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand.
This morning we kneel before Christ the King. As the beautiful eucharistic preface states: ‘As king [Christ] claims dominion over all your creatures, that he may bring before your infinite majesty a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace’. Truth, life, holiness, grace, justice, love and peace, all these are fully found in God. Through his Son and his Spirit our almighty Father is establishing those qualities upon earth so that the kingdom of this world may become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ Revelation 11:15.
Our Gospel reading reminds us of how care for the hungry and thirsty, the sick and those in prison extends Christ’s rule towards the day when, in the words of the Collect, ‘the whole created order will worship at the feet’ of God’s infinite majesty.
In the Times on Tuesday Melanie Phillips applauded recent judicial decisions protecting the rights of believers to hold the age old belief in marriage as heterosexual. Some of you have been in conversation on Facebook with me about this controversial article.
G.K.Chesterton remarked that only belonging to the Church sets one free from the degrading slavery of being a child of one’s time.
As Christians we kneel before God in Christ and not before majority opinion in a post-Christian culture. It isn’t easy and gets little easier in our culture though this is far from China where Crosses are being taken from church roofs.
The Feast of Christ the King is no feast of an idea. It is the feast of a reality we kneel before, the reality of Christ’s kingship - that Jesus is Lord.
Jesus is Lord – three words sum up our Creed.
Jesus is Lord. The carpenter born in Nazareth who shows the world the love, truth and power of God – he is Lord. It is his name that brings heaven to earth and earth to heaven.
Secondly Jesus is Lord. A human life of 33 years lived at the start of our era continues the same yesterday, today and for ever through the power of an indestructible life (Hebrews 7v16b).
Thirdly Jesus is Lord which means he is right above all that is or has been or will be. Jesus is God’s final word to humankind. He is also to be the very last word over all each one of us as we shall contemplate next week on Advent Sunday.
In Jesus a human being lives over all things in God. Nothing gives us more hope for the human race than this. Here is the place heaven and earth come together. As Pascal said Jesus Christ is the centre of all, and the goal to which all tends.
So we kneel before him this morning.
This Sunday Eucharist is the hour of Jesus, a time given to him by us together that reminds us all our time belongs to him.
Our daily prayer is submission to him as Lord of our life, as is the private confession to him of ours sins.
Our reading of the Bible is teacher to put faith in the constancy of God’s word and not in the multitude of human words that make up public opinion.
The service we give others is a submission to Christ present in all people and things.
Worship, prayer, bible study, service - these are our kneeling before Christ the King as individual members of his body to be underlined and refreshed this morning.
Christ is King, Jesus is Lord - and he is our king, our Lord, with the Father and the Holy Spirit to whom be all might, majesty, dominion and power henceforth and for evermore. Amen.
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