Was my turn to preach today… Christ the King. Not an image I turn to often, but nonetheless, the name of the Feast and an opportunity to consider what that might mean in terms of how leadership is viewed.

I am a child of the northern half of the northern hemisphere. This time of year is often about soup and good bread. Blankets, frosty mornings, and extra time to find the gloves that I was so certain I’d shoved in my pockets at the end of last winter. It is a season of movement from the outside-in. The wind and the chill pick up, and the cushioning against it begins. And it often happens gradually…a layer at a time. Long sleeves, then a sweater, then a coat, gloves, hat, etc. Often, it happens this way, but not always. There are those moments, those “Ohhhh, remember the winter of…” times when the shift has been radical, swift, and unrelenting. People are left scrambling…for salt, for shovels, and as we see too often now, for shelter, food or a coat that comes close to fitting.

That kind of concentrated time is what I think of with the Feast of Christ the King of the Universe.  It is a pivot point in the liturgical year.  Ordinary, ordinary, ordinary, (meaning that we count them—the first Sunday of Ordinary time, the second, and so on…) and then seemingly suddenly, Christ the King…which means Advent is coming and with Advent, then Christmas, and then the New Year, and Epiphany, and then and then and then…

Muriel Barbery spoke of a different, though not disconnected, pivot point in her book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog.  I now know what you have to experience before you die; let me tell you.  What you have to experience before you die is a driving rain transformed into light.  (Renee, concierge, main character; The Elegance of the Hedgehog)

This feast is the like the call for extra layers come all at once, so we can make our way through into the stillness, the waiting time, hearth-time, birthing-time, that is to come.

It seems that the readings suggest that this feast is also about the moment when driving rain becomes light. Light that will lead us home.

I know what it feels like to be scattered on a day of cloud and thick darkness (Ezekiel). I suspect we all do, in different ways.  The day when disappointment arrives.  When bad news clings to our legs and burdens our step.  When we recognize an unsettled-ness within that is not to be tamed. When we find ourselves standing in the driving rain of fear…

The promise of Ezekiel is that God will be the one to gather us back in…back to the heart.  I remember a time when that love, when the binding up I needed, tasted like tea.  I arrived early and out of sorts to the parish I was attending at the time and was met in the hall by the director of Religious Education.  “You do not look like you feel at home with yourself,” she observed.  She said it in Spanish—I just loved the expression. “I can’t sit with you right now, but I can make you tea.  Why not sit back here and have tea.  When you are done, just leave the mug on the table and I’ll come later and get it. You just drink—let me serve and clean up.”

And I was able to enter the sanctuary with more light than rain that day.  With such a straightforward and unencumbered act of love, my thirst for care was met, my hunger for welcome satisfied.   And I had indeed been blessed.

‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’…. ’Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’ (Matthew 25:34-40)

I who have been blessed with receiving God’s loving care through someone else, what do I notice in my neighbor?  What story needs welcomed with respect?  What truth needs to find hearth in being spoken aloud in order to be accepted?  For what does my neighbor thirst?  Justice? Mercy? What is the hunger I see, hear, or only sense?  Food? Company?  Healing?  

And what unencumbered acts of love do I offer as a response?  Can I stand in the rain of need with someone and bear witness?  Can I shift or pivot to a movement from inside—out, offering to another what I have received, withholding nothing, except the judgement of worthiness or unworthiness?

When we act out of the sometimes difficult honour that is the love of Christ made manifest and do the best we can for each other…perhaps it is then that the last enemy, death, is destroyed. (I Corinthians).  Nothing is held back or held bound; hunger and thirst are satisfied; dis-ease is soothed.

And this is our inheritance…the experience of hope or even Faith that this is possible.  That at least in part, this satisfaction and soothing—of tension, violence, stress, injustice, hatred, need…name your experience or watch the news— In part, some soothing is possible when we, the people of God, act in accord with the one we claim to follow.

It can be possible when we too are servant leaders, like Jesus, the humble leader we honor today and always. The sort of leader who is not afraid to make Love known through action and who calls the people to do likewise so that all may live into wholeness and walk into whatever lies ahead with the light of hope and glory as our beacon.