November 23, 2025
READINGS & MESSAGE
JEREMIAH 23: 1-6
The prophet Jeremiah is foretelling a little bit about the future in this passage…he has had a vision from God and needs to share it with the world…and his vision is of hope, for God is going to raise up ‘a branch’ of David’s lineage and this person will execute justice and righteousness and will deal wisely in all things…I believe that this is always the hope that we have for every child who is born…that they will pave the way for the future to become a changed environment, a changed world where nations begin to speak to others about peace and not war…about food to feed each other instead of hoarding…about justice for all…and this just isn’t a dream, for anything is possible with and through God…
COLOSSIANS 1: 11-20
I would like all of you to listen closely to what Nancy is going to verbalize for you this morning from the Colossians passage…for following this passage, I will share with you the words of a song that I wrote about this “Invisible Image” way back in my theological training days
LUKE 23: 33-43
We come today, on this Reign of Christ Sunday, to what I call the bookends of our faith…we are people of joy and tragedy…we are people of light and darkness…we are people of emptiness and fullness… we are people of birth and death…next week, we begin our journey into the area near Bethlehem and what leads up to the manger birth…but we still need to see what is at the other end of our faith and whatever opens it up also needs to have a closure…we herald the Christ-child’s birth but we also need to herald the other end of it…let’s listen to the words of Luke as they also bring us words of hope…
“WHAT IS GODS REIGN LIKE?”
I’m not much of a pollster but sometimes the information which comes out of these surveys makes me pay attention…this survey was taken in 2018 so it’s fairly accurate in terms of information…and here’s the survey…countless Canadians were surveyed about their ‘religious connections’ and it was found that almost 97% of the folks said that they believed in some sort of a God and in the same survey of these 97%....27% declared themselves “deeply religious”…only something like 27 – 29% of Canadians attend religious services every week…so the other 70% who stated that they believed in a God may never grace the doors or entrances to any church (of course, unless it has to do with a wedding or possibly a funeral)…maybe some of these folk just can’t stand the church!....and for the life of me, I’m still trying to figure all of this out for it is in this collective mode of worship where oftentimes, magic happens…where the Spirit that you may be yearning to encounter, becomes oh so visible…or the pain and the loneliness which a person may be experiencing, slips away…and some of us work very hard to make worship meaningful and relevant…we work hard to make it sincere and real…it’s possible that some of these folk who may detest ‘church’ have experienced something which goes against their grain and have not experienced other denominational forms of worship…
it’s kind of like going for lutefisk the very first time and knowing that so many folks rant and rave about it that you’ve got to give it a second or a third try to see if it’s really real or not…and there are many views of Jesus which may fit very well into your mode of life or of thinking and you have to give it a second or a third try because one of these will work for you… and I’m going to call this the “Seven Jesus’ I have known”…see if one of them works for you and if one of them may work for the person who you may see as an agnostic or an atheist…
When I was a child, I was led to believe in the “Conservative Protestant Jesus”, my Dutch/Reformed upbringing…he was ‘born to die’ and he died on the cross…his birth, life, and death had a distinct purpose and Jesus died for all of my sins… kind of a good thing when I was a kid because then I could do whatever I wanted and someone else would take the blame…this changed for me when I realized that it didn’t have global significance – it was personal…
And then along came the “Pentecostal / Charismatic Jesus” when I followed a bunch of my friends to the local Pentecostal church…the Holy Spirit was definitely there but there were these nagging questions of God’s concern for the whole world, for history, and for creation…
So I wandered over to the “Roman Catholic Jesus” and loved the importance of the Eucharist in that hospitality was so important…the sharing of meals together…but the exclusivism of the church bothered me…
Then I dabbled in the “Eastern Orthodox Jesus” in my theological days and enjoyed the wonderful concept of the Trinity, the mystery, and being engaged in the world…
This led me to the “Liberal Protestant Jesus” with its focus on social justice…
And then one of my friends in the theological circles which I lived in was a Mennonite, so I leaned into the “Anabaptist Jesus” with the focus on peace and nonviolence…
And then I studied extensively the “Liberation Theology Jesus” who confronted injustice in the whole society and stood in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed…so where did I end up?
I think I came to the conclusion that there is a complexity in proclaiming Jesus…I don’t argue that one of these interpretations is the true Jesus but I am reminded that the purpose of the church is to proclaim Jesus Christ, whoever that church understands Christ to be…
And…it’s complex, because our beliefs are subject to our individual whims and conceptions or misconceptions of the truth…and we always try to put our beliefs front and centre and sometimes in opposition to others’ beliefs…
Reign of Christ Sunday reminds us that Jesus is all of these “seven” and more…we may take one of these stands or two or more or possibly all of them but we need to be reminded that the purpose of the church is not to be a place of entertainment where your worship leader puts on a show but it’s a place where your heart and the heart of God intersect… the church is not just a place of maintenance where it’s a safe place for you to go…the church is not just fellowship where you feel comfortable in the larger group…and the church is not just for protection where we build ourselves this ‘safe’ wall around us…no…
The church is the place where we dare to risk our lives for what Jesus stood for…and this is why we hold up Reign of Christ Sunday – to follow once again, in the path which he leads us…
And you know folks…in five weeks or so, some us will be singing William Chatterton Dix’s song, “What Child Is This?” and we’ll be singing it with gusto and jubilation…three times we will proclaim through the refrain of this hymn, “This, this is Christ the King, whom shepherds guard and angels sing; haste, haste to bring him laud, the babe, the son of Mary!”…The time hasn’t quite arrived, however, for all of us to sing about the birth in the manger, even though we are hearing Christmas carols in the malls and stores …we are just coming to the end of the church year – the liturgical year - so on the evening on November the 30th, next Sunday, at midnight, we turn our calendars to December the 1st, and it’ll be New Year’s Eve – church style!
And when next Sunday develops, the Advent messages of hope, peace, joy, and love will ring out to the world!!!
Amen.