Today, the Christian Church Universal celebrates Jesus Christ as King.  The trouble is; Jesus never proclaimed that he was a “king,” at least not in the way that people wanted a king.

It would seem, according to Ezekiel that Jesus came as a servant and a shepherd.   Jesus, the Good Shepherd, was out among the people tending to their needs, calling the powers-that-be to justice—challenging them to stop filling their coffers with the hard-earned money of the people, and making sure that everyone, especially the least among them, had what was needed to simply live—a clarion call to each of us today.

Our need to proclaim Jesus as king goes back to Old or First Testament times when the people then begged God to give them a king and God acquiesced because they were, as Scripture says,  “a stiff-necked people.”  They constantly wanted, as we do, to make God into their own image rather than allowing God to be who God is. Even up until the crucifixion, the apostles, those who probably knew Jesus best, outside of his earthly parents perhaps, thought of him and wanted him, in fact, to be a king who would put down the Romans. They were thinking as humans think, not as God thinks, as Jesus once told Peter , but Jesus was calling them to so much more.

The gospel chosen for today from Matthew describing the last judgment is a good place to start in describing Jesus’ true presence on this earth. Exegetes tell us that our task as commanded by Jesus is not to simply do humanitarian service, but to work at getting to the heart of why people are hungry, thirsty, homeless, in prison, lost and alone.  I believe many of us do the humanitarian work as is evidenced in the outreach activities of this parish and that is good, but Jesus, who was not a king in worldly terms, but a shepherd, servant, brother and friend, encourages us to indeed, get to the heart of the above problems—to see the faces of the people that go along with the statistics—searching out every lost one.  A good case in point is that of the immigrants in our country, those who are afraid of deportation with the current administration in Washington and those still wanting to come here.

If we get caught up in celebrating Jesus as king that puts the focus on him to save us from whatever danger is out there, and then the attention is shifted from our need to be engaged with our world, as he was with his. As you recall from last weekend’s gospel; we are called to risk, which will sometimes bring discomfort, even be messy at times, but it is the way of Jesus, it is the way to peace wherein fear of judgment, in the end, is not a worry—in other words, if we walk in Jesus’ footsteps, judgment should not be something we have to be concerned about.  Jesus came to show us the way by being a servant and the example he took for himself often was that of a humble shepherd, one who cared for sheep who would often wander like us, off, get lost and need to be found.

Even though most of us aren’t familiar with what it means to be a shepherd as none of us takes care of sheep, the tenets of such work can be carried forward—that of selflessness, patience, understanding and love. We know that shepherds, men and women were all about caring for their sheep, the good ones at least, bringing them to good sources of pasture and water, binding their wounds when they wandered off, when they were lost, the good shepherds would seek them out, basically keeping them safe.

This weekend calls us to see Jesus as our Brother and Friend—through the shepherd stories and the beautiful 23^rd psalm. We learn that our God doesn’t want to lord it over us, as a king might, but to be among us, that our God, as the Good Shepherd, will go any distance to find us when we are lost and will always listen, will always understand, will always love us.

It is good for us to reflect on this most comforting message of our loving God as a follow-up to last weekend’s parable of the talents wherein some of us found the harsh words of the master in that story, hard to take—that the rich will be given more and that “the more” will be taken from those who have the least.  This is definitely a scripture message that we don’t want to take literally, as it seems to fly in the face of what we believe Jesus usually preached—in fact, today’s gospel would seem a contradiction to that.  Again, the context is so important.

In last week’s gospel, Jesus was trying to prepare his followers for the End Times and the harsh language was to impress upon them the importance of doing the right thing, now! Don’t wait, he was saying, in order to catch their attention.

A better way to look at the statement that the rich will be given more and the little the poor have, will be taken from them, is to get beyond the surface story told here.  Reflecting on what Jesus is saying in Matthew’s account of the Last Judgment, we have to believe he means more than the idea given at first glance in the seemingly, “offending” statement of the rich having more at the expense of the poor.

When we do the right thing—that is, care for those with less and the other Corporal Works of Mercy, when we risk our safety at times for the good of others, when we use the gifts given to us, multiply “the master’s good” (as in last week’s story) in the world, we become richer as persons.  When we “bury the master’s good,” our gifts, refuse to share in order to take care of ourselves, we become poorer, and the gifts given to us, do, in effect get “taken away.”

That friends, is the beauty, perhaps the frustration of Scripture—the Spirit of Jesus is always, “alive and well,” so to speak, calling us to be open to more, to stretch ourselves beyond what comes to us at first glance.  Jesus, our brother and friend certainly doesn’t promise that it will be easy, it will in fact be messy, but in the end, it will be life-giving, all will be cared for.  We will have created a world worthy of the God who created us in love, gave us Jesus in love and has called each of us to do the same.

So friends, today let us celebrate Jesus as our brother and friend, one of us, not one apart from us, which the title “king” seems to suggest. When we get familiar with Jesus as brother and friend and see, truly see how he was with others, it is much less easy to discount him or to not recognize him in the suffering humanity of our world.  We move forward friends, as we complete the liturgical year this week and prepare for the next with the beginning of Advent next Sunday. May each of us be blessed as we share our gifts, our love, with our world.

My friends, I just finished reading Sue Monk Kidd’s, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter.  It is one of her older selections, with a 1996 copyright and in it she documents her personal journey to come into herself as a woman, to in effect, find her voice.  I had come upon this book early in my own process of finding my voice and hadn’t read it then, but reading it now was good for me, as it served as a wonderful review, especially now in the watershed time that we find ourselves for finally hearing the voices of women abused, for finally, it would seem, hearing their collective voices as one and the same—as credible.

Sue Monk Kidd came out of a Southern Baptist upbringing wherein women “knew their place” in Church and society and they knew it so well that they didn’t question the fact that they had no voice that was their own, that wasn’t first “approved” by the patriarchal system within which they lived—a system supported by both Church and State.  This system, as we all know, puts men in charge, is controlled and policed by men in order to keep women and children, especially girl children, “in place,” in order to serve the whims of these same men—all nice and tidy.

The author lived as a dutiful daughter, the wife of a Baptist minister under this system, questioning not, until the day she walked into the local drugstore and saw her daughter, a teenaged employee there, on her knees, stocking shelves and being ridiculed by two men. The gist of the ridicule was a comment by one of the individuals that, “This is how he liked to see women, on their knees!”  The other individual, laughed!

It was at this point that Sue Monk Kidd found her long lost voice. She noticed that her daughter’s reaction was to hang her head, swallowing the abuse as women had so many times before.  In Kidd’s reflection over the next few years as she was “coming out” with her true woman’s voice; she realized that she had sat idly by listening to comments from men in the general society, in church, unaffected, like other women, but when the abuse was dumped on her daughter, the awareness of what she had gradually been coming to, through dreams, study and reflection, was made apparently clear in the rude comments thrust upon her daughter—the intention being that this was women’s place!

So, it was with a lion’s heart that she marched up to the abusers and stated in no uncertain terms that this young woman was her daughter and they may like seeing women on their knees, but that this was not women’s place!

What followed for Sue Monk Kidd were seven more years of digging deep, reading women scholars in Church and society, of the likes of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-language, Sallie McFague, “God as Mother,” in Weaving the Vision: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality and others.  Little by little; she acquired the inner strength to begin proclaiming publicly what she only sensed in the example of her daughter—that women, in society and in religious settings were made the pawns of men, with one intent, to use and control them, and for the most part, women were taught to enable this behavior by not speaking out.

With  a great deal of trepidation and second-guessing, which, by the way, are the feelings women have to overcome in order to hear their own inner voices and respond to them, Kidd began sharing with her husband her experiences and learning, her deepest yearnings to disavow herself with the Baptist church, the very church he served in as a minister because she could no longer abide being told from the pulpit that “Women were the first to sin, the second to be created and that they were made for man’s benefit”—that because of their disobedience to God and their temptation to men, beginning with Adam, they would forever be in second place.  All nice and tidy.

Well, needless to say, this was unsettling to her husband, but much to his credit, perhaps his deep care for her and their relationship, was, over time, able to listen and truly hear what his wife was struggling with and trying to articulate, and eventually, saw that change was needed.

The readings that the Church has given us today are great reflections on this watershed moment for women and men in our society and Church.  I include men here because this awareness that many women come to in mid-life, if at all, is something that men must come to as well if true change is to happen.  There must be the realization within men that if the birth right that women come into this world with is taken from them to serve the other half of the population, then the conquerors are left with only half a life too.  Each of us is created as a reflection of the Creator and that must not be taken from us for any reason, least of all, to control others.

The beautiful reading from Proverbs today was in past times entitled, “The Virtuous or Valiant Woman.”  The Priests for Equality text, that we use here, in their wisdom, have made this a gender-less specific reading in order to impress upon each of us, male and female that the traits espoused here are universal and genderless—we are all called to strive after perfect love—instilling confidence equally in each other, bringing advantage, not hurt, doing our work willingly for the benefit of each other, holding out our hands to the poor—these are the traits that are to be praised at the city gates, because these traits last, unlike physical beauty.  We have to wonder that if these traits were more universally practiced across the genders, would we ever have abuse that allows one to be first to the detriment of another.

Paul is his letter to the Thessalonians writes with confidence to his converts that because they are “children of the light,” they need not worry for when God comes, they will be ready! And yet, knowing the weakness of humanity, he cautions them to not live as though “asleep.” Our ability to reflect the Creator calls each of us to stand in the light, to not allow darkness to take over any of our sisters or brothers.

And finally, as the Church Year is coming to an end and we are coming closer to the beautiful season of Advent preparation; we are confronted with the gospel reading from Matthew today about being “good and faithful servants,”  “being willing to risk” and that, in the end, there will be judgment for our actions. I have always thought that if we keep our eyes on Jesus, walk in his ways, we will risk at times, our comfort, for the greater good, but we won’t have to worry about judgment. Amen? Amen!