Kings and Kin (Luke 23:33-43)

“Christ of the Breadlines” ©1952 Fritz Eichenberg

This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on November 23, 2025. The full livestream of the service may be viewed here. (The sermon begins at the 48:09)
​Scripture texts: Jeremiah 23:1-6 • Colossians 1:11-20 • Luke 23:33-43

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Good morning Augustana and welcome to the Feast of Christ the King -- aka the Solemnity of Christ, aka the Reign of Christ, aka the Majesty of Christ Sunday. It’s the last day of the Liturgical year, and the culmination of our journey through Luke’s gospel, as we prepare once more to enter a  season of waiting through the cold dark of night for Christ to come again and again and again. It is the newest Feast of the church year, instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925, but the reign of Christ is by no means a new idea or doctrine -- it is merely the Church's annual commemoration of the ancient and essential truth which was passed down through the ages and has long been a central tenet of Christian theology. It dates back to Cyril, the 5th century Archbishop of Alexandria, who served during a socio-political era marked by the peoples’ excessive debauchery and violence. To these he declared that Christ’s “dominion over all creatures is not seized by violence nor usurped, but [is] his by essence and by nature. His kingship is founded upon the hypostatic union -- [that is, the total and impenetrable fullness of both Divinity and Humanity extant in Christ alone.] And so, “Christ alone is to be adored by angels and men [as He alone] has power over all creatures.” 

Of course Cyril’s proclamation was just a more-defined affirmation of the Nicene Creed we still affirm today, which was an elucidation of what the author of Colossians wrote in today’s second reading, which was, going back even further, a summation of what the Apostle Paul wrote in his epistles to the Romans, Corinthians, and the Philippians in particular. 

That said, Pope Pius XI’s reaffirmation and commemoration of Christ’s eternal reign was anything but incidental. In fact, his Quas Primas encyclical was written in the aftermath of World War I, which saw the violent fall of no fewer than four empires, and so was a direct confrontation and scathing criticism of the global rise in secularism, white supremacy, and ultra-nationalism. It was also a declarative summation and explication of all that ancient church wisdom up to and including, significantly, the work of Pope Leo XIII who consecrated the whole of humanity to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in his 1899 proclamation that the promise and hope of Christ’s eternal reign belongs not just to “Christians” but to everything and everyone whom God created and imbued with Their divine image. 

And dare I say, beloved, we still need the promise and proclamation of Christ’s primacy now as much as ever, do we not? We, too, live in a moment in time when self-styled kings are working feverishly to establish and maintain their own dominion and rule. When religious leaders have aligned themselves with political ones, as Israel and Judah once did, not yet aware that their cooperation with the Empires of earth will only and inevitably lead to their and their peoples captivity and oppression. There are scores of pastors and preachers who’ve traded confrontation for collaboration in an attempt to install “christian” kings, to theologically and politically rule over the nations, despite that every emperor who’s ever been converted to Christianity has in turn, and invariably, converted Christianity to Empire.

So whether it’s called Emperor or Capital or King or President or Mammon, the Prophet’s cry still rings out with the urgency of Jesus’s own warning in Luke 16 that we cannot serve two masters. And unless we are decisive, deliberate, and dogged about who we worship and serve, the king of the day will, whether by fascination or force, enslave us to itself. There is no middle ground or moderation, there is no option to abstain. We must choose. And however simple we might say that choice is, the follow-through can be a slog, because we live in time, where the powers and principalities of this age are not playing. 

Which is precisely why I find today’s text -- and all of Luke’s gospel, really -- so liberating and beautiful: For in these pages, Jesus never competes for a Kingdom. Despite that he is crucified as the King of the Jews, he never once claims that distinction for himself, nor does he embody or express that sort of power or dominion. He never seeks to be anyone’s king, but is instead, from the start, everyone’s kin. 

That is what makes him an existential threat to the rule of Empire and its lords. 

For between the idea of kingship and the embodiment of Kinship there stretches a chasm as wide and fixed as the one between the rich man and Lazarus. And the sources from which each draws its authority and power could not be at greater odds. 

Kings and Kingdoms, the Empires of this Age, we know rely on fear: Fear of pain and suffering yes, of poverty and oppression, but more than any of that, the fear of dispossession and isolation: of living and dying alone, without a witness. It is Empire’s greatest weapon over and against its subjects, and the primary means by which it organizes society, enforces its laws, and maintains its control. Those who submit, assimilate, and obey may to some degree enjoy the tenuous protections and provisions of Imperial order. But those who defy or disrupt it will be made an example of when punished, either by public torture and humiliation, or by expulsion beyond society’s reach and memory, where the devouring dark awaits. 

Empire knows the human mind, body, and spirit are not designed to tolerate such violence either as its objects, agents, or witnesses; and that even to those who only bear witness, it can feel like their only protection against the onslaught of Imperial violence is to shut it out: To go numb and pretend it isn’t happening, or that, at least, it cannot and will not happen to them so long as they stay compliant. 

Crucially, as Walter Brugemann writes in his book Prophetic Imagination, this is the primary function of Empire. “Empire lives by this numbness… it expects numbness [in response to] the human costs of [its violent militarism], [and] goes to great lengths to keep [that] numbness intact. The imperial consciousness [can only survive] by its capacity to still our groans and go on with business as usual as though none were hurting and there were no groans.” Empire needs people numb because those who are numb or in denial of what is, are unable to face the catastrophes caused by unchecked Domination, never mind challenge it.  (Brugemann, Ch. 5: “Compassion")

Where kings and kingdoms depend on numbness, embodied Kinship deliberately presses into it, welcoming the needling pin pricks of empathy and compassion that awaken us to the reality and gravity of feeling, and rescue us from the immobilization numbness always produces. Among kin, groans can’t be stifled or stilled, and grief can’t be buried or denied -- it is voiced, shared, and observed. Among kin, wounds aren’t ignored; they are tended, dressed, and healed. And yes, sometimes pain and grief shared with us in solidarity can become so big and heavy that they take on a life of their own in us. But this, too, is holy, as the weary are relieved of their burden by kin who make it their own. This is why Jesus was such a danger to Rome. 

He was neither immobilized by the enormity and constancy of suffering around him, nor was he controlled by the fear of Imperial violence. Instead, he bore the blows of Empire in solidarity with all its victims and enemies, making himself their brother, and declaring Creator’s favor for everyone and everything Empire despised. This he did not to irritate or agitate the rulers of the age, but because he knew his own personhood and power were inextricably bound up in his kinship with the poor and powerless.

Within the dominant culture of fear and fealty, knowing as he did that he would eventually be victim to Empire’s most grotesque impulses, Jesus embodied a kinship and cultivated a community so entirely counter to it, that even women like Mary Magdalene and Joanna, who received the strategically-distributed wealth that Empire hoarded, turned around and gave it to Jesus knowing he would re-distribute it, because he would redistribute it among the hungry, poor, the sick, and outcast. And they did so not to curry favor with Jesus as one might with a king, nor to prove their worth to his kingdom. They did it because Jesus welcomed, healed, and honored them first, as sisters and equals. Because he bore their burdens as his own, they made the burdens of the community their own. This was the way of Christ’s Kinship.

From the moment of his birth Which heralded the scattering of the proud, the toppling of the mighty, the exaltation of the lowly, and the filling of the hungry, as the rich were sent away empty; to his first sermon sermon in the Temple when he proclaimed that freedom for the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, liberation of the oppressed and the day of God’s favor were at hand in his own coming; to his crucifixion on the cross where we meet him today: At every turn, Jesus was not just with the people, he was one of them and belonged to them.

Indeed, God did not come from the body of a nobody to play-act at personhood or “go undercover boss,” experiencing the weariness of living  but only to a point and with an eject button always at hand.

He was born and lived and ate and drank and played and laughed and worked and argued and delighted and suffered and died with and as a nobody. And by choosing their kinship over Kingship, he became too close with too many people who cared for him too deeply, that if Empire let him go on feeding and healing and living among these other nobodies, more people -- officers, outcasts, and numbed folk alike - might start thinking they mattered too. 

That’s what Kinship does: It relieves the fear that we must suffer alone or that our suffering doesn’t matter. It gives us the power to transform private, intangible griefs into public, communal proclamations that "suffering matters, that it must be taken seriously, that one another’s pain must never be made an acceptable sacrifice" to the false gods of comfort and security. 

And this, Brugemann wrote, is “the one thing Empire [and its culture of dominance] cannot tolerate or co-opt: Our ability to stand in solidarity and kinship with the victims of the present order. It can manage charity and good intentions, but it has no way to resist solidarity with pain or grief.” (Ch. 5: Compassion)

It will always, of course, with every weapon at its disposal, slaughter the guilty in pageants of public humiliation and desecration, in order to silence, suppress, or subdue its spread.

But again, take heart, and look upon the cross: Bear witness to Empire's last and final failure, as Christ dies an enemy to no one, but at utter peace in solidarity: with both death itself and each of its agents, pleading the Father’s forgiveness for their ignorance; with the agony of abandonment in its power to so thoroughly crush his spirit; and with the brother hanging next to him, the one declared most undeserving, whose companionship in death Jesus will carry into paradise. To this brutal, bitter end, when Empire had dealt its most fearsome blow, the crucified king of the Jews chose kinship with all.

This is the Kin-dom of Christ, alive with us, raised in us, which calls to us as a mother to her beloved. So let us, Oh God, by your promised and ever-present Spirit, be the incarnation of your transfiguring Kinship, the embodiment of your transforming kin-dom, that we may bear in our bodies and as Christ’s One Body, the reconciliation of everything and all things to you, almighty and merciful one Christ our Kin. Amen.
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