WRITTEN THINGS
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 “Christ of the Breadlines” ©1952 Fritz Eichenberg This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on November 23, 2025. The sermon alone may be viewed below. The full service livestream may viewed here. (The sermon begins at the 48:09) Scripture texts: Jeremiah 23:1-6 • Colossians 1:11-20 • Luke 23:33-43 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.
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 “Moses with the Burning Bush” © 1963 Mark Chagall This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on November 9, 2025. The sermon alone may be viewed below. The full livestream of the service may be viewed here. Scripture texts: Haggai 1:15-2:9 • 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5 • Luke 20:27-38 Good morning, Augustana! I am excited to be with you again today, to preach God’s word. And so I pray that the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart may be pleasing to Creator God, Brother Christ, Spirit of Breath and Fire.
Before I begin, I’ll just note how rare it is for me to preach more than one, never mind all three, lectionary texts at one time but I will today, and for good reason, so buckle up and hold on tight because we’re gonna do some time traveling, and we’re going to start with a little imagination exercise I heard a few years ago when the hosts of one of my favorite podcasts made a whole episode about how truly bonkers the notion of time travel really is: Imagine, they said -- and I invite you to do so now -- imagine a person from the from Bronze Age stumbling upon a portal to Now, a fantastical time when all information, knowledge, and wisdom from every age, civilization, and empire that’s ever been -- including their own -- and every human advancement, from paper and ink to digital art and auto and air travel, and doctors who can replace a person’s heart with someone else’s, and computers and the internet through which we can organize people from all over the world for time-coordinated actions of global resistance to tyranny, or conversely teenagers can create mountains of dank memes; is available to them and everyone else they encounter, every moment of the day through a little black mirror of lights and sounds and moving pictures that fits in the palm of their hands and in the so-called pockets of these leg contraptions called pants. Imagine they’re stuck here for a decade or two, and somehow, against all odds, they learn to live with us — to speak our languages, grasp our technology, and participate in our cultural rituals like baptism and beer pong. And when they return to their own timeline with their iPhone that somehow remains connected to our modern satellites which can transmit all that Wondrous Reality Beyond to their community way back then, they are not immediately detained and executed but survive to share the mysteries of ages beyond, and try to explain it to all their neighbors. Imagine them attempting to explain the fact that other worlds exist beyond this one, beyond the moon, billions of lightyears away, and we know it because humans created tools that allow them to peer into the past, present, and future, through long metal tubes with a pieces of glass on each end which, when you look through them, can make imperceptibly tiny things huge and bring infinitely far-away things up close. “Look, let me show you,” they would say. “And let me tell you about how they’re learning to reconceptualize time altogether through the theory of quantum physics.” As they tell their tale, they gain a following of devotees who truly believe them, and think they must be some kind of god from beyond, which they kind of are. But along with the fanatics are groups of people who haven’t lost their minds but are actually reasonable and understand how asinine these claims really are. So, for everyone’s sake, they set out to prove the traveler is a charlatan and liar, with “gotcha” questions that’re sure to be their undoing -- questions that will be, of course, rendered meaningless and nonsensical in light of the truth. I bet some of you can see where this is headed, but let’s not get there too soon. |
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