An Everlasting Dominion: Daniel 7:9-14
Christ the King Sunday
As I watched,
thrones were set in place,
and an Ancient One took his throne,
his clothing was white as snow,
and the hair of his head like pure wool;
his throne was fiery flames,
and its wheels were burning fire.
10 A stream of fire issued
and flowed out from his presence.
A thousand thousands served him,
and ten thousand times ten thousand stood attending
him.
The court sat in judgment,
and the books were opened.
13 As I watched in the
night visions,
I saw one like a human being
coming with the clouds of heaven.
And he came to the Ancient One
and was presented before him.
14 To him was given dominion
and glory and kingship,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
that shall not pass away,
and his kingship is one
that shall never be destroyed. (NRSV)
In 1925, Pope
Pius XI issued the encyclical Quas Primas that, among other things,
instituted the feast of Christ the King into the liturgical calendar.[1] He wrote, “[A]lthough in all the feasts of our
Lord the material object of worship is Christ, nevertheless their formal object
is something quite distinct from his royal title and dignity. We have commanded
its observance on a Sunday in order that not only the clergy may perform their
duty by saying Mass and reciting the Office, but that the laity too, free from
their daily tasks, may in a spirit of holy joy give ample testimony of their
obedience and subjection to Christ…thus the feast of the Kingship of Christ
sets the crowning glory upon the mysteries of the life of Christ already
commemorated during the year, and…we proclaim and extol the glory of him who
triumphs in all the Saints and in all the Elect.”[2]
There are
several other things that make sure this is not a perfect encyclical that we
should embrace unquestioningly, especially we non-Catholics who do not answer
to papal authority—for one thing, it advocates a relationship between the
Church and all secular governments that puts the Church clearly in charge on
God’s behalf. The Church has done the
worst harm to ourselves and to the world to which we are sent when we make
ourselves into a secular power of governance.
It is not for us to rule the world, no matter how true and right we feel
our vision of that world may be, and we must be very careful when we say that Christ
shall reign but actually mean ourselves.
But Pope Pius
understood that there is a great deal of power in naming our belief that Christ
is King over all the political maneuverings we try to make—after all, in Pius’
time, there were a lot of maneuverings going on. In 1925, Adolf Hitler was beginning to bounce
back from the disastrous Beer Hall Putsch [Put-ch] in Munich by publishing the
first volume of Mein Kampf and creating the SS as his own personal army;
Benito Mussolini had given a speech in the Italian Chamber of Deputies that put
him well on his way to becoming the fascist dictator we have in our history
books; the Scopes trial in Tennessee raged about whether it could indeed be
illegal to teach evolution in a public school and veered very far into that
Church-as-government mistake; and the Ku Klux Klan held a rally in Washington,
D.C. to flaunt the idea that racism was not only powerful but acceptable. The world had plenty of people deciding—some
under the auspices of Christianity—that they were the ones in charge,
that their rule was the one people should accept. There were a great many self-made kings in
1925 and the pope decided it was important the Church remember to Whom,
exactly, it is that we owe our final allegiance.
That swirling
mix of men swallowing down power is not unfamiliar, either to us in 2021 or to
Daniel around 170 B.C. The text today is
from one of the three apocalypses in the book of Daniel—there’s more in those
chapters than three men thrown into a furnace, after all. “Apocalypse” comes from a Greek word meaning
“to uncover;” Daniel’s visions here were not for the sake of monstrosities and
fear but for uncovering the hope that what was happening was not the end of the
story; that who was in charge was not the one who has the final say. For all that we Christians have taken on
these passages as indicative of Jesus the Christ, it is important that we
remember their original Jewishness; Professor Corinne Carvalho notes that Daniel
wrote as part of “a people who had been colonized by the Persian and Greek
emperors. For them this vision subverts the earthly power by co-opting the
images used to push them into subservience and transferring them to their God,
the ‘Ancient One.’ That God’s co-optation of empire in this dream sequence will
be accomplished through defeating the human emperors and taking over their
claim to worldly power.”[3]
This is a text by a people
threatened by empires, not by a people in the midst of shoring up their own. We who live in 21st century
America, an empire for at least one hundred years, must take care to recognize
that the image of a fiery throne is one that aims to burn away the
ruling order, not support it. Our faith
cannot support the idea that God fits into our power structures in order to
continue the way we have decided to do things.
Rather, our celebration taps into the hope that there is more than
this, that what is currently in place is not forever, that God’s power will
overcome the unjust systems creating pain and grief right now.
I wrestled
with this sermon quite a bit when the verdict came out on Friday that Kyle
Rittenhouse had been acquitted of all the charges against him. Rittenhouse, a white then-17-year-old, drove
from Illinois to Wisconsin in August of 2020 on a self-appointed mission to
“protect” the businesses of Kenosha against protestors around the death of
Jacob Blake, a Black man shot seven times in the back by a white cop.[4] Armed with an AR-15 rifle, Rittenhouse shot
three men, killing two. He was
congratulated by some of the police on the scene and, later, by racist hate
groups. On Friday, he was found not
guilty of charges of first-degree reckless homicide, first-degree intentional
homicide, and attempted first-degree intentional homicide.
Deja Vishny, a
criminal defense lawyer who worked for the Wisconsin State Public Defenders’
office for almost 40 years, said of the outcome, “In general, the Black
community in Kenosha is treated poorly in the court system. Just like a lot of
places, there’s over-incarceration of Black people; there’s harsh sentences for
Black defendants; there’s a lot of bias against Black people. They have no
Black judges there. The jail is disproportionately minorities, particularly
Black people. But here you have Kyle Rittenhouse, who is on the side of these
vigilantes and white supremacists. And the judge is bending over backwards to
give him a fair trial where day in and day out in the courts in Kenosha County,
the average Black defendant is not necessarily getting a fair trial.”[5]
“The courts
sat in judgment / and the books were opened.”
There are plenty of communities gathering on this Christ the King Sunday
who would dearly love for divine judgment to override the paltry veneer of it
that continually comes out of our modern courts. There are those who have been longing for
generations for there to be an Ancient One Who is given dominion and glory and
kingship, Who rewrites the very map of the world. It feels like time and beyond time for there
to be a fiery throne that burns away the systemic racism and oppression in this
country.
That is part
of this text, part of this Sunday, part of this moment of observing the last of
this Church year before beginning the story again. God is a just God, our Scriptures tell us, a
God Who weeps at the mistreatment of all creation, a God Who brings low the
haughty and breaks the bars of captivity.
To want the apocalypse, the uncovering of something other than this is a
valid prayer to bring to the gathering shadows as the year ends. It is faithful to yearn for an everlasting
dominion over the prejudiced kingdoms of this world.
And. And there is the recognition, bitter though
it may sometimes be, that that time, that opening of the books, is not yet
come. There is still work to do—after
the verdict came out, pastors were handing out food and handwarmers to the
brokenhearted people on the Kenosha courthouse steps. There is the miracle that Jacob Blake did not
die after being shot seven times. There
is the fact that we get up again and protest again and rewrite laws again and
demand change again. There is the
promise that “a thousand thousands served him…[and] his dominion is an
everlasting dominion.”
We celebrate
today the hanging of the green, an old ceremony of decorating the sanctuary to
make it as well as ourselves ready for the arrival of the Christ child at
Christmas. The baby, born as an
ostracized Jew under the Roman Empire, a brown man no matter how many times we
paint Him white in our art and books, was a refugee before He was five, was
eventually executed by the State for being too loud in the pursuit of justice,
love, and mercy. Jesus the Christ got up
again and protested again and demanded changes again—and lived again,
resurrected to the dominion that is everlasting not because He became emperor
but because He was already God.
When we
celebrate Christ the King Sunday, it is not because we seek to overthrow the
president or the prime minister or the queen or whoever in order to establish a
Church-led mirror of secular power structures.
Christ as King is our clarion call that the whole notion of a king
without justice or mercy is wrong, that any reign with impunity for white but
not Black is a failure, that the subjection of one nation to another is
sinful. Daniel’s vision is a beacon of
something completely other to those who felt trapped and unheard, and we
in the 21st century Church that has more power than any of the disciples
could have imagined as Jesus quoted this very text need to be extremely careful
about what kind of king we say we want. We
are called to be too loud in the pursuit of justice, love, and mercy; to stand
against all the ways we dehumanize people we deem “other”; to name the ways the
powers of this world cannot and will not be the last things standing because
the Ancient One shall take His throne and “his kingship is one that shall never
be destroyed.” This faith plays the long
game and we who are part of it are asked on this Sunday Whom we shall serve—the
King on a fiery throne or the caricature that we make who doesn’t ask us to do
anything too uncomfortable or draw too much attention to ourselves?
This doesn’t
end tidily; using our human metaphors for God’s endless power never does. But it does end with action—the call to the
work of the Kingdom, God’s reign in heaven and on earth, in which the unjust
empires are toppled and a child born in Bethlehem becomes One Whose dominion is
everlasting.
May we be open
to all the ways that that is fulfilled that don’t look anything like what we
are expecting. May we be open to all the
ways we are called to bring it into being.
Amen.
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