The Baby King

In a culture as busy and diverse as ours, there are all kinds of ways we measure time. Take any twelve months and watch the years come and go: The calendar year ends in December, the school year in May; the fiscal year may end in June, and then there are all the years that ours alone--the years between birthdays, between anniversaries, the years since the death of someone we have loved and lost.

Today is the end of another such year. Today is the last Sunday in the church year, the last Sunday before Advent, and like all those other year ends it looks backward and forward, with a little nostalgia and a lot of hope. Today's lessons are full of mystery and grandeur: In Daniel, a vision of the Ancient of Days seated on a flaming throne, served by thousands upon thousands of souls. Then in Revelation there is Jesus coming with the clouds, the ruler of the kings of the earth, who has made us kings and priests by binding us to him with his own flesh and blood.

Both of these images try to tell us where we are headed, what it has all been for, and they are strangely comforting. However it will all work out for us, God is there, and in charge, with Jesus at his right hand. However it will all work out for us, the universe, and love will win out in the end. God rules, and all is right with the world.

Then there is the lesson from John, also full of mystery and grandeur, but troubling. The theme is the same--the sovereignty of God--but this time the scene takes place on earth, not in heaven. There are no thrones, no white robes, no flowing rivers of fire. Just Pilate's dusty headquarters in Jerusalem, with a map tacked to the wall, perhaps, a rough table strewn with a few law books, and outside the sound of soldiers drilling. Inside, two men about to debate the meaning of kingship, one a well-dressed officer of the Empire, one a ragged street preacher. They appraise one another carefully.

Pilate is a little taken aback--whatever this Jesus has done, it is so rank that his own people will not even deal with him. They have turned him over to be tried by their enemies the Romans, and it is Pilate's job to decide whether or not the Galilean is a threat.

"You are the king of the Jews, I take it," he says. He says it flat, like a statement, but it is really a question. He wants to know what he is dealing with--a psychotic, an evangelist, a revolutionary? Is the man dangerous or a dreamer? Should he be stopped and made a public example or pitied and put away, a ward of the state? Pilate wants Jesus to show his hand, but he is playing with a master.

"Is that your own idea," Jesus says back to him, "or have others suggested it to you?" It is a good move: Answer a question with a question. Ask Pilate if he can think for himself or if he just believes everything he hears. Now it is Pilate's turn, but Pilate does not answer the question. Who does this Jesus think he is, anyway, cross-examining the governor? I mean, who is the arres-ter here and who is the arres-tee? Pilate dodges the spotlight, turns it back on Jesus.

"Do I look like a Jew?" he says. "Listen: Your own people have brought you here. What have you done?"

"My kingdom is not of this world," Jesus replies, "my authority comes from somewhere else." He does not answer Pilate's question either, but at least it is an answer instead of another question."You are a king, then?" Pilate asks, glad at last to have something concrete to pursue. But Jesus will not even let him have that.

"`King' is your word," he says. "My task is to bear witness to the truth." The last sentence of the exchange, curiously missing from this morning's reading, is Pilate's.

"What is truth?" he asks, and goes out to tell the Jews that he finds no case against Jesus.

What is truth? And what, in particular, is the truth about Jesus? For some of us the question may still be whether or not he is, truly, king, but for most of us that question has already, by faith, been answered. He is our king; we are his subjects and citizens of his kingdom. We believe that. The question for us is, what does it all mean? He is our king, but what kind of king? Condemned by his own people, abandoned by his friends, dead before anyone really understood what he was about. We are citizens of his kingdom, but where is that exactly and what do we know absolutely about it? We are his subjects, and our lives will never be the same because of it, but why can't we speak intelligently about what that means? We try, and our attempts come out about as cryptic as the exchange between Pilate and Jesus. What can we say, about our king, about our residence in his kingdom, about how the world is different because of it all?

Those are the questions of the day. According to the church calendar today is the feast of Christ the King. The lessons are full of kingly language and images full of questions about the nature of Christ's kingship--even the opening collect calls Jesus the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. It is a Sunday about thrones and crowns, majesty and sovereignty.

What irony, then, or what wisdom, that at the height of this royal crescendo we end the year and begin again in Bethlehem. At the height of our questions about Christ the King we are presented with Jesus the baby and set out to watch him grow up all over again. Year after year we come to this same intersection. Year after year we cover the same beginning, over and over, from Daniel's Ancient of Days to Mary and Joseph's baby in a hayrack. And the point of it all? In the words of T. S. Eliot, "to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

So that is where we stand today, at this intersection, between a heavenly king and a mortal baby who are as different from each other as night and day, who are the same person, who have everything to teach us about ourselves and one another. Christ the King. The baby Jesus. Christ the baby Jesus King? Okay. So what is it about babies and kings and ourselves that we need to know?

Well, let us start with a real baby. This one happens to be named Elizabeth Florentina, and several minutes ago she was baptized into Christ's body. With a few drops of blessed water, under the wings of the Holy Spirit, her ship came in. Through no inherent merit or good deed of her own she became part of a royal household, one of Christ's own, and she now stands to inherit everything he has, including his kingdom and his priesthood. Remember what we said? "We receive you into the household of God. Confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share with us in his eternal priesthood."

So Elizabeth Florentina was not only crowned in our sight, she was also ordained by our invitation, and shares with us in Christ's priesthood. She has a ministry to perform, and she has as full a measure of God's grace as you or I to carry it out.

Now if you are normal you are beginning to bristle a little bit right about now. You are thinking this is all very nice and perhaps even theologically correct to talk about a baby being a priest and all, but practically speaking it is a little ridiculous, isn't it? I mean, some of us have been baptized for thirty, forty, fifty years and still have not got the hang of it. Most of us cannot even remember our baptisms, and we wonder sometimes if that is not part of the problem. What if we had not been carried into the church and baptized before we knew how to focus our eyes, What if we had been allowed to wait--until we understood what it was all about, until we had reason to believe we could keep the baptismal vows we made, until--through careful study and diligent prayer--we learned what it meant to share in Christ's kingdom and priesthood? Wouldn't that have made all the difference in the world? God knows, but looking at Elizabeth Florentina I doubt it.

But you decide for yourselves, remembering that the chief job of a priest is to serve as a mediator between God and God's people: To represent God to the community, and to represent the community to God. That is, incidentally, one thing we lost in the Episcopal church when we turned the altar around: The graphic illustration of a priest addressing God with the congregation at his or her back. Of course, it depends on where you believe God is, but to be true to our calling, we priests should really spend the whole service turning back and forth, speaking to God as a representative of the congregation, then turning around and speaking to the congregation as a representative of God. That is what a priest is and does.

Now of all the kinds of people you can think of to perform that function between God and humankind, can you think of a better priest than a baby? About the time God gets fed up with us a child is born, all innocence and promise. God looks at that baby and maybe remembers a child of his own. Then God sighs and says, "Okay. All is forgiven. Let's try again."

Or about the time we decide God is not there, a child is born, all beauty and miracle. We look at that baby and maybe remember another miraculous child. Then we sigh and say, "Okay. There is love loose in the universe that is bigger than I am. Let's try again."

What better priest could we want? And what better reminder of our own high priest could we have? Before he could say his own name, kings knelt in front of him and called him king--a little plump-fisted, red-faced baby king, who did nothing to deserve the title except to be born and to be loved by God. Even then, he was God's answer to a world in need of saving, before he had done a single thing about it. Even now, Elizabeth Florentina shares in his eternal priesthood, before she can tell you a single thing about him.

So today at least let us look forward to putting ourselves in the hands of a baby priest, a baby king, and letting him teach us. Forget all the trite stuff about how babies know they are dependent and we should too. It is all true, but forget it anyway. Instead, as part of your Advent preparation, start paying attention to babies, any old babies you can find. Watch them. See what they tell you about God, and wonder what they tell God about you. Let them be your priests, diapers and all: Utterly inarticulate, totally responsive, listening to voices we no longer hear, just lying there knowing things we have forgotten. Let them be your mediators, between the known and the unknown, between the ordinary and the divine, between heaven and earth.

Then, once you have practiced with them, go ahead and draw near the baby king whose priesthood is definitive, upon whom all our claims to royalty and ministry depend. Watch him reach for the light. Which is he? A baby or a king? A newcomer to life or the ancient of days? The most delicate creature in the world or the savior of the whole creation? Do the distinctions begin to blur? Are the answers hard to find? Good: Welcome to the mystery--of belonging to a king with no kingdom in this world, of believing a baby can change the face of history, of loving a God no one can see or explain.

And then there is the even greater mystery: That we have been chosen to carry on the work of that king, that baby, that God, in the world--just us--inarticulate, mystified babes in the faith that we are. It is said that when Jesus finally got to heaven the angels asked him who he had left behind to finish what he started. "Just a small band of men and women who love me," he answered. "That's all?" the angels said, more than a little worried. "But what if they should fail?"

"I have no other plans," he said.

Barbara Brown Taylor