Sermon — November 22, 2020

The Rev. Greg Johnston

A few weeks after I started here, a parishioner from my old church in Lincoln passed away. It wasn’t a tragic death; she died in her home at the age of 99, surrounded by family, at the end of a long and, in fact, heroic life. I say “heroic” because that’s what she was: a hero.

I had only learned this the year before, when she was presented with a Congressional Gold Medal at the age of 98, but Patricia Warner, three quarters of a century before I knew her, had once been a spy. In 1942, her husband—a naval officer—had been killed in combat in the Second World War. Patricia, aged twenty-two, promptly headed to a Navy recruiting office to join up. On learning that the Navy didn’t take widows, she turned to a younger, scrappier service: the newly-formed Office of Strategic Services, OSS—America’s first modern spy agency.

During the war, she was stationed in Spain, where she helped smuggle downed American and British air crews out of occupied France. When Allied airplanes were shot down over Europe, the Belgian and French Resistance would try to rescue any survivors, hide them, and bring them through a kind of underground railroad all the way to the Spanish border. Then British and American agents could transport them through Spain to the British base at Gibraltar and bring them home. Spain remained neutral during the war, but its leader was a dictator sympathetic to the German cause, and it was full of German military and intelligence officers.

So Pat went undercover as a flamenco dancer, gathering information on German activities and recruiting friendly agents to the Allied cause, sending Morse code from her apartment and arranging for submarines to pick up downed fighter pilots off the coast.

Now I tell you all this, not just because it’s a cool story, and not just because I once applied for an internship to be a CIA analyst—I was rejected—but because this is, in a sense, exactly what we Christians are: spies embedded deep behind enemy lines.

This Sunday morning, the last Sunday after Pentecost, the last Sunday before a new liturgical year begins in Advent, is often called the feast of “Christ the King.” It’s a fairly recent feast, as far as church calendars go. The Pope only created it in 1925, soon after Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy. In the face of a rising tide of fascism, the Church emphasized the struggle between two kinds of kingdom: the empires of the world, with their values of power, wealth, and domination, and their bombastic, demagogic dictators; and the kingdom of God, with its values of compassion, love, and peace, and its self-sacrificing ruler, Christ the King. The feast of Christ the King stands at the transition between two great seasons of the Church: the season of Advent, when we quietly await the arrival of Jesus our newborn King, the Messiah, the Prince of Peace; and the long season after Pentecost, when we recognize that Christ still lives and reigns in the Church, and we seek to follow him and obey.

The kingdom of Christ is a kingdom that’s both “now and not yet.” We proclaim that that little baby who lay in a manger two thousand years ago was and is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords; yet we know as well that his kingdom is incomplete. We believe that God will come to set the world aright; yet we can see clearly that it hasn’t happened yet.

Christ’s reign over the earth is something like the French government-in-exile during World War Two. It was the legitimate government of France; there were French citizens who obeyed it, served it, gave their lives for it; but its land was occupied by a hostile foreign power. And while it was a true that a climactic moment of liberation was going to come, for years people did their best to live faithfully deep behind enemy lines—maybe with the help of the occasional spy.

Today’s Gospel reading shows us this conflict between the kingdoms of the world and the kingdom of God. Jesus returns in glory and separates the sheep from the goats, the righteous from the unrighteous, and he uses a simple test. It’s not whether they call themselves Christians or Jews, Hindus, Muslims, or atheists. It’s not whether they’re active members of their local church. It’s not even whether they’re upstanding and well-respected citizens. It’s whether they gave food to the hungry, and drink to the thirsty; whether they welcomed the stranger and clothed the naked, tended the sick and visited the imprisoned, because, Christ the King says, “just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40) Whether they knew it or not, when these sheep were caring for one another, they were meeting Jesus face to face. The same Christ who becomes present in the Eucharistic bread and wine becomes present in people who are sick or hungry or locked behind bars. And woe to us, the ancient Christians used to preach, when we clothe the Body of Christ in silver and fine silk in the Church and bow down in awe, while we leave his Body hungry in the street and turn away our eyes while he asks us for something to eat.

If this is what the kingdom of God looks like, then it seems clear that we’re not living in it yet. Despite our best efforts, we do not manage to feed all those who are hungry, and to clothe all those who are naked, let alone to care for all those who are sick or in prison. And we do display that hypocrisy that honors Christ’s body in the Church and ignores it in the streets; at least most of us do, at least much of the time.

But God is coming back to set things right. And that’s the real story here. The kingdom of God is not just a set of ideals or values that we ought to follow. It’s a real kingdom, it’s a real government; it’s in exile now, but it’s going to return in force. This is what the “shepherd” imagery of the prophet Ezekiel is all about. “Shepherd” was a common image for a king, who leads and guides and cares for the people like a flock. And, God says, after generations of human kings have failed to care for their people, “I myself will search for my sheep, and seek them out… I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep… and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak… I will feed them with justice.” (Ezekiel 34:11, 15-16) It’s this “coming again” to lead the sheep, this “coming in glory” with “all the angels” (Matthew 25:31) to “restore all things,” that we await in Advent. It’s the D-Day of the Christian story, the final liberation that will end with the kingdom of peace, and love, and justice, the kingdom of God that feeds the hungry and heals the sick, finally ruling the world.

But that day has not yet come. We’re left here in this world, like a bunch of spies, living in a hostile kingdom, but doing our best to help our cause. We can’t liberate France all on our own. We can’t feed all the hungry on our own. We can’t end the pandemic on our own. Those victories are up to forces beyond our control. But we can feed a few people who are hungry. We can visit a few people who are imprisoned. We can slow the virus enough so that just a few fewer people might be sick and die. These little differences will never be enough to change the world. But to one person, from one person, they can mean everything.

So here we are, spies for the kingdom of God, living subversively as agents of God’s love in an often-unloving world, slowly chipping away at the reign of cruelty, violence, and destruction until—one day—our God returns to reign. We don’t know when that final victory will come, and we’ll see Christ returning in glory; but we do know when we can see him walking among us now, because he’s told us where to look.

So where, O undercover Christian, have you seen Christ this week without knowing it? Where have you seen someone hungry, for food or for meaning, and how could you feed them? Where have you seen someone thirsty, for water or for God, and how can you give them something to drink? Where have you seen someone sick or imprisoned, in body, mind, or spirit, and how can you give them relief? Because this is our mission while we’re here behind enemy lines: to seek out our neighbors when they need us and to help, to smuggle them out of the kingdom of this world and into the kingdom of God’s love—and there, in them, to meet our Lord and God. For “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40) Amen.