Sermons preached by Rev. Mark Schaefer
There is some embarrassment in the modern church about Christ the King Sunday. It’s viewed as patriarchal, monarchist, and imperialist: all the things that a good modern-day Christian should oppose. And we should. But there’s something missing from that understanding, and that’s that proclaiming Christ as King has always been a subversive act.
Jesus responds to the Sadducees’ ingenuous question with solid legal analysis, theological understanding, and linguistic analysis. But even more than the deftness with which he deals with the Sadducees’ hypothetical, he teaches us a powerful lesson about God’s nature.
What if the church, were not a place that promised that everything was okay, but that acknowledged that everything was not? What if the church were a place where people could be broken without feeling like they were somehow being terrible Christians because they still feel broken? Even after coming to church and singing hymns about how everything is great.
The chasm in the afterlife is erased when we fill in the chasm in life, when we take care of the poor, when we ensure that no one has to worry about where their next meal is coming from, no one has to worry whether they'll be able to afford life-giving treatment.
The shepherd goes after the one lost—it doesn't mean the other 99 are not beloved or that they're not part of the holy flock. It just means there's one in trouble right now and that sheep needs help.
The power of Pentecost is that it creates a new definition of community: not defined by any one national or ethnic tradition, but as something universal, available to all people, as they are, and in their language.
that is true, then those with whom we would share the gospel do not have to become like us in order to receive the message. That grace is already present in their lives, in their cultural contexts, in their communities.
We are hardly ill-informed innocents stumbling along in spiritual ignorance. We would be better off if we were. But no... we had to know good and evil. It was precisely that knowledge that was so seductive to us in the Garden. We wanted to know. And we certainly have done so.
The Exodus led a people out of bondage into a new land where they were called to establish an alternative social model to those of the kingdoms around them. In the same way, the Gospel calls us out of our bondage to power and injustice, to create an alternative community grounded in justice, love, service, and fellowship. These are not things that we can do alone.
It’s not easy to overcome millions of years of adaptation to an environment where things were just not plentiful. It’s not easy to imagine now the world we live in, how much food there is, and how bad we are at sharing it. How much wealth there is—and how bad we are at sharing it. Because somewhere in our mind, we’re hoarding these things because we think we’re going to run out.
And so, it’s interesting to me to read this story and see how it was that the magi found the Christ child. Though they consulted with the scribes and got the answer from the scriptures, the scribes and scriptures were not enough to help them find Jesus. To do that, they had to follow the star. They had to follow the light. In times of overwhelming darkness, we look to these stars in our firmament and follow these until we encounter the Christ child who waits for us at the end.
or us this Advent and Christmastide, let it be that we have been given a dream: a vision of a world of peace, justice, love, and hope. A world in which the love of God reigns. God’s angel comes to us with this dream and bids us to wake and claim the Christ child as our own.
I. BEGINNING Thanksgiving is a great holiday. And not just because of the food. Though, I’m not going to lie—that is a big part of it. And not just because it marks the beginning of the Christmas season. Though, that is a big part of it, too. Rev. Mark SchaeferCongregation of St. Thomas the DoubterNovember…
But the witness of Mark’s gospel is clear: self-sacrifice, commitment, and perhaps even suffering are part of discipleship. They are what it means to be a Christian—to follow in the footsteps of the one who sacrificed everything for the sake of God’s kingdom. This is not a faith of privilege or benefit; it’s not a faith of status and honor. After all, in its early days, it was a faith popular with slaves and second-class citizens, like women.
This is how faith is meant to work. Faith is like a light we shine on the world. And the light we shine helps us to see the world not as it is, perhaps, but as God intends it to be. The light of faith helps us to see a broken world and imagine it whole. It helps us to see a world of injustice and imagine it just. The light of faith helps us to see a carpenter from Nazareth and know him to be our hope and salvation.