Christ the King in This Skeptical Age.

We have celebrated the Sunday of Christ the King, the last Sunday of the Christian year. The scripture, from Matthew, speaks of Christ who will be seated on high and who will separate the sheep from the goats. We spend much of our faithful lives trying to line up with the sheep, even though it's much more fun to act like a goat. The scene of that final judgment can send chills through the most ardent sheep, because it tells us that, whatever we have done to the least of God's children, we have done to God. I cannot help but think of the gathering of polarized goats we refer to as Congress. Many of the Tea Party darlings speak eloquently of "family values" while cutting programs that aid the marginalized of society. We have many on the left who chide believers as being in love with a fairy tale, and who go so far as to state, with seeming certainty, that Jesus of Nazareth never existed. How does one prove a negative, I wonder? For the record, any serious scholar worth his or her salt has studied the evidence closely and all agree that Jesus is a real person from history. Obviously, what cannot be proven is the certitude of his divinity. We live in a time when there is no real respect given to the idea of religious belief, when a sabbath day is present only in memory, and when immediate personal gratification is the order of the day. No wonder that there is no interest in hearing of a "King" of any type being a standard bearer for the faithful. It takes a lifetime, or at least, it has for this writer, to begin to understand the magnitude of what Christianity claims as its central tenet: God became human and identified with the least and the lost. What passes for Christianity in many parts of the world, and certainly in America, has little in common with that original vision. Christianity has became synonymous with winners and power brokers and people "like us." Working on college and university campuses for the past twenty-five years, I have seen the proportion of students who avail themselves of the services of the religious and spiritual life programs shrink continually. Students arrive at college with no religious "memory," that is, they have little or no experience as a part of a faith community, so why would they choose to affiliate with a program now? So, this is the situation out of which we proclaim Christ as King. Well, this writer will continue to do that, because we need the vision of a great and powerful leader who sides with the poor and dispossessed. When it comes right down to it, every one of us has felt dispossessed, even if we have not been financially poor. More and more of us are at risk of becoming financially poor, and risk falling through the cracks as social programs are cut in favor of tax cuts that curry to the wealthy and powerful. In Advent, Christians have the audacity to proclaim that a baby will be the symbol of a new world order. For a few moments, people will come together to sing carols and light candles. Meanwhile, we will be chastised for failing to spend quite enough on gifts to boost the economy, and the King will again be placed on the shelf until next year. But the image of God as loving the dispossessed will not be hidden, and it will continue to make us uncomfortable and to feel embarrassed when someone asks us if we really believe that stuff about Jesus. And the sheep and goats continue their journey along the road that meanders to the Kingdom of God.