Christ the King 29C
St. Mark’s November 20, 2022
Jesus on the cross with thieves Luke 23: 33-43
In the name of our God who forgives, remembers, and offers us paradise. Amen
“Jesus, remember me..”
When the thief being crucified, traditionally called Dismas, asks Jesus “to remember him when Jesus comes into his kingdom,” Jesus responds, “Today, you will be with me in paradise.” That is not necessarily later after they both died, but right now. Jesus’ kingdom and his reign of peace are not simply in the future. It is right here, right now, if we only look for it, if we are willing to remember./ Remembering is not just recovering data from our memory banks. Re-/membering has a richer meaning for Christians. It means re-connecting, re/turning to a relationship. When Jesus gathers around a table for the last time with his friends, he says, “Do this in remembrance of me.” ”Reconnect to me.” When we hear this in the middle of the Eucharist, we not only bring to mind Jesus, his life, death, and resurrection,/ but we also bring together, re-member, the various parts of Christ’s body, Christ’s church, Christ’s world, as Christ stands there waiting for us. We remember and reconnect our lives with Christ as well as reconnect to those from whom we have been estranged./
We are offered paradise, Christ’s peaceable kingdom, when we gather around this communion table, even and especially with people who challenge us, disappoint us, frustrate us, or have wronged us. This table is a sign that communion with God is possible for thieves and criminals, for people who are significant pains in the neck, and for each one of us. The table represents the concrete possibility of communion with God and those with whom connection seemed impossible./ /
In Jesus’ last words from the cross, Christ the King teaches us how we accomplish reconnection.
“Father, forgive them.”
Think about the table we will gather around this Thursday, the Thanksgiving table. Our table traditions say volumes about how we gather and re/-member. Close your eyes./ Remember who has been and still may be at your table this week. Aunt Fanny, the drama queen; Martha, the family matriarch who knows terrific and tragic stories about everyone, living and dead; Robin, the lost child; Tom, the eternal child; Suzie, the family gossip; Marcella, who has a plan for everyone’s life; Uncle Billy who drinks too much and no doubt will become obnoxious before the day is over; Carol, who sees the good in all people and all things; James, the eternal pessimist;/ the brothers and sisters who differ about every political issue;/ and especially those wonderfully wild, energetic children running underfoot. That’s not a bad image for the church.. and for the kingdom of God, the scratchy proximity of near enemies coming together because deep down, under all those facades, they do love each other and know their only way of survival is to follow Jesus’ example from the cross, to forgive each other their humanness, ask for forgiveness, and remember that everyone also has a cross to bear. /
As we gather around the Thanksgiving table, we also remember those who are not there: loved ones who have died, those who have joined the communion of saints, those absent because they are in the military or government around the globe. We remember those absent because their relationship with the rest of the body is torn or fractured. Sometimes we remember those who have no access to a table./ If we keep re-membering, re-connecting we will soon have a vision of God’s kingdom and an image of how to make it a real place.///
An iconic movie for this relationship is “Places in the Heart.” A young widow, Sally Fields, survives the depression, planting and selling cotton with the help of an itinerant black man and a bitter blind man. In the powerful closing scene in a country church during communion, as the grape juice and bread are passed, the characters exchange the peace of God with each other, those dead and alive: the young black boy who killed Sally’s husband and then was brutally murdered, the banker who showed her no mercy, people alienated from each other, people who have harmed each other, her sister and her unfaithful husband, as well as those who love each other, Sally, her murdered husband, and her two children. It is an image of paradise, realizing connections, forgiving, and re/-membering./
“Forgive them, Father……, Mother, sister, brother.”//
Archbishop Desmond Tutu chaired the truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa after apartheid. Surviving that holocaust meant staying connected, re/membering, hearing people’s stories, and hearing, “yes, I did that; forgive me, I see how we are connected, and I do not want to lose that relationship again.”/
Hopefully, that is also what is happening in this city, in this church, as our disastrous pandemic moves toward becoming endemic.///
“Today, you will be with me in paradise.”
So, we begin to live in this paradise when we re-member, stay connected to God and our neighbor and learn how to forgive ourselves and our neighbor. The word paradise has often been used as another word for heaven. Paradise comes from the Middle Eastern word for a walled garden. It is a place of safety, an oasis in the desert, a church like this one, where relationships are protected and flourishing. It echoes the Garden of Eden, surrounded and walled in by four rivers of plenty. When the image becomes more extensive, it can mean “this fragile earth, our island home,” as Eucharistic prayer C describes us. There is a clear implication that paradise, this walled garden, includes all of us, even that other criminal hanging next to Jesus, whose response is not repentance but mockery. The difference between these two thieves, and those living in paradise and those who do not, is whether they are awakened to the possibility of forgiving and re/membering. It is not a matter of just putting on a different pair of rose-colored glasses. At times it can be cross-bearing hard work.
The re-membering that brings us into paradise is realizing our connection to each other, asking forgiveness for the harm we have done, forgiving others for the damage done to us, and holding on to a dream for the future for what is possible in God’s good creation./
We are all in the same walled garden, Americans, Ukrainians, Democrats, Republicans, Russians, North Koreans, Iranians, Muslems, Chinese, and Anglicans. Whether or not it is paradise depends on what and whom we re-member, what and whom we forgive, and with whom we stay connected.//
Who will you remember, reconnect with, and forgive around this family table today/ and later this week at Thanksgiving?
This morning, this week, we have the opportunity to forgive,/ remember,/ reconnect, and be in paradise.
Katharine Jefferts Schori, “Collective Memory,” A Wing and a Prayer (Morehouse Publishing 2007), pp. 15-18.