385 One King

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “One King”, originally shared on November 25, 2025. It was the 385^th  video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   There seem to be major political shifts happening in our society and in the world as a whole, and they all have to do with the Christian understanding of marriage. Today, we’re going to find out why.

   How many kings do you have? Is that a trick question? Maybe. Maybe not. Today, we’re going to find out.

   We have seen public demonstrations with the theme “No Kings” over the past several months to protest the perceived authoritarianism. of the current administration. It has been estimated that millions of Americans have participated.

   We fought a war against the rule of King George III to end his abusive rule and gain our national independence from 1775 to 1783.

   Kings are not popular here in the United States. We believe in personal independence. We value it, and we have fought for it.

   So how do we approach a Christian holiday like “Christ the King” Sunday. “Christ” and “King” sound like polar opposites to us. 

   But how can we know who God is?

   What do you picture when you think of God? An old buff guy? The Force? A kindly grandparent? An absentee parent? Today, we’re going to find out who God is, and I guarantee that it will shock you! Even if you already know God, who He is always comes as a surprise?

   What do you picture when you think about God? A a guy in a white robe sitting on a golden throne? Long, flowing beard and puffy hair?

   A kindly, elderly friend who just loves you exactly as you are, asks nothing of you, and who just wants to love you and give you gifts?

   An impersonal essence? A principle? A generic higher power?

   Maybe something else?

   Your personal vending machine who you can ask to give you whatever you desire but who you can walk away from anytime you want and is otherwise uninvolved in your life?  

   A wise harmless old guy, like George Burns in the movie?

   Do you ever picture God as being young?

   Here’s another question: What do you think God thinks of you? Does that very thought make you feel guilty? Is God always judging you, waiting for you to get out of line? Do you think of God as violent and vengeful? Kindly and indulgent? Unavailable? Indifferent? Loving?

   Christmas will be here in about a month. (!) Do you picture God as a spying Elf on A Shelf? Watching like Santa, who knows when you’ve been sleeping, who knows when you’re awake, who knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!? Ohh!

   If you picture God as any of those things, get rid of them. I’m about to blow your mind!

   Maybe you think of God as cosmic royalty on Christ the King Sunday.

   Last Sunday was “Christ the King” Sunday in most churches throughout the world.

   One of the titles given to Jesus at his birth was “Prince of Peace”. OK. How did he get promoted to “Christ the King?”

   Last Sunday was the last Sunday in the Church year, and in it we go t to see who God is.

   The Gospel reading for this Sunday begins like this, in Luke 23:33,

³³When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. 

   This is where we find out who God is. This is where we find out what God thinks about us. At the cross.

   Here’s the story:

   Everyone has a belief about what the world is and how the world works. It’s called our “worldview.”

   The Christian worldview takes many forms, but they are all founded on the belief that the world as we experience it is not the way it’s supposed to be. Human beings messed up that perfect relationship with God and the perfect world that God created by rebelling against God. We thought we knew better. We still do, and that’s how evil enters the world.

   God sought out people to return to the personal relationship with God for which they were created: destruction and renewal, slavery and liberation, a chosen people blessed to be a blessing, the religious Law, victory and defeat, nationhood, disunity and hope, prophets, priests, and kings, and more! Nothing worked, or it didn’t work for very long.

   Then, in what the Bible calls the fullness of time, God became incarnate, God came in human flesh, fully God and fully human being in Jesus Christ. And God was rejected by the humanity he came to save and they crucified him. That’s the part we are seeing today.

   But they did not take Jesus’ life. He gave it. He who committed no sin, took the punishment for our sin on himself to restore the relationship with God for which we were created to all to receive that relationship as God’s gift.

   I have a t-shirt that says, “Body Piercing Saved My Soul”. That’s the most important message in history. Body piercing saved my soul. And yours.

   That is our worldview. Our message is our world view in our increasingly secular culture. Our challenge is that it means nothing to say that we need a Savior if the world doesn’t know that it needs to be saved. The cross means very little to people who don’t know of their need for it.

   But, the world does sometimes have a vague interest in God.

   And what do we learn about who God is at the cross? We are reminded that God’s disposition toward humanity is personal. We see God’s love in action in God’s suffering for us.

   Where do we see the kind of king that Jesus is? In John 19:1-5,

1Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. 2 And the soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they dressed him in a purple robe. 3 They kept coming up to him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” and striking him on the face. 4 Pilate went out again and said to them, “Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no case against him.” 5 So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, “Here is the man!”

   We learn what kind of king God is in what Martin Luther, the 16^th century church reformer, called the Gospel (the good news) in miniature, in John 3:16,

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

   Luther describes that as the Gospel in miniature because everything in the Bible points to the cross and because the Bible’s purpose is to lead us to a living relationship with the one true living God in Jesus Christ.

   Here’s how it happens, as the Gospel reading for this Sunday continues in Luke 23:34-43,

³⁴Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” And they cast lots to divide his clothing.

 ³⁵And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!” 

³⁶The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, ³⁷and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!”

 ³⁸There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.” 

³⁹One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” 

⁴⁰But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 

⁴¹And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” ⁴²Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” ⁴³He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

   That is Christ the King. The King of Kings of all time and space.

   Christianity didn’t begin in the Western World. Christianity was in Africa before it was in Europe. The Ethiopian Bible was put together well before the King James Version.

   Augustine of Hippo, in North Africa, one of the great theologians of the early Church, is attributed with the saying, “If you were the only person on earth, Christ would have still suffered and died for you.”

   We have been set free from the consequences of our sin at the cross. We exist as a part of the human race that is now reconciled to God, by God in Jesus Christ through faith and in Baptism.

   Even death has no more dominion over us.

   A colleague, a predecessor at a congregation I served, told me about the night he had a Church Council meeting, and he knew it would be a late evening. He called his wife and told her not to make dinner for him. He would just stop by McDonald’s on the way home, which he did. But, as he got out of his car to order inside, someone jumped out at him, pointed a gun at him and told him to give him all his money or he’d kill him.

   He told me, “I wish I could say that I was brave, but the truth is that I was just tired, and I said, ‘You can’t kill me. I’ve already died in Jesus Christ.’” He spoke of his Baptism, but I’m guessing that the other person thought that he was facing the living dead. And, in a sense, he was.

   All the color drained from the other person’s face, and he turned and ran away!

   Jesus is God, and he died for us. That’s a lot to absorb. When he lived incarnate on the Earth, he was young. He became human flesh as an infant, was a little kid, a teenager, and did not begin his public ministry until he was 30 years old. He was 33 when he gave his life, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven. Imagine Jesus as someone you know who is about his age. Imagine Jesus in occupied territory as a first-century skilled worker at the far eastern end of the Roman Empire. Imagine Jesus on the cross.

   That is who God is. Humanity is reconciled to God by God.

   God is neither male nor female. Our references to God are how we express our cultural identity, not God’s identity. There is no race in God.

   And yet, God is personal because God has made us for and given to us a personal relationship with God. That’s why Jesus, who was a middle-eastern Jew, often looks black in African Christian art, Chinese in Chinese Christian art, Latino in Latino Christian art, Indian in Indian Christian art, and European in European Christian Art.

   In James McBride’s book, The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother, he tells of the time when he was walking down the sidewalk, through the puddles after a rainstorm, with his mother. He asked his mother what color God is. His mother said, “God is the color of water.”

   There is no way to describe God. We can only know what God reveals to us in the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One God.

   God knows everything, God is everywhere, and God is all-powerful. God is always the same, including what God reveals in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.

   God is wholly other. God created everything out of nothing. And when I say “nothing” I don’t mean empty space. I mean nothing, no height or width or depth. No time. Nothing. God does not exist in any way that we can conceive of existence.

   That’s why the people of God receive this command in Exodus 20:4-5a.

4 You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them;

   That’s why God does not have a proper noun for a name. The “name” of something was believed to contain the fundamental reality of the thing it named in Bible times. That’s why when people went through some life-changing experience their name had to change, i.e. Abram and Sari to Abraham and Sarah and Saul to Paul. When Moses asked the voice from the bush that was burning but not consumed for its name, God answered “I am”. He gave a verb not a noun because it is impossible for a human being to know anything of God’s fundamental reality, except that which God choses to reveal to him or her.

   When I was taking notes in seminary, I sometimes used abbreviations like J the B for John the Baptist, or C the K for Christ the King.

   What do you think the initials CK mean to most people? Maybe the currently disgraced comedian Charlie CK? Most likely the logo for Calvin Klein, a symbol of conspicuous consumption, a label to announce your money, if not your taste. Because the world does not know God.

   Who is God? We can only know if someone has named the name of God to us. We can only know what God has revealed to us. We see what God has revealed to us most clearly on the cross.

   I spent a summer when I was in seminary doing a quarter of Clinical Pastoral Education. CPE is a program training prospective pastors to do hospital visits and counseling. It’s very intense and exposes seminarians to a lot of different kinds of life experiences.

   The program I was a part of was held at Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois, right outside of Chicago.

   One night, there was a humongous thunderstorm, and a lightning bolt hit a transformer and knocked out power to the hospital. The emergency generators kicked in and all essential services like the operating carols, the Natal Intensive Care Units, the respirators, and so on, received power.

   Almost immediately, the switchboard was lit up with calls from very agitated air traffic controllers from the nearby O’Hare International Airport asking what had happened to the fluorescent cross on the top of the hospital.

   Pilots coming in for landings had used that cross as a visual reference point as they descended and, seeing no cross, had been thinking that they were coming in from the wrong side of the airport. They were pulling up and flying in stacks over O’Hare.

   From that night onward, the cross was included in the emergency power network.

   The cross is our reference point. We see the love of God on it, what God did to restore the living relationship with God for which we were created.

   Americans may not like kings. Some of us may march for “No Kings”.

   But Christians have one King, and it is Christ.

   We will end the old church year this coming Sunday. We will begin the new Church year the following Sunday with the first Sunday in Advent, during which we will remember the wise men who came looking for the infant Jesus. Why? They had seen a sign that a King had been born.

   What kind of king?

   It is at the cross that we see who God is. Christ is our One King.