As we continue to experience the Word of the Lord together, Let us Pray. God of grace, God of Glory, on your people pour thy power. Open us, O God, to hear your word proclaimed, so that we might come in contact with you. Speak Lord, your servants are listening. If these words are not Your Word, may they be forgotten and come to naught. But if they be Thy Word, may they adhere to our hearts, forever transforming us from glory into glory, into the creatures you would have us be, Thou who art our Rock and Redeemer, Amen.

Sherry, Brad, Keaton and I would play cards. We played this great game called Spite and malice. The advantage of Spite and Malice is that you can play it with as many people or as few as you like, and it’s pretty easy to learn and play. The disadvantage is that it is quite addictive. When I lived in Orlando, the 4 of us would play whenever the opportunity arose. I had bought this belt buckle from the thrift store for 50 cents. It was the trophy. If you won, you got to keep the buckle. You got to take it home with you, display it however you wanted, the whole deal. When we played again, the winner would bring the buckle, and it was up for grabs. So, everybody wanted the buckle. Not because the buckle was that great, but because of what it symbolized. If you had the buckle, you were either King or Queen. The others would have to refer to the buckle holder as His Royal Highness, or Her Royal Highness, or HRH for short. So, we’d play cards maybe on Thursday, and on Sunday at church, the three of us would have to refer to Brad as His Royal Highness. You always wanted that closest to the weekend win, cause on Sunday, it was always fun to be at church and have folks call you King, or His Royal Highness who brings us all honor. And the jokes came about what kind of ruler you would be. Don’t let Sherry win, she’s a terrible Queen. The peasants are always mistreated when she reigns. It is good indeed to have a good king.

Today is Christ the King Sunday, the end of the Christian year. That’s right, your calendar may say November, but today is Christian New Year’s eve. Who wants to say “Happy New Year?” And so, as it is the End of the Christian Year, we celebrate things of the end. We celebrate the timelessness of Christ’s rule. With that in mind, today we read from Paul’s letter to the Colossians. Again today I’ll be reading from the Message translation. Listen to God’s word for you today. Message Colossians 1.11-20. The Word of the Lord…Thanks be to God.

Verse 11 is in a way a forward, or introduction, or prelude, because the text shifts in verse 12. But it starts in verse 11. May you have strength, Paul writes, but not the grim strength of gritting your teeth but the glory strength that God gives. What is glory strength? It is strength that endures the unendurable and spills over into joy. Wouoo. That’s glory strength. I would like some of that. Wouldn’t you. To endure the unendurable, and spill over into joy. If you want to talk about miracles, everyday miracles, there’s a big one. To endure the unendurable, and spill over into joy. Good forward.

So, in verses 12-20, we get a focus shift. This is what is commonly called a “Christ Hymn.” Like a hymn in the hymnbook that uses song to teach us about the nature of God, “Great is the Lord, he is holy and just, by his power we trust in his love. Great is the Lord, he is faithful and true, by his mercy he proves he is love.” This Christ Hymn is Paul informing the readers about who Christ is, what is the nature of Christ. The hymn is found mostly in verse 15-20, and it declares the ultimate quality of Christ and his supremacy over all other powers. It not only declares that Christ is the king, and has been so since before the inception of time, but it states that Christ is a good and wonderful king. 15-19 is about the fact that Christ rules, and has always done so. 12 – 14 are about how good God is, and that includes the Trinitarian view of Christ who reigns with God from the beginning. Christ is praised as not only pre-existent with God, but also active as Head of the Cosmos. The hymn focuses on Christ in two distinguishable but related movements. (1) Christ was and is active in creation. Even so, (2) now he is active as the Head of a new divinely created corporate entity – namely, the body of Christ which is the church.

The problem with this hymn is that it doesn’t state the obvious problem. After Christ with God created the Cosmos, death entered the picture. And it didn’t take long, either. Within the first three of chapters of Genesis, we have the fall, Adam and Eve sent out from the place of life to a place where death is involved, maybe even where death reigns. To punctuate that point, within the same chapter, we read about Cain and Able. And that explains a lot. This is nothing new here. Theology has been figuring this out since the birth of time. Just read the Psalms. For example, the 18^th Psalm, verses 4 & 5, “The cords of death entangle me; the torrents of destruction overwhelm me. The cords of the grave coil around me; the snares of death confront me.” Or, for a more well known Psalm, consider this, “Yea though I walk through the valley of death…” This world is the valley of death. Everywhere you turn, you can see the influence of death. But this is nothing unfamiliar to us. Do we need the Bible to tell us that we live in a world where death is ever prevalent? Can’t we just turn on the 6 O-clock news, or CSI, or watch coverage of the latest war? Death, and the reality of death, fights hard to keep a hold of humanity. It is as old as Cain and Able, and as new as Prime Time News. The timelessness of death continues to remain with us.

This is why we need glory strength. We need to be able to find the ability to endure the unendurable, especially in this world. The unendurable surrounds us. We don’t like to talk about it, because it’s not fun, but each one of us will one day die. And worse than that, we have to watch friends and family suffer pain and death.

Here is where we can find glory strength. See, even though death has entered the picture, Christ the great king took care of that, too. By his incarnation, life, death, and resurrection, we have been won. We have been won by Christ for Christ. Make no mistake, the death of Christ is not part of some bizarre sacrificial service that was necessary to appease an angry God. The death of Christ was a pivotal point in history. At that time, Christ won us from the power of death. Death and its power had tried to steal us from the Creator. So, Christ came down and took us back, won us through his death and resurrection. We are Christ’s victory spoils. That is why Christ is our King. He has won us. We are his.

And verse 20, in the first chapter of Colossians seems to sum it up. “Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe – people and things, animals and atoms – get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the Cross.” Now that Christ has won us, and all of creation, Christ as King fits all of creation into its order, and I love the language of this, fits all of creation together in vibrant harmonies.

Christ created everything, and continues to be active in creation. And, when it became obvious that there would be a battle for creation between sin and death on the one hand, and God and life on the other, Christ won us for his own. As such, he is King. Fortunately for us, he is a magnificently gracious King, who rules creation with grace and care. It is good indeed to have a good king. Amen.