Back to the Basics

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, November 23, 2025
Luke 23:33-43

    When I first started out as a pastor, the Rev. Dave Daubert was a mentor and coach for me.  He helped our congregation at the time identify a new mission statement and core values to guide our decision-making and ministry efforts.  Pastor Daubert insisted that every Christian church’s first core value should be, “Jesus is Lord.”  For example, in terms of decision-making in a church committee meeting or church council, we begin with the foundation of our shared understanding that Jesus, ultimately, not any of us, is in charge.  The church’s main purpose is to serve Jesus.  If we’re not doing that, we’re not being the church.  So if our primary purpose as Christians is to serve Jesus as our Lord of Lords and King of Kings, how might that change our decision-making?  I’ve found it to be a helpful guide for churches to remember, “Jesus is Lord.”
    Today is actually the 100th anniversary of the festival of Christ the King.  As Lutherans, we follow a seasonal liturgical calendar with appointed scripture readings for each week similar to other mainline Protestants and the Roman Catholic church.  This is the newest festival in the church year.  To put things in perspective, All Saints has been a festival since the 800s, Christmas since 336 when Rome became Christianized, and Easter is the earliest Christian festival, when Christians first began gathering as church communities to commemorate Jesus’ resurrection from the dead in the 30s.
    Pope Pius XI first established Christ the King Sunday in 1925 after the world had come through the horrors of World War I, and amidst turbulent nationalist fascist and communist movements, like emerging Naziism that threatened to bring another World War, which we know eventually did happen.  At a time when many countries’ dictators were demanding total loyalty, the Pope encouraged Christians to remember Jesus is Lord of Lords and King of Kings.  We have no king but Jesus.  Lutherans adopted Christ the King Sunday in the 1970s along with other Protestants to continue to refocus believers on the true eternal ruler of all, away from unquestioning loyalty to earthly powers.  And so this primary, basic purpose of the Church, both Protestant and Catholic, continues today: to turn people back to serving Jesus as Lord and King, first and foremost.  This is a festival where we go back to the basics of our faith – the first commandment – “You shall have no other Gods.”  The core of the gospel, as we read in Luke today, that Jesus died and was raised to save us, and that only Jesus can save us.  They crucified him as King of the Jews, not realizing he was actually King of the Universe.  Today is a day where we go back to the basics of our faith.
    In just over a month, it will be 2026, the 250th anniversary year of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, where Americans overthrew colonial, monarchical rule to establish democracy and declare that we don’t need a king.  Throughout our country’s history, we have resisted any person who tries to rule more like a king than a democratically elected official.  So, what does it mean for us as American Christians to call Jesus our King?  Why should we put ourselves under anyone including Jesus as our LORD and KING?  Why do we WANT to use this title for Jesus, when it may seem archaic and out of touch with our current reality?
    The retelling of Jesus’ crucifixion in Luke today gives us some insights.  Try as we might to put God first in our lives and pray, “your will, not my will, be done,” we can relate to the criminal on the cross and others who say, “Aren’t you the Messiah?! Save yourself, and us!”  We want Jesus to do what we want him to do, not the other way around.  We have particular ideas of what Jesus should be like as our Lord, Messiah, and King.  Maybe we want Jesus to instantly fix all our problems.  Maybe we want him to be like a magician and do the impossible for our self-preservation, rather than for our transformation.  Instead, our gospel tells us that Jesus as our Messiah and King saves through a humbling death on the cross, crucified between two criminals.  Some of Jesus’ final words are, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”  We confess to God that we, still, don’t know what we are doing.  We have failed to follow Jesus perfectly or understand his role in our lives.  We need his forgiveness and salvation.
Jesus’ final words are words of forgiveness, not a triumphalist display of glory and might as we might expect of the King of the Universe.  Jesus often acts in ways that are unexpected, even today, showing up among the unnoticed, the least, the last, and the lost.   He calls us still to lives of service, walking with us in the midst of our suffering.  In the eyes of the world, even for some people today, Jesus fails in surrendering himself to death on a cross.  Jesus is a different kind of king.  We call him Lord, because we believe his way of life AND how he died is one of forgiveness, healing, restoration, life, and salvation.  We want to serve Jesus as our Lord and King because we have seen how he has changed us by his transforming death and life.  He is a ruler we can trust, whose way is good!
    So today, we go back to the basics:  death and resurrection, putting God first in our lives, confessing that we don’t know what we’re doing, and receiving Christ’s forgiveness. We rejoiced with Belle at her baptism this morning.  Belle attended her first Christian worship service when she was 3 years old and Dorothy was her nanny.  Throughout her life, she kept going back to church and having positive experiences, including being a part of a church family at a Methodist church in New Hampshire where she did everything except be baptized.  This day is a long-time coming for Belle, to officially become a Christian through her baptism today.  She told me this is a new start for her, as baptism is for all of us, “back to the beginning.”  At our baptisms, we join Christ in his death, and we rise with him to new life in his kingdom.  We hear this good news, “truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”  This promise is true for us just as it was for the criminal on the cross.  Remembering our baptism helps us rearrange our priorities so we again and again try to put Jesus first in our lives, as our Lord and King.  So on this 100th year of celebrating Christ as King, may we remember that Jesus is Lord, that through our baptisms we share in his death and resurrection, and that at the last, through his mercy and forgiveness, we will join him in paradise.  Amen.