blip : Being Lonely In Paradise :

Title: Re-member me?
Date: 11.25.07, Christ the King Sunday.
Texts: Luke 1:68-79, 23:33-43; Col 1:11-20; Jer 23:1-6

“Will you remember?” Hanging on the cross, tortured, nearing death, the convicted rebel asks Jesus to remember him. Don’t forget me, Jesus, he says.

(pause)

That’s something we all want—to be remembered. It’s the legacy question that presidents seem to ask on their way out of office—how will they remember me? But you and I ask it too. “How will I be remembered?” “Will someone remember me?” “Who will show up to my funeral?”

We’re usually very good at running away from death, from thinking about death. Sometimes it almost feels like we live in denial of death—our own, and the many throughout our world. But our passage from Luke shoves death right smack in the middle of our face. Our attention is focused on three people, nearing death, on crosses, painfully awaiting their last bit of life to drip to the ground.

With death fast on his heels, one terrorist says to another, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Yes, I just called Jesus a terrorist. Let me explain. It’s an important point, especially important these days. Jesus, though wrongfully accused, gets a terrorist’s death—he dies hanging between two convicted terrorists.

Crucifixion isn’t for a run of the mill thief or criminal. Only special people get killed on crosses. Crucifixion takes a lot of work—it’s costly. It’s only for people who the Roman powers consider enemies of the state, threats to national security, subversives and revolutionaries, sectarian radicals, freedom fighters, Middle Easterners who want the Empire out of their backyard. Sound familiar?

Sometimes the bible sounds so strange, like it comes from another planet, a distant world—separated from ours by thousands of years. But I don’t need to do too much work to make this passage relevant—it’s already about our world. It’s about three guys from the Middle East who get tortured to death because the Empire thinks they are a threat, enemies of the state, what we call these days, terrorists. You see, Golgotha, that hill outside of Jerusalem, is just down the street from Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

The tortured murder of Jesus is a public humiliation—Rome has done it before, and they’ll do it again. They try to make an example out of him, like they did to other Jews who claimed to be Messiahs, alleged liberators/redeemers of Israel. They put a sign on his cross, “This is the king of the Jews.” The sign is meant as a deterrent. It tells all the other wannabe radicals that this is what happens when you talk too much about the promise of another kingdom, another dominion or empire, other than Caesar’s. Too much kingdom talk will get you killed.

But this man, this Jesus, is different from the other messianic terrorists. And if we want to know more about this man, we’ll have to trust terrorist hanging on the next cross over. He’s the one who gets Jesus right; he’s the one who calls Jesus a king. He says, “this man has done nothing wrong.” Jesus is innocent. Jesus is a victim, a casualty of people drunk on power. And it’s the guilty terrorist who speaks the truth, proclaims the truth—it’s the guilty terrorist who preaches.

And then he says, “Jesus, remember me when you enter into your kingdom.” And Jesus answers his companion on the cross, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

(pause)

There’s something very strange about reading the crucifixion story today. The church calls this day Christ the King Sunday. We focus on the kingship of Jesus and our service in his kingdom. But how strange is it that we read about his humiliating death, not his coronation. We read about a cross on a deserted hill, not a throne in a beautiful palace. We read about the tortured death of two terrorists, and a falsely accused one—not an extravagant banquet and celebration.

But what can all this mean for us. I can see two ways this can affect our lives.

First, contrary to the advice of parents, Jesus hangs out with the wrong crowd. Jesus chooses really bad people to be his companions. I’m not trying to say that Jesus wanted to die alongside violent men—that somehow Jesus is in solidarity with terrorists, that he’s some kind of Che Guevara, or Fidel Castro, or Camillo Torres. That’s what they were saying in the 60s. That’s not at all want I’m saying.

But what is completely unnerving about this passage, at least for me, is that Jesus invites one of them into paradise—to be his companion forever, into eternity. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “today you will be with me in Paradise.”

It’s crazy enough that this tortured Jesus, with the thorns of death digging into his soul, forgives his torturers and killers: “Father, forgive them,” he says from the cross, “for they know not what they do.” That’s amazing enough. But it’s almost what we’d expect from this guy who’s been extending God’s forgiveness throughout his life, to unexpected people. It only makes sense that he has the grace to forgive, even in his final moments, even to forgive his killers.

But that Jesus accepts a terrorist into God’s kingdom, into paradise, is completely disturbing. It’s disturbing because that place is our hope too—that’s the party we plan on attending too. It’s like being invited to a party, and discovering that someone you really don’t like is going to be there. You can’t stand them; they disgust you; the last thing in the world you want is to be stuck in the same room with them for an evening. So, you graciously make up an excuse, and regretfully apologize for having to miss the party.

And apparently heaven, the paradise of God, has people like this violent rebel there. And exactly at this moment—this scene on the crosses—is where we see displayed before our eyes the profound mysteries of God’s peace, the peace of Christ, something quite different from how our world thinks about peace.

As we heard Paul say in our reading from Colossians, “Through Christ God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross” (1:20). It’s that ‘all’ that disturbs me. Because it sounds like it includes Jesus’ terrorist companion.

At the cross, Jesus invites this convicted criminal into peace, into paradise—to be his companion for eternity, to live at peace with him, and with those he has wronged.

Jesus shows us that peace is possible. But it’s a peace that takes work—it’s something we receive through friendships with our enemies. It’s something we receive through companionship, with friends and enemies, like Jesus and the terrorist. It’s not just about taking their guns and bombs away. Peace is not the absence of war. The peace of Christ is a much more difficult promise—it’s about being drawn into friendships, eternal friendships, and finding companions, even among hated enemies.

And we receive moments of that kind of peace, that mysteriously beautiful peace of Christ, the peace of paradise, when we find companions, fellow travelers—when we form friendships across walls, across divides. Christ’s kingdom crisscrosses all our boundaries, and invites us to link ourselves across divisions—even if that means with violent men and women, because that’s exactly the place where Christ’s peace overflows miraculously.

So, that’s the first thing we can learn: that Christ makes friends with bad people, the wrong people, and that’s also our call if we want to proclaim the peace of Christ’s coming kingdom.

But there’s also a second way this passage can change us, a way it offers us good news. It’s there in the question one of the terrorists asks the wrongly accused terrorist: “Jesus,” he says, “remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Remember me.

The good news is that God remembers us; God remembers you and me. The promise to remember is there in our passage from Jeremiah 23.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.

Jesus is the son of David, the Messiah of Israel. Jesus is the way God remembers his people—God gives them a Messiah, a savior.

God remembers. It’s there in the song of Zechariah we heard in the reading from Luke’s first chapter:

The Lord God of Israel has raised up a mighty savior for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets, that we would be saved from our enemies… Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant.”

God remembers.

And just as God remembers and redeems Israel, so God remembers you and me. Just as Jesus remembers his companion on the cross, so Jesus will remember me and you. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “Today you will be with me in paradise.”

Paradise is God’s garden, the Garden of Eden remembered and recreated. Paradise is the earth renewed, overflowing with milk and honey, bearing fruit, exploding with life. And like that first garden, paradise is where we receive companions, friends—bone of our bones, flesh of our flesh. Paradise is the place of the wedding feast where all the guests are joined together as the bride of Christ, God’s beloved.

The good news is that God remembers the past, but it’s also that God remembers the future, and is at work transforming us into what we will become: the beloved bride of Christ, without spot or wrinkle, the eternal companion of Jesus.

Christ remembers his beloved. Christ remembers you. Christ remembers who you are and especially what you will become—renewed and reunited with all his companions, bone of our bones, flesh of our flesh, the beloved of God.

(pause)

In a few minutes we will find ourselves at the banquet table of our Lord, the Lord’s Supper, our communion. That’s the place of our union, where we come together as companions, where we get to work at receiving the merciful love of Christ that holds us together, that renews and reforms us as God’s beloved people, all of us, invited into the eternal embrace of God’s love.

It’s the place where we remember what God remembers—you and me, woven together with the needle of God’s love, which is the cross. And when God remembers us, we are re-membered: we become members of one another, we are joined, we are reunited, we are remembered to Christ.