The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
November 20, 2011
Vol. 14 no. 44
The last Sunday of the year is upon us and we still have December to go! The Church chooses to operate by a different calendar, and that is fitting because we don’t fit much into anyone’s calendar anymore. Rather than be square-pegged into the rest of society’s round holes, we have insisted upon our unique conception of time. Increasingly, the world and nature seem out of synch, but we declare a different time, in and out of season.
All clocks stop on this last Sunday entitled the Reign of Christ, not Christ the King as in other traditions. A “reign” has the sound of timelessness, so the idea is that we are still living under the regency of Jesus Christ. That idea is not as popular as it once was. Certainly, the non-church world thinks it is quaintly out of date and out of touch. Needless to say, other world faiths do not accept Christ’s reign either, especially those that have experienced the oppression of Western Christian cultures.
Does Christ reign only over the faithful people who believe in him, or as in Isaac Watts’ majestic hymn of 1719 (Voices United #330), “Jesus shall reign where’er the sun does its successive journeys run, his kingdom stretch from shore to shore, till moons shall wax and wane no more”?
Miroslav Volf of Yale Divinity School has written Allah: A Christian Response in which he states that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, as do the Jews. Many evangelicals adamantly reject the ‘same God’ conclusion, but I don’t believe we in the mainline church are worshiping the same God as evangelicals, if you want to get picky. I don’t believe God is picky, for look at the widely different children God has and few of us have figured out everything about God.
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan