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Reign of Christ Sunday

Colossians 1
11 [Be] strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, 12 and [give] joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light. 13 For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.


I don’t want to go all Dan Brown in you, but we’re surrounded by powerful symbols.

Take your bulletin, for example. First notice the fold is perfect, done by a highly-qualified expert. Then look at the overall shape of the bulletin, taller than it is wide, like a window, or a book, or a portrait painting. And here is where it gets interesting: if you take one of the bottom corners and fold it to meet the opposite side of the page, you will have something that begins to resemble paper airplane—but it’s not. Next, fold the upper portion over, and then unfold. You should see that the line across the page creates a proportion of one to point-six. Taken overall, the bulletin had a patio of one to one-point-six. And this, according to everyone including Dan Brown, is called the golden ratio, or the golden mean, or what some have called it the divine proportion.

And now, without dragging you down the rabbithole of the Fibonacci and a sequence of numbers that will blow your mind, we can simply look around us and see the divine proportion. Faces have it, except for those two Russian guys arrested in connection to the impeachment investigation (Lev and Igor, if you’re following the news). You can see the divine proportion in the way the shell of a snail spirals outward, or the way sunflower seeds are arranged on the face of the flower. We live in a galaxy that takes the shape of the divine proportion, and even the double-helix of our DNA has it too. Think of a well-proportioned building, like St. Lawrence Hall at King and Jarvis. Each window has the divine proportion, 1.6 over 1. Take four of these windows, two over two, and the shape is the divine proportion. Take nine windows, arranged over three stories, and the effect is the same—the divine proportion.

Maybe your mind is blow even without discussing Fibonacci (you can google him later), but let’s add one more: the dimensions of the Ark of the Covenant, instructions given by the Most High to create the symbolic vessel of God’s presence in the tablets of Sinai—which match the divine proportion, two-and-a-half cubits by one-and-a-half cubits. And just because, one more: look up in your mind’s eye at the Creation of Adam, Michelangelo’s masterpiece, and measure. From Adam’s shoulder to the tip of his finger, then the tip of God’s finger to the tip of God’s toe—the divine proportion of one to one-point-six.

The thing about things like the divine proportion is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The ratio between the length of your hand and the length of your forearm—it’s obviously hard to stop. Where was I? Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Something invisible has become visible, something seemingly undisclosed has been disclosed and then cannot be hidden. St. Paul said so himself:

15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

It’s such a simple thing: Jesus is the visible image of an invisible God. Want to know what God is like? Look to Jesus, before all things and in all things, the firstborn of creation. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood (Peterson).

But how does it describe Christ the King, the Reign of Christ in our time? Well, hidden in plain sight is the order of things: “whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.” Students of history may wince that this point, thinking of the so-called ‘divine right of kings,’ and the kind of turmoil caused when rulers ignore the will of the people. But the verse says no such thing. The verse reminds rulers that they are uniquely obligated to follow the direction of the King of Kings—to rule his way, and follow his will.

And the letter doesn’t stop with kings and other rulers. Paul turns his attention to the church, insisting that Christ “is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.” Not the pope, not the moderator, and never the minister—Christ is the head of the body that he himself personifies. He is the ‘first born from among the dead,’ at the head of a long line of saints from the beginning down to today. When Paul begins Ephesians and Philippians with “to all the saints” he is inviting us to add our name to the list: to all the saints in Weston, God’s holy people, faithful in Christ Jesus.

And while we’re on the topic of seeing the unseen, this is still another layer of making visible the invisible, namely seeing Christ in others. See how it works? When we see Christ, we see God. When we see Christ in others, we see God. So whether we see Christ or whether we see Christ in others, we are seeing God. The visible image of an invisible God is manifest everywhere we look, and within everyone God favours—the poor who are first in the Kingdom, and those who mourn, the vulnerable, those who hunger for justice, the merciful and the pure of heart, the peacemakers and the persecuted, who are very often one and the same.

And just when the poetry of seeing God seems to have reached a conclusion, Paul says ‘just one more thing.’ And the one more thing might be what someone practical person might call ‘the point of the exercise,’ the place where this conversation is leading—and that would be incarnation:

19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

And while I said incarnation, you would be correct if you said ‘yes, but I heard atonement.’ Making peace through his blood is certainly one way to describe the way we are reconciled to God, but I think Paul is saying more. I think he is giving us two options here, two options in the face of a mystery that will only be revealed in time. This is why you only ever hear the phrase ‘atonement theory,’ because there are a few.

In one theory, Christ wins a cosmic battle over the forces of evil, bridging what separates us from the divine. In another, humanity is rightly convicted of malfeasance, but Christ pays our penalty. In yet another, the story itself, on a hill far away, is enough to turn hearts of stone to hearts of flesh for God alone. And then one more: “pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Christ, and through him reconcile all things to himself.” In other words, incarnation.

Obviously, this topic will come up more than a few times in the next few weeks. And when it does, I hope you can see what can often go unseen: God in Christ, pleased to dwell. Christ in others, blessed to reveal. And God in each of us, in some sort of divine proportion, allowing us to be Christ to one another. Amen.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 4:57 AM