As we’ve noted already, today is the final Sunday in the Christian Year, celebrated as “Reign of Christ” or “Christ the King” Sunday in the wider church.
It’s one of the more recent additions to the Christian calendar, not an ancient marker in the life of Christ, but first celebrated 100 years ago in 1925, when Pope Pius XI instituted the “Feast of Christ the King” in response to what he saw as an amalgam of destructive forces in the modern world: the breaking down of the world order following World War I and all the repressive regimes that were emerging in communist Russia and fascist Italy, the stirrings of Nazism in Germany, and other nationalistic ideologies taking root and their claims of ultimate authority.1
In those turbulent and unsettling times, this Sunday was meant to be a sign of theological resistance to the many and varied authorities of this world that would claim our allegiance. A testimony that though governments rise and fall, Christ reigns eternal. But also more elemental, a reminder that no matter what should come, what challenge or darkness or trial we should face, “though the earth should shake in the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult,” we should not fear, for God is with us, and God is for us.
This holy day of the church is just 100 years old, but the promises it centers, of course, are much older—they are part of the bedrock of scripture.
I.
Psalm 46 is the first of what are known as the “songs of Zion,” songs of praise to God for protecting the holy city of Jerusalem and, much more, the people within it. And in its poetry, it lifts two images of constant danger or threat in the ancient world. The first is the sea. Of course, Jerusalem itself is many miles inland, and so the sea here really represents all the many threats of the natural world: storms, floods, droughts, and so forth.
Ancient people were under no illusions about the vulnerability of human life in the face of the natural world. Ultimately, of course, we’re at the mercy of the same forces today, a fact about which we’re reminded every hurricane season or with every extreme weather event, or even skyrocketing homeowner’s insurance rates. But ancient people had a much more direct, visceral understanding of their insecurity against the forces of nature: their dependence on the weather to grow their food, the devastating effects of natural disasters—earthquakes, winds, fire, and maybe especially, water.
In biblical times, the sea was a symbol for all that’s chaotic in life and in the world. As far back as the story of creation, it was the dark, untamed waters of ‘the deep’ that the Spirit of God hovered over to create life and order. In the book of Revelation, in John’s vision of life in the world to come, when ‘death and crying and pain will be no more,’ and every tear will be wiped from our eyes, we’re told that ‘the sea will be no more.’ If these shadowy forces were somehow pushed to the margins at creation, in the world to come, they will be eliminated—God will wipe away all that is chaotic and dangerous and unknowable.
There remains something wild and mysterious about the sea. It’s said that we know more about our solar system and the expense of outer space than we do the depths of our own oceans. It turns out those depths, the ones we vacation near, can be just as difficult to get to.
II.
In John Irving’s classic novel, The World According to Garp, the title character’s young son, Walt, misunderstands the constant warnings about the undertow when they’re at the beach, hearing it as the “Under Toad,” a giant toad, a frog, that lurked under the waters waiting to snatch him and pull him under. The family has a good laugh about it, but soon his parents begin to use Under Toad as their code word for anxiety, and what they felt as the constant threat of danger just underneath the surface of things.
I remember some summers ago when the boys first reached the age when they were all excited to play in the ocean on our trip to the beach and were big enough to swim into the ocean, though not too far. They spent hours out there running into the surf, fighting off the waves like they were comic book villains. But on more than a few occasions, I caught them, in their unattended moments, staring off into the horizon over the waters. They asked questions at night about how far it went, how deep the water was. They asked many times about the undertow and the riptide we had warned them about, forcing me to confirm again, for myself as much as them: You must be careful; I may not be able to save you. And it seemed that their world had now grown much bigger.
When the psalm declares, ‘So we won’t fear when the earth changes, and the mountains shake in the heart of the sea, and its waters roar and foam and the mountains tremble in its tumult,’ of course, it’s talking about the very real threat of nature, but it’s also talking about all the different storms of life. All the ways the earth can change under our feet. All the mountains that can shake—those presences we’ve known to be so steady, so immovable, so dependable, that all of a sudden stumble. We’re well aware at this point of the ways our foundations can shake as a people. But we each will know at some point these forces in our own lives.
A loss, a change, a diagnosis. A rejection, a disappointment, an honest-to-God failure.
Grief, in all its many forms, is chaotic in this way. It can feel as if we’re lost at sea, or that the ground has moved. I had someone confess to me sometime ago in the aftermath of a great loss, I feel like I’m having to relearn so much of my life. Basic things: how to get dressed, brush my teeth, go to work, eat.
It is no easy hope to say that even when our world crumbles and life as we’ve known it is washed away, we will not fear, for God has promised to be present with us through it.
III.
But the psalm doesn’t stop there. It knows there’s another constant threat to human life apart from nature, and that’s other humans.
‘The nations are in an uproar,’ the psalmist says, but deep down ‘the kingdoms totter.’ And this tension is important. The nations and their governments, their armies, wield the threat of great violence and pain and suffering, and yet if you look closely, they’re unstable. Even in ancient times, the psalmist knew it was not from strength that nations most often go to war, or that those in power execute aggression or violence. These actions most often come from a place of instability, insecurity, and fear. The psalmist knows what every generation forgets, which is that no kingdom or empire in the world has lasted forever. They each run their course. War and violence, in the end, lead to nothing but more war and violence.
Of course, armies and war are not the only forces of harm among people, far from it. For most, the threat of violence and abuse comes from far more personal relationships. Add to this the weapon each of us carries that’s capable of such intense harm, which is our words. So much pain, so much damage. Most often, words we don’t mean or misuse, or are careless with, thrown about in fear or insecurity or hurt. We’ve become so accustomed, so accepting of the ways our speech has been degraded: the hostility, the coarseness, the almost contempt for the truth. And the same as other weaponry, all it leads to is more words, more fear, more insecurity, more hurt.
Underneath all of these things—from the threats of war and political wrangling and subterfuge, to the bombardment of words we’re subject to day after day, there is a churning anxiety. A restlessness, a tightness in the chest that we have grown so used to it doesn’t even register until attention is called to it and we’re given an invitation to release it, which is precisely what this psalm does. It’s against this vicious, anxious cycle that God declares: ‘Be still! and know that I am God.’
Be still. Stop, for a moment, your ceaseless, restless moving. Look around at the mess you’ve made and remember that I am God—that I am God and you are not, is what’s implied.
Robert Alter, the great biblical translator, interprets these words slightly differently. He translates them not, “Be still and know that I am God,” but “Let go and know that I am God.”2
Let go.
The word in Hebrew means something like “release,” or “relax,” as in “relax your grip,” and drop whatever it is that you’re holding onto. It has a military connotation—like saying, “drop your weapons.” “Desist.” One translation gets to the point and says, “Stop your fighting!” Another says, “Stop striving!”—which hits me.
Let go.
The point, then, becomes not merely to slow down or be more mindful or more present amid hurry and conflict—all good things that we should do and be. But to disengage. To put down our weapons, which also means to relieve ourselves of whatever it is we’re holding onto for our own defense and protection.
What are you protecting? This psalm seems to ask. What do you feel needs your protection? What’s changing too fast? What seems out of control—and out of whose control?
What would it look like to let go of whatever it is you’re grasping, whatever you’re holding so close, so dear—not in resignation, but in faith that God is God and we are not?
Every story of change or transformation or new life in the face of death, of dawn peaking through the darkness, every one of them is not merely a story of being still, but of letting go of something: of a way of thinking, a way of seeing. Letting go of a regret, of a loss. Every one of them. What were Jesus’ words from the cross in John: Into your hands I commend my spirit. Letting go.
And you, from your own crosses, your own trials in the past that became your own moments of redemption or renewal or even resurrection—thinking back, what did you release, opening your hands, making yourself vulnerable, but open to receive?
IV.
This may be the invitation we need to hear, especially this Sunday, as we stand before the season of Advent and Christmas and all that comes with it—much of it good, but so much of it tender:
What would we need to let go of here at the end of our year together and as we enter the next, so that our hands would be free to receive what this season would bring?
Expectations of grandeur and perfection, so that we could receive what and who is in front of us?
Old wounds and memories of loss this season seems to raise from the tomb, so we could stand ready to receive the new birth, we pray is coming?
What would you lay aside to truly receive this season that’s before us? This life that we will live and are living even now?
This world that is still held in God’s hands?
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- Frank C. Seen, “The Not-So-Ancient Origins of Christ the King Sunday,” The Lutheran Forum, Fall 2007, “https://www.lutheranforum.com/blog/2017/11/11/the-not-so-ancient-origins-of-christ-the-king-sunday
- Robert Altar, The Book of Psalms