Sermon – November 22, 2009: King
Sermon for Sunday, November 22, 2009 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
King
2 Samuel 23: 1-7; Psalm 132: 1-12; John 18: 33-37
In the early 1600′s English Separatists formed a congregation in Gainsborough
under the leadership of Thomas Smyth, who taught that the Bible, not creeds or church
tradition, should be the guide for faith and practice, that the church ought to be composed of
professing believers, and that they should govern themselves instead of being governed
by bishops. This church, at odds with the Church of England, was illegal. Its rapid growth
exposed it to danger, so the membership divided and founded another church under the
leadership of John Robinson.
The King of England, responsible for preserving the spiritual monopoly of the state
church, persecuted churches like Smyth’s and Robinson’s. By f608 they had been driven
out. They found refuge in Holland, where their faith was tolerated.
Smyth’s congregation settled in Amsterdam, where it was converted to the
principles of believer’s baptism and religious liberty by contact with Mennonites. In 1611 a
member of that congregation, Thomas Helwys, went back with a number of fellow
believers to found the first Baptist church England. Robinson’s church settled in Leyden. In
1620, hoping for a less worldly environment in which to pursue their vision of faithfulness,
two members of that congregation, William Bradford and William Brewster, led a number
from their church to America on the Mayflower.
Where does the king come into the story? The king comes in to interfere with
people’s worship of God.
We’ve been Baptists so long it’s obvious to us that rulers of nations shouldn’t try to
tell people how to pray or how to baptize or how to construe what happens at the
communion table. That’s God’s business, and that’s our business. If our souls and God’s
Spirit can’t reach an understanding on those things, no one in government is going to be any
help about it.
But back when Robinson and Smyth and their congregations were choosing exile
rather than submit to their king, it was a new idea. From ancient times rulers had been
regarded by their subjects and upheld by official cults as partners or representatives of
God. The New Testament’s clear distinction between the claims of Christ and the claims of
the empire, which resulted in so much martyrdom and such rapid spread of the faith, was
blurred once Christianity became the official cult of the empire. Kings harkened back to
God’s special regard for David and his dynasty to legitimate their power. Until the
Protestant Reformation restored reading the New Testament to the population at large, not
much got said about the possibility that God and kings might make competing claims on a
person.
The two Old Testament readings expose the vulnerability to wrong of human kings.
David says, in 2 Samuel 23: 3-6, “The God of Israel has spoken, the Rock of Israel has
said to me: ‘One who rules over people justly, ruling in the fear of God, is like the light of
morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy
land. Is not my house like this with God? For he has made with me an everlasting
covenant, ordered in all things and secure. Will he not cause to prosper all my help and my
desire? But the godless are all like thorns that are thrown away.” It is ruling according to
God’s will–in the fear of God–that kings are secure. How does David know that his house
will never produce any rulers whose priorities will be godless, and the dynasty get thrown
away like thorns? That’s the insight of Psalm 132, which tempers its talk of a sure oath from
which God will not turn back by making it conditional on what the kings do. Listen to verse
12:: “If your sons keep my covenant and my decrees that I shall teach them, their sons
also, forevermore, shall sit on your throne.”
If they are godly, it will go well with them. If they do what God says is wrong, then it
will not go well with them. Kings are like everyone else in that. Kingship is not above the
law of God.
This is a very dangerous truth. Twenty years after the Pilgrims sailed on the
Mayflower England erupted into a series of civil wars, culminating with the execution of a
king and a Puritan dictatorship.
On these shores, however, people were slain by illness and famine, and not by
each other. In fact, the Plymouth colony was delivered by what must have seemed the
miracle of friendly and English-speaking natives. After the first full harvest the little band of
Christians devoted themselves to a feast of thanksgiving, and invited their Wampanoag
friends. They were peaceable people, enjoying peace with their neighbors, and they were
grateful. Their knew that they had been saved by God, and feasted in celebration of what
had been done for them.
Their kingdom was not of this world. Their influence was eclipsed by a large influx of
Puritans, a more militant kind of Protestant. The people we call the Pilgrims were almost
forgotten until the late nineteenth century, when waves of Southern and Eastern European
immigrants aroused establishment fears of un-American influences. Then the story of
people who had come freely to be Protestants against the old world’s traditions, and who
had settled in with the English-speaking natives in peace, and submitted themselves to
their common Creator in heaven, was revived.
On Christ the King Sunday we remember that Jesus, too, wouldn’t accept the
worldly conception of kingship. He, too, was powerless against the ruler of his day, and
foretold his victimization in establishing that the fulfillment of his mastery over his own
disciples was in being reduced to body and blood. On Easter Day he ate with them again,
already vibrant with the life of that divine realm now his own, and they shared the food as a
feast of celebration for what had been done for them. That’s the spirit in which we hear the
invitation to the Lord’s Table once again, subjects of a ruler above all other powers in our
lives.
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