"Celebrating Our King"

Sermon by The Reverend Cindy Carter

November 26, 2023

Several years ago, right after Christmas, my friends Tim and Suzi handed me a copy of a book titled Just Mercy. The author was named Bryan Stevenson. As they handed it to me, they said, “You need to read this book.”



I promptly took the book home and placed it in the stack of other books I “need to read” some time. And, to be honest, I sort of forgot about it for a while. 

Sometime into the new year, I had an opportunity to visit my friend Jimmy, who was a prisoner at Fountain Prison in Atmore, for the first time. I won’t bore you with the details of my visit. For those of you who want details, just let me know. 

Let’s just say that it was eye opening. I learned quickly that I was not “prison savvy.” I learned quickly that prison, even if you are only visiting, can be a demeaning and dehumanizing experience. I learned quickly that prisoner and visitor have more in common than one might think.   

When I left Fountain Prison that day, I could not get home fast enough to find that book Tim and Suzi had given me. You see I knew that Bryan Stevenson and the organization he founded, the Equal Justice Initiative, works with the criminal justice system, works with prisoners who were wrongly accused, works with child prisoners. 

I knew I had to read that book. I guess my firends Tim and Suzi had been right all along.

I will always remember when I finished it. It was during Holy Week, after I got home from our Maundy Thursday service. I will never forget it. 

In a TED talk that Bryan Stevenson did and in many of his public speeches, he has said that, if you want to change the world, there are several things you need to do.

The first of these is that you have to get proximate to problems. You can’t help solve the world’s problems at a distance. You have to get up close and personal.

You have to give food and drink to hungry and thirsty people; you have to welcome strangers; you have to give clothing to naked people; you have to take care of sick people and visit people in prison.

He also says that you sometimes have to do uncomfortable things. And, we all know that doing the things that I just read, the things Jesus mentioned in this parable, can be pretty darned uncomfortable.

My visit with Jimmy brought me up close and personal with a world and people I frankly knew nothing about, and it was definitely uncomfortable. 

It caused me to want to read a book that I might never have picked up again, even though dear friends had given it to me. And, while I may never change the world, that proximate, uncomfortable experience has taken me down paths I would never have imagined. Now, I definitely want to change the world for people like Jimmy.

Bryan Stevenson is certainly right about what it takes to change in the world, because you have to start somewhere. You have to be willing to get up close and personal with people and situations that might be very unfamiliar, and you have to be willing to do some pretty uncomfortable things.  

Jesus also knew that’s how you change the world.

But, I think there is something else that Jesus knew. Jesus knew that when we do these things we open up ourselves to being changed. We become vulnerable so that we can be transformed. 

I believe that experiencing up close a person who is hungry or thirsty, naked or a stranger, sick or in prison, as a friend, as someone not unlike our ourselves, expands our vision of humanity and of God. It expands our vision of who we are as children of God. Showing grace to others changes us.

I know that when I’ve shown grace to another person, no matter how small that act of grace, I have been blessed and I have been changed. These gifts of grace have opened hard, stony places in my heart I didn’t even know were there.

I met my friend Debra a number of years ago when she attended what we called our “When Christmas Feels Blue” service about a week before Christmas in the parish where I served before my retirement. She had been invited to come by one of her friends who was a member of the parish. 

You see Debra had not too long before experienced the loss of her father. He had been brutally murdered in his home just outside town. Debra was grieving and searching and questioning and, with that invitation, found her way to us. 

And, she never left our parish after that evening. She became a member, was confirmed, has served as senior warden. 

Debra is also a dedicated volunteer in the parish’s Rice and Beans Ministry, among the many ways she serves there. One Saturday each month, food is distributed and a hot home-cooked breakfast is served to anyone who shows up. No names are taken, and no paperwork is required. You just have to show up.

One Saturday morning, as I walked through the kitchen behind the serving line where she was standing behind very big pan of scrambled eggs, Debra asked me if I had a minute. In that minute, she told me that she had just served breakfast to the mother of the man who was her father’s murderer.

At that moment, Debra was shocked, confused, and pretty unsure of what was going on. All she knew is that she had looked at that woman and put scrambled eggs on her plate.

But, she now says that as the days and weeks passed, when she was able to process what had happened, she knew that it was a moment of grace, a moment when God  began to show her that forgiveness was possible.   

Up close and personal -yes. Uncomfortable – absolutely. And, in that unexpected moment of grace, transformation began for my friend Debra.

Today, we celebrate “Christ the King Sunday.” We celebrate a king who said that his kingdom in not like the kingdoms of this world. A king who doesn’t want to preserve the world the way it is, but to change it - so it is more like his kingdom. A kingdom that is full of justice and compassion and love.

A king who doesn’t want us to stay the way we are, but to change us, to transform us – so that we are more like him. People of justice and compassion and love.

A king who is more interested in the hungry and thirsty, the naked and the stranger, the sick and the prisoner than in the full and the powerful. A king who is more interested in making us vulnerable and sensitive and open to change than in keeping us as we are.

Today, we celebrate a king who spoke with a lonely, sad, thirsty woman, a Samaritan no less, a stranger to him in every way possible, and offered her living water.

Today, we celebrate a king who filled a basin with water, tied a towel around his waist, knelt down, and washed the feet of his weary disciples.

My friends, today we celebrate a king whose throne was a cross. AMEN.