This Sunday, on the Feast of Christ the King, we will strip away the comforting lies and face the terrifying truth: sin is just the husk God always planned to tear off His creation at the cross. We’ll discover why the same voice that scares hell out of the unrepentant thief is the voice that lets the repentant one breathe free in Paradise—and why, as long as Christ reigns, neither the Church nor Christian civilization has to die.
Proper 29: Christ the King
Psalm 46; Jeremiah 23:1-6; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43
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I.
There is a lot to walk through in today’s readings. Let us go through them, passage by passage, starting with Jeremiah 23:1-6.
The first point Jeremiah makes is that God must deal with the failure of His people: specifically, with the failure of Old Israel, but also prophetically, for our own day, with the failure of the Church.
Much of my preaching this year has been focused on this failure, indeed it has become something for which I am known. Sometimes, I think to myself, “Perhaps I will preach on something else today,” only to open my lectionary to find a text from Jeremiah is appointed to be read.
Well, I suppose I could ignore the text, and just preach my own words, but then I would be guilty of the very thing the prophet decries.
It is impossible to miss Jeremiah’s point. Verse 23:1 reads, “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!”
The King James Version is even more explicit, “Woe be unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! saith the Lord.”
The pastors? Yes, the pastors.
Ryan Burge, professor of Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote in his Substack this past week, “the political partisanship of the average mainline pastor diverges significantly from the politics of the folks sitting in his pews.”
Burge is not saying mainline pastors are more conservative than their congregants. In fact, quite the opposite is true.
He writes: “For the ELCA, clergy are 13 points more likely to be Democrats. Among PCUSA leaders, 61% are Democrats compared to only 39% of the membership. The biggest gap shows up in the United Church of Christ. Among clergy, 71% are Democrats, while just 46% of the laity identify that way.”
Our own church is a UCC church, with me, an outspoken conservative pastor. With three nearly back-to-back membership classes this year, we may be one of the fastest growing churches in the UCC.
I use this illustration to make Jeremiah’s point real for us in 2025. Pastor means shepherd (the KJV vs. the RSV translation) and shepherds have two jobs: tend the sheep and keep the wolves away.
Too many pastors turn this on its head. They chase after the wolves and starve the sheep. What do I mean by that? Well, occasionally I see someone come to church and they’ve got “the look.”
What’s the look? Well, it’s hard to say exactly, but from “the look” you can tell how they’ll react if you preach the gospel to them.
If you tell them they are sinners who deserve to die and go to hell, they will become defensive.
If you challenge any of their sacred cows, especially the sacred cows of “a woman’s right to choose” (choose what, exactly, to murder?), gay rights, transgenderism, Ukraine, etc., they will get angry. If they get the sense you might have voted for Trump, they will have a public meltdown. I could go on.
As I said, occasionally, I will spot one or two of these visitors and that’s when I turn on my scary voice, my “wolf warning” voice.
That’s one of the two voices the great Reformer, John Calvin, said a preacher needs to have. One voice for the sheep, to call them with comforting words into the fold, and another voice for the wolves to say, “Stay away from my flock.”
But I’ve noticed something. Invariably, when I’ve chased someone away, I notice one or two people go after that person and try to draw him or her back in.
That’s not good, because as church members, you need to be on your guard against the wolves too. If your pastor is doing his job, you need to support him, because if you don’t, he will stop doing his job.
Pastors who stop doing their jobs come under Jeremiah’s rebuke, while churches who tolerate and even enable pastors not to do their jobs come under God’s judgment. (I preached on that last week when we discussed the destruction of Jerusalem temple.)
Before I continue I need to emphasize why pastors must have two voices. I also want you to hear from me what a burden it is to have to speak in two voices.
I want you to understand what is happening right now. Right now, I am preaching eternal life to some of you and eternal damnation to others of you. But I am using the very same words.
I know that some of you will go to heaven because of what I preach and that some of you will go to hell. I have to face that every time I climb the steps to this pulpit. This is a serious and somber thing I do.
It is why I think pastors who do not take this burden seriously, who step into the pulpit — or on the stage as is more often than not the case — in a t-shirt and jeans, are contemptible. They are trifling with the Word of God.
This is why I wear a black robe, like a judge, because Sunday after Sunday I am here to pronounce judgment. For some of you that judgment is, “This day you will be with the Lord in Paradise.” For others it is, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation?”
How does this work? Well, it works like this.
First, God in His eternal counsel and from his good pleasure has ordained some of you to be saved.
He has ordained my preaching — that is He has ordained my shepherd’s voice — to be the means of your salvation.
But for others who hear my words and who reject them, they are not saved. Worse, they will have no excuse on the Day of Judgment. Because of the words I have spoken today, they will not be able to claim ignorance. They will not be able to say no one ever told him the truth.
Second, it works because I do not preach my own word. I preach the Word of God, and the day I stop preaching the Word of God you should throw me out of the pulpit and run me out of town.
Very well, let’s move on.
II.
Many pastors shrink from carrying the burden I’ve just described, from using both voices. It is to such pastors that God says in today’s reading from Jeremiah, “You have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. Behold, I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord” (Jeremiah 23:2, emphasis added).
You see, any church that says “All Are Welcome” only wants to acknowledge the first voice, the voice that calls the sheep. But not everyone is a sheep.
Not everyone should be welcomed into the church, and it’s the pastor’s job, through his preaching, to sort out who is who.
The wolves prey upon the sheep and they target welcoming churches so as to unsettle their members with their perverse ideas.
St. Paul knew this and used both voices in his letters. In Galatians 5:12 he famously writes, “I wish those who unsettle you would mutilate themselves!”
But I will let you in on a professional secret: it’s the same voice.
The same voice that scares the wolves away lets the sheep know they are safe, that their shepherd is doing his job, that he is protecting his flock.
This morning’s reading from Jeremiah ends with this proclamation, “I will set shepherds over them who will care for them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall any be missing, says the Lord” (Jeremiah 23:4).
Do you see how it’s the same word, the same voice? The sheep have no fear because the same voice that drives out the wolves is driving away the source of their fear.
Jeremiah 23:4 is describing the reconquest of a flock that has been captured by wolves, and the effect on the sheep has been devastating.
Two of those sheep end up hanging on the cross next to Jesus in today’s gospel reading from Luke.
The first doesn’t get it. All his life he was told by false pastors that he was accepted for who he was, that God loved him, and that anything he did wrong wasn’t his fault. It was society’s.
All his life he’s expected his mother or his father or his pastor or Uncle Sam — I guess, since this happened in Roman times, it would be his Uncle Caesar — to solve his problems for him.
After all, to this day our politicians tell us that there is “no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”
Now, here he is hanging on a Roman cross, slowly suffocating to death. (The tender mercies of the wicked are indeed cruel.)
All his life he’s been taught that his sins are not sins, but now his sins have caught up with him. Now he’s demanding — from Jesus no less, the one man who could save him — his “get off the cross free card.”
Here’s the difference between the two thieves. The first wants his sins saved, the second wants to be saved from his sins.
The first wants to justify the wicked things he’s done, to rationalize them, to hear Jesus say, “You do you.” “Smile, God loves you.” “You are blessed.”
But those are the words of the serpent — the original false pastor — to Eve in the garden when he lied to her saying: “You will not die” (Genesis 3:4). Now, three of Eve’s sons are dying for her trespass. Mother of the living, indeed.
The second thief understands this. He understands that the only justification there is for his sins is hanging on a cross right next to him.
The second thief says to the first thief, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong” (Luke 23:40).
This is the only way for us to recover our original righteousness. But here’s the most difficult part to understand: it was always meant to be this way.
III.
We have the tendency to read the Bible chronologically, for obvious reasons. After all, on the very first page, Genesis 1:1 begins with the words “In the beginning…”
This means we want to put Adam first, and Jesus second. The corollary is that we end up defining our lives, including our religious lives, especially the terms of our salvation, in terms of sin first, salvation after. As the hymn goes, “I was blind, but now I see.”
But Christ is first, the Original. In other words, original righteousness precedes original sin.
In our reading from Colossians today, Paul writes, “He [Jesus] is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation” (Colossians 1:15).
Pause over that phrase, “the first-born of all creation.” Linger over it. Turn it over in your head. What could it mean, “the first-born of all creation”?
The plain meaning is that Christ is supreme, the king and lord of all, but also first. The first-born of all creation. Not Adam. Christ.
Genesis begins, “In the beginning God created…” but John’s Gospel tells us of the — I struggle to find the word because time itself is a created thing — John’s Gospel tells us of the reality that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).
We reverse that order into a perverse string of things we tell ourselves. We tell ourselves that sin is original, that Adam came first, that Adam and his wife frustrated God’s plan, that Jesus was Plan B, that God the Father sent God the Son on a rescue mission, and that Jesus is now leading the charge to retake what Satan has stolen from God.
That is very much what the first thief had in mind: “Save this mess I’ve made of myself,” he says.
God will do no such thing. He’s not interested in the mess we’ve made, and certainly has no intention of cleaning it up.
Rather, He will discard the mess we’ve made, like a husk, so that the ripened seed can be revealed. That seed is Jesus Christ: “He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation.”
Elsewhere, Paul writes, “Therefore, if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
IV.
The great deception, the delusion, that our readings have focused on the past two weeks is that somehow we can be rehabilitated, that the raw material of sin, by some strange alchemy, can become the stuff of righteousness and holiness.
This is the lie at the back of every works-based religion: Judaism, Islam, and the less-than-biblical forms of Christianity. This is what the false pastors love to preach. “All are welcome here,” they say. “Bring your sin here,” they say, and then they promise either to atone for it in their confessionals and masses or affirm it with their rainbow flags and yard signs.
You see, the Roman Catholic is no different than the progressive Christian when it comes to his approach to sin. Like the unrepentant thief, both expect Jesus to do something with it. But the only thing Jesus will do is rip it off, like shucking an ear of corn, to reveal the new creation He has made in us.
Sin has served its purpose, and like the corn shucks and the tares, it is fit now only for judgment, fit only to be burned.
Speaking of that coming day, John the Baptist says of Jesus, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:12).
Paul continues in today’s reading from Colossians, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” Christ is supreme and the very reason all things, including sinful Adam, hold together. Therefore, Adam cannot be first. Christ is. Christ is holding Adam together.
Paul continues, “He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent.” Rip the husk of sin off and what is revealed? Christ’s body, the Church, which was always there, but only late in time did it seem to appear.
Old Israel and Old Jerusalem were the husk, but inside the New Israel and the New Jerusalem were ripening, being adorned as bride for the bridegroom.
Colossians 1:19 reads, “For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell.” There is no question in Paul’s mind that Jesus is God, and because He is God, He cannot be Adam’s replacement. Hardly. Christ must be the original “image of the invisible God” in whose image Adam was made.
In the same way, the Church does not replace Israel. Rather the Church is the original body of Christ of which the Israel of God was always a part.
For this reason we must put aside any notion that we cooperate with God in our salvation, that we participate in our salvation, or that we “bring something to the cross” for Jesus to fix.
This sort of thinking goes by many names in the less-than-biblical forms of Christianity. The Orthodox call it synergism. The Roman Catholics call it good works performed while in a state of grace. The Methodists and the Baptists call it “free will” and the individual’s own choice to accept Jesus as his or her personal Lord and Savior.
But all of this amounts to saying the same thing as the scoffing rulers taunting Christ on the cross, “He saved others; let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God,” the same thing the unrepentant thief means when he rails, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!”
Even Christ did not — could not — save Himself from death, because death is the very husk He came to strip away and finally destroy.
“The last enemy to be destroyed is death,” Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:26 and today’s reading from Colossians concludes with these words: “[For through Christ God was pleased] to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”
In other words it was always meant to be this way. All of it, the sin included:
The dishonesty that led to the bribes paid and accepted;
The lust that led to the fornication; The same-sex attraction that led to the sodomy; The gender dysphoria brought on by social contagion in the schools that led to the mutilation;
The failure to honor the body as a temple of the Spirit that belongs to God that led to the piercings and the tattoos;
(“Preacher is saying I’m bad because I have tattoos!” No. Preacher is saying that all you’re doing is marking and cutting the husk, the husk that will soon be torn off.)
The jealousy that led to the theft;
The fear, shame, and the lack of trust that led to the abortion; The hate that led to the murder, and the lies told to cover it all up;
The complacency that kept you from voting;
The cowardice that kept you from taking a stand;
The unbelief that kept you from going to church and the contempt for God’s truth that kept you from opposing the spread of false religion that subverted the Church from within, and now invades our land from without — the modernism and liberalism from within, and the atheism, communism, Islamism, Hinduism, and the resurgence of paganism from the outside.
And none of this took God by surprise. None of it caught Him off guard, or unprepared.
When you realize that it all led to the cross, then, then you will cry: “Foul! Foul! Get it off of me! Rip it off! Tear it off! Cast the whole thing into the fire, myself included, for I am fit only to be burned!”
Then, then, when the final tear is torn and the last bit of chaff burned away, then you will find that all that remains is the peace of the blood of the cross.
Then, and only then, will you hear the words, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise” — not because you deserve to hear them, but because you were created to hear them.
V.
The work of the Church is reconquest, not because something needs to be “taken back” that was stolen from God, but because this was always the eternal counsel and original purpose of God.
Jeremiah says, “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.”
In Genesis 1:28 Moses wrote, “And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’”
Man was always meant to rule in righteousness over creation. Today, on the Feast of Christ the King, we finally celebrate that rule. We acknowledge the reality that, even now, there is sitting on the throne of the universe a man, Jesus Christ, who is also God.
Jeremiah’s day has come. David’s Son now reigns in heaven.
This has two implications for us right here, right now.
First, there are no accidents. Nothing escapes Christ the King’s rule. Not a sparrow falls to the ground unless He wills it, and all the hairs on our head are accounted for in His book (Matthew 10:29-30).
This means that nothing surprises Him, nothing catches Him off guard. Do you think He is surprised by your wickedness? Was there some sin He thought you were incapable of? Some disease which did not serve His purpose? Do you think you have fooled Him with your religion?
No. He knows you through and through.
The good news is that He has accounted for all of it. These are the husks, which, when once they have served their purpose, are stripped away to reveal the new creation He has made of you.
You and I need this kind of contrast, this “before and after,” the conversion, the “blind, but now I see” experience, to understand God’s otherwise hidden counsel and purpose.
The second is that it is true that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about, provided that the government rests upon His shoulder.
That is the prophecy found in Isaiah 9:6, “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”
The humanistic government proposed by the mayor-elect of New York City, by the increasingly socialist Democratic party (which is also the kind of government that most Republicans seem incapable of resisting) does not rest on Christ’s shoulder.
Such a government makes no pretense of even trying to rest on Christ. It is a government fully vested in man. It is destined to fall. Christ Himself will see to it personally.
If we want to reestablish our government on the shoulders of Christ, then we need to get serious about restoring biblical values to our culture and demand the same from the candidates for whom we vote.
This means we cannot be complacent or cowardly. We cannot refuse to act. In fact, it is precisely because Christ is King that we must act. He expects this of His loyal subjects.
The point of nearly every parable of Jesus and nearly every prophetic utterance is that God’s people must be faithful. His pastors must be true.
After all, the King is not far away and He is coming back soon. We will turn our attention to the return of this King next Sunday, the first Sunday of the season which marks His coming, Advent.
The Church does not have to die. Individual churches die at their own hand — by suicide, from their own choices — when they tolerate false pastors and admit unbelievers to membership.
Christian cultures, Christian countries, and Christian people do not have to die out either. What the world insists is inevitable is not inevitable at all — not while Christ is King.
The Great Replacement is not inevitable, but the Great Reconquest is.
Preached on November 23, 2025, at the First Congregational Church, Woodbury, Connecticut (https://www.firstchurchwoodbury.org).
