I visited St. Peter’s Oakland yesterday on the Patronal Feast Day of our Anglican Province of Christ the King. Canon Weber’s sermon clarified issues facing our culture today, and I have reprinted it with his permission. Thank you, Canon Weber:
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Sermon for the Feast of Christ the King, October 26, 2025; Canon Matthew Weber, preaching at St. Peter’s Anglican Church, Oakland, CA
Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Today we celebrate the feast of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King. This feast is especially important to our parish because we are part of a jurisdiction known as the Province of Christ the King; today is, therefore, our provincial feast of title (if there is such a thing). And as you probably have gathered, on any given feast of the liturgical year, the proper texts—that is, the texts which belong to that feast—express something of the nature of the feast, whether it be the celebration of a particular saint, an aspect of God’s being, or a mystery of the faith.
Today’s lessons seem, at first glance, curious. We start with an epistle which sings of the glory of Christ’s mighty works : deliverance from the power of darkness, redemption, forgiveness of sins. Christ is the firstborn of creation, the image of the invisible God, by whom and for whom all was created, the head of the Church, the great Reconciler. I could preach a whole sermon on what just one of those things implies—and I’ve left out a few components of Paul’s impressive list.
The Epistle sets us up to expect an even more grandiose Gospel—perhaps Jesus prophesying his coming again in glory, perhaps some other regal or epiphanic image. But instead of the vision which we might expect, of the Son of Man coming in glory from the clouds with the Heavenly Host, we get a brief glimpse of Jesus’ interrogation by Pilate before his crucifixion–not a very triumphant or rousing image, by any means. Pilate wants to know whether Jesus has actually claimed to be King of the Jews, because–for whatever reason–Pilate is reluctant to condemn him. He doesn’t look or act like the bandits (terrorists might be a better word) that he usually sees charged with sedition, and wants to be sure that the Temple party aren’t just setting up a rabbi they don’t like for the Romans to deal with. So he asks him, very specifically, whether he is in fact King of the Jews, and Jesus dodges the question, finally saying the most surprising thing : his kingdom is not of this world.
And yet, at this very moment we have Christians who are focused on creating a Christian kingdom (or government of some sort) in this world. Based on the teachings of Reformed theologians like R.J. Rushdoony, Gary North, and Greg Bahnsen, we have pastors and politicians who are quite sure that establishing a Christian theocracy will bring about Christ’s goal of “teach[ing] all nations, and baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Just look at the wickedness of the world today, they say; people commit heinous sins, and the governments of the world rubber-stamp it. The Church is divided, often against itself. The West, once shaped by Christianity, is in the process of discarding it as a culture. I can see how the idea of establishing an avowedly Christian government, with laws to prohibit all the sins that our secular government currently allows, can be attractive to anyone who is dismayed by the state of the world. Just get Christians elected to positions of secular power and get them started on changing the Constitution and the laws, and everything will fall into place. Right?
What could go wrong?
Well, as you may have guessed, I think quite a lot could go wrong; but that’s the least of it. I find that there are several objections that could be made, and the first is this: If political dominion were the goal of the Church, wouldn’t the life of our Lord and his Apostles have looked rather different? If Jesus had wanted political power, why did he scold Peter and tell him to put his sword away when he attacked the Roman soldier? If the ministers of the Church were meant to be secular rulers, why did the Apostles scatter to the ends of the globe to preach the Gospel and suffer martyrdom for it? Why was it that martyrdom was considered the holiest possible death for a Christian in those early days? And let’s not forget what Jesus says in today’s Gospel, which I quoted for you at the beginning of this sermon: “My kingdom is not of this world.” So by the witness of Scripture and the early Church, this idea would seem to fail.
Following upon that point, it is true that the Church held an immense amount of political power beginning in late antiquity, and throughout the Middle Ages. Here the record of history shows us dozens, if not hundreds, of unedifying examples of Christian princes making bloody war on other Christian princes, and going back to ancient history we see that Israel, which had direct access to God and received the Law as though from His own hand, falling into pagan practices again and again. Their hotline to the Almighty didn’t prevent them from being corrupted. And we can adduce numerous examples from history as to the disasters that occur when the Church and the State attempt to march in lockstep: the Eastern Roman Empire, which for all its Christianity could not prevent the Iconoclast heresy from taking power; the English crown, which swung like a crazed pendulum between various forms of Catholicism and Protestantism throughout the 16th and 17th centuries (and which now has all but abandoned the faith); and right here in North America, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in which a person who overslept on Sunday morning might find himself flogged in public for neglecting divine service. All these arrangements eventually collapsed under their own weight or succumbed to the inevitable tensions between the Church’s ideal and the State’s reality, and in every case both Church and State suffered for it. Through the lens of history, we must conclude that this is a failed idea.
And then too, there are practical problems. Whose Christianity becomes the state religion? Reformed? Catholic? Baptist? What kind of Baptist? Free-Will, Reformed, Regular, Independent Fundamental, and so on? Here again, the adoption of any particular distinctive form of the Christian religion will force the government to persecute members of dissenting faiths—because if dissent is tolerated, then the slow sink into indifference will be all but assured. And these dissenters will quite likely outnumber the conformists, which is a problem of its own.
Another possible practical problem: how will this Christian government deal with commerce? There is much that occurs in the world of business which may be legal, but is hardly moral. How will a Christian government make this distinction? Will it also tolerate sharp practice in business, risking the taint of corruption in the newly-Christian state? And in a global economy, what will such a government do about trade with countries like China, which persecutes Christians and is involved in active genocide against the Uighur people? How could our Christian government continue to trade with a country that commits such evil? And so we see that for practical and moral reasons, this idea fails again.
Lastly, and I think most importantly: Does passing laws to enforce Christian behavior make people more holy? Does it contribute to their sanctification? I think not. It is crucial to salvation that we be free to make the choice. And being free to make the right choice entails also being free to make the wrong choices! If we coerce people into joining the Church, we become just like those of other religions that we criticize for spreading the word by means of the sword. So it seems to me that from the perspective of mission, this idea fails miserably.
It must seem terribly attractive to simply seize the reins of power and compel everyone to behave the way they ought, to actualize the Kingdom of God on earth. But Christianity in this world is over and against; joining it with the powers that be weakens it and forces it into compromise with the demands of politics, which will inevitably corrupt the ideal. We know that Jesus will return at the end of all things, to judge the world and to institute his Kingdom. We cannot make this happen according to our desires or our schedule; God cannot be compelled by our actions. That would be, not religion, but magic—and magic is forbidden to us. Our work here on earth is to love God and to love our neighbor: nothing more and nothing less. That is a life’s work which I have yet to perfect, and I suspect the same is true of most Christians—so what is most important is that we keep at that, and trust in God’s mercy and love to supply what we cannot: so that at the King’s return, when he shall come to judge the quick and the dead, he will find us all ready.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Christine Sunderland
Christine Sunderland 