I suspect that most people in America believe that Jesus is a king. Probably the great majority. That may be one reason why Christmas is so overwhelmingly popular (there are other reasons, I’m sure, like Toys-R-Us). People hear about choirs of angels, see in their mind’s eye the shepherds kneel at the manger, share the long trek of the wise men, and they catch a shadow of the awe that Luke and Matthew wanted to convey. Surely Jesus was, is some kind of king. A king of glad tidings (whatever those are). A king of steeples and hymnals, of carols and Communion tables, of choirs and creeds. A somewhat seasonal, warmly familiar, mild-mannered king.

Have you made room for that kind of king in your life? If you have, I doubt he took up much room. Expecting a king like that, you’ll probably enjoy Christmas, or some hastily-seized, breathless moments of it, anyway. I imagine just about every person here will grab an hour or two in a few weeks to hear Luke’s and Matthew’s accounts of the King’s birth. We’ll hear the glad tidings and make room for a little bundle of fairly good news…

But of course today, we hear about quite another kind of King, don’t we? Quite another kind of Good News! Today, the last Sunday of the church year, just before the Season of Advent, we hear about Christ, the King of churches and choirs but also the King of nations, armies and navies, of planets and presidents, of mortals and of mortgages. This is Christ the King Sunday, not Jesus the Baby Sunday. The Scripture reveals to us the triumphant King who has returned to sit on the judgment throne before all nations. This is no heart-warming story about an easily-accommodated king. And that may be for us today some very Good News, after all…

Now it’s true nobody’s ever told me ‘The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats’ is their favorite – not even a Presbyterian. It is a cringeworthy story, in which Jesus matter-of-factly speaks of the final judgment, when like a shepherd bringing in his flocks for the night, he will divide the intermingled sheep and goats into separate flocks for some very different accommodations. We are told that the King on the throne knows who’s been naughty and nice, who has clothed the naked and fed the hungry and visited the prisoners – and who has not. And seemingly based on this criterion alone, the division is made, the boundaries of eternality set.

You got a problem with that? Boy, I sure hope somebody here does. Last time I checked, the Bible was unequivocal – we are not saved by our works, however noble, but by grace, and grace . We are able to stand before the righteous and holy God only because we, by no merit or wisdom of our own, have been baptized into the righteousness of Christ, made heirs to his right relationship with God the Father, his Father, made our Father by a spirit of adoption. That means, friend, you cannot be good enough, cannot look busy enough, cannot ever earn your way into God’s good favor. So forget about getting stars in your crown, as some of you like to tease me about. Salvation in the Christian faith has always been, will forever be, not about what we do, but about what Jesus has done.

So how about those sheep and goats? I have long pondered over this, and somewhere along the way, I noticed something strange about the people at the King’s right hand and those at his left hand. When the King confronts each group about their treatment of the hungry, the imprisoned, the sick, it would make sense that the faithful ones were ready for that moment: they knew all along they were ministering to the King, and have been anticipating their reward. The others, oblivious to the secret of doing works of mercy and justice, would then haplessly meet their end because they were ignorant of the King’s covert way of getting around. But in fact, the “sheep” and the “goats” are both oblivious: neither has any idea what to make of the King’s words. Neither group knows the secret that the King has been coming to them, invisibly, in the needs of the poor, the oppressed, the least and lost.

What could that mean? I believe it means that this teaching is not a prescription – an order that we should pour ourselves slavishly into social work, hoping to get our ticket validated before our moment before the judgment seat comes. The story is a description of what those who love the King and live in his Kingdom are like. Put simply, reaching out in compassion to help others is merely an outward expression of an inwardly reality: knowing God with all one’s heart, soul, strength and mind. When your life is part of the ministry of reconciliation that is Christ’s, when you live in response to the joy of the Master who has heard the cry of the needy and sent to us His Son, His saving love, then serving those who are in need, as the opportunity presents itself, is a holy habit – it’s just what we do, unpremeditated, unguarded, uncalculating.

To me, it was just such an impulse that brought the Kingdom of Heaven to a place called Le Chambon, a little village in southern France. Back in the early 40s, the Vichy government was in power, acting as the French puppet of the Nazis who had begun to round up Jews from every corner of their expanding empire. In virtually every Dutch, Polish, French village, Jewish families who had lived on the land for generations were turned over to vanish forever – just not in Le Chambon. There, in a little Huguenot church, was a minister who said, “these people are the people of the Bible. Our present government is not legitimate, and has no authority over us in matters like these. So we are going to stand up.”

So in nearly every farmhouse, school, and barn in that village, Jews were sheltered. And when more Jewish families began to arrive, the people of Le Chambon took them into their homes, too. After the authorities got wind that something was fishy, and came and arrested their pastor, these Protestants got even busier, running forgery operations in their basements to make fake passports to spirit Jews into Switzerland. When spot-check raids began, they hustled their guests into the forests nearby, and went back to get them and bring them back home after the threat had gone. By the war’s end, this little village of 2,400 people had sheltered and saved from certain death between three thousand and five thousand Jews. And though they faced imprisonment, or even worse, the people of Le Chambon ratted out and gave up not even one.

Those Nazis, they had a lot of tanks, a lot of firepower. They had the power of fear. The kingdoms of the world respect that kind of power. What did the farmers of Le Chambon have? What was different about that one town, when hundreds of others like it did nothing as the cloak of evil unfurled around them? That question almost went unasked. But a filmmaker named Pierre Sauvage, himself the son of Jews saved by the farmers of Le Chambon, went back about 20 years ago to find the answer to that question: what was it that made this one village make such a difference? Did they just want stars in their crowns?

After nearly 50 years of anonymity, the heroes of Le Chambon were little old ladies hanging out laundry, old men out tilling their gardens. The filmmaker was steered toward one woman, about 80, to ask her why she had sheltered more than 50 Jewish refugees in her home over the course of the war. She seemed genuinely puzzled by his question, and then without a hint of ego she replied: “What else were we supposed to do? We were Christians. We’ve always been Christians. We just did what came naturally to us.”

Now don’t you think the King is delighted by her answer, she who did so much for the least of these? The King only expects of his subjects the very things that he did among us to show God’s abiding love. Jesus took pity on hungry crowds and fed them (Mat. 14 and 15), Jesus healed the sick and lame (Mat. 4, 8, again 14 and 15), he named and denounced the systems that left the poor naked or even caused their poverty - and pointed the way for his disciples to confront these systems (Mat. 5). When his time came, before the judgment seat of another, lesser kingdom, he was treated as a stranger and an outcast, he was stripped naked, he was imprisoned, afflicted with suffering, he endured terrible thirst, and became as one of the least, so great was his love for us.

After all these years, we come to worship here. And soon, we’ll put up our tree, and sing songs about glad tidings told. But fundamentally, our reason for being here, our reason for being at all, is to enter into the joy that is a deepened relationship with God, made possible through Jesus Christ. There is no other reason for the season. All that we have, all that we’ve been given, every gift we can summon forth, every sacrifice we can make, these things we do only because they become a way of life, a new future we choose for ourselves, the Kingdom of God, an alternative to the way of death typified by the kingdoms of this world.

I began by saying that most people accept that Jesus is a king. But you knew already what the real question is, didn’t you? Is Jesus your King? Are your gifts, your abilities, your wealth, your dreams, placed daily before him to the glory of his Kingdom? Is that a holy habit you have made, or are willing to get started on making, your own? For it is in submission that we discover true freedom, in loss of self that we find abundant living, and in service to the King that we discover glad tidings of great joy all year long.

Thanks be to God, there’s a choice.