What King do you see?

Today is the feast day of Christ the King. I wonder what kind of picture comes into our heads when we hear the word, “King”. I wonder how we react to the idea of someone being King over us? What does it mean to have a King? These questions are difficult enough when we’re thinking about a King here on earth, but I think that sometimes they seem even more difficult to answer when we are talking about Jesus as King. But that is what I’d like to do this morning. We’re going to have a look at the three readings, at the things that they show us about Jesus as King, and think about what that means for our lives now.

The first reading we heard is part of the book of Daniel. You probably know him best from the story of Daniel and the Lion’s Den. Daniel was an Israelite, probably from one of the ruling families in Jerusalem, who had been carried off into exile in Babylon when Jerusalem had been defeated about 600 years before Jesus was born. He was a faithful worshipper of God, who, throughout his exile proved the practical wisdom of following God faithfully.

A few years before the incident with the lions, Daniel had a series of dreams or visions, in which he was shown things that were to come about in the future. The descriptions of the things that he was shown sound foreign and strange, even when they’ve been translated into English. What is it with all these beasts and horns, and wheels on a throne?

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Encountering God in Work

Last week, Charlie talked about the various amounts of time that he’d calculated he would be spending in various activities in his life. Now, I reckon that I’m going to spend about 83,200 hours of my life working, about 20% of my waking hours. That’s quite a big chunk and if I’m not Encountering God in my work that’s quite a big chunk of life God will be missing from.

And I don’t believe that God wants to be missing from 20% of our lives, I believe that God loves us and is interested and involved in everything we do, including our work and therefore we can Encounter God in our work.

For some of us that is a new idea
For some of us it is an idea we have heard before but we’ve forgotten it
For others it will be something we do experience but hunger to experience even more

As I speak I am aware that I don’t put all this into practice and that I fall well short of the vision that I hope to communicate, of how it could be. I’m also aware that my experience of work is limited, both in time and variety. So the challenge to me and to us all, is to take the principles from this sermon and ask God if and how they could be applied to our working lives.

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