It’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving, traditionally known as Christ the King Sunday.

In the Gospel of Mark – most likely the earliest of the four canonical Gospels – Christ is the king but his throne is a cross.  Mark challenges us to rethink our ideas about what a Messiah is, who God is, how God is experienced and understood, and where God can be encountered.  God moves outside the holy-of-holies and appears in the middle of nowhere with John the Baptizer, and is fully encountered in the life of some hillbilly from Galilee named Jesus.  Seriously.  The religious leaders have it all wrong and this “nobody” has it right.

So for this Christ the King Sunday, let’s rethink what it means to make Christ the King in our lives.

  • It means that we take his words, his deeds, his teachings and his actions as seriously as we take the narrative of his birth, death and resurrection.
  • It means that our commitments to follow his teachings and example come before family, work and the accumulation of nice things.
  • It means that Christ is more important than church.

If you haven’t read anything by Tony Campolo or Jim Wallis, I recommend you do.  They have a lot of valuable things to say for the life of the church.  The two of them have come up with a new term that I love: Red Letter Christians.

Red-Letter Christians take the words of Jesus seriously (printed in red in many Bibles, hence the name), and place extra emphasis or priority upon what Jesus actually taught and said, even over the teachings of Paul or the Old Testament.  They believe the church has made too big a deal over certain issues while virtually ignoring the things that Jesus taught about most.

Ouch.

But they are very convincing, and I’m certain I’m guilty.  Color me convicted.  Just getting the Jesus part of the Bible right is a difficult enough task without the six hundred do’s and don’ts in the OT and Paul.

So I believe that if we really want to call Christ the King in our lives, then we really should be red-letter Christians.

Here are some links for further reading: