Tag Archives: Randy Clayton

I posted “The Refugee Jesus“, the sermon I preached yesterday at Rutgers Presbyterian Church. It focused on Christ the King Sunday and Jesus the Refugee and what it meant to affirm a refugee as king in times when acts of terror occur and leaders and pundits fan the flames of fear.

Today I discovered that my friend Randy Clayton preached a similar sermon at Brown Memorial Woodbrook Presbyterian Church: “Of Kings and Kingdoms.”

Here are some excerpts:

But King Jesus is certainly not just a figurehead whose only role is to make us stick out our chests in pride; nor is King Jesus a despot who takes and oppresses, ready to pounce on us for one wrong move, unable to forgive and set us right again.  In fact, King Jesus didn’t even proclaim he was king, but his actions and his love showed us the real truth.

…

He was a king yes, but his kingdom didn’t look anything like Pilates’ kingdom, or the Roman Empire.  Jesus was a king, yes. He had royal bloodlines that stretched back to King David, but his kingdom looked like none the world had seen. He is king, but his reign of truth and life is based on love and peace and trust rather than coercion, division and fear. He is not a king surrounded by body guards and armored cars, but he was a king surrounded by the poor and the hurting, the outcast and the lonely, the grieving and the prisoner, the powerless and the refugee.

…

To align ourselves with Christ’s rule and God’s kingdom is certainly to oppose acts of terror, calling them the evil they are, that’s for sure. But at the same time it is to work to end the poverty and the hopelessness across the world that gives rise to desperation and fuels the terror’s flames. To align ourselves with God’s kingdom and Jesus’ rule is to welcome the widow and the orphan as Jesus did, to risk what we have so that others might find life, as Jesus did, and to get worked up about the same things that Jesus got worked up about. And maybe especially in these frightening and scary times, it is to follow Jesus’ example and refuse to live in fear,  to refuse to let our actions be guided by fear, and to let our lives and all we do we shaped and molded by the affirmation that both in life and in death we belong to God.

I encourage you to check out the whole sermon.

See you along the Trail.