sermon on deciding which Jesus to follow

24 November 2025 - 9 minutes read - 1812 words

I had the opportunity to preach yesterday for Reign of Christ Sunday. Reign of Christ Sunday is one of those liturgical moments that admittedly makes me a little nervous: I like the idea of putting Jesus first, but it really, really depends on what we understand by Jesus. (I’ve been writing on this for a while, it looks like.) So, I decided to take the opportunity to invite members of my congregation to reflect on who Jesus is for them and what it means to put that Jesus first. Here’s the sermon text:

introduction: Jesus vs. Joseph

Sixty years ago, our denomination, Community of Christ, was going through some growing pains. At the time, most of our congregations were in places like North America, French Polynesia, or Western Europe—places where people were already familiar with Christianity. If people in those congegations wanted to share our common faith with someone new, all they had to do was to explain how our church was different than other Christian churches. We would talk about Joseph Smith Jr., the founder of our church, and his son Joseph Smith III, who reorganized the church 30 years later, and we would talk about what they had contributed to our beliefs.

In the 1950s and 1960s, though, members of our church started to encounter people in places like Korea and Japan, where Christianity was not as common. Some of these people were interested in our church, but now, we couldn’t explain our faith as easily as comparing ourselves to other Christian churches. Members and leaders found that first, they needed to answer an important question: Who is that Jesus that you keep talking about?

Up to this point, our identity as a church had mostly been about being different than other Christians, but now that we had to explain even our Christianity to people curious about us, we decided that maybe we could learn something from other churches after all. Top leaders of our denomination gathered for some classes with professors at a nearby United Methodist seminary so that they could take what they learned and decide what was most important for our beliefs.

As the first class was just getting started, those leaders quickly got put on the spot about that question of “what was most important.” One seminary professor asked a pointed question: If you ever had to choose between what Jesus taught and what Joseph taught, what would you do?

All eyes turned to W. Wallace Smith, the president of our denomination at that time. This might have felt like a personal question, because he was the son of Joseph Smith III and the grandson of Joseph Smith Jr. Did he feel like his family legacy was on the line? Whatever he felt, his answer was clear: “We would have to go with Jesus.”

“Reign of Christ” Sunday

I love this story for the way it reminds us of the importance of putting Jesus at the center of our faith, and at the center of our life, even if it means rethinking other things that are still important for us. In the decades since this moment, we as a denomination have worked hard to keep Jesus at the center of our faith. Just as W. Wallace Smith and other church leaders turned to other Christians to help them think through what was most important for our denomination, we have continued to ask what traditions and practices we can borrow from other Christian churches to keep ourselves focused on Jesus.

Today, for example, we join other Christian churches in celebrating “Reign of Christ Sunday,” which is also known as “Christ the King Sunday.” Our scripture passage for today touches on Jesus’s importance in a couple of different ways, but let me reread for you Colossians 1:15-18, whch emphasizes to what it means to make Christ our King.

15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, 16 for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.

When we celebrate the Reign of Christ—when we celebrate Christ as King—we (and other Christians) acknowledge Jesus as most important.

the perversion of Christ as King

I love the invitation of Reign of Christ Sunday, to reconsider what is most important in our lives and to make an effort to put Jesus first. However, this beautiful invitation can also go wrong. Let’s consider a couple of examples.

First: A few months ago, a crowd gathered in London, England—specifically, in the neighborhood of Whitehall, where the offices of the British government are found. They began to chant “Christ is King, Christ is King, Christ is King.”

Second: Andrew is the name of the CEO of a small social media company. Whenever Andrew writes a news release or sends an email to a reporter, he always signs off with the phrase “Christ is King.”

Today, on Christ the King Sunday, it sure sounds like these people get it. Right? They are very focused on making Jesus their King and their Ruler. However, the truth is that I’ve left out some important details from these stories.

First, that crowd gathering in London and chanting Christ is King was there to protest immigration. At least some of the people in that crowd believed that no one born outside the United Kingdom deserved to be in the United Kingdom.

Second, sure, that social media CEO writes “Christ is King’ at the bottom of all his blog posts, but some of those blog posts describe Jewish people and organizations as “demons.”

Is that the Jesus we want to rule over us on Reign of Christ Sunday and throughout the year? Before we put Jesus at the center of our lives, we might need to ask ourselves the same question that people in far-off lands were asking us in the 1960s: Who is that Jesus that we keep talking about?

different visions of Jesus

When I started preparing this sermon, I decided to reread a book called Imaginary Jesus, which I’d first read in college. The book is about a man who realizes that his faith has been built around a certain version of Jesus and finds himself trying to discover the real Jesus instead.

Throughout the story, he meets several different imagined Jesuses: Legalist Jesus (who is very focused on rules), Magic 8 Ball Jesus (who gives easy answers to prayers), Perpetually Angry Jesus (who is always mad at sinners), Testosterone Jesus (who can rip a phone book in half and is very popular at men’s retreats), and even King James Jesus (who speaks only in thees, thys, and thous).

It’s a pretty funny book, and I love how the author invites us to set aside the Jesuses that are convenient or easy for us to believe in and to try to identify a real Jesus who challenges us more. Here’s the thing, though: I don’t know if it’s always easy to tell who the real Jesus is.

Even if we committed to sit down together, open up our Bibles, and not leave this sanctuary until we read everything we could about who Jesus really is, we would run into an obstacle: In the Bible itself, we’ve got at least four different authors with their own take on Jesus—five if we count Paul, and maybe a couple of others in there, too. We can reconcile these different stories, but still: if you read closely, Mark’s Jesus is very human and down to earth, while the Gospel of John emphasizes Jesus’s cosmic power before it even tells us his name. Those Jesus are kind of different.

The Anglican priest and Bible scholar John Barton has this to say in his book A History of the Bible:

Modern Christians probably do not spend much time reflecting on this issue. Long familiarity with the Gospels prevents people from noticing just how strange it is to have [different] official versions of the life and sayings of the founder of Christianity… it is remarkable that the Church decided to canonize all four versions and not to attempt to reconcile them.

Barton notes that this can be an advantage for Christians, and I agree, but it also makes it harder to agree on who the real Jesus is. The New Testament gives us a Jesus who tells Peter to put away his sword (Matthew 26:52), but it also gives us a Jesus whose robes are stained red with the blood of his enemies (Revelation 19:13). It probably makes a difference which of those Jesuses we choose as our King, which of those Jesuses we choose to put ahead of everything else in our lives.

choosing a Jesus

Of course, those aren’t the only two Jesuses we have available to us. Of course, I won’t pretend to know with any certainty who the “real” Jesus is among all those choices (though I definitely have some opinions!). Of course, we don’t all have to agree—here in this room, or throughout our denomination, or across the world. If Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, and others could offer us slightly different Jesuses and all make it into the New Testament, I think there’s room for us to have different views of Jesus and still share in Christian fellowship.

Yet, there are some versions of Jesus who are just plain dangerous. So, it’s still a good idea for each of us to think carefully about which Jesus we want to put on the throne, which Jesus we want to put ahead of our favorite church leaders, political parties, sports teams, and movie stars.

One of the interesting things about Reign of Christ Sunday—about today—is that it is the very last Sunday in the Christian calendar. As far as our worship themes and religious seasons go, today is December 31st, and next Sunday, things start all over again. However, when the Christian calendar restarts, we don’t restart with the month of January, we restart with the Christian season of Advent.

Advent begins next Sunday and continues all the way until Christmas. Advent is all about waiting for Jesus: waiting for his birth, waiting for his second coming, waiting for his Reign, waiting for him to be crowned as King, as the most important person in our lives.

As we wait, I can think of no better time for each of us to consider: Who is that Jesus that we are waiting for? What kind of King are we preparing to put on the throne?

Thank you.

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