SOCL, 34 Christ the KingC

Sunday November 23, 2025

See

We engineer rescue fantasies where power proves itself through exemption—divinity validated by immunity to consequence, salvation measured by our extraction from difficulty. The crowd at Calvary demands performance: save yourself, prove your legitimacy by escaping what crushes us. We've inherited this theology, expecting God to function as cosmic emergency exit rather than companion through catastrophe.

The criminal beside Christ recognizes what power cannot: presence matters more than rescue, being remembered transcends being saved. He asks not for evacuation but for inclusion in divine memory when every system has decreed his erasure. This is faith stripped to essentials—not demanding miracles but trusting that somehow, impossibly, we matter even when we're dying.

Christ's response shatters our transactional expectations: paradise exists not after suffering ends but within it, wherever memory refuses erasure and presence transforms abandonment. We keep waiting for God to change our circumstances; perhaps divinity offers something more subversive—the assurance that no pain places us beyond remembrance, that accompaniment redefines what salvation means. Today, here, in this—not someday, elsewhere, after escape.

Listen

2 Samuel 5:1-3; Psalm 122 (121); Colossians 1:12-20; Luke 23:35-43

Reflect

(Luke 23:35-43)

-Recall a moment when you desperately wanted someone to fix your situation—to rescue you from consequences, erase difficulties, make everything okay again. Notice how exhausting it becomes to keep hoping for extraction, to measure love by whether it spares you pain.

-Consider the criminal's radical request: not rescue but remembrance, not escape but inclusion. What if the deepest need isn't to be saved from difficulty but to know we're not forgotten within it? How might companionship through suffering surpass exemption from it?

-Where in your life are you waiting for circumstances to change before you can experience peace? What shifts if transformation happens not through evacuation but through presence—if paradise isn't a future destination but attention that refuses to forget you, even now, especially now?

Pray

God who remembers, you inhabit our suffering rather than exempting us from it. Meet those who feel abandoned by systems that promised rescue. Teach us that salvation means accompaniment, not escape. Transform our communities from places demanding miracles into spaces practicing presence. Make us instruments of memory where the world decrees forgetting.