November 2025

“A king who dies on the cross must be the king of a rather strange kingdom. Only those who understand the cross can also understand the whole meaning of Jesus’ assertion: my kingdom is not of this world.”                                                           Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Almost all the Feast Days of the Church that we celebrate every year have been around for many years—most of them since the very early years of the Church.  Some of them are these: Christmas Day, Easter Sunday, Pentecost, and, since the Reformation, Reformation Sunday.

But not the feast day we will celebrate this month: Christ the King Sunday. In fact, our celebration of Christ the King on November 23, 2025 marks the 100th Anniversary of the establishment of this Feast Day.

How did that happen?  This day was established by our Roman Catholic brothers and sister in 1925. They set up in a way that was not very nice.  They set up to be celebrated at the end of Octobers--as a rival worship day to our Lutheran Reformation Sunday. 

But we all make mistakes, and our Catholic members of the One Body of Christ admitted that they had erred in trying to outdo Lutherans. So, they changed their ways in 1970 (some of us remember things got a little easier between Catholics and Lutherans around that time) and moved the Celebration a month ahead.  After they made the change, we Lutherans got on board.

But why a feast of Christ the King in the first place?  And why did it get going in 1925?

In 1925, the Vatican looked out and saw two kinds of government in the world that they thought were wrong: Fascism in Italy; Communism in Russia.

In the 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran Pastor in Nazi Germany, looked at Germany and saw that his homeland was being run the wrong way. 

So what do Catholics and most Protestants celebrate on Christ the King Sunday? We celebrate a King who rules the world not with violence or force but with love from a cross. That is the good news of Christ the King Sunday.  That is the news that lifts us up. 

Yes, we often see that bad leaders rule the world in unrighteous ways. But, on Christ the King Sunday we are promised something more than what we often see: The power of love from a King on a Cross who promises to make this world a place of peace and love.

May our hearts be lifted by this good news: the news of a king who rules from a cross!

Pastor Leonard Hummel