Beloved of the Dakotas-Minnesota Episcopal Area ~ 

This weekend, many of our churches will celebrate Christ the King Sunday, the final Sunday in our Christian liturgical year. Next week, people will gather with family and friends to share in Thanksgiving festivities, a time of food and fellowship before stepping into the Advent and Christmas seasons. Even as we engage in these moments of celebration, we’re also invited to pause, to reflect on the origins of both Thanksgiving and Christ the King Sunday, and to realize we must pass through hard truths before we reach anything holy.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving didn’t begin as a Norman Rockwell table. It began as a complicated human attempt to name provision in the midst of colonial expansion, conflict, survival, and deep harm to Indigenous peoples.

If our nation is honest, Thanksgiving requires repentance as much as gratitude...truth-telling as much as table-setting. It requires us to hear the stories our textbooks silenced, to honor the resilience of Native communities who endured what many did not survive, and to refuse a nostalgia that erases the cost of our national myths.

And yet - even with all that truth-telling, Thanksgiving also points us toward a deeper human longing:

to recognize simple blessings,
to pause for breath,
to remember and give thanks - in seasons of gratitude and grief...

It is an invitation to practice thanksgiving as a spiritual discipline—gratitude that sees clearly, tells the truth fully, and still whispers “thank you” to the God who sustains us.

Christ the King Sunday

Christ the King Sunday is relatively new - born not in the ancient church, but in 1925. Pope Pius XI established it as a direct rebuke to the rise of nationalism, fascism, and the worship of political power.

The Church needed reminding that the only throne that deserves our ultimate allegiance is the one occupied by the crucified and risen Christ.

Christ the King was, from the very beginning, an act of resistance - a proclamation spoken against the idols of the age. Not a sentimental feast, but a protest. A line drawn in the sand. A reminder to every generation that if Jesus is Lord, then nothing and no one else gets to pretend they are.

So here we are entering the week that begins with Christ the King Sunday and leads us toward Thanksgiving - two observances that require redemption, truth, humility, and hope.

And - if we listen closely, both point us toward the same audacious proclamation:

Jesus Christ is Lord of lords and King of kings.

Not Caesar.
Not country.
Not ideology.
Not fear.
Not illness.
Not death.

The power that orders the universe is not coercive, violent, or domineering. It is the power of a shepherd-king who reigns from a cross, breathes peace into locked rooms, welcomes children, feeds the hungry, heals the broken, tends the outcast, and overturns tables that exploit the poor.

His crown is made of thorns.

His scepter is a towel wrapped around his waist.

His throne is wherever mercy takes root.

His kingdom is not built with borders, armies, or elections, but with the daily, ordinary practices of love.

This kingdom is not someday.

It is now.
It is near.
It is at hand.

Wherever wounds are tended - Christ reigns.

Wherever the hungry are fed - Christ reigns.

Wherever truth is told with love - Christ reigns.

Wherever gratitude becomes protest and grace becomes power - Christ reigns.

So as we hold Thanksgiving and Christ the King Sunday in the same breath, let us hold the whole truth:

What began in human struggle is redeemed in divine love.
What history distorted, Christ can restore.
What our world still fractures, Christ intends to heal.

And as we step into this season, may this intersection of Christ the King and Thanksgiving mark our way of life - 

a quiet rebellion,
a gentle revolution,
a daily allegiance to the only King whose reign is mercy,
whose law is love,
and whose kingdom will never end.

And for that, I give thanks.

With Gratitude and Hope,

Bishop Lanette Plambeck
Resident Bishop
Dakotas-Minnesota Episcopal Area
The United Methodist Church