Do any of you know the story of Tubby the Cocker Spaniel? Well . . . remember Tubby’s name. We’ll come back to him, but first let’s put today’s gospel lesson in perspective.
This lesson picks up where last week’s lesson ended. You’ll recall that Jesus is sending the twelve out to do missionary work. “Go,” he tells them “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel . . . proclaim the good news . . . cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.”[1] In last week’s lesson, he warned them that this was not going to be easy, that they would face opposition. In this week’s reading, he continues in that vein and ups the ante, increases the volume: it won’t just be difficult, he says, it’s possibly going to be deadly!
There won’t just be arguments at the Thanksgiving table; there will be fights! Your father or your mother, your sister or your brother . . . they won’t just disagree with you; they will be your enemies; they will try to kill you. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”[2]
“Put things in order, … agree with one another, live in peace.”
We “boast in our sufferings,” writes Paul to the Romans, “knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us….”
It’s the last Sunday of the Christian year, sort of a New Year’s Eve for the church. We call it “the Feast of Christ the King” and we celebrate it by remembering his enthronement. Each year on Christ the King Sunday we read some part of the crucifixion story. As Pope Francis reminded the faithful in his Palm Sunday homily a few years ago, “It is precisely here that his kingship shines forth in godly fashion: his royal throne is the wood of the Cross!”
There is an old tradition in the church: on Trinity Sunday, rectors do their best to get someone else to preach. If they have a curate or associate priest, he or she gets the pulpit on that day. If not, they try to invite some old retired priest to fill in (as Rachel has done today). No one really wants to preach on Trinity Sunday, the only day of the Christian year given to the celebration or commemoration of a theological doctrine, mostly because theology is dull, dry, and boring to most people and partly because this particular theological doctrine is one most of us get wrong no matter how much we try to do otherwise. 
