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You know what really gets me? It’s when a TV series ends the season with a “cliffhanger” episode, and you have to wait until late September or even October to find out what happened. Like the time on West Wing when the season ended with a bunch of shots fired on the President and his staff as they walked to the motorcade and you had to wait four or five months to find out who was shot, who was killed, who survived. That really annoys me. Sometimes I think they do that as a negotiating strategy with their cast. You know: “Go along with our contract offer, or come September it’ll turn out you were shot in the last episode.”
I don’t know if any of you have ever noticed, but the Gospel of Mark ends right in the middle of a story, like one of those season ending cliff-hangers. Except Mark doesn’t come back in September and finish the story for you. He just leaves you hanging.
O sure, there are nice tidy endings to the Gospel, but if you read the fine print, you realize that Mark didn’t write any of them. In some translations, these clever little closures to the story are referred to with headings like “the first alternate ending, the second alternate ending, etc.” In other translations, these add-on conclusions are simply listed in the footnotes with the explanation, “Other texts and versions add the following passage:” and “Other authorities add the following:”
The logical conclusion is that in ancient times people were just as uncomfortable with season ending cliff-hangers as I am. They didn’t like Mark leaving them dangling, so they came up with endings to the Gospel and stuck them on themselves.
What’s really interesting is to see what these uneasy folks added to the Gospel – and therefore what Mark left out. What was added, and what Mark made no mention of, was the women running to tell the disciples, and the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus in the flesh. Mark ends his Gospel with this ponderous curiosity: the women visited the tomb and found it empty. Then they were ordered by this strange young man to go and tell the disciples that Jesus had risen. Mark simply says, “they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
Thus ends the Gospel of Mark. They were afraid, and told no one. Story over. Some biblical scholars speculate that by ending the story with the determination of the women to keep their silence Mark was offering a sort of explanation for the Apostle Paul’s silence about the empty tomb in his letters (which are actually the oldest writings we have in the New Testament). The theory is that the resurrection, to Paul and those in the early church, was more of a metaphor about the spiritual presence of Christ in their midst than about his body getting up and walking out of the tomb.
I don’t know about that, but I guess I’m a lot like those ancient folks who had such a hard time with his ending that they had to add more to the story. I want to see what happens in the next season’s first episode. But on a bit more reflection, I think I like Mark’s unfinished story. Because every story is really unfinished. Mark just makes it a little more obvious.
When the fairy tale’s handsome prince and beautiful girl are married to “live happily ever after” we’re not told what their married life was really like. How the prince got along with his mother-in-law or whether he paid attention when his wife talked to him, or whether the lovely new princess squeezed the toothpaste from the wrong end of the tube, or loaded the dishwasher funny.
Every story is unfinished. And when the sky seems to fall on your head leaving you with a burden almost too great to bear, when a loved one dies too soon, when debilitating disease takes over a life, when a job is lost and a career goes up in smoke, the story is not finished. After every dark night the sun rises, after every bleak winter the flowers emerge, after every ferocious storm the clouds pass. And still the story is not over. There are days yet to be seized, there is life to be embraced, there is love to be found. Every story is unfinished.
That is true for each of us as individuals, and it is true for this interconnected web that is the human family. You and I are part of that web as we move through our days, and we so often go to bed with the notion that what we have done in the day is past and gone. But is it? We rarely stop to consider how every little moment of the past day lives on in the ways that other lives were touched, other experiences altered by our actions and decisions. We have no idea what the consequences of our living have led to. For us, the story of our day remains unfinished.
Fifty years ago, I was a police officer in Aurora, Colorado. I, like other officers, used to supplement my income with off-duty assignments. One such job was walking the concourses of a large shopping mall to provide uniformed police protection. One afternoon while walking the mall, I spotted through the crowd amidst a group of African-American men a familiar black face. Instantly, I blurted out a name. “Zeltee,” I called out, and the young man walking with a group of other young men looked up with a start. It was one of my old track buddies from high school. I hadn’t seen him in five years, and here we were in a shopping mall, almost a thousand miles across the country from that high school, and I picked his face out of the crowd in an instant. That’s not like me. I think it shocked me almost as much as it did him. But then I realized there was more to the story. The group of guys he was with were clearly rattled by this cop calling out to their friend. And Zeltee was noticeably nervous. He spoke to me politely for about a minute and then left the mall with his buddies. I have wondered about that brief incident many times. I’ll never know, as Paul Harvey used to say, “the rest of the story.” What were Zeltee and his friends doing in that mall? What were they so nervous about? Why did they leave so suddenly after encountering me? How was it that I instantly picked his face out of that crowd? Did I stop something from happening? Did I make something else happen? Did that possible change in plans keep something from happening to Zeltee? Did it cause something to happen to him? Did it keep something from happening to someone else? Did that person have an impact somewhere else or on someone else because of what did or didn’t happen that day?
Thinking about such things quickly leads to the realization that every decision one makes in the course of a day, every action, every trip you take, and every trip you forego, every encounter with another person, every turn of the steering wheel or decision to pick up the telephone has some result, some impact on the lives of others. And even a seemingly insignificant impact might be momentous. A kind word or welcoming gesture might come at a crucial moment of decision for a person, and their decision might have rippling consequences that lead to changing the course of history.
George Bailey learned it in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. When he was shown in detail what his community would have become had he not lived – how individual lives would have been altered and how those lives so altered would have led to a chain of events that sent the entire town into a destructive tail-spin, it became clear that the impact of his one life was vast beyond his comprehension. Every one of us is part of an incredibly complex web of human interaction, and every one’s life has untold impacts on the lives of others, and on the outcome of the entire human adventure. The old Zen masters were right: separateness is an illusion and in truth all is One. And when you lie down at night, the impacts of your connection to the web of human existence keep reverberating around the community, and I daresay, around the globe. You will never know what those impacts are. Your story is always unfinished.
And when the burden of too many hurts, too many disappointments, too many broken dreams becomes hard to bear, what you do matters. Your decision either to collapse beneath the weight of that burden or to seize yet another day of opportunity may have consequences for good or for ill far beyond your reckoning. And those consequences will remain shadowed and out of your reach. They will never be entirely known. Your story is always unfinished. But the joy of living is not in fairy tale endings where everything miraculously gets tied up with pretty ribbons. True and abiding joy is found by reveling in the story, unfinished though it may be. It is claimed by celebrating your participation in the larger story, the Divine story of the great human adventure.
Mark’s Gospel ends abruptly with the women keeping their silence about what they’ve seen in the garden. Was Mark trying to offer an explanation for the silence about the empty tomb in the letters of Paul? We’ll never know that either. But he was trying to tell us something, and I kind of like that it isn’t entirely clear, that it’s left dangling like the cliff-hanger episode at the end of the season. Because that’s how life is lived, and that’s what Jesus presented to us: the unfinished story of our own existence, the unknown ways in which we change the world with only a word, the opportunity to choose life in the midst of every crucifixion moment.
And in the end, what Mark in his gospel is brilliant enough to hint at, without hitting us over the head with it, is that because the tomb was not the end of the story for Jesus, the tomb may not be the end of the story for us either.
There is plenty of room in an unfinished story for many different endings – plenty of room for different views and different theologies, for literal understandings and appreciation of the metaphor. But because each of us relates the story in our own way, no matter how you tell it, you can stand here this morning, shoulder to shoulder with other folks living unfinished stories, and together proclaim, “Christ is risen! Christ is risen, indeed!
Hallelujah!
Hallelujah!
Hallelujah!”
One of my favorite stories (which I may have used before, but if so it bears repeating) comes from my seminary days at Colgate Rochester Divinity School in Rochester, New York. It’s the apocryphal account of Jesus’ resurrection appearance to a group of seminary students. He approaches them and asks, as he did of Simon Peter, “Who do you say that I am?” And like good seminarians, they respond, “You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of all being — the kerygma in conflict and decision in the humanizing process.” And Jesus says, “What?”
The story is funny because it calls attention to a rather common, and somewhat pernicious tendency among those of us with degrees in theology. We like to cloud the air with a little theological jabberwocky whenever we’re afraid of being on shaky ground. It is a very comfortable thing for a minister in a pluralistic society and a theologically diverse congregation to allude to Jesus in abstract terms like ‘the kerygma in conflict and decision in the humanizing process.” Such intellectualizations allow us to speak about Christ in ways that cover the wide range of theological perspectives and categories that make up just about any congregation. We can maintain a modern world-view and a healthy skepticism while not offending anyone – and confusing everyone.
The only problem is: what are we to do with Easter? What are we to do with this embarrassingly simple story of a man who rose from the dead, confounding our attempts to allegorize the gospel and relativize the Christ? The story is simply this: Jesus was crucified, dead and buried, and rose from the dead. The Bible doesn’t give us much wiggle room to dodge the shock of that account.
The disciples’ first response upon hearing the story was understandable. They may not have been tremendously quick on the uptake, but they had been around long enough and been through enough to know the difference between reality and foolishness. They heard the story of the resurrected Jesus and they decided not to bite. Scripture says they dismissed the story as “an idle tale.”
We are less ready to dismiss the entire story than they, but, if the truth be known, neither are we particularly overcome by it. It is good on Easter Sunday to repeat, “Christ is risen!” It is heart-warming to recall the scriptures; it brings a smile of recognition and the warmth of fond memories. But many of us tend to keep the transforming power of that story at arm’s length. We are, after all, rational, twenty-first century, thinking people. None of us have ever seen someone come back from the dead. And it is a simple thing to value the teachings of Jesus without having to be knocked off our pins by a denial of the degeneration of the human body at death. It’s not that we admit our skepticism out loud. We simply keep it in the back of our minds as a hedge against getting too carried away with religion. We are people of science, and we live in such a reasonable world. The base-line of comfort that allows us to get through our days is the relative dependability of predictable events and the familiarity of the patterns and routines that become our norms. If we lived in a world where the sun might rise or set at any moment, causes might as easily follow effects as the other way around, and people might come back to life as readily as they die, we’d all go out of our ever-loving minds. We are like the people of the village Anatevka in the musical Fiddler on the Roof; we keep our balance through tradition!
But, would it disturb you to learn that our science has revealed the world to be a far less predictable and far more surprising place than we ever imagined? The litany of the bizarre, now embraced by scientific theory, is impressive: sub-atomic particles – the building blocks of existence – seem to be capable of instantaneous ‘communication’ over nearly infinite distances; the subjects of quantum experiments appear to have no objective characteristics at all until observed by the experimenter, as though the act of observation itself were ‘creating’ reality; and the events upon which we so consistently rely in our daily lives are based not upon the dependably precise and ordered actions of electrons, protons and neutrons, but upon the degree of probability that certain occurrences will arise in a virtual sea of sub-microscopic unpredictability.
In short, the brightest scientific minds of our age are telling us that there is far more to existence than you and I can begin to imagine. And that, at its core, reality is not a comfortably known phenomenon; it is more unfamiliar and unsettling than the most far-fetched science fiction. Put in the language of faith: there is something far more wonderful to life than we know.
The sad truth is most of the time we keep ourselves at a distance from that wonder because we are addicted to the familiar. The unknown, let alone the unknowable, is just too uncomfortable a place to live. We wrap ourselves in blankets of custom, and walk through our days holding tightly to tradition, while all around us, unseen, the world is recreating itself with new surprises every minute. It is entirely understandable that we hold tightly to the familiar. It’s not a cause for shame. But it does create a tremendous amount of resistance to allowing ourselves to be surprised by reality, surprised by one another, surprised perhaps by the Lord of Life.
I think it’s our pride that often keeps us from being surprised. We like to feel that we’re smart enough to see things the way they truly are. It is the humble person, the humble heart, the humble church that is open to transformation, to the learning and growth that cannot come from our well-ordered routines and prideful assurances, but only sneaks up on us and startles us by tapping on our shoulders. Karl Barth said that “Wherever graves are, there is resurrection. . . . Broken, the Church can bear its message with its head erect, for the Gospel belongs to the Church that is lost.”1 Barth has put his finger on a profound truth: being a little lost is a prerequisite to being transformed. And it is our pride that keeps us from being at all lost.
For example, men are often shocked, angered and disbelieving when we are told that we have said or done something hurtful to women. We don’t believe that we have done anything wrong. We rarely intend any harm. So if our wives are hurt by something we said or some assumption we’ve made, or women in a group discussion point out that we’ve made a sexist remark, we tend to conclude that they are imagining it or that they are being over-sensitive. How many of us men are willing to look at our own responses as prideful resistance?
What’s more, it’s not only men who take part in that comfortable system. Women buy into it all the time. This all goes on not because any of us are out of whack, malicious, or masochistic. It’s simply that we don’t know any other place of comfort than the places that are familiar.
It’s not a coincidence that the disciples who heard the tale of Jesus rising from the dead were all men. It’s not a coincidence that those who went to do the anointing at the tomb that morning and ran back with the news were women. It’s not a coincidence that the men (who were busy with their important, manly stuff) dismissed what these women had to say. Scripture says, “. . . it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told this to the apostles; but these words seemed to them an idle tale [and we might add the implied phrase: told by foolish women].”
But, surprise, guys! The women were right!
And, surprise, everyone! The story of Jesus was not over after all!
There are things far more wondrous in this life than you can begin to imagine. But we miss them so often because we’re too wrapped up in keeping life predictable.
If we’re ever going to get anywhere, we’ve got to get out of our “comfort zones.” If we’re ever going to let the intrinsic value of each human being be known and embraced we are going to have to allow ourselves to be astonished by each other! That means approaching one another with fresh eyes, expecting to see something of value where once we might have been dismissive. That applies to men and women; it applies across cultures and races; and it applies to those who find themselves on opposites sides of an issue. If we’re ever going to truly know the wonder of this amazing, Divine creation we live in, we’re going to have to be ready to see and recognize the astounding in the world around us! That means paying attention to the ordinary and expecting to find the extraordinary. If we’re ever going to take the truth of Jesus Christ to heart, and allow it transform our lives, we’re going to have to let ourselves be surprised. And maybe the place to start is to be surprised by the story of a man once dead standing and removing the burial cloths, and the ground trembling and shaking open the tomb. If we can allow our minds to get a little blown by that, then maybe we can begin to see that the power of Love can shake off the blinders of prejudice, pattern and pride, shake off even the scales of death, and make us new!
Our death-dealing patterns of living are not the final answer. The barriers that separate races, genders, cultures, and perspectives are not the end of it. And perhaps death is not a brick wall at the end of the line but a door.
This is the abiding note of hope, that is the consistent theme of all those who have stood before the darkened tombs of life’s desperate moments and been overtaken by grace.
Christ is risen! And in that wondrous event is the clear and unmistakable declaration that there is no defeat from which victory cannot be won. There is no ending which cannot turn into a beginning. There is no death by stale routine that cannot be remade into something grand and noble.
Christ is risen indeed!
Have a glorious Easter.
1 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, Oxford University Press, 1968, p. 416.
Here’s an idea: what if we put an ad in the paper inviting people to be part of Christ’s church – I mean, the way Jesus envisioned it? I can see it now: “Come join our movement. Here’s your chance to reject your parents, turn your back on your wife and children, hate life, and give up everything you own! And all for the priceless opportunity to be rejected, despised, and crucified, just like Jesus!” Can you imagine it? Folks would be beating down our doors – “not!”
Jesus said a lot of things that we would be unlikely to put on a sign out in front of the church building. But if we’re reluctant to simply “tell it like it is,” we certainly have plenty of company. Can you imagine a presidential candidate whose strategy it was to tell the truth? “Vote for me, folks, not because I can turn the economy around; truth is, a president doesn’t really have much to do with what happens to the economy. And I’ll put forward some legislative initiatives (like health care and limiting “earmarks” and immigration reform), but we all know that very few of them will make their way through congress. I’d like to tell you that I can protect you from random violence, but all the armies in the world aren’t going to stop a determined killer. I’m not a perfect human being; I’ve done some things in my life that I’m not proud of. But vote for me, and I’ll do my best, even though, in the end, a lot of you aren’t going to be very happy with it.
Or, how about an ad campaign for a car: “Buy one of these new Ford Tornados. It doesn’t get anywhere near the gas mileage we’re capable of producing, but then, no other car does either. This car won’t make you more sexy – it won’t get you dates, or make everyone stop and stare when you go by. In fact, most folks will hardly notice you, because you’ll just be one more car on the road. And, after a few years, this nice shiny finish will be full of pits and dings, and you may have even put a crease in the fender. You’re also going to have things go wrong – the struts will give out, and the electronic ignition is likely to get out of whack. But, it will get you from point A to point B most of the time. And, hey, isn’t that what you really need from a car?”
Nobody runs ads like these. I wonder why? Truth is, I have a hard time being totally honest myself – even with myself. Sunday after Sunday I stand before you sharing the words of Jesus. And I soft-pedal, I sugar-coat, I equivocate. I don’t want to make you mad. I don’t want to discourage, disappoint, or upset you. But I do it not just for your sake; I do it for mine. The gospel scares me to death.
I’d rather have a different gospel than the one we have. I’d like to have one that says, “If you get a flat tire, just ask Jesus and he’ll send someone by to fix it for you. If you want to hit a home run, just point your finger to the sky before you step up to the plate and God will make it happen.” I’d rather have a gospel that says, “You have a very good head on your shoulders and you know what it means to care about the right things, so whatever you think is right, don’t worry, you’re on the right track.” I’d rather have a gospel that says, “If you just pray, and smile, and live a moral and righteous life, you’ll be better than everyone else, and the Lord will smile on you.” I’d rather not have the cross sitting on the communion table, because it keeps reminding me of the high cost of discipleship, and distracting me from the benefits of the “power of positive thinking.”
Instead, I’m stuck with a Jesus who says that if you want to follow him, you’d better first sit down and count the cost, because it could demand everything of you – even the things you hold most dear. Instead of a Jesus who meets all my needs, I’ve got a Jesus who gives me needs I didn’t even know I had. Instead of a gospel that confirms everything I already believe and vindicates me in my biases and assumptions, I have one that constantly challenges me to expand my thinking and see things from other people’s perspectives.
If there was one thing that demonstrated Jesus’ divinity, it was his capacity for telling truth. You see, for you and me, for presidential candidates, and for auto makers, what matters most is getting people to like us, getting people to follow, getting votes, getting members, getting sales. For Jesus, all that matters is truth. He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” His is not the way that most people choose, his is not the half-truth that sells, his is not the “good life” that we all buy lottery tickets hoping to find.
You and I don’t choose Jesus because his truth is enticing and inviting; he chooses us. And once his truth gets inside you, there’s no escaping it.
There are a lot of churches these days selling a very happy gospel. It’s a gospel all about being nice, and feeling good, and having your needs met. It’s all about smiling, and raising your hands in the air, and saying, “Praise Jesus!” But if you really read the gospels, you don’t find any of those things in there. You find a summons to let go of your own needs, and serve others. You find a call to take up your cross and sacrifice yourself. You find an appeal to follow after a Christ who will lead you through trials, and test you.
This is not to say that there is no value in things like happiness and beauty and pleasure. It’s simply that the pursuit of these things is not the heart of the matter. There is a joy far deeper than mere happiness. There is a fulfillment far greater than simple pleasure. That’s the truth that Jesus brings us. He says that the life he offers is “abundant” life. And, yes, part of that abundance is found in simple pleasures. But the deeper reality is that, even though it’s not always fun or even satisfying, life can be deep, and full of meaning and worth and power. He says you will “know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” I take that to mean that, though it may not be a popular path to take through life, it will be an honest one, and in that honesty you will be released from legions of lies that would otherwise enslave you.
I’ll tell you what I truly believe. I believe that if you and I ever got smart enough to know what we really wanted – what our souls wanted, not our minds and bodies – we’d be clamoring for the gospel – the honest, unpopular, demanding, uncomfortable gospel of Jesus.
Frederick Buechner tells the story of a man he knew who used to keep sheep in the town of Rupert, where he lived. He said, “Some of them he gave names to, and some of the them he didn’t, but he knew them equally well either way. If one of them got lost, he didn’t have a moment’s peace until he found it again. If one of them got sick or hurt, he would move heaven and earth to get it well again. He would feed them out of a bottle when they were newborn lambs if for some reason the mother wasn’t around or wouldn’t ‘own’ them, as he put it. He always called them at the end of the day so the wild dogs wouldn’t get them.” Buechner says, “I’ve seen him wade through snow up to his knees with a bail of hay in each hand to feed them on bitter cold winter evenings, shaking it out and putting it in the manger. I’ve stood with him in their shed with a forty watt bulb hanging down from the low ceiling to light up their timid, greedy, foolish, half holy faces as they pushed and butted each other to get at it. If God is like a shepherd, there are more than just a few ways, needless to say, that people like you and me are like sheep. Being timid, greedy, foolish, and half holy is only part of it.
“Like sheep we get hungry,” Buechner continues, “and hungry for more than just food. We get thirsty for more than just drink. Our souls get hungry and thirsty; in fact, it is often that sense of inner emptiness that makes us know we have souls in the first place. There is nothing that the world has to give us, there is nothing that we have to give each other even, that ever quite fills them.”
Folks, Buechner was right. There’s a hunger deeper than our yen for a BMW and a winning argument. There’s a thirst greater than our unquenchable desire for happiness and distraction. Your soul is hungry for truth – to know truth, to hear truth, to tell truth. And if our church amounts to anything it is to the degree that your soul’s hunger is fed here.
In a very real sense, that’s what Palm Sunday is all about. Jesus rode into town, not like the Presidential candidate who rides in a self-important precession of limousines, but on a donkey. He came willingly and with grave determination into Jerusalem, the heart of the civil and religious establishment that was bent on destroying him, to speak truth to power and suffer the inevitable consequences. When his disciples wanted to join with the crowds in joyously proclaiming him the Messiah, he told them that what was in store for him was a cross, and if they wanted to follow, they were to take up crosses as well. He made it clear that the only way to change the world was to change the very order of things, and make personal self-sacrifice the highest rule.
That’s the gospel truth. It’s the message that doesn’t bring crowds trying to beat down the door to get into the church; it disappoints an disturbs most of us. But if you’re going to build something that abides – like a new kind of world – it will take a movement that runs counter to the culture, and counter even to human nature. And for that, you will pay a price. So, if you want to sign on, sit down first and count the cost.
The ultimate truth of the gospel is this: that no matter how difficult the journey, no matter what trials we are called to undergo, we are never, ever alone. Each and every one of us, like the sheep under the care of a good shepherd, is held and sustained by the hand of the Lord. And that love will not fail us.
We may not soon have anyone running for the presidency who just tells us the truth and lets the chips fall where they may; we may not ever see real “truth in advertizing;” but I’ll make this promise to you today. To the best of my meager ability, I’m going to strive to not run away from the gospel, even though it scares me. I’m going to try to discern Divine truth, and simply tell it, and I’m going to challenge you to do the same.
To tell the truth, it’s all we’ve got.
We are journeying with Jesus in this Lenten season to his cross on the hill. Today we consider his appearance before Pontius Pilate, the Roman Procurator, or governor of Judea, who tried Jesus and sentenced him to death on a cross. Pontius is simply a family name that goes all the way back to the ancient Samnites, tribes that lived in south-central Italy and eventually became the Romans. So Pilate is a Roman down to his ancestral toes. It was Pilate who held the power to release Jesus or to punish him as he saw fit. And, although he was pushed by leaders of the Sanhedrin, it was his decision, acting on behalf of the Roman Empire, to send him to the cross. Crucifixion was a Roman form of execution, and it was Roman soldiers who beat him and nailed him up. Isn’t it odd that, even though it was the Romans who were responsible for the final act, no one derides Italians or residents of the Holy See as “Christ killers” like so many fundamentalists call the Jews?
In truth, the Roman authorities as well as the chief priests and scribes of the Sanhedrin, were simply an embodiment in that place and time of a universal and perpetual presence called “the powers.” The powers are always with us. They are the ones who collect might and dominance like children collect sea shells. They rely on armies, gas chambers, death squads and balance sheets to get want they want. They’ve spoken Chinese, Latin, German, and English. They’ve sat in council chambers, on thrones, in mansions, and in board rooms and corner offices. Over the millennia, they have won a lot of battles, but the message of the gospels is: they will never win the war. They can put a man to death, but they can’t kill the truth.
At any rate, the focus of our inquiry this morning is an intriguing, disjointed dialogue that transpired in the praetorium, which is the provincial governor’s official residence. Jesus stands before Pilate apparently accused of the treasonous act of calling himself a king. The conversation is difficult to follow because Jesus rarely answers Pilate’s questions directly. He suggests; he evades; he becomes cryptic; and in perhaps the most remarkable moment of this remarkable exchange he fails to answer at all. Jesus has just replied that he has come “to testify to the truth,” and implied that whatever kingship he holds is over a kingdom of truth. He says, “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate then asks the question that has intrigued people for centuries: “What is truth?” And to this profound question Jesus offers a profound silence. That silence, to this day, disturbs us, disrupts us, and rattles the doorknocker of every placid heart.
Frederick Buechner writes, “The silence that has always most haunted me is the silence of Jesus before Pilate. Pilate asks his famous question, ‘What is truth?’ (John 18:38), and Jesus answers him with a silence that is overwhelming in its eloquence. . . .
“It is a truth that can never be put into words,” Buechner says, “because no words can contain it. It is a truth that can never be caught in any doctrine or creed including our own because it will never stay still long enough, but is always moving and shifting like air. It is a truth that is always beckoning us in different ways and coming at us from different directions.”1
Buechner has put his finger on a profound reality. Pilate is a man whose feet are on solid ground. The praetorium is Herod’s grand palace, and Pilate stands on the marble floors of tradition and power. When he asks for the meaning of truth, he wants a clear answer – a forty word essay, double spaced, and neatly typed. He has no equipment for reflecting on an amorphous truth that touches one’s heart in ways that cannot be easily delineated. It is a truth that Jesus tried to speak around the edges of when he told stories – parables – to illustrate an equally amorphous thing he called the kingdom of God. But those stories at least tell us something – around the edges – about that silent truth of Jesus. They say that greed, retribution, judgment, and the flaunting of temporal power are false paths that lead only to heartache and destruction. They tell us that whatever truth is to be found will be down the road of humility, justice, peace, and compassion.
That word compassion jumps out at me when I consider those who, over the years, have wanted to cut programs like Meals on Wheels and Head Start saying that the real compassionate thing to do is to not ask people for their hard earned money to support such programs. That is, I believe, a definition of compassion that was once put forward by a man named Ebenezer Scrooge.
That is, I’m convinced, something of what Jesus was communicating with his silence. The question was coming from a man who had no clue. Pilate was clearly not concerned with a trivial issue like “right and wrong”; he was focused on what would get him in the least or the most trouble and with whom. Jesus’s silence spoke volumes. It said that no response could be given to a man who wouldn’t know the truth if it stood in front of him in chains. In response to the question, “What is truth?”, Jesus’s silence said: You know it if you see it. Or, conversely (in relation to “compassion”): You know what it isn’t if you don’t hear it.
But it’s a simple matter for us to sit quietly in the court room gallery, shaking our heads in condescension at the man Pilate who is brought before us for judgment. We find ourselves smirking at his wishy-washy complacency and incomprehensible motives. We might be shocked when the bailiff comes to our seat, grabs us by the arm and leads us to the stand. “Where were you when this crime was committed?”, comes the question. “I . . .I wasn’t even there,” we reply. “I had nothing to do with it. I was home watching TV. I was at the hockey game. I had a meeting.” But you and I know the truth, don’t we? Because that rarely indicted co-conspirator is us.
Pilate did not act alone. Christ is condemned to die over again every time a desperate and hopeful glance meets an indifferent eye. Christ is led away to Calvary yet again when good people retreat to their living rooms rather than stand up and be counted for at least the bits around the edge of that which we regard as truth. Christ is nailed to the tree each time a person is looked upon with suspicion or contempt because of the color of his skin, the accent in her voice, or the gender of his partner. Christ is crucified once more when those with the power to do good, to help heal the environment, or to share with the needy choose instead to line their own pockets or try to secure their positions of power by appealing to people’s fear. The message of Pilate’s awkward interrogation strikes us when his questions sound alarmingly familiar; the tendency to do violence to the truth is pervasive.
As Pilate tried to wash his hands of the whole affair, we find ourselves so frequently trying to place the blame outside of ourselves, beyond our culpability. The sin of evil externalized is the loss of accountability. Once the enemy has been identified elsewhere, anything goes to defeat it. We recognize evil in bloody extremists like ISIS, but even there our righteous rage must be tempered with a little history. Christianity has been used over and over as an excuse for some of the ugliest racial and religious violence the world has known. Our law-abiding, Muslim brothers and sisters have every reason to be afraid in our current climate. And the histories of our religion as well as our nation tell them their fears are not groundless. It is our responsibility to reach out to them and make sure they know we stand with them as children of the Most High. It is our responsibility to speak up in a culture of growing fear and hostility and acknowledge our own culpability and call others to account, to declare without equivocation that this is one world, and we are one people. It is our responsibility to defy those who speak hate and cry for retribution. These things we must do, for those who will not will find themselves trying to wash the blood from their hands and once again picking up the hammer to nail him to the tree.
The story of Pilate is our story: yours, mine, our nation’s, our world’s. In this season of reflection and self-examination, let us all place our feet on the marble floor of that praetorium and stand face to face with the one accused. And as we do so, may we recognize the truth that stands before us.
As we continue with our Lenten Pulpit Series I find that one question has always nagged me about Judas: Why did he do it? Was he simply a bad apple from the outset, bent on doing evil? Was he an undercover operative of the Sanhedrin, planted among the disciples to bring down this rising star who might pose a threat? Was he really so in need of, or so enchanted by, the thirty pieces of silver that he would turn on his best friend and teacher for some easy cash?
An interesting theory has been posed by several commentators. It’s the notion that Judas was convinced that Jesus was destined to drive out the Romans and rule the people of Israel. According to this theory he believed that turning Jesus over to the authorities would bring on a final showdown in which Jesus would be forced to utilize his messianic powers, calling on a host of angel warriors to wipe out the Romans. When this didn’t happen he was crushed and threw the money at the feet of the chief priests and the elders and went out and hanged himself (as we read in today’s gospel reading).
I think there’s some value in this interpretation (whether it’s true or not); it offers us some real meat to chew on. Judas must have been increasingly disappointed in Jesus, perhaps starting with the time he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, instead of leading a procession of armed and riotous insurrectionists ready to do battle with the authorities. And when Mary anointed Jesus’s feet with expensive perfume Judas hit the ceiling. Maybe he secretly wanted to sell it to buy weapons for the coming battle with the alien oppressors. At any rate, this Judas we are considering painted Jesus with his own brush and invested himself in seeing his hero bring about the sweeping victory that he envisioned. When that didn’t happen, the bottom fell out of his world.
Does any of this sound familiar? We do it every four years with Presidential elections. When Barack Obama was running for the office, people all over the country got caught up in seeing him as the one who would remake America in the image they held. When it turned out that he wasn’t able to make it all happen the way they dreamed of, great numbers of people who had voted for him lost total confidence in him. The same thing happened with President Biden. Biden entered the White House with high approval ratings of 57 percent, enjoying a honeymoon period from his decisive victory in the 2020 election. Then, his average approval rating across his four years of power dropped to 42.2 percent, a historically low figure. The only recent president to score lower was Biden’s predecessor and now successor Donald Trump, who had an average approval rating of 41.1 percent over the course of his first term. And it’s been little different so far with President Trump in his second term. He was elected by people who were fed up with things the way they were and saw him as the one who would go to Washington and shake things up – set things right. But it hasn’t taken long for the bubble to burst. His approval ratings have already fallen into the basement.
I have seen the same dynamic in churches. A new pastor is brought in and everyone sees this person as the answer to all their needs and someone who will steer the church into the course that they imagine. That pastor is seen in ideal terms and gets put up on a pedestal until someone’s feelings get hurt, or things go a bit wrong, and now that same savior becomes an easy target. I’ve seen churches ripped apart by that sort of ugliness. By the way, let this be a cautionary tale for all of us as we consider future pastoral leadership.
You and I tend to look for heroes and saviors. If we don’t do it overtly we do it subconsciously. It seems to be built in to our DNA. And the problem with saviors is that they quickly and almost dependably turn into punching bags. That’s because they’re all human and flawed just like the rest of us.
At the root of this malady is, I believe, our tendency to have our values and interests turned upside down. We tend to hold images in our heads of how things could be better in our lives and world, but we seem to be short on investing ourselves in making those images into reality. So, it’s easier to believe that someone else could make it happen for us. That’s the bread and butter of politicians; they promise that they can do this for you, and most of the time they can’t. If we could all live the things that Jesus taught we would find ourselves taking responsibility for making the world a better place in our own corner, and not investing all our hope in some leader to do it for us. That idea is the genius of our democracy. It’s the notion that the people are the ones to lead – at least by being well educated, well informed, and civically active. Unfortunately, that ideal seems to be constantly battling against human nature.
Another effect of all this is that we tend to find ourselves chasing after idols – worshiping the wrong things. It’s easy to believe that wealth, or cleverness, or good looks are the things that can make life rich and meaningful; and it’s inevitable to discover in the end that they are not. Those aspects of life that truly matter are subtler, quieter, less tangible. Dadgie’s daughter gave us a little plaque that we keep on the wall near our entry. It reads: “The best things in life aren’t things.”
Eugene Peterson illustrates this point commenting on the difference between Peter and Judas. “Among the apostles,” he writes, “the one absolutely stunning success was Judas, and the one thoroughly groveling failure was Peter. Judas was a success in the ways that most impress us: He was successful both financially and politically. . . . And Peter was a failure in ways that we most dread: He was impotent in a crisis and socially inept. At the arrest of Jesus, he collapsed, a hapless, blustering coward; in the most critical situations of his life with Jesus, the confession on the road to Caesarea Philippi and the vision on the Mount of Transfiguration, he said the most embarrassingly inappropriate things. . . .
“Time, of course, has reversed our judgments on the two men,” Peterson continues. “Judas is now a byword for betrayal, and Peter is one of the most honored names in the church and in the world. Judas is a villain; Peter is a saint. Yet the world continues to chase after the successes of Judas, financial wealth and political power, and to defend itself against the failures of Peter, impotence and ineptness.”
That seems spot on to me. We’ve got our values all upside down. We are currently anticipating a funeral for our dear Wilma. I suspect the room will be filled to capacity. It strikes me that all these people who mourn this woman, shedding tears at her passing, acknowledging what a hole she was leaving in their lives and in the church aren’t considering what financial holdings she might have had, possessions she had accumulated, or some degree of political power she had come to wield. It was all about the lives of people she had influenced, the love she had shared with so many people, the smiles, the warmth, the sensitivity. These are the things that mattered and that moved so many people to tears of loss and will bring also tears of joy celebrating her wonderful life. Wilma had her values right side up. I realize I’m preaching to the choir a little bit here; but even choirs need to practice once in a while.
So why did Judas do it? The poor guy got caught up in something. Through the fog of history, we don’t really know what it was. It might have been, as we have speculated this morning, the passion for a leader who would destroy those he saw as enemies and restore him and his people to a place of power. But whatever it was, it was an upside down set of values. He led the crowd of hired thugs to Jesus and identified him to them with a kiss. His kiss of betrayal was the ultimate seal of his lostness. That kiss held power. Like the Mafia’s kiss of death it set in motion things that could not be undone. But there are other kinds of kisses: like a mother’s gentle kiss of a baby, the familiar kiss of a couple married for forty years, or even the warm kiss of friends demonstrating their mutual affection. These kisses hold power as well. It is the power of compassion, tenderness, love. And that power will, in the end, defeat all the armies of empire that swords could not.
Judas could not bear to live with what he had become, and he hangs from a tree for all time as a warning not to reject the values and timeless message of the one who hangs on the cross.
There is a rather strange phrase in our reading from the gospel of John this morning. “When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’” That phrase “the disciple whom he loved” stands out. And we wonder: Didn’t he love all the disciples? How can it be that there was only one of them he loved?
Actually, this is one of five times in his gospel that John refers to “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” That disciple, oddly enough, is never named. And that has created an intriguing mystery, along with a lot of speculation. Some scholars believe the so-called “Beloved Disciple” was Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead. Lazarus was the brother of Mary and Martha, and when he fell ill, “. . . the sisters sent a message to Jesus, ‘Lord, he whom you love is ill.’” And when Jesus heard that Lazarus had died, “Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, ‘See how he loved him!’” And Lazarus lived in Bethany, near Jerusalem, so when Jesus said, as he did in this morning’s scripture that this disciple whom he loved was now his own mother’s son, John writes, “from that hour the disciple took her into his own home,” which would have been easy for Lazarus to do, living so near. On this and other evidence, many believe that Lazarus is the Beloved Disciple.
Others think it was John the son of Zebedee. They regard Lazarus as a kind of secondary disciple, and feel that the one whom Jesus loved must have been a more prominent follower. Since so many of the other disciples are ruled out by either being described as with the beloved disciple, or by having died before some of the key events took place, it comes down to John. And since Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved are seen together in both Luke and Acts, and Peter and John are placed together in the Gospel of John, it seems clear to these folks that John is the guy.
In very recent times, there has even been speculation, believe it or not, that Jesus was gay, and when we read that this beloved disciple was, at the last supper, reclined on the breast of Jesus, we are to take “the disciple whom Jesus loved” in a very particular sense.
As for me, I find the fact that this disciple is never named to be a fascinating invitation. It is as though there is a large portrait of Jesus and the disciples and one of them – one close enough to Jesus to be embraced by him – is simply an empty dotted outline of a person – a lacuna. That empty outline is the invitation. It allows us to fill it in with whomever we wish. That I find intriguing. Whom would you put in that portrait?
One good candidate, obviously to many of us, is Mother Teresa. She sacrificed her own comfort, health, and safety to care for the poor and dying. She became a world-wide icon symbolizing the kind of selfless love that Jesus preached. Surely she would fit well into that portrait. But she also was an imperfect human being. She was criticized by some for not using the large donations she had received to improve the poor living conditions in her houses for the dying and for not promoting women’s rights.
Or, perhaps there are people you know personally who you’d nominate to be put in that portrait alongside Jesus. There might be one or two in this room that you’d think of. I won’t mention any names to keep from embarrassing anyone.
But maybe the most can be gained by shifting our focus from the empty dotted figure to the one nearest: to Jesus himself. Maybe more can be learned about the Beloved Disciple by considering the one who loves him. For me, Jesus is best understood as the closest thing we’ve seen among our kind to the Lord of Creation. I love the words of nineteenth century Scottish author, poet, and Congregational minister, George MacDonald, who wrote: “How terribly, then, have the theologians misrepresented God! Nearly all of them represent him as a great king on a grand throne, thinking how grand he is, and making it the business of his being and the end of his universe to keep up his glory, wielding the bolts of a Jupiter against them that take his name in vain. They would not allow this, but follow out what they say, and it comes much to this.
“Brothers, have you found our king?” MacDonald asks. “There he is, kissing little children and saying they are like God. There he is at table with the head of a fisherman lying on his bosom, and somewhat heavy at heart that even he, the beloved disciple, cannot yet understand him well.”
MacDonald paints a portrait of Jesus that hints of a gentle and loving divinity, a shepherd who knows his sheep by name and who holds next to his bosom not only the little children, but all those who are confused and searching, those who are lost or broken, those who are incomplete and unfulfilled. We see this Jesus even as he hangs on the cross, turning this beloved disciple over to his mother, and putting her in his care.
And we see this Jesus as he enters Jerusalem. He comes, riding into the heart of the storm – to the center of power of those who will be bent on destroying him – knowing that he will undoubtedly face both physical and mental pain and that he will not be emerging from this encounter. And he chooses as a symbol for this entrance not the procession of military might such as we might see on the streets of Red Square in Moscow or in missiles streaking through the skies over Ukraine, not the grand parade of impressive black limousines or the royal wave from the back seat of a Bentley, not even the feisty fist-pumping of the big fight’s underdog, but quietly on the back of a baby donkey. He is telling us, I believe, that divine power and love confront the paltry powers of the principalities with head bowed and eyes warmed by tears of pity. The one who holds the central seat in our painting is one who is always ready to embrace, always looking for an opening through which love and grace can find their mark.
There are so many in our troubled world who miss that message of love and grace. All too many people are so caught in self-indulgence, self-pity, or carelessness that they are unable to receive that tender embrace from Jesus. I was listening to a news report recently about the illicit fentanyl trafficking from Canada. A reporter was interviewing a young man who was involved in the drug trade. She asked him if he felt any remorse over the number of people who died because of the drugs he was exporting. His response was chilling. He said, “It’s not my problem.” There has always and everywhere been a strain of humanity that is barely human. It’s no wonder Jesus wept over the city when he entered it.
So, who is the disciple whom Jesus loved – the person in the empty dotted outline? It is you. It’s like those notations on the map of stores at the shopping mall: “You are here.” To place yourself in that portrait is to let go of your defenses and allow yourself to be embraced. To place yourself in that portrait is to finally allow yourself to be forgiven and know that you are OK, cracks and all. To place yourself in that portrait is to set your course down a difficult, demanding, and yet deeply rewarding path.
It may seem a complex and demanding thing to tell you that you are the Beloved Disciple at the breast of Jesus – to say that you are loved by the divine power that filled and motivated him. But maybe it’s a deeper, more profound, and, yet, simpler message than it seems. The famed theologian Karl Barth was at Rockefeller Chapel on the campus of the University of Chicago during his lecture tour of the U.S. in 1962. After his lecture, during the question and answer time, a student said he had read many of the great theologian’s works but was still confused. He asked Barth if he could summarize his whole life’s work in theology in a sentence. Barth said “Yes, I can. He paused a moment and said: ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.’”
Let’s sing it together.
Today, I continue our Lenten Pulpit Series: On the Road to Calvary. And this morning we stop with Jesus at the gate to the holy city in the heart of Israel.
These days, Israel is in the headlines. we’re all aware of the deadlocked hostility between Israel and Palestine that is the touchstone for much of Arab resentment and retaliation around the world. The epicenter of the righteous rage is Jerusalem. And “ground zero” is a holy place in the Holy City which Palestinians call “al-Haram al-Sharif” (or, “the Noble Sanctuary”) and Jews hallow as the “Temple Mount.” It’s like a vortex in the midst of swirling emotions; it is a supremely revered center of holiness, sacred to both Muslims and Jews, and it is the eye of the storm of hatred and violence that led to a Hamas attack on Israel, engulfed the West Bank and Gaza, and percolated into Lebanon, with Iran now threatening to get involved. Now, much of the world is waiting and watching to see how far the conflict might spread. Jerusalem lives as a symbol of something very ancient and sacred in the hearts of people throughout the world, and it often resides on the front pages of our newspapers as a seat of terror. It is a place of violent passion, and yet its very name, Jerusalem, has long been popularly regarded to mean “vision of peace.” It is the capital city of holiness and hatred.
But we also know that none of this is new. Thus it has been for as long as there is a human record. Almost two thousand years ago as Jesus approached the Holy City he lamented over it: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” He looked upon the city “named for peace” and wept, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!” Jesus’ lament is ours as well. He shared our sadness about the city, and our discouragement. He said, “See, your house is left to you.” In other words, the fate of the city is in the hands of the people; the Lord Almighty has given up.
How does such a thing happen? How does that which is so sacred become such a center of bloodshed? I don’t presume to be an expert on the Middle East, or to be able to comprehend or speak intelligently about the many personal, political, and social ingredients in this long and painful conflict. But I do believe that it is at the core of much of the violence, terrorism and war that plague our world today. And there is something at the heart of that ancient center of conflict that is terribly important for people of faith everywhere to grapple with.
Jesus broached the subject for us when he approached the gates of the Holy City and spoke to Jerusalem through his tears: “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!” He said that those things that make for peace were hidden from the city’s eyes, and they seem to have remained hidden for two thousand years. I would not be so bold as to claim that I alone know what they are, but I would like to think aloud with you today about his challenge, and ask: what are they? What are “the things that make for peace?”
I believe the beginning of an answer lies in a central lesson drawn from the ancient conflict that emanates from the “Noble Sanctuary” of the Holy City. It is this: holiness and hatred are not the polar opposites that we may regard them to be. They are intimately bound together, and we ignore the relationship between them at our peril.
It is very easy for us to stroll through our days with the comfortable assurance that our faith is a source of peace and makes us people of peace. But the truth is nothing separates people, or pits them against each other, quite as powerfully as does religious belief. And the more firmly wedded we are to our beliefs the more susceptible we are to animosity and intolerance. We may not think about it, but how easy it is for Protestants to have anti-Catholic sentiments brewing under the surface, or for Christians to harbor a silent anti-Semitism. It can take the form of a simple sense of pride, or a deeper feeling of resentment. Even within our own circles, within Protestantism or within a community, we often find that those who are the most passionate about their faith are often at odds with others about religious and moral questions.
I would suggest to you that there is at the heart of this perplexing problem the same paradox that we see in the Holy City consumed by violence. The righteous passion that pits people of faith against each other is partly an evil, and partly a necessity. It is, in one respect, a thing to be avoided at all costs, and in another respect, unavoidable. The very language of Jesus reflects how unsettling is this paradox. On one occasion he said, “judge not, that you be not also judged,” and “take the log out of your own eye, then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your neighbor’s eye.” But at another time he said, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother. . . .”
As hard as it may be to accept, religious faith not only draws us to each other in loving community, it also compels us to take stands for those things we believe in and puts us in opposition to each other. There is no easy way around this paradox. It is a fact of religious life. The extremes of this principle may be played out in broad and grotesque ways in the Holy Land, but on a different scale, the dynamic is the same for us. There is something in the nature of Divinity, and of holiness, that draws us into both peace and conflict, inner conflict and outer conflict. I may recoil at this truth, but I cannot change it. There are things worth contesting; there are principles and values at the heart of religious conviction that one is compelled to take a stand in defense of. But the bloody record of religious history teaches us to be extremely cautious in naming those things, and even more cautious in deciding how to defend them.
The same principles apply to those other sources of conflict: economic disparity (both the defensiveness engendered by greed, and the aggressiveness brought on by injustice), perceived threats, and personal and national interests. It falls to those who hold power to continually re-examine their motives and consider what it means to be a global citizen – what is worth defending and what is better yielded, what is worth protecting and what is better shared.
These are not simple questions. They are not even questions most of us care to take seriously most of the time. To do so is to question our own motivations and standards, and we ordinarily do that only under extreme pressure. But the place to begin is with a tacit recognition that conflict is inevitable. If we are open to such a perspective we may even discover that, as Gandhi said, “the most important battles are fought within.”
So, one of the things that make for peace is, in my opinion, a shared and wide-spread, sacred intention to exercise the utmost caution in considering what is worth standing for and standing against.
But that leads to another question: once we have decided something merits a strong defense, how do go about defending it? The testimony of Jesus’ entire ministry as well as the appeal to common reason tells me that we are compelled to choose the least violent means possible in any circumstance. Interpersonally that means thoughtful consideration of the perspectives of others, and negotiation before launching into righteous tirades and sharp put-downs.
The same principle applies to nations. It seems to me that war becomes an easier choice for those who refuse to see it for what it is. War is not a glorious and noble undertaking, it is not a natural and ordinary part of human life, it is not a morally neutral tool of foreign policy. War is hell. War is perhaps the most despicable horror humanity has invented. If a nation takes the step of entering a war, it must do so in recognition that it is choosing a great and terrible evil, and it must only do so to avert an even greater evil.
I’ve heard much discussion in the media from time to time about post-traumatic stress disorder, about the disruption in so many lives and families of our combat soldiers: the high divorce rate (about three times the national average), the rate of alcoholism (about four times the national average), and the sky-rocketing number of suicides. So many of the military professionals I’ve listened to speak about this as if it were a troubling and unexpected development that everyone is scratching their heads trying to find ways to “fix.” Listening to them, I begin to think that they see the life of combat as something a human being should be able to take on like any other job, and with only enough training, supervision, and resources, soldiers should be able to handle the work of warfare with the same balance and stability of mind and body that an electrician displays in wiring a house.
I believe that we make war more inevitable when we see soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen as simply those doing another job in society. I thank the Good Lord for our military personnel, but soldiers are not bankers or plumbers. They are, out of a sad and terrible necessity, being trained as killers, and being prepared to go into the very belly of hell to be involved in unspeakable human terror, a terror that will change them, injure them, emotionally disrupt them, and kill many of them. We can do what we can for them, train them, support them, counsel them, but we cannot make the horror in which we ask them to participate into some readily manageable routine.
One of the things that make for peace is, I believe, an intentionally preserved and diligently reinforced honesty in all of our hearts and minds about the true nature of war.
Perhaps what is most needed in the Middle East and elsewhere right now is the capacity to discern what battles are worth fighting, and for what purposes, and a lot of deep reflection about how to fight those battles.
And, as for that ancient conflict centered in the Holy City, the bloody and regrettable history on our own continent might be ample evidence to our Israeli and Palestinian brethren that the claim to such things as “birthrights” and “divine destiny” are rarely the work of any power higher than ourselves and our own greed or fear. In truth, the struggle to draw a new map, shape a new humanity, and bring about a new peace may be the most difficult and challenging battle of all. It could pit “son against father and daughter against mother,” but it could be far more worth giving one’s life to than the objective of voicing rage against the infidels.
These are also the questions you and I face day by day. The question of faith is not “how can I avoid conflict?” but rather, “where is the Holy Lord’s battle for peace raging, and how do I sign up?” The hope is not “how can I get what I want?” It is “how can I help make the Divine vision for humanity more real?” The challenge is not, “who must I oppose and put down?” But it is, “how can I, even I, discern this very day the things that make for peace?”
So, Four members of the current Administration in Washington and a list of at least seven Hollywood stars have faced allegations of sexual misconduct. The thing is, I suspect that most of us, at least at some point or another in our lives, have done things we regret. We’re “tempted” not only by sex, but by the occasional opportunity to cheat on our taxes, by an impractical but stylish car, and, of course, by chocolate. A good friend of ours visited recently and, bless her heart, gave us a big bag of chocolate candy. Unfortunately, I pass by that bag in the kitchen several times a day. As Oscar Wilde famously offered (on the lips of Lord Darlington), “I can resist everything except temptation.”
So we have some acquaintance with temptation. And when Jesus is tempted, so the Bible says, by Satan in the wilderness, we feel that we have some basis for empathizing. But I think we’ve got a lot to learn. You and I tend to focus on specific things that we’ve been told we’re not supposed to do because they’re “bad things.” So, it’s easy for us to reduce this whole concept of temptation to a list of “no-no’s, a list that no doubt includes messing around with the woman next door and eating chocolate. But Jesus put the whole thing in a larger context. He artfully used a few scripture verses to carve away the fluff and dig right down to the core of what temptation is all about – the worst kind of temptation, the kind of temptation that, if you yield to it, can eat up your soul and leave you with nothing but a hungry heart.
The temptations of Jesus were three: carelessness, idolatry, and deceit. There’s a lot we can learn from his ordeal in the desert. There’s a lot to be gleaned from the way he framed the issues.
Satan, so the story goes, tempted him to turn a rock into a loaf of bread. But here’s how Jesus frames the dilemma: he says, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’” Here’s what I think was going on: Jesus was in the midst of a spiritual quest. He was disciplining himself by fasting, seeking a connection with the deeper reality of the spirit which transcends and underlies the cravings of the body. The temptation wasn’t simply to munch on a piece of bread, like we might succumb to a bar of chocolate, it was the temptation to live carelessly – to deny the spiritual center that he was in the midst of seeking.
What portion of our lives do you and I devote to seeking that spiritual center? Have any of us pursued a deep connection with the Ground of All Being with such passion and intention that we would deny ourselves life’s pleasures, or even necessities? This is the first great temptation we face. It is the temptation to deny that our essential nature is one of spirit, and that our sprits need care. They need to be fed, nurtured, and grown.
Spirituality isn’t just moving into ones’ self for the sake of gaining a little more peace in your life (although, that is certainly a benefit). The highly developed and mature spirit is not only an inner resource, it’s a gift to be shared. It means not just a deeper but a broader awareness. It means living with care for oneself and for others. That’s why we strive to abstain from unhealthy foods and unhealthy relationships, not simply because they are on a list of “no-no’s” but because we are taking care of all our spirits.
One seasoned and wise spirit can make a profound difference in a community, or even a nation. It’s been said that the key event – the major turning point – in the American Revolution was the moment George Washington retired from the army and went home to Mount Vernon. At the end of the Revolutionary War, the nation worshiped Washington; they wanted to make him king of America. They would have granted him virtually anything – unlimited power. But with a spirit afflicted and tested over years of trial, Washington had gained the wisdom to know that if he yielded to the temptation of unimaginable personal power, the Constitution would be rendered null and void, and all that he and his countrymen had fought for would be lost. The inner lights of one person, carefully tended and empowered, can light the way for a whole people.
The second temptation is well known to us. It’s practically written in our DNA. The story says the devil promised vast wealth and power if only Jesus would worship him. Again he replies from scripture: “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”
We don’t set out to worship other gods, we just want a degree of comfort and security in life. But one thing always leads to another, and before we know it we are living for and serving the things that please us and protect us: money, position, possessions, influence, admiration. In time, it can become virtually impossible for the Spirit of the Lord to squeeze in through the cracks between our golden calves of distraction. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why Jesus spent so much of his time with the outcasts and misfits, and why he said that the poor would inherit the kingdom, and that it would be harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Sometimes I wonder if he instinctively knew that those who are less privileged, less secure, less satisfied, have more room in their hearts for the Spirit to move in.
But it’s not just money we worship, it can be virtually anything and everything. Martin Luther said, “That to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is, I say, your god.” What are our idols in America? I was curious what they might be so I got on the Internet and did a web search for “American . . . idol” and got 319 million hits! (Well, actually, I stopped counting after 700). Truth is, the way people talk about the TV show, you might think it really is an idol. We can fill our lives with television, or food, or toys, or even church! It’s true, church can become an idol!
If we start worshiping the institution instead of the Lord of Life it’s designed to serve, we can make a golden calf of it. William Willimon gives his take on Aaron’s defense when Moses came down from the mountain and found the children of Israel worshiping the golden calf. He writes, “Aaron said (I think), ‘But Moses, they are having such a wonderful time. The people are feeling much better about themselves. Even the teenagers are involved. I take this as evidence of a great rebirth of spirituality in our age. Besides, the parking lot is full and who can argue with that?’” We need to be vigilant about just who and what we are worshiping, even here on Sunday mornings!
And finally, Jesus was confronted with the temptation to throw himself off the temple tower so that God would send angels to rescue him. He answered, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” The temptation to bargain with the Lord is simply one manifestation of our proclivity to deceive everyone, beginning with ourselves.
Sir Walter Scott was right. Deception is indeed the beginning of a “tangled web.” And self-deception is its prelude. Whether it’s wearing a mask to conceal your true motives, or jumping off a bell tower under the delusion that it’s the Divine intention to protect you from all harm, living the lie complicates life, cheapens its purpose, and erodes its value.
A classic example is Thomas Jefferson’s great self-deception. As you know, Jefferson was the principle author of the Declaration of Independence. The noble words in that document about the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal” were the hallmark of a new idea that was America. It was an idea that would be expanded upon and outlive the limited definitions of what constituted a person in Jefferson’s time. But at the same time he was writing these great words, Jefferson was holding slaves himself, slaves he would not release up to the point of his own death.
Bill Moyers says, “Addicted to his own place and privilege, he could send the noblest sentiments winging around the world, but refused to let them lodge in his own home. . . . He knew the truth, and he lived the lie.”
That’s what tempts us to betray ourselves and those around us: knowing the truth, but living the lie.
The season of Lent has arrived. During these forty days leading up to Easter Christians traditionally do a lot of soul-searching. They often deny themselves some pleasure, or fast, or spend regular time in prayer. This is done to follow the example of Jesus who spent those forty days fasting in the wilderness, engaged in spiritual struggle. But it’s not about giving up candy bars as a tradition – like Ground Hog Day or saying “bless you” when someone sneezes. These days afford a great opportunity to examine your life, to consider what draws you to be careless about your essential spiritual center, what compels you to chase after the false gods of money, possessions, or even religiosity, what tempts you to live the lie even when you know the truth.
It’s tempting . . . to consider all the talk of “spiritual discipline” and “self-examination” just a bunch of churchy stuff that has little to do with me. But I tell you, it’s the sort of thing that great people, great institutions, and great nations are made of.
I confess that this morning’s gospel reading is not the sort of passage that I’m usually drawn to. But, as is often the case, when reading this one over again, something jumped up and bit me on the brain. It was this response by Jesus buried in the middle of the text: “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you?” It’s not entirely clear to whom he was speaking as he said this. There was the man who had spoken up from the crowd and asked Jesus to look at his demon-possessed son, there were the disciples to whom the man had turned earlier, and there was the crowd gathered around. To get a handle Jesus’s exasperation, let’s look at each of these possibilities in turn.
First, the man who approached Jesus to begin with. He was clearly in a state of turmoil. His son was going through repeated convulsions, shrieking and foaming at the mouth. Today, we might conclude that he has some disease that is causing seizures; maybe he was epileptic. But in that day it was understood that he was possessed by a demon. The father was at his wits’ end. He turned to Jesus in desperation, calling out to him from the crowd, asking him to look at the boy. It’s hard to hear the biting words of Jesus in response to this man’s earnest plea, referring to his generation as wicked and perverse. As a trained and experienced pastor, I would have been more empathetic. I might have employed a Rogerian therapeutic response, something like, “You are clearly distressed about your son’s condition.” Or I might have simply been more comforting, “I’m so sorry. You must be in such pain about this.” But even if I said nothing at all, surely it would have been better than calling this distraught father and his whole generation “wicked and perverse”. What might Jesus have been trying to say to this guy? Could it be something as cold and unfeeling as: “Why are you looking to me for a cure? This is your lot in life; live with it!”? Playing with that possibility in my mind, I wonder if there is a degree of – albeit cold – comfort.
I wonder if the wisdom of such a response is the same harsh truth that the Lord spoke to Job and his friends at the end of Job’s book. Job has railed and ranted for thirty-four chapters about life being brutal and the Lord Almighty being unfair, and for thirty-four chapters Job’s friends have put him in his place, taking him to task for not trusting in divine goodness and the fairness of life’s balances. In the last chapter that Lord Almighty has appeared on the scene and, as vehemently as Jesus, rebukes Job’s friends because, in the words of the text, “you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.” In other words, divine sanction is given to Job’s words, and he is basically saying that life is, indeed, unfair, and so, by extension, we are simply to do our best to learn to live with that unfairness.
If this is what Jesus has a twist in his knickers about, perhaps there is a deep wisdom to be mined here for all of us. All too many of us, I believe, approach life as if it is a kind of candy-store where all that is required of us is to do the right thing – that is, pony up our nickel at the counter – and we will get all the candy we deserve. We’ve all been around long enough to know, rationally, that it doesn’t work that way, but on a primitive, emotional level we feel that it should. And we can find ourselves either sulking and pouting, or desperately chasing after pipe-dream solutions to insoluble problems instead of letting the Spirit do its work to transform our hearts and minds to find the grace to adjust to a less than optimal reality. I don’t know if that’s what Jesus had in mind, but if he didn’t it’s still a pretty good lesson. The crowd that surrounded him was clearly impressed enough by his healing power that they could not be offended by his harsh words. Scripture says “all were astounded.” Maybe these days, our young people would put it in different words: “Awesome!”
Or, let’s consider the possibility that Jesus was speaking to his disciples when he leveled this scathing chastisement. You might note that just before Jesus went on the attack, the man had disclosed that he had gone to the disciples with the problem but they could do nothing. Could it be that he then turned to his closest followers and shot out the words, “faithless and perverse generation”? Was Jesus admonishing them for not having sufficient faith to heal the boy themselves? That also seems like a shot of pretty tough love. Wouldn’t he have gotten further in teaching them about faith by using a “spoonful of sugar” as Mary Poppins says, to help the medicine go down? Why so severe? I’m not sure I have an answer to that, but it does occur to me that faith-healing is a very tricky thing, and maybe the faith required to do it takes a bit of a jolt to wake up to. I remember watching Oral Roberts on television many years ago and seeing it as not much different than the so-called professional wrestling matches that were aired later in the evening. It all looked pretty hokey and staged to me. But then, I also hadn’t had any experience of such a thing. I have certainly heard many stories of people being healed of diseases when doctors could come up with no explanation for the cure. And it’s clear that modern medical science has hardly begun to grasp the power of the mind – the power of faith – in the healing act.
Dadgie and I knew a man of both powerful intellect and extraordinary spirit who was diagnosed with cancer. It was a form that the doctors had no cure for, and he was given months, or at best, a year to live. His response was to create a Japanese rock garden in his back yard. It was a beautiful, serene place with the ground covered by many thousands of small stones of various colors in a circular pattern. He would spend a certain amount of time each day out in the rock garden picking weeds, twigs, and debris blown by the wind out from between the stones. He said that each unwanted thing removed came with a reverent meditation in which he visualized removing cancer cells from his body. His cancer remained in remission and he lived for many years in this way. Is there some special power in faith to heal bodies? I rather believe there is. And maybe Jesus was just tired of the disciples spending so much time with him and still not figuring that out. At any rate that power is something to think about, something to stir the soul in times of distress, something remarkable, something “Awesome!”
But there’s another possibility – a kind of hybrid of these two. And this is my personal favorite. Maybe Jesus was almost mouthing his scathing condemnation under his breath. And maybe it wasn’t directed at any one or any small group of individuals. Perhaps it was an expression of frustration with everyone. Maybe it was intended for the whole crowd gathered there, and by extension, for you and me. And what is the mark of our participation in a “faithless and perverse generation”? Could it be that we so rarely seize either the transformational power of acceptance or the healing power of faith? They are opposite sides of the same coin, you know. The development of the kind of gentle, pliable heart that takes the hurts and traumas of life with grace is just the flip-side of the capacity to use the power of faith to bring healing to at least some of our wounds – physical, mental, and spiritual. And how does any of us gain the grace of that pliable heart or the power of that healing faith? Here’s my best answer: ask for it. You and I may not be the kind of believers who assume that prayer answers everything, but I tell you that it is a window through which the Spirit blows into our lives if we will open it. In fact, according to the New York Times, a study at Carnegie Mellon revealed that “Mindfulness meditation . . . can change the brains of ordinary people and potentially improve their health.”
Frederick Buechner, commenting on today’s gospel reading, writes, “I am saying just this: go to him the way the father of the sick boy did and ask him. Pray to him, is what I am saying. In whatever words you have. And if the little voice that is inside all of us as the inheritance of generations of unfaith, if this little voice inside says, ‘But I don’t believe. I don’t believe,” don’t worry too much. Just keep on anyway. “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief” is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.
“Seek,” Buechner continues, “and you will find – this power of God’s love to heal, to give peace and, at last, something like real life, so that little by little, like the boy, you can get up. Yes, get up. But we must seek – like a child at first, like playing a kind of game at first because prayer is so foreign to most of us. It is so hard and it is so easy. And everything depends on it. Seek. Ask. And by God’s grace we will find. In Christ’s name and with his power I can promise you this.”
Buechner has hit on the heart of it. Prayer does not heal every wound, resolve every issue, mend every relationship. But it can, little by little, open that window so that the Spirit that flows among us and through us can begin to remake our hearts, heal our purposes, ease our fears, and even, at times, mend our bodies.
And that is, well, “Awesome!”
After the great flood of Genesis, so the story goes, God struck a deal with Noah. Placing a rainbow in the sky, God promised that he would never again send a flood to destroy the earth, and whenever God looked at the rainbow – like a string tied around the divine finger – God would be reminded not to do such a terrible thing again. It’s an etiological tale devised partly to explain why there are such things as rainbows. We now know better. In fact, we have learned that, in a sense, a rainbow isn’t even a “thing.” A rainbow, as we understand it, isn’t actually a physical structure out in the sky somewhere. It really only exists inside our heads. Two separate people and a third with a camera will all see a rainbow, and the camera will record one on film. But they’re not all seeing one thing. Each one sees a different rainbow. It is an optical phenomenon created by the refraction of light from water molecules that is basically created on the retina of our eyes, or the film of a camera.
All of which gives the lie to Dorothy’s notion that “somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue”, since there is no somewhere that lies over a rainbow. And clearly the rainbow’s end is no place for a leprechaun to store his pot of gold, since the place doesn’t exist. But I like the idea of the rainbow as a reminder. When Dadgie and I were given the wonderful gift of trip to Hawaii many years ago, we discovered that one of the most characteristically lovely things about the place is the daily light show. Almost every evening there would be a brief shower followed by a rainbow. Now every time I see a rainbow I can’t help thinking about Hawaii and about the magical time we spent there. I don’t know if a rainbow serves as a divine reminder not to flood the planet, but it certainly can be a reminder of goodness, and worth, and beauty.
In his first epistle, Peter likens the event of the ancient flood to the waters of baptism. He writes, “. . . God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you . . . .” He’s using water as a symbol of the power to save. Admittedly, the analogy is stretched pretty thin in the case of the flood, since the story claims that every man, woman, child, and animal on the planet was destroyed by that water with the exception of those on the ark, but we’ll let that slide, because he makes a marvelous point about the water of baptism. He refers to the act of baptism as “an appeal to God for a good conscience.” I’m not one hundred percent sure what he means by that (and maybe it’s grist for a whole other sermon) but in the least I believe he’s suggesting that this symbolic washing of our bodies and the vows we take are a reminder that we do truly desire to live, and for our children to live, the kind of lives that Jesus taught, full of humble, self-giving grace and compassion.
Water is indeed a salvific reminder, whether it be the water of baptism or the water of a rainbow. All the water droplets refracting light onto our retinas spread out into reds and yellows and blues do indeed comprise a kind of saving act, because every time you or I looks into the sky after the rain and is reminded that at the heart of creation there is not murky darkness but brilliant light, not brutal ugliness but beauty and grace, we are saved just a little.
We need such reminders along the way if only because it’s easy to lose the light, the beauty, and the grace in a pile of grocery lists, meeting agendas, or dirty laundry. That’s the value of things like wedding rings, I believe. They’re always catching on something, pinching our fingers, or clicking against water glasses, reminding us that at the heart of a relationship is a blessed and elegant bond, a commitment made amidst the recognition that love is the supreme gift of life.
So the ancient storyteller of Genesis suggests that the rainbow is sort of God’s wedding ring. Every time God sees it in the sky he is reminded of his covenant and the vow that he took. Frederick Buechner writes that, “in one way, then, it gave Noah a nice warm feeling to see the rainbow up there, but in another way it gave him an uneasy twinge. If God needed the rainbow as a reminder, he thought, that could mean that, if someday God didn’t happen to look in the right direction or had something else on his mind, he might forget his promise and the heavy drops would start pattering down on the roof a second time.” Buechner’s fanciful slant on the story is a fine reminder. Whether the Almighty needs a rainbow wrapped around the divine finger or not, certainly you and I do. If our minds are absorbed or our attention is distracted it’s all too easy to forget that our very survival depends on the offering and receiving of grace and compassion, or, put another way, not to be so consumed by urgent conflicts that we lose track of truly important values.
The late anthropologist, professor, and writer, Loren Eiseley, recounted a powerful experience of being reminded of those values one day when he encountered a “star thrower” framed by a rainbow. He found himself in Costabel, walking along a beach in the very early morning as a storm seemed to be brewing all around. He passed a number of professional shellers, collecting starfish that had washed up from the ocean, preparing to boil them, dissolving the live creatures so the shells could be sold. Eiseley writes, “Around the next point there might be a refuge from the wind. The sun behind me, over the projecting point, a gigantic rainbow of incredible perfection had sprung shimmering into existence. Somewhere toward its foot I discerned a human figure standing, as it seemed to me, within the rainbow, though unconscious of his position. He was gazing fixedly at something in the sand.
“Eventually he stooped and flung the object beyond the breaking surf. I labored toward him over a half-mile of uncertain footing. By the time I reached him the rainbow had receded ahead of us, but something of its color still ran hastily in many changing lights across his features. He was starting to kneel again.
“In a pool of sand and silt a starfish had thrust its arms up stiffly and was holding its body away from the stifling mud.
“‘It’s still alive,’ I ventured.
“‘Yes,’ he said, and with a quick yet gentle movement he picked up the star and spun it over my head and far out into the sea. It sank in a burst of spume, and the waters roared once more.
“‘It may live,’ he said, ‘if the offshore pull is strong enough. . . .
“Do you collect?” Eiseley asked.
“Only like this,” the star thrower replied. “‘And only for the living.’ He stooped again, oblivious of my curiosity, and skipped another star neatly across the water.”
The man’s eyes seemed to invite Eiseley to join him, but the objective scientist demurred. He knew the act of trying to save these few starfish was folly, that “death is running more fleet than he along every seabeach in the world.” Eiseley writes, “I nodded and walked away, leaving him there upon the dune with that great rainbow ranging up the sky behind him.”
Much later, Eiseley returned to the beach to find this man futilely trying to give life in the midst of the storm. He writes, “Somewhere far up the coast wandered the star thrower beneath his rainbow. . . . The star thrower was mad, and his particular acts were a folly with which I had not chosen to associate myself. I was an observer and a scientist. Nonetheless, I had seen the rainbow attempting to attach itself to the earth.
“On a point of land, as though projecting into a dominion beyond us, I found the star thrower. In the sweet rain-swept morning, that great many-hued rainbow still lurked and wavered tentatively beyond him. Silently I sought and picked up a still-living star, spinning it far out into the waves. I spoke once briefly. ‘I understand,’ I said. ‘Call me another thrower.’ Only then I allowed myself to think, He is not alone any longer. After us there will be others.
“We were part of the rainbow – an unexplained projection into the natural.”
Eiseley said he realized there was a larger drama being played out behind the scenes – that there was something cosmic and perhaps divine at work in them, and it was humanity as well as starfish that they were seeking to save. The circle of the rainbow was a “visible model” of the “perfect circle of compassion” and throwing the stars was a declaration of life being sowed in the midst of death and defeat. And maybe that’s the object as well of the One who resides “far outward on the rim of space” where genuine stars are “similarly seized and flung.”
Maybe rainbows are, after all, something more than photons of light spread out by their colors on the screens of our retinas. Maybe they are special places where heaven touches earth and both Divinity and humanity are reminded by their perfection and loveliness that there is something in our meager existence that is worth saving, and that, in the end, beauty, compassion, peace, and light are far more powerful than all the forces of rage and destruction.
None of this is new. In fact it’s as old as the gospel. It’s implicit in everything we’re about here, and it’s buried somewhere in just about every sermon you hear from this pulpit. I didn’t expect you to be surprised. It’s just a reminder.
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