Trickle Up Economics (Luke 4:14-21)

So, here we are: Luke’s version of Jesus’ initial voyage into the waters of ministry. Actually, this week is the first half of that story, next week we’ll read the second, but here at the outset it’s good to remember that beginnings are important in a piece of literature. What an author—in this case, Luke—chooses to open with tells us a lot about the concerns of that author. Take Mark, for instance: the first episode he describes—after the baptism, wilderness and calling of disciples—is an act of healing. On the other hand, the first instance of ministry Matthew describes—again after baptism, wilderness and disciple-calling— is the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

By contrast, Luke defers his telling of disciple-calling and chooses to begin with this episode of Jesus in his home-town synagogue. He’d been led into the wilderness and tested by that wily old Devil, and emerged unscathed, “filled with the power of the Holy Spirit.” And it’s important to remember the sequence: the Spirit had descended upon Jesus at his baptism, led him into the wilderness—Mark says drove him in, as if he’d had no choice—and now he’s filled with the power of that same Spirit. And what did that Spirit enable—compel him, maybe?—to do? Teach. He began to teach in synagogues all around Galilee, and was a huge success right off the bat. Word got out and, his fame preceded him all around, into the surrounding country-side. People were just waiting to hear from him, lining the tracks into dusty little sheep-smelling towns and packing out the synagogues where he preached. He was a rock star! Or as Luke more prosaically put it, he “was praised by everyone.”

And now he comes to Nazareth, where, Luke reminds us, he was brought up. And it’s just as crazy—on his way into town, at least. It was like one of those carefully-staged American Idol episodes . . . you know, where they bring the contestants back to their home towns? There’s this big ol’ parade into town, Jesus riding in an open limo like a homecoming queen, smiling and waving to the crowds . . . there’s Joseph with his little brother James on his shoulders and Mary, with her secret smile, and look! Over there’s Barnabas, his best friend, with his high school sweet-heart Hannah, who is displaying a prominent baby bump. Jesus is a home-town boy made good, and they’re all out to meet him, whooping and hollering, trailing him all the way to the synagogue, where they pack the place out, discomfiting the elderly rabbi, who twitters and fusses around, and finally—with great ceremony—hands Jesus the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.

Now. Isaiah is a big book, and he could have read any part of it, like “Comfort, comfort O my people” which would have been a comfort in those dark days of Roman occupation, or “Truly, O people in Zion . . . you shall weep no more.” But instead, he opens the scroll to the part that begins “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” and so, stressing that Spirit thing again, we’re going to hear what it’s all about. And what it’s about amounts to his mission statement, what he’s come to do. But it isn’t just any coming, he didn’t just decide to show up one day; he has been anointed—by God’s Spirit, no less—to do it. And anointed is a freighted verb, the Greek for it is chriso, which of course is the root word for “Christ.” And what is the Hebrew for Christ? Messach, from whence we get the word “Messiah.”

So Jesus has been Christ-ed or Messiah-ed by God’s Spirit to do some stuff, to perform some deeds, and what he doesn’t say is as interesting to me what he does. He doesn’t say he’s come to boot the Romans out and bring back the glorious reign of a Davidic king, which were the expectations swirling around about the word “anointed” at the time. But neither is it to save us from sin and prevent us from going to Hell, as many Christians assume. What this statement is about is what we today would call social justice: he’s been anointed, messiah-ed, even, to bring good news to the poor. To proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind; to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

So. A lot of folks concentrate on the five things in that list— the good news for the poor . . . what could that news be but not-being poor? The release of the captives . . . probably spoils or prisoners of war, not having a particularly good time. Giving sight to the blind and freedom to the oppressed, lot of both of those going around in the day; and in short, the Day of the Lord’s Favor. All are wonderful things, and we should view them not as a definitive list but a representative one. We should view them in the same light as those more famous Old Testament passages: a time when the lion shall lay down with the lamb, spears shall be turned into pruning hooks, and we shall practice war no more. More specifically, “the day of the Lord’s favor” is reminiscent of the Jubilee Year, that legendary commandment of God wherein every fifty years, all debts are forgiven, all property is returned to its original owners, and everyone is set free.

But here’s the thing: the Jubilee Year, as far as we know, was never actually implemented, and so is what Jesus is promises a final coming of that time? Is he saying “this thing is finally coming, this long-awaited promise of re-ordering, redistribution of the gains—even lawful ones—this day that has been prevented human greed?” What we have here is a first cut at what Jesus’ ministry is all about, and it’s clear that for Luke, at least, it’s all about proclaiming the dawn of the Great Jubilee, a new era of liberation, restoration, and return. Because of that, this good news comes first of all not to the rich but to the poor, to the disadvantaged and downtrodden. In this “inaugural address” of his ministry, Jesus is crystal clear that the Gospel is above all about God “lifting up the lowly”—words that should sound just a little familiar . . . they were sung by his mother when she visited her cousin Elizabeth. Remember? “My soul magnifies the Lord,” she sang, ‘and my sprit rejoices in God my Savior, who has . . . brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; who has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

And did he learn this almost radical concern for the lowly, the marginalized and outsiders at his mother’s knee? It’s possible . . . certainly he came by it honestly. His father Joseph was by no means rich—in those days, there was no middle class, just rich and poor, and carpenters were clearly among the latter. And though this theme is present in the other gospels, it’s given especial prominence in the writing of Luke, who describes the apostles continuing this work of proclamation of the Jubilee—in thought and deed—all the way through the second volume of his writing, which today we call the Acts of the Apostles.

But the Jubilee ideal isn’t only for the benefit of the marginalized—it contributes to the health and wellbeing of society as a whole. Everyone benefits when liberty and vision extend across the neighborhood—that’s what “Jubilee” was all about. We’ve heard a lot about supply-side economics, where supposedly if you take care of the upper class it’ll somehow “trickle down” to the poor and marginalized. Jesus is having none of that: what he is preaching is pure-D “trickle up” economics, and as we know, he follows it up by practicing what he preaches. He knows that a healthy society takes cares of its most vulnerable members first, and that’s what makes for a solid, moral foundation.

Well. He rolls up the scroll, hands it back to the rabbi, and sits down. Unlike these days, when teachers—and preachers—generally stand, his sitting was the signal that the teaching—or preaching—was about to begin. And as kind of an aside, this is the model for our own, Reformed preaching, minus the sitting of course. Like Jesus, first we read from the scripture, then we expound on it, drawing what lessons we can.

Anyway. All eyes are riveted upon Jesus, there is a drop-dead silence, which for a bunch of Israelites is amazing, even in synagogue. And he looks intently at each of them in turn, and all swear he is looking straight into their souls, and he begins his teaching with “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And this idea of scripture being “fulfilled” in and through contemporary events was a powerful, widespread notion in Jesus’ day. It wasn’t just that ancient scriptures were understood to foreshadow the future, but that the meaning of present events was illuminated by how they embodied key events in scripture. Thus, the present and the past elucidated each other—God typically works through signature, even poetic patterns. Those motifs will resonate in current events, and current events will “fulfill” or “fill out” ancient motifs. The prophets of old - such as Isaiah, who we hear from in this week’s passage - thought and spoke and acted in terms of these signature forms, and likewise, so did Jesus.

More importantly, in this situation, so do his home-town friends and relatives, his homies. They stare at him in awe, gob-smacked by what he was telling them. And if we read just a verse beyond our passage we see that at first, they were appreciative: “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth,” Luke tells him. That this is doomed to change is the subject of next weeks lection, but for now, I just want to leave you with a thought about our own place in all this. If it’s Jesus’ mission to proclaim good news to the poor, release of the captives, and etc., then it is ours as well. Further, as Saint Francis supposedly said, and Jesus embodied, we’re to do it in words, if necessary.

And you know what? We do a pretty good job of that around here, I have to say, especially for a congregation our size. Our mission programs are varied and important to our community. Soul, Winton House, Centro de Vida. The music school, Greenhills Strings and the Jean Wiggins Choral Scholars. Our activities—our coffee houses and recitals, our high-quality music program—help bring culture and hope to the Greenhills community. This congregation was historically and continues to be vital to the health of Greenhills and its surrounds.

If Jesus was a fulfillment of the Jubilee spirit of the Lord, we—by way of being his body on earth—are part of that. And to that I can gratefully say “Thanks be to God.” Amen.

It Takes All Kinds (1 Corinthians 12:1-12)

In Paul’s time, they were just learning how to be Christians.  It’s true: nobody had ever been one of those before, nobody had ever lived as a follower of Christ, and they had no idea how to go about doing it.  Paul had established communities in his travels, most probably meeting in houses—thus the term “house church”—many in secret, and it was a new thing for them.  Compounding it all was the fact that this Jesus fellow wasn’t like anybody else: he wasn’t an aesthete like those guys over in Qumran nor was he a military leader—no matter how wishful their thinking he was called the Prince of Peace. He wasn’t a moral leader, he didn’t seem to be much interested in who was sleeping with whom . . . in fact, he didn’t preach about sex once, although he did talk about divorce, about protecting the woman in an unequal relationship.  Most of his preaching was about money, about its use and abuse, and not unrelated, how to treat your neighbor.

This last prompted some, at least, to live in communes, or so Luke says in Acts, and it seemed to have prompted a lotof them to re-think leadership of their communities.  That was important, because communities were where it’s at in first-century Christianity, you couldn’t be a Christian on your own, Christianity was practiced in community with others.  That’s as true today as it was back then, I think: as Christians we’re called to do the difficult work of living in community.  Every time somebody says to me “I can be Christian on a mountaintop, I don’t have to be in a church, I want to tell them—and sometimes I do—that they are full of it, because Christian spirituality isspirituality in community.  If you are not in community, you may be spiritual, but it’s not a Christianspirituality.” John Calvin put it even more strongly when he said “unless we are united with all the other members under Christ our head, no hope of the future inheritance awaits us” and “beyond the pale of the Church no forgiveness of sins, no salvation can be hoped for.”

Of course, there’s one caveat here: Calvin’s not speaking of a building or even a denomination, but the greater church, what he called the invisible church, which includes and subsumes the Presbyterian church that he helped found.  And he based his ecclesiology, his theology of church, largely on these passages from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians . . .  it’s here that Paul talks about the church as a body and Christ as the head . . . Note that we close our passage with his famous “for just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.”  And from this metaphor flows all of Calvin’s—and Paul’s—ecclesiology, his theology of church, if you will.  Note the “for:” it’s forjust as the body is one, as in becausethe body is one we can effectively govern the church, that is, we can govern the church in a Christ-like manner.

I’ve always said, whenever I’m asked—and sometimes when I’m not—that one reason I’m a Presbyterian is that we do representative government right.  For those of you who don’t know what I mean, we are governed by elected officials, elected to represent us just as our congress-persons are, and . . . and when I went with my pastor to Presbytery meetings, where representatives elected from each church Session get together with pastors to help govern, I saw a system that, by and large, worked.  Not that it didn’t have its little squabbles, its little ups and downs, but hey … look at the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives—you knowhow well they’ve been working, lately.  And one reason—perhaps the mainreason—it works is this little thing: all the members of the body, though many, are one, and they are one in Christ.

We are one in Christ, and in Christ, as Paul says over in Colossians, all things hold together.  He is the center which keeps us from flying apart; if we separate, if we split up, as this denomination has before, as individual congregations have been known to do, one thing I can say: Christ is not in it.  Christ holds all things together . . . and you can spin it around, too, you can come at it from the opposite direction: without Christ, true unity is impossible.  And more to today’spoint, true sharing of power and leadership is not possible. For if church splits have nothing of Christ in them, neither do jealousies or anger or the protection of power and turf.

There are varieties of gifts, Paul says, but the same Spirit.  It’s the same Spirit, whether you be pastor or janitor or choir director or plumber, and if it’s the same Spirit, how can anyone claim superiority or turf?  It’s through the same Spirit that we are all chosen, that we are all called, no matter what our gifts.  There are varieties of services, but the same Lord. How against the ways of the powers that be thisis, where we value some jobs—no matter how vital—over others, and justify paying some people much less than a living wage based on our—not God’s but our—notions of how much a job is worth.  If our societies were truly Christian societies, it would not matter the nature of the job, all would be paid enough, all would have enough.

This doesn’t mean everybody is identical: there arevarieties of services, says Paul, and to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good, not for their own personal good, or even for their family’s good, but for the commongood . . . to one is given the utterance of wisdom, another the utterance of knowledge, to another the gifts of healing . . . to one the gifts of music, to another the gifts of teaching, to still another the gifts of preparing a mean casserole or repairing the locks on the sanctuary doors.  All are given specific gifts, all are given tasks to do by the same Spirit, and for the glory of the same God.

This notion is at the heart of the Protestant doctrine of call, of the priesthood of all believers: God calls each of us to specific tasks—note the plural—and we are gifted through the Holy Spirit to perform them.  In the Presbyterian Church, we follow Paul in this: our offices, our positions are supposed to be gifts-based, we are to hold church position based on the gifts the Spirit has given us.  By this theory, I have some gifts in the realms of preaching and pastoral care—no smart remarks from out there—but thank God there are others with financial heads on their shoulders to appoint as treasurers and heads of finance committees, because if I did it, we’d be in altogether worse shape than we are now.  And likewise, thank God there are people who can play the organ or piano or lead a choir, because if it were left up to me to do it, well . . . have you ever heard a bag of cats sing?

Notice where all this puts the emphasis: it puts it on the person, and their abilities, not the office and any intrinsic worth.  If a person is appointed or elected or hired for a job, they are done so by dint of their suitability for it.  If they are not suitable, then they should perhaps not be in it.  As Paul points out here—and our theology of call affirms—there is nothing special about a particular office, about a particular position or job.  There are all kinds of jobs . . . the only thing special is the person filling it.  That’s why—and this is controversial, I know—I find it hard to respect a position.  As Paul says, there are varietiesof position, all are of value to God.  It’s not that I have no respect, but I reserve thatfor people, and that after they have shown they should be respected.

Well.  Tomorrow’s Martin Luther King’s birthday celebration.  In a few minutes we’re going to sing an iconic civil rights hymn. And reading today’s passage, it’s striking how egalitarian Paul was, not just for the times, but human beings, period. In this passage—and the remainder of chapter 12—Paul lays out his criteria for church leadership—and thus, of course, membership—and not oncedoes he say anything about race or gender or sexual orientation, for that matter.  He doesn’t say “There are different gifts, but the same Spirit, unless you’re black.” He doesn’t say “All those gifts are activated by the same Spirit, unless you are a woman, and then it must be the devil . . .”  No. All gifts of the Spirit are givenby the Spirit.  End of story.

And of course, this is hardly the strongest case for inclusion Paul made . . . he is, after all, the one who wrote “There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”  It makes centuries of exclusion and bigotry in the church all the more unexplainable, because make no mistake—Paul is the founding theologian of the church. That’s why I thank God for prophets like the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, who through their lives and—yes, death—consistently call the church to live up to its promise of inclusion for all. Amen.

It's Not Easy Being King (Matthew 2:1 - 12)

     It wasn’t easy being Herod. Consider: Herod the Great—aka Herod the First, the Herod of our story—was appointed ruler of Judea by his father Antipater the Idumaean, who was from what the Hebrew Bible calls “Edom.” After Herod helped overthrow the last of the Jewish Kings, thus handing Palestine to the Romans, he was awarded the title “King of Judea” by the Roman Senate, and set about alternating between oppressing his Jewish subjects and trying—with little success—to be a good Jew himself. He had a pretty long rule, by the standards of the day, some thirty years or so, and perhaps it was because of his extreme paranoia, which led him to be rather, how shall we say it, brutal toward members of his own family, murdering for example, his second wife Miriamne and her relatives when he thought them a threat.

Be that as it may, as Herod approached his dotage, he began looking towards his sons as heirs. His first choices were two of his sons by Miriamne: fine, ruddy youths who’d been raised in Rome, at the Imperial Court no less, and who offended Herod with their Imperial manner upon their return home to Jerusalem. Nevertheless, they were his choices for heirs until another of his sons—first-born Antipater II—turned the King against them, and Herod had them strangled for treason. Which put Antipater II in the cat-bird seat as Herod’s heir . . . for a year, anyway, until he got convicted of trying to poison the old man and executed, at which point Caesar Augustus was said to have remarked that “It is better to be Herod's pig than his son."

Well. Herod was on his last legs in 4 BCE, the year Jesus was born, when three Magi—aka wise men—showed up, looking for “the child who has been born king of the Jews.” And when they came before the King, they emanated . . . what? An aura, I guess, a touch of the divine, doubtless because they had been following a star, a spark of that Presence, and it had filled them with wonder and hope that shone out of every pore.

But Herod hadn’t gotten any less paranoid since he killed his last son, and he was completely absorbed by dynastic worries, and so missed the aura entirely. And he was in a panic when he heard what they had to say, and all Jerusalem with him, which seems strange, because Herod wasn’t a beloved figure by any means. Nevertheless, he called for the chief priests and rabbis, the Sanhedrin, and various assorted sooth-sayers, and asked them where this young king was supposed to have been born, and by way of answer, they quoted the prophets: “‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.’”

“Holy Moly,” Herod thought “I’m the Shepherd of Judah!” And he called for the wise men—in secret, of course, wouldn’t do to have people know there’s a rival, might send shock waves through the market—and sent them to Bethlehem to look really hard for the child and let him know where he was so he could, ah, worship him, yes, that’s the ticket . . . worship him. But the magi weren’t called wise for nothing—they were court astrologers from the Far East, and where they came from it was no different than in the here in theMiddle East. The powerful didn’t give up that power lightly, especially when they’d had it for as long as Herod had. And it was in that moment that the magi—no slouches at divination—first felt that the King’s motives were not what you would call pure.

And it’s not so different these days, is it? It’s hard to pry the powerful away from their power. I saw it in the federal government, the Agricultural Research Service, where I once worked. We were organized into research units, with a Research Leader (or RL) over a group of scientists, kind of like in a university department. The RL was a scientist as well, promoted from within the ranks of us run-of-the-mill types, and the minute that happened, they often began to change. They had control of all the money, and because they still had to do research, the temptation was strong to use it to help maintain their position. And that went all the way up the hierarchy, from area leader to regional leader all the way up to the top.

Administrative hierarchies are like that . . . the one thing you can count on is that the individuals in them will try to hold on to what power they possess, and that gives the hierarchy a kind of unholy stability. You can see it everywhere, even in churches. Look at the Catholic abuse scandal: it wouldn’t have become entrenched if everybody—priest, bishop, archbishop—weren’t trying to hold onto power, or—and this is even more dangerous—making sure the hierarchy itself, which in this case was the Church, persists. Which, of course, preserves their own personal power, so it’s a nasty feed-back mechanism, it goes round and round and round.

Paul called these hierarchies “powers and principalities,” and recognized that they took on a life of their own. He often short-handed it with the word “flesh” and ended several of his letters with lists of bad things associated with it. Biblical scholar Walter Wink has fleshed this notion out, and showed that if anything can be called demonic it’s these entrenched, intertwined structures of administrative power—whether governmental or corporate—in which we are all embedded.

And perhaps that’s what Matthew means when he says Herod was afraid and “all Jerusalem with him.” After thirty-some-odd years of rule, there were so many toadies, so many functionaries in the multi-storied hierarchy—really a web—of which he was the head, that if you cut that head off, and relocate it somewhere else—Bethlehem? Really? —everyone would lose.

Whatever the case, the wise men departed in secret, and Herod’s own private guard watched their backs, making sure they weren’t followed, and lo! before them went the star, in defiance of all physics, and they were returned to that state of timeless wonder that had accompanied them to Jerusalem, before their encounter with Herod brought them . . . where? Certainly not reality, for this had more the feel of realism than all the petty squabbles at court . . . the star went before them, even in bright daylight, and settled over a Bethlehem house. It wasn’t the fanciest, nor was it the meanest, it was just a house, with a small adobe wall around a courtyard ringed by a kitchen and sleeping rooms, and there, in the center of the courtyard was Mary and the child, and their hearts were filled with an unaccountable joy, and once again they felt the heightened . . . something that surrounded the child, indeed that poured off him, wave after wave, like a warm tide. And they fell to their knees before the boy—they couldn’t help it, really—and they cried out their delight and homage.

Friends, at the touch of the star, at the sight of the child, the magi experienced another reality. Call it the Kingdom of God, as does our scripture, or the imaginal realm, as do Sufi mystics, or the ground of all being, but it is there. And though it is intertwined with all matter—and in a sense, underpins all matter—it is insensible, that is, invisible to our ordinary senses, most of the time, at any rate. But occasionally, the kingdom slips through the veil that normally hides it, and it did so that night. The wise men saw it, heard it, touched it, and even those veterans of the strange—they were magi, after all—were overwhelmed.

And that reality—which in the end we simply call God—that reality was incarnated that night, distilled and instilled by some means impossible to describe into that babe in that courtyard in that luminous night. The light of the world, pouring from that child . . . the light of the world who somehow was that child and—somehow again—is still with us, still underlying and supporting everything, and will be with us until, like the wise men, we go home by another road. Amen.

Word on the Street (John 1:1 - 14)

     The Word, the logos, became flesh—was enfleshed, as we sometimes say—and came to live around here. Right here, among us, the denizens of Greenhills, Ohio, USA, the World, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the universe. But it wasn’t new to the universe, to the cosmos, not by a long shot. It was there all along, in the beginning, we just couldn’t see it. In fact, it was there in the beginning with God, and we all know that was a long, long time ago. What if our spirits were to take wing like time-traveling doves, and fly back through time to substantiate this claim, that the Logos was there in the beginning, maybe we stop at the rise of us, of Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago, we stop and look around with our spirit-sense, and yup! There it is, right there where John claims it is . . . and once again we take flight, slipping through the air, passing through time like smoke through leaves, and around us we catch fleeting glimpses, and everything of course is running backwards, a great cloud coalesces around a fiery point and a while-hot ball emerges out of the sea, and we come to realize we are looking at the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, and sure enough, there they are, thundering around the plains and through the jungles and seas . . . we alight for a moment, and dodging a Stegosaur, we determine the presence of the Word; and how are we doing that, you might ask, how are we so sure the Word is present wherever we alight? Well, I can only say that like pertains to like, that our spirits are of the same stuff—not matter, you understand, but the same . . . essence—as the Word, we vibrate on the same frequency, a frequency far too subtle to detect with any detector we’ve ever invented, and just as birds recognize other birds, trees detect other trees and rocks other rocks, our spirits, our divine sparks register the spark, in fact our spirits just barely resist dancing a little jig in its presence, like the one John the Baptist does in Elizabeth’ womb, when his spirit recognizes the incarnate Word.

Anyway. Our spirits flutter back through time, dodging flying reptiles, batting away giant mosquitos—wouldn’t you just know that they’d be able to see us?—and dive into a sea teeming with fish and then—as the age gets younger—no longer fish but arthropods, trilobites, then progressively simpler life forms, swimming in that primordial soup, until zap! a blinding light that would sear retinas, if our spirits had retinas, and behold! The first living thing, and our spirits immediately feel the Word, coiling around and within the organism like an all-pervading serpent, and once again our spirits are off, back through the eons, and though we are at a frequency much more subtle than the material world coming into being around us, we still dodge and metaphysically wince when volcanoes belch up underneath, or when continents crunch together like ponderous bumper cars. Our spirits know they cannot be harmed, but old habits die hard. And through it all, like a background weave, like a pulsing electric ligament, winds the Word.

We suppose, though our spirits’ adventures, that Paul was correct when he wrote that in Christ all things are held together, because our spirits—reporting back to our hearts—tell us that the Word, the one that was enfleshed, pervades everything, and as they keep voyaging back though time, things get more and more dodgy—thank God our flesh is not there—and they sense that the Word is in everything and everything is in the Word . . . and now the Earth is a fiery ball, we’ve seen it go from cool and green and ocean-covered to molten red, as if heated in a cosmic forge, and now it’s hurtling through space, racing around a sullen sun, and it comes apart before our spiritual eyes, back into its constituent pieces, the loose rock and space dust it was before centripetal force coalesced it, and still the Word is there, and it is becoming apparent that John was just a bit conservative, a bit off in his metaphor-shifting. He likened the Word to light, the light of the world, as a matter of fact, and it’s a metaphor that certainly had legs, it’s lasted to this day . . . light, that allows us to see, that illuminates dark corners, that becomes associated with truth, and those dark corners? Why they’re always associated with false, and everybody knows that false is wrong, it’s bad, and so things that are dark must be that way, no? The night—the life-giving darkness, when plants respire, when people are refreshed by sleep—the night must be bad . . . at night, with the glittery stars and garish, silver moon . . . the twinkling stars that were to the ancients holes in the firmament, or to the Aztecs, demons held back only by sacrifice . . . the poetry of John’s prolog didn’t create this false dualism, but it certainly helped it perpetuate . . .

But what if we think of this light as what physics has revealed it to be? What if we think of it as energy, as streams of photons . . . the light of the Word, the light that is the Word, powers the world, some—like theologian Father Bruno Barnhart—say it has powered the whole enterprise in the West, in Europe and the Americas, first the flowering of society and educational institutions under the church, and then as science and secular rationality, all powered by what Father Bruno calls the Christ Quantum, that bursting of energy and creativity release when the Word became flesh. And what do we know now about light? Is it not both wave and particle? Is not the metaphor John wrote even sharper, even more apt today? If light is both-and, so is the Word, who was both with God, separate from God, and at the same time, identical with God, the same as God . . . light from light, light as light: two natures, God and not-God, all at once.

But our wandering spirits are further back than that, by some 5 billion years or so, and the weight of the intervening millennia grows heavy, and now there is only our sun, which grows smaller and smaller even as we watch, until it is no more, and we are suspended in the void, and here’s the thing: it is a void, it is empty of matter, but not of the Word, not of the Christ . . . what? Christ Quantum as Father Bruno would say? Christ Omega, as Teilhard de Chardin would put it? Perhaps Word is the best we can do . . . but it’s not Word as we conceive of it today, not a static thing that lies there on the page, nor is it an assembly of characters that points to an object—or objects—in the so-called “real” world . . . it is a dynamic presence, always has been, always will be, always changing, always vital, always new.

Problem is, we often do not conceive of it that way, everybody kmows what the word of God is, it’s this book right here, written down anywhere from two to three thousand years ago, argued about by Roman Catholics and then Protestants and Catholics, finally settled as to its contents by 70 CE in the former case and 1500 CE in the latter, and here it is, you can hold it in your hand, see? Certainly not a part of us, certainly not dynamic in any way, and if it was made flesh, as our passage would have it, it certainly isn’t that way now . . .

And our spirits have accelerated in their flight . . . ten billion years ago, twelve . . . we see the accretion and scattering of whole constellations under gravity’s inexorable weight, and still there is the Word, wound through and around everything, all the nascent stars and wobbly solar systems . . . and are there other life-systems to which this Christ-Principle, this powering and empowering evolutionary engine is central? It is not for us to know at this time, but someday perhaps we will . . .

Fifteen billion years ago, sixteen . . . things are getting packed, now, much more compact, and we are swept along toward a discernible center, and galaxies and interstellar dust are zooming at super-hyper-dooper-sonic speeds towards that center, and right before the crash we close our metaphysical eyes, and . . . we are back in the present: I suppose there are some places—or rather, some times—even our spirit selves cannot penetrate, and if ever there was such a space-time, the Big Bang would be it. But John assures us—and I have to take his Word for it—that the Word was there in the beginning, and that implies even before the Bang, and that everything was created through the Word, everything was created in the Word, and that Word was there when it all happened, in the beginning, and that means before the Big Bang when literally God only knows what was there, or even if there was a there.

The Cosmos burst into being with a Bang . . . all of a sudden there was space, all of a sudden there was time, and seventeen-odd-billion years later, here we are, like all created matter, trapped in space, bound up in time. Except . . . except that part of us that is divine, the divine spark, as I call it. In our journey through time, we discovered that John wasn’t exaggerating when he says things are created in and through the Word. Paul wasn’t whistling Dixie when he says in this Word all things—all things!—hold together. And today, do you want to see this Word? Do you want to feel it? Hold out your hand and touch the back of the pew in front of you. Run up to a tree, rub your hands over the bark. Heck, plant your feet in the Greenhills streets, ‘cause the Word isn’t just on the street, it’s in it as well.

And one more thing: if you want to experience the dynamic Word, the ever-changing, ever lively Word, you don’t have to sit with 2000-year-old writings and wait for the Spirit to make them come to life—although that’s not a bad thing to do, everything has its place. But all you have to do is look at your neighbors and family and friends, and really be present, really listen to them, and you’ll see the Word shine through in everything they do. Amen.

The Forerunner (Luke 3:1 - 18, Advent 2C)

When I was an undergraduate, there was a campus preacher named Hubert Lindsey, but everybody called him “Holy Hubert.” He got his start at Berkley in the 60s, and got beat up over 150 times, most notably by the leadership of the Black Panthers. Nevertheless, he was responsible for bringing a lot of young people, a lot of “hippies,” as denizens of the counterculture were called in those days, to Christianity. He had a knack of showing up at protests and turning the talk toward Christ; then-governor Ronald Reagan quipped that the State of California owed him millions in crowd control and, of course, he was darkly accused of being a tool of the State because of it. And though he was seen by students as something of a joke, he nevertheless is considered to be one of the fathers of the West Coast Jesus movement.

I saw him on the campus of the University of Washington in the early 70s. He’d stand in front of the Husky Union Building—the HUB—and draw big crowds of students, who would joyfully heckle him as he preached. I say “joyfully” because there was no malice in it, from either side, really. He would say outrageous things—“bless your dirty little hearts!” and “everything about you is evil, everything about you is defiled”—and the students would eat it up, they’d laugh and throw verbal jabs back at him, attempting to best him in debate, which, of course, they never could. But there was no animosity in it, and if you go back and look at some of the videos—YouTube has some, just search under “Holy Hubert”—you can see the compassion underneath all the fire.

I think of Holy Hubert every time I read about John the Baptist—it’s almost like, in my mind, he’s a spiritual descendent. Every time I read John’s taunt—you brood of vipers!—I think back to Hubert calling the students “You little devils!” And predicting hellfire for each and every one. The difference is, of course, that John was the forerunner, he was heralding the coming of Jesus into the world, and Hubert was an evangelist, trying to save souls after the fact, more akin to John the Gospel-writer than John the Baptist.

But stylistically, at least, they have something in common. Like Hubert, who preached up and down the West Coast, John preached up and down the Jordan. Like Hubert, John minced no words: “You brood of vipers!” he’d spit, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?“ Like Hubert, he preached of repentance, urging his listeners to turn away from their sins. And I wonder—if you were to get into a time machine—maybe H.G. Wells’, I hear it’s not being used at the moment—if you were to get into a time machine and go back to watch John the Baptist there on the rocky Jordan banks, what would you see? Did the locals taunt the hair-shirted prophet? Did they fling jibes and insults at him like the modern kids did Hubert? Did the Jordan prophet fling ‘em right back, did he seem to enjoy the game as much as 70s preacher?

One thing I’m sure of is that underneath any playfulness he might have had, underneath any compassion he might have shown, there was the same resolve, the same overwhelming sense of mission. Just as Hubert was deadly serious in his desire to see students brought to Christ, John the Baptist was serious about his calling as the forerunner, the messenger, the harbinger of Christ. “I baptize you with water,” he’d say, “but one who is more powerful than I am is coming, and I’m not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals.” In other words, he’s saying, he’s not worthy to be Jesus’ slave.

If it was important to John that he not be mistaken for the one whose coming he foreshadowed, it was equally important to the early Gospel writers. Disciples of Jesus that they were, they wanted to make sure their readers knew that Jesus was the one, not John, the followers of whom may have been still around. In fact, some Biblical scholars think there may have been a rivalry between the followers of John—beheaded by Herod for speaking truth to power—and those of Jesus, crucified for doing the same.

Well. Be that as it may, it’s important to note the content of John’s message. “You brood of vipers!” he’d say. “Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Don’t tellnme you have Abraham as an ancestor. God can make children of Abraham out of those rocks over there. That’s not gonna cut it any more. It’s not about ancestry it’s about the fruit you bear. In fact, even now the ax is on the tree, it’s on the tree of Israel, the leafy ancestors of Abraham, ready to cut it down if it doesn’t bear fruit, ready to cut it down and feed it to the fire! As we’ve seen, John could be a just a bit over the top . . .

 And his followers would say “If it’s not about our ancestry, if it’s not enough to be sons and daughters of Abraham, then what shall we do?” And it’s as important to notice what John doesn’t say as much what he does. He doesn’t say “just believe in the one to come,” he doesn’t say “you must follow the one named Jesus.” He tells them that they have to reform their behavior. Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none, and whoever has food must do the same. It’s not enough to mouth platitudes, it’s not enough to just believe, you’ve gotta change your behavior, you’ve gotta put some money where your mouth is.

It’s a theme that runs throughout the whole New Testament, from the Gospels to the Epistles. Over in Matthew, Jesus tells a parable of a king (clearly meant to represent himself) who separates the sheep from the goats according to how they take care of the poor—whatsoever you’ve done to the least of these, the king says, you’ve done to me. In John, Jesus says that he has come so that we might believe, Paul is the avatar of salvation through faith, but the author of James insists that faith without works is dead. There is a tension in the New Testament between being and doing, belief and action, faith and works.

Here, John comes down squarely on the action side. How do the Israelites avoid the ax and the fire? Give clothes to the naked and food to the hungry. Don’t take more than is your due, especially if you’re a tax-collector. Don’t use your power to extort money from folks by threats or false accusation, and don’t be greedy, be happy you have a job, for Pete’s sake.

Traditionally, John is seen as an avatar of the old, the last of the hair-shirted prophets, preaching hell-fire one last time before the coming of grace, and there’s certainly something like that going on. But I think he represents something else as well: an acknowledgment that the Gospel is to be practiced, not just believed. John was the forerunner of Christ, all right, but he was also the forerunner of a new social order, which combines prophetic action—you will be known by your fruits—with forgiveness by the grace of God.

And there’s one other thing John was a forerunner of, and that’s Christianity as a whole. He prepared the way for the entire Christian enterprise, that begun with the coming of the one whose sandals he was not fit to untie. He prepared the way for the apostles and St. Paul. For Benedict and Augustine, St. Francis and St. Teresa. He prepared the way for John Calvin and John of the Cross, for Martin Luther and Billy Graham, for all the evangelical preachers right down to good old Holy Hubert. And last, but certainly not least, he prepared the way for the denizens of Greenhills Community Church, Presbyterian—he prepared the way for us.

But not only did he he showed us how to prepare as well. Advent is a season of preparation, and not only did John the Baptist prepare the way for Christ and every Christian to come, he showed us how to do it as well. We’re to examine our lives, how we relate to each other, how we conduct the business of living, how we relate to God. The meaning of repentance is turning ones life around—each Advent we’re invited to examine ours and see what needs turning. Amen.

Holding Our Breaths (Advent 1C)

I was talking to a pastor one time from another denomination, one that doesn’t follow the church calendar, and he said to me rather wistfully: “I kind of miss Advent,” and I said, “well, you can always put some in . . .” as if it's a commodity, like put a little tiger in your tank.  But it’s true, you can put a little Advent in, you don't have to hurtle full-throttle from Thanksgiving right on into Christmas, like some mean, holiday-celebrating machine. My sister and brother-in-law used to plan worship for a little Baptist church in Gold Bar Washington, and even though Baptists don’t do Advent – or Lent or Baptism of the Lord Sunday, for that matter – my sister and brother-in-law did Adventy-kinds of things for a while before Christmas day. But in many Protestant traditions, including my fellow pastor's, Advent has been lost, and to reintroduce it can cause dissension in the ranks.

These days, many of our fellow Christians can’t seem to wait for December 25^th to roll around . . . they want to start celebrating Christmas right after Thanksgiving, just like everybody else. And why not? It’s a festive, joyous season . . . Andy Williams called it the “Hap-happiest time of the year!”  We go out and sing carols, our breaths all puffy in the cold, and come back inside to drink hot spiced cider and eat cookies with those little sprinkles on top. Cities large and small construct mini-wonderlands out of colored lights and people walk or drive through them in great numbers. There’s a state park up the coast from where we used to live in Oregon that lights up the night right up until Christmas Eve, and the combination of Christmas cheer, crashing surf and barking sea lions is stunning and unique.

The fact is that every year, Christmas appears out of nowhere, almost as if someone’s thrown a switch.  The stores pipe carols through their Muzak speakers and lights twinkle merrily on electric shaver displays and if you like Jimmy Stewart, you’re in luck because It’s A Wonderful Life gets the royal treatment from NBC, and every time a cash-register goes ka-ching, another angel gets its wings.

Why would anybody in their right minds want to put this stuff off? Don’t we have a right to be happy? Aren’t we sick and tired of politics, politics and more politics?  Don’t we want a little joy in our lives? Well, of course we do, and truth be told, not many of us will forgo these things entirely in the next twenty-three days. So what’s the point of Advent? Why does the church insist that we stop and linger these four weeks when everybody else hurtles full-tilt-boogie into a winter wonderland?

Well, one answer is . . . we’re not everybody else, or at least we’re not supposed to be . . . and more importantly, Christmas is not everybody else's festival, or at least it’s not supposed to be. It’s our holiday, our story, and it started long before the year of Christ’s birth . . . we believe that God was working divine purposes long before four B.C. or whenever the latest guess at Jesus’ birth year happens to be. We believe that all of creation waits for final redemption, and that we must wait as well, to re-enact the yearning, longing desire for the coming of the Lord.  Isaiah expresses this well: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.” He craves that presence, that over-riding comfort, as many of us do, deep down where our souls live . . . we are tired of the fighting, tired of the hate and oppression, and we ache after the spirit-balm of the coming of the Lord . . . can you not feel it? Can you not taste it, blowing on the winter winds? That's what Advent is about . . . it's about the longing, the anticipation, the preparing for the savior of the world. In short, it's about the waiting.

Jesus Christ, the savior of the world . . . who'll save us from more than just our sins. He'll free the oppressed, feed the hungry and we ain't a-gonna practice war no more. The ground-zero beating heart of Christian hope will be born 23 days from now, in a manger, in an out-of-the-way town in a minor Roman province. That's when Christmas is . . . it's not today, it's not next Sunday, or the Sunday after that. It's December 25^th, and until then, there is just the waiting.

But Isaiah also says that God works for those who wait upon the Lord, and this makes lingering, it makes abiding a virtue. Of course, it's a virtue we seem to have less and less of these days . . . advertisements blaring want and desire leave little room for waiting, little time for patience . . . the credit-card industry has been built on impatience, people ruin their lives for the benefit of the CitiBank bottom line. It's much easier to hand over that little piece of plastic than to wait.

But at Advent, we're required to wait upon God, and that's not a bad thing. Good ol’ Isaiah says that those who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength. They'll mount up with wings like eagles, run and not be weary. They'll walk and not faint. God works through the waiting, it’s a means of grace, as theologians put it, and this recognition of waiting is at the center of contemplative prayer.  All the techniques for clearing the mind of clutter, all the ways of meditating on scripture, of rolling images of Jesus or words of comfort around and around in our minds, they're all aimed at one thing – to enable us to wait upon the Lord . . . to clear the mind of the debris of everyday life, all the centipedes of incidental thought crawling through our brains, all the extraneous detail of our full and busy lives. And when our thoughts are cleared, there is room for God to work in them and on them and thereby in our hearts . . . and it's a slow process, which seems much more like waiting than working. I know it's like that for me . . . I'm a product of our can't wait, why-not-have-it now society, and I want instant results from what I do. But when you do contemplative prayer, there’s most of the time no instant effect, no immediate improvements or change, and it can be discouraging.

But I’ve learned that God works in God’s own time, slowly and deliberately, perhaps because things easily gained are easily lost, and with anticipation comes value. As we wait, we have time to savor, to reflect, to integrate the changes fully in our lives, to make them truly part of us. And so at Advent, we're asked to wait for the Lord's coming, and as we do, God will work on us. As we take time to meditate on the season, and to contemplate our need for redemption, it becomes richer for us, and we come to know Christ more fully.

That's how Advent began – 1400 years ago it was a time of meditation and renewal, a time of cleansing and purification, a time for God to work on us before the coming of the Christ. As scripture says, we all become like one who is unclean, we all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, our sorrows, our pain – like the wind—carry us away.

And as the years passed, it came to pass that Advent became a time for contemplation not only of the past but of the future as well . . . it became a time to look forward to not only Christ's first coming, but his second too . . . and so we read passages like the one from Luke, describing poetically the final days. And just as we can't separate Jesus' identity as the crucified one from that of the ruler of the universe, so we can't separate the babe in the manger from the final judge of us all. They are the same event, really—the coming of the kingdom of God.

The great theologian Jurgen Moltmann wrote that the first coming of Christ, on that cold winter's night, makes sense only in light of his promise to come again. God's kingdom reached its greatest expression yet in the person of Jesus. In fact, Jesus is the kingdom personified, as he himself told his disciples – he said the kingdom of God is here among you. And if we had only his first coming to celebrate, it would be hard to believe that our current existence – definitely not heaven on earth – is somehow God's reign. So at Advent, we hold two events together, in celebrated tension, so that we can see the kingdom for the trees, so that we can see that despite all appearances, despite the famine and the misery and the wars and rumors of war, God's kingdom is coming, and it's already here and it will be here and fulfilled in the future.

Christ himself said it to John, in a dream there on Patmos Isle: “I am the alpha and omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” And he stands there, in the center, holding the past and the future together, and so through him is forged our present. Christ – at the center of our lives, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we take advantage of it or not, whether we allow him to mold us or shape us or use us or not. Christ at the center of the universe, within everything, holding together the past of bondage to corruption and sin over and against the future when our redemption is complete.

Christ at the center, in time as well as outside of it, in our world and yet transcending it, coming again – soon! – and yet for the first time ever. And our task over these coming weeks is simple – all we have to do is wait upon the Lord, who will act and has acted in his own good time. And it's a profoundly subversive task, a counter cultural task in the best sense, for it goes against the dominant tide of our culture. “You don't have to wait for anything,” it roars, over and over, time and again, and yet, we Christians – some of us, anyway – wait. We wait because we know it's a virtue, because we know that God will bless those who wait for the Lord. We wait because we know that in the waiting, the thing we await becomes sharper and sharper in focus, that as we meditate and cogitate and contemplate, when it finally arrives, when Christ comes in a lowly manger and in fire and cloud-bedecked glory, his arrival will be all the more sweet. Amen.

Truth and Consequences (John 18:33-37)

      So here we are, the last Sunday before Advent, the season that begins with the fourth Sunday before Christmas and ends Christmas Eve, and our reading is from the middle of the passion narrative, of all things. You know the passion narrative, don’t you?: The story about the trial and death of Jesus Christ? And it’s relevant because it’d also Christ the King Sunday, and contains a discussion of what makes a monarch in the Kingdom of God. And the very fact it’s from the passion narrative lends it a poignant irony over and above any words that might be said, because the first thing anybody would ever ask about Jesus, who was nailed to that tree, is what kind of ruler, what kind of sovereign, what kind of king gets drug through the streets of Jerusalem, poked and prodded and jeered at, and then hung up to die on a cross? And, by extension, what kind of religion is bult around such a thing? Because make no mistake, Christianity is as much about the crucifixion as it is about the resurrection, as much about the crash of winter as the coming of spring.

It was early in Christianity that Christians started calling Christ their king, right along with calling him Lord, which befuddled Jews and Greeks and just about everybody else in the Greco-Roman world, because getting killed made one kind of a failure, didn’t it? It made one kind of a loser, and less kind individuals would have gone around making the L-sign on their foreheads, if English had been invented, which of course it hadn’t. Losers weren’t any more respected by the general populace in those days any more than they are today, and a guy who got himself killed definitely wasn’t a winner in their books. The guy had done all kind of miracles, all kinds of signs, and shown power over life and death, for St. Peter’s sake, but cracked like a soft-boiled egg at the first sign of Roman opposition. He wouldn’t even save his own life. Was it any wonder his disciples had scattered like quail?

And here he was up before Pontius Pilate, Roman governor of Judea, who would not have made anybody’s most-cuddly list. History would remember him as a ruthless, vicious ruler, who’d keep the Roman peace at any cost, who ate scruffy revolutionaries like Jesus for breakfast. In fact, he had a some-time insurrectionist named Barabbas just waiting for the right moment to string up, which apparently would be right after he got done with Jesus. Now Jesus had been brought to Pilate because the Israelite religious authorities could sentence anyone of anything up to, but not including, death, and they wanted Jesus dead. But Pilate, despite his cutthroat virtuosity, is hesitating. And this has always puzzled biblical scholars, because it was way out of character for him, so the more liberal amongst them proposed that the Gospel writers, ah, embellished the scene, trying to curry favor with the Romans by blaming the Jews. See, they’d say, we’re good Roman citizens, we don’t blame y’all for Jesus’ death, it was those evil Jews!

But you know, I wonder if it’s something about Jesus that gave Pilate pause . . . after all, we know that the disciples only had to see him and hear his voice to up and leave everything and every one to follow him. Jesus seemed to radiate, to exude something that wasn’t of this world, at least any world that anybody in this one’d ever seen. Cynthia Bourgeault calls it a “recognition event,” that people recognized something in Jesus that resonated with them on a deep, and not-particuarly-rational, level. And perhaps that’s what we’re seeing here, that the Pilate historians know would even twitch at putting a rabble rouser down may be a testament to Jesus’ magnetic and holy presence.

Well. Our passage tells of Pilate’s final confrontation with Jesus, and to me, it looks he’s just trying to get a handle on it all. “Are you the king of the Jews,” he asks, and he knows full well that that’s what Herod styles himself as, king of the Jews, and perhaps Pilate is trying to get Jesus in trouble with the Romans’ pet overlord, but more likely he’s just trying to find out what he’s being charged with. Because in fact, he hadn’t been told. The Sanhedrin had just hauled him over and dumped him off on him, saying “If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you.” What kind of trial is this that the judge doesn’t even know the charges?

So Pilate is trying to do his job, and to do it he needs to know what the charge is, and so he asks “Are you the King of the Jews?” Cause if he thinks he’s the king of the Jews, then he’ll know what’s up. And Jesus’ answer—“Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?”—has been taken to be kind of smart-alecky, like “did you figure that out all by yourself, or did you get help?” But I don’t think it’s meant as an insult, I think he really wants to know. We already know that Jesus makes a sharp distinction between what comes from the inside versus what comes from without . . . remember? He says it’s not what comes from outside that defiles, but what comes from inside. Similarly, Jesus is asking whether Pilate’s question comes from within Pilate, and thus is sincere, or whether he’s parroting what he’s heard.

We live in a time where it’s an important distinction, don’t you think? We’re constantly bombarded with information and opinions, squabbling talking heads and news that is of doubtful provenance and veracity (notice how I didn’t call it fake news?). If we let ourselves be swayed by everything that comes from without, from everything we are told, we’ll be like those bulrushes over in Isaiah, but instead of our heads being bowed, they’ll be whipping around like bobbles on a spring.

But how does our dependence on all these outside influences dovetail with Jesus’ teaching that it’s only what comes from within that defiles? All those buffeting viewpoints can’t defile, can they? After all, they do come from without . . . Well, Buddhist psychology puts it this way: in everyone there are seeds: seeds of violence, seeds of compassion, seeds of fear, seeds of joy . . . every human emotion, every human behavior is within us in embryonic form. For fans of Western psychology, it’s akin to C.G. Jung’s collective unconscious, where human behaviors are represented by common archetypes. In the Buddhist metaphor, these seeds—of violence, evil, compassion, joy—lie dormant until they are “watered” by something from the outside. Thus, watching or participating in violent activities water the seeds of violence, watching or participating in deeds of compassion water seeds of compassion, and the person grows increasingly violent or compassionate. Does it mean they will be actively violent or compassionate? No. But, according to Buddhist thought, their tendencies, their propensities for them will increase.

And so, according to this thinking, outside influences—news, movies, political rallies, and the like—can actually change how we are on the inside, and therefore, as Jesus would say, come from inside and defile—or make better, for that matter. And so, when Jesus asks whether the question about his kingship is asked on his own, he is taking Pilate’s spiritual temperature, speaking from a far different spiritual place than was Pilate. Jesus is trying to see into his psyche, Pilate is just interested externalities: “I am not a Jew, am I?” he says, “Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?” And in fact, Pilate doesn’t know, they haven’t told him,

So we have Jesus being Jesus, plumbing spiritual reaches, and Pilate being Pilate, just trying to figure out just what is going on. And Jesus makes it clear that he’s interacting with the governor on a whole other level: “My kingdom’s not of this world. If my kingdom were from there, my followers would be fighting to keep me free. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” And there it is: Pilate is speaking of worldly things—things of this realm—and his notion of kingship is based there. Jesus, of course, is speaking of the Kingdom of God, his natural habitat, and his notion of kingship is based there.

And Pilate takes one more stab at understanding this enigmatic man with the entire universe in his eyes: “So you are a king.” And once again, Jesus reply is from another realm: ”You’re the one who says I’m a king. But here’s the reason I was born and the reason I came into this world: to testify to the truth.” He may be on trial in this temporal realm, but his testimony isn’t about that. His testimony is about the eternal, it’s about truth. And whoever belongs to that truth listens not to the things of the world, but to his voice. But once again, Pilate hears things from his own perspective: “What is truth?” he asks, shaking his head as he walks away.

And of course, that’s the problem: Pilate is talking about the truth of the powers that be, the powers and principalities, as Paul would call them. Political truth, that shifts with the wind; human truth, which blows around like those bobble-head bulrushes. That truth is tied to authority, to whomever is in power, who holds the reigns of the media, who can control the dominant narrative. The truth of which Jesus speaks is a more basic truth, a more fundamental truth, a truth that doesn’t vary, that doesn’t budge. It’s a truth that underlies reality. And this is John, remember, where Christ’s own self is that word of truth, so Jesus testifies to himself and God, the ground of being that sent him.

And those who belong to that truth listen to that truth, they listen to him. which shouldn’t be hard to do, because they—we!—are intimately connected to him, as branches to a vine. In fact this Word, this truth abides in us, and we in him. It is our center, below any Buddhist seeds, more fundamental than any Jungian archetype. And we are fundamentally grounded to this truth, and have recourse to it, if only we will, when the chaos and confusion and obfuscation of modern existence seems too much to handle.

Sisters and brothers, this is the kind of king Christ is, one who points to truth, one who is that truth, available to us through scripture and through his own indwelling self. All we have to do, as the old hymn says, keep our eyes on him. Amen.