“If God were able to backslide from truth,
I would fain cling to truth and let God go.” – Meister Eckhart
| Rev. Pat Bumgardner |
Daniel 7:13-14 |
| November 26, 2006 |
John18: 33-37 |
Chapter 18 of John’s gospel begins what we call, The Passion Narrative. You may be thinking this is a strange time of year to be reading this story. Should we be reading it closer to Lent, as we move into celebrating the resurrection? And, the answer is yes! Sort of. The lectionary, a schedule of readings that many Christians of faith ff (more or less) places it here, on the 34th or “last” Sunday of the year, before Advent begins a new church year, to celebrate a feast that has come to be known as “Christ the King” Sunday. And, it was actually a feast that the Franciscans pushed for and Pope Pius the XI instituted way back in 1925, before anyone here was ever a twinkle in your mother’s eye as we used to say euphemistically when referring to sex in Indiana (more on sex later!), a feast not to make Christ into the spitting image of this world’s reigning monarchs or presidents or prime ministers, but in fact, quite the opposite: to call people of faith back from toying with allegiances to rising nation states and sects of fascism, it was a feast instituted to address the kinds of issues our parents and grandparents and great grandparents lived through, WWI, WWII, Hitler, nuclear attacks. The Church wanted us to ask ourselves to whom does your heart, your life’s allegiance really belong? Whose image do you reflect in this world? And, in a way, that’s the question John’s gospel is asking in chapters 18 and 19 of his text, and a question worth asking ourselves now, whether we’re baby boomers or X’ers or Y’ers or whatever generative title we have been assigned. Jesus has been “arrested” at night, in a garden someplace across the Kidron Valley, a lot of Roman soldiers are there along with Jesus’ own disciples, and people sent by a coalition of church priests and Pharisees. He goes peacefully, John says, though Pilate does manage to slice off the ear of the high priest’s slave and violently demonstrate in whose reign we belong to, in John’s theology Jesus is led first before Annas, then before Caiaphas, the high-priest that year, and lastly, before Pilate, Roman governor of Judea. All the drama stuff has already happened. Judas has betrayed Jesus, Peter has denied him (not once, but three times). One other disciple, someone John doesn’t name, but that scholar speculate may have actually been Nicodemus, tags Jesus and surprisingly goes into Annas’ and Caiaphas’ homes with him. Apparently, Caiaphas keeps Jesus until just before dawn, when he ships him out to Pilate and the Praetorium, where our story begins.
“Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked, ‘Are you the Sovereign of the Judeans?’ Jesus answered, ‘Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?’ Pilate replied, ‘I am not a Judean, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?’ Jesus answered, ‘My sovereignty is not from this world. If my sovereignty wee from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the religious authorities. But as it is, my sovereignty is not from here.’ Pilate asked Jesus, ‘So you are a sovereign?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’”
And there Pilate calls for Jesus, asking, “Are you the Sovereign, the Ruler, the King?” (that was Herod’s title, and therefore a politically loaded question). “Are you the Ruler of the Judeans?” You know, we like to believe that Pilate was trying to find a way to free Jesus and nasty Jewish people got him killed. I actually read something written this year by an Episcopalian priest that essentially said, “we can’t help it if it’s true.” Only Jesus revealed the truth about God; nobody else. What is truth? That will be Pilate’s question. And we will get to that in a moment, but first, I believe it bears repeating here that the Greek word John uses (ioudious) does not mean “Jewish” or “the Jews.” It is a very specific term and it means, the Judaeans, an elite, well-placed, well-connected (both politically and religiously) ruling class in Jerusalem who, on the surface, touted their allegiance to God and Moses and the Torah alone, but who in reality were kind of like the Enron guys, they used “accepted accounting procedures,” to ensure their own continued wealth and power. Jesus was a Jews. This story does not really make any sense until we get that the reference in Chapter 1 in John to “his own people” rejecting him is talking about us, human beings, not Jews alone. He became flesh, the Prologue says, not male, not Jewish, not Palestinian, not poor, not a carpenter, not the child of an unmarried mother, those things were merely the circumstances, the accidents of his birth. It’s no different than us not wanting to be defined by our Queerness alone. We are human beings. Why doesn’t the Constitution apply equally to us, too? Why do people of trans experience have to have separate but supposedly equal laws to protect or guarantee access to benefits or even the use of a bathroom? Because people miss the main point of our births: we are all human beings. The meaning of the Incarnation is that God took on human form and people of all kinds of people, could not then and cannot now, cope with the implications of that truth.
Pilate, according to John’s rendition of the story, is in cahoots with the religious authorities. He knows why Jesus is there in front of him, he sent the soldiers into the garden to arrest him in the first place. Read the story: Judas brought the “cohort,” (speiran) verse 3 of chapter 18 says. That means between 200 and 600 armed soldiers, possibly the whole kit-n-kaboodle at Pilate’s and Herod’s immediate disposal (and that does not mean rounded up a few wayward soldiers working off the books).
Jesus wasn’t killed because Jewish people rejected him. His disciples were Jewish. The whole group goes to Jerusalem after his disciples to celebrate Passover, the first chapter in Acts says Jesus is executed because he chooses not to sell out, to remain loyal to his own experience of God, and that alone, and it’s making other people think they too, have a choice about who their hearts and allegiance belong to, that that can make a difference in how the world is shaped.
When the armed forces come forward in John’s account, Jesus asks who they’re looking for. They say, “Jesus the Nazarean.” No other gospel records these words, “the Nazarean,” it’s John’s way of designating Jesus as someone separated by choice as the Nazirs were or consection someone whose allegiance is to God alone.
“Are you the Ruler of the Judeans?” Pilate asks Jesus. And, Jesus says, “Is this something you’ve come up with on your own, or that others put you up to?” He knows about all the under-the-table deals being cut here. These guys are not being nice or polite to each other, they’re jabbing at each other. Pilate tries to play down the alliance, “I’m not one of yours, not a Judean. Your own handed you over, what have you done?”
And, Jesus answers: “My reign is not from this world, if it was, my followers would be fighting right now to keep me from being handed over.” But fighting, as we said, is a marker of worldly allegiance.
“So, you are a ruler?” says Pilate.
“So you say,” responds Jesus. “For this I was born and for this I came into the world to testify to the truth, everyone who belongs to the truth, listens to my voice.”
And Pilate, before having Jesus scourged, will ask in a very good question, “Truth, what is truth?”
It is perhaps not the most interesting sermon topic, but nonetheless a good question in this day and age of “spin-masters,” people who make a living by slanting the “truth,” the “news” or world events in particular directions. A good question in a day and age where “mis-speaking” has replaced admissions of lying (and I honestly don’t know what the priest would have said if I’d gone to the confessional and said, “Well, I misspoke when Sister Mary Ignatius asked me if I’d plagiarized St. Catherine of Sienna’s Dialogue as my own thought on truth.” Your penance, “go and make better use of foot notes next time!?!)
What is truth? We live in a culture where “truth” is kind of a relative thing. Competing truth (at least this is the theory) exist side-by-side, as long as we leave each other alone. But what happens when we don’t? In Sadr City, outside Baghdad, Sunni Moslems bombed Shiite Moslems, because well, they see things differently and couldn’t leave it at that. Even here, John Canora was beaten and strangled to death out in Howard Beach about a month ago, because Billy Ray Staton and Alex Brown panicked when they found out he was gay. Everyone knows they’re lying. They knew John was gay before they went home with him, that’s why they went home with him and why they thought they could steal his two cars, and something went wrong. They panicked, perhaps, but not because he was gay.
How can you defend yourself with a lie? The answer is: people do it all the time. We do it from the time we are little kids, play with the truth, clean it up a little, give it a little twist in our favor.
What is truth? That’s the $64,000 question (or, for those of you born past 1970, the “who wants to be a millionaire” question). How do we define truth? I remember sitting in a diner in Texas once, listening to these ministers talk about truth (hey! what else do you do in Texas?!) Anyway, as they offered their various “relativistic” answers, I asked, somewhat naively I must now admit, “Whatever happened to absolute truth? You know, the kind the Vatican is hoping will experience a revival as they try to convince people it’s a sin to use birth control or have sex if you’re gay, and therefore you shouldn’t go to Church, because you’re out of whack with Church truth, forget the fact that you think you have a decent relationship with God!” That’s what I grew up with, if the Church says it, it’s absolutely true.
Men’s testicle would shrivel if they masturbated, that was the horrifying “truth” we were told. And, women, well, there was nothing worth touching anyway!
Right now, a man named Eric Keroack is poised to become the head of a federal office that oversees the funding of birth control, pregnancy tests, breast cancer screening and health care for over 5 million poor people in this country, and he says the truth is having an abortion can increase your risks of breast cancer and that women who have multiple sex partners experience a permanent alteration of brain chemistry that makes it impossible for them to ever form lasting relationships. (It may make them harder to satisfy, but Ms. Gibney is my proof, they can settle down. Ask her, not me!)
What makes something true? The fact that someone from the government says it or that the Church teach it? Dogma, doctrinal policy is not truth, at least not in the Bible.
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free, Jesus will say. But, would knowing even the unadulterated facts in the case of the fifth government minister slain in Lebanon in less than a year really free anyone, or simply fan the flames of hatred and violence, already ignited? Simply make one person blame another and keep on fighting?
What kind of truth was Jesus talking about? This is why I was born, he says to Pilate, standing in a life and death situation, to witness to the truth.
Was it truth like I gave my little brother, who couldn’t count yet, 14 M&M’s and myself 16, instead of the equally distributed 15 I swore to my Aunt Pat I had counted out (cross my heart and hope to die - - - well, not really, I had my fingers crossed!).
Was it “scientific” truth, Jesus meant, verifiable data, you know like the earth revolves around the sun, not vice-versa, a truth for which Galileo was summarily persecuted and then excommunicated for? There’s a guy named Polynani (or something like that) who says that even so-called objective truth is subject to the subjectivism of the observer.
Maybe truth is like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. “The things about which one feels absolutely certain are never true,” wrote St. Oscar Wilde. “That is the fatality of faith and the lesson of romance.” “Truth is something you stumble into when you think you’re going somewhere else,” said Jerry Garcia before he made the mistake of designing ties!
I AM the truth, Jesus will say in Chapter 14 of John’s gospel, when Thomas says he’s lost and doesn’t know what Jesus is talking about or where he’s going. Jesus was born full of truth, the Prologue to John’s gospel will say (“the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we saw his glory, the glory that was from God as a Child of God, full of grace and truth’!). Over thirty-nine times this one gospel will talk about truth and in each case, it is not about a fact or even a moral principle, certainly not someone’s idea about doctrine or dogma. It is always about who we are.
What does it mean to be the truth? That’s the real question this morning. On Thursday, we talked about “Thanks-giving” or giving thanks, as the spiritual practice of looking for grace --- and praising God for the moments and places where we see God’s grace breaking through in this world. It’s what Daniel was doing in the first lesson. He’s watching, the stars, really. Daniels was a star-gazer; he read the signs in the stars, the images he saw there. (Remember when you were a kid and you’d lay out on the grass at night and look at the stars, - - -Did you have grass in NYC, the growing kind, I mean, that’s not helping is it? - - -or during the daytime, we’d look at the clouds, I see an elephant, that’s not an elephant, it’s a giant mouse. People tend to see what they look for.] Daniels is looking at the stars for hope, at a time in history when his people have experienced extreme persecution under four successive tyrants, and at first sees only monstrous beasts, one like a lion with eagles’ wings, and one like a roaring bear ripping flesh apart, one like a leopard with four heads and the last some kind of creature with 10 horns.
But he keeps on looking and finally he sees the clouds open and someone who looks like a regular human being, that’s what the term “Child of Humanity” mean, a regular human being, not a beast, or a tyrant, but someone just like us. In all things, the gospels will later say, it’s the one title Jesus will take for himself. Daniel sees a Child of Humanity, someone just like us, coming on the clouds. And God (the Ancient One) trusts that person, that human being just like us with the power and authority needed to save his people.
It’s sort of like what God is doing in places like Nigeria and Jamaica and Eastern Europe, sending MCC’ers in to support all the efforts to end violence and persecution, imprisonment. Trusting people like us to call forth the healing, the salvation that is to be part and parcel of every human life.
Truth is not dogma or fact or something we memorize and can spit out verbatim, like the Baltimore catechism. “What is man?”, as we so dutifully memorized. “We,” human beings are creatures composed of bodies and souls made to the image and likeness of God.” That’s only true if what we are saying matches up with something we are experiencing in ourselves, through our lives. When we begin to look for the power of God in our regular lives, then it means something (like?) thanksgiving moving from looking for the ways God is breaking through to participating in that healing in that restoration, in the setting of things right by seeing God’s part here. That’s why Jesus says, I AM the truth.
When he exposes the grace and power of God in himself and get this: it didn’t matter how overwhelmed or how useless or how insignificant he felt, how out of his league. The Catholic Church is wrong that you have to be a certain way to experience the grace of God. And, I guarantee you, he felt lost that day at Lazarus’ tomb; he was crying, the was mad, northing like a horse John’s 11th chapter says. He was a mess, but something miraculous happened there. You know, maybe sometimes you feel like a mess, you feel overwhelmed. One in six households in NYC are “food insecure” last Tuesdays’ press conference said. Forty-one percent of the agencies helping have less money than a year ago to work with, and 100,000 new people are hungry here this year. Maybe you think, I can’t give any more. Jesus felt overwhelmed at the tomb, on the shore with 5,000 hungry people in front of him. He got in a boat and tried to run away, but they figured out where he was headed and doubled around a met him on the other side. But, what he did, in the end, with that feeling, whether at Lazarus’ tomb or with 5,000 hungry people clawing at him, was simply open his heart, John’s 11th chapter says, he lifted his eyes to heaven. Matthew says he prayed, he exposed himself to the grace, the presence of God, we could say. Or, he revealed the presence of God with him, knowledge of God and self-knowledge go hand-in-hand, said St. Catherine of Sienna. He didn’t pretend he felt anything other than what he did. It was the simple act of being open to God’s power which scriptures says is right here with us, that made the difference.
We can debate all we want about whether the disciples were really resurrected or really, physically walked again or had senses restored, but this I know: each and every case, they had their sense of humanity restored, their sense of being a real person, just like everyone else, created in God’s image, worthy of an equal place, restored. That’s what happened to the man born blind in Chapter 9. It’s what happened to Lazarus at the tomb. Unbind him, and set him free, Jesus says. When we regain a sense of our humanity of being regular people like everyone else, miracles occur. Women in Iran of al places begin to form equal rights organization, as is happening right now, and university students form the first on-campus gay group in China’s history, “Happy Together,” they call themselves at Fudan University. And Queer people in South African stand up for and gain the right to marry.
We are the truth ~ the embodiment of God’s love and grace in this world. When you get that, then you get that you have a choice, not only about who and what you align yourself with in this world, but about the kind of difference you and me and all of us as regular human beings can really make. That’s what scholars (Myers) say is the real point of John’s Passover Narrative: to lead us to that fork in the road, where we realize there’s something in us, about who we essentially are, as Children of God, with God’s amazing grace and love a part of us that makes all the difference.
“The Road Not Taken” – Robert Frost
“Two roads diverg’d in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one trav’ler, long I stood
And look’d down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.
Then took the other as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverg’d in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travel’d by,
And that has made all the difference.”
You know, maybe you think the only thing I’m good at is…. shopping! Well, you shop red at the Tap and you help fight AIDS in Africa.
The truth is we are, all of us, good people, and we can make a choice every single day. We are never at the end of our options or resources because every moment we draw breath, is an opportunity to present ourselves, expose ourselves to what God’s goodness and mercy and grace can do through us. It’s a choice, there’s always a choice.
We can go the way of the world and align ourselves with the “spin” of limited power, limited resources nothing much I can do.
Or, we can say, here I am God, an ordinary person, and I’ve come to bear witness to the simple truth that You are with me, do with me, in me, through me, whatever you can.
Choosing the latter will make all the difference in the world ~ and that’s the truth.
Amen.
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