A Strange Sort of King (Luke 23:33-43; Reign of Christ - C; November 24, 2013)

A Strange Sort of King

Luke 23:33-43
Reign of Christ - C
November 24, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

What a strange sort of king this Jesus is!  The symbol of his office is not a crown or a scepter, but a brutal means of torture and execution!  This does not match any notion of ours of what it might mean to be a king.

Not that we know much of what it means to be a king.  The last king we saw around here was nobody special, at least not to look at him.  That doesn’t really fit in with our idea of what it means to be a king, either, if we think about it.

Diana, our three-year-old granddaughter, knows exactly what it means to be royalty.  It means dancing around her home wearing a princess dress.  And, of course, she wears a tiara, because, really what’s the good of being a princess if you can’t wear a tiara.  That’s what princesses do on her source for her ideas about being a princess, the television show Sophia the First. 

Of course, our modern kings and queens are quite different from their ancient counterparts and from the media-fueled fantasies of three-year-olds.  They reign, but do not rule, as the British say.  They are sort of like flags, only they can walk and talk.  They are symbols of their countries, roving representations with no real power.  Real power is invested in parliaments that are elected.  There are a few of the unlimited kind of kings still around but they are in places like Qatar and Swaziland, so we don’t really have any experience of them.  Absent any experience of our own we fill in the blanks in our imagination from the legends of King Arthur, the fabrications of the Walt Disney Company, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

We are inclined to view kings through a romantic filter.  A real king with real power—of the sort that the ancient world knew—would not be welcome.  As Dennis in The Holy Grail tells King Arthur who claims to rule by virtue of the sword Excalibur, given him by the Lady of the Lake, “…strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government…you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you.”  We might keep a king around for ceremonial occasions, but the real thing?  No, thank you!  We like our kings firmly controlled by constitutions.

But in the ancient world a king—with or without a sword thrown at him by a “watery tart”—was not bound by any constitution.  When it came to his power over his people, he answered to no one but his own conscience—if he had one—and from his decisions there was no appeal.  The only limit on a king’s power in the ancient Roman world was the emperor. 

It was because Jesus threatened the emperor’s power that Pontius Pilate murdered him.  He did it casually and almost without thought.  But he did not do it carelessly.  There was nothing careless about the arrangement of Jesus’ death.  Jesus was crucified, a form of execution reserved for non-Roman rebels and traitors.  The sign tacked up on his cross with its inscription, “This is the king of the Jews,” was deliberate.  The full weight of it doesn’t come across in English.  There was no word in Greek for emperor.  The emperor was known as basileus, “king.”  “This is the Emperor of the Jews” was an insult both to Jews and to Jesus.  Emperor of the Jews?  There is no Jewish empire and there is no Jewish emperor!  And that was precisely the point of Pilate’s sarcastic mockery.  Jesus’ claim is false and ridiculous.

So just what is Jesus doing there, being executed on a cross?  It is not as if he didn’t know this was coming.  Ever since his staged entrance into Jerusalem at Passover, the Jewish freedom festival, with all the traditional Jewish gestures of royalty, Jesus knew that the powers-that-be would have to react.  And he knew that they would react violently.  That’s how real kings react to threats to their power.  The first rule of power is that if you do not use your power to protect your power you will lose your power.  Everyone knows this.  The Jewish leaders know this and they scoff, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, God’s chosen one.”  The Roman soldiers agree, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!”  So does one of the thieves, “Are you not the Messiah?  Save yourself and us!”  Messiahs and kings act to save themselves.  Everybody knows this.

And yet Jesus does not save himself.  In fact, he is strangely passive.  Earlier, when he and his disciples were going out to the Mount of Olives, he made sure that they had two swords among them, but when an unnamed disciple used one of the swords, Jesus rebuked him and healed the victim of his disciple’s violence by restoring the ear that had been cut off.  Jesus refused to use the weapons that he had to resist those who came to arrest him.

Jesus is supposed to be this dangerous revolutionary, but he doesn’t look or act very dangerous.  At every turn Jesus refused to oppose Roman force with force of his own.  He did, in the words of one of the criminals crucified with him, nothing wrong.  But he was executed anyway. 

The Romans were a violent and brutal regime, but they claimed to be doing justice.  They claimed to be doing only what they had to do to keep order and establish peace.  Like every bully in history, they blamed their victims.  When Jesus goaded them into a violent reaction without himself giving in to violence, he unmasked the Roman regime.  He stripped away their pretensions to be doing justice.  The Romans were not interested in justice; they were interested in power.  They had no divine claim to rule the world.  They didn’t rule the world by right.  They were just bigger and meaner than their neighbors and willing to bully them into obedience.

Here is the double irony of the cross.  While it appears that Jesus is at the mercy of the Romans, in fact they fail to make him play their game.  They can strip away his garments, but they cannot strip him of his integrity.  They can kill him, but they cannot force him to give up his humanity.  The crucifixion was supposed to be a demonstration of Jesus’ weakness, hence the irony of labeling as the Jewish emperor.  The double irony is that, instead, the cross became a demonstration of Roman weakness and of the illegitimacy of the Roman emperor.

If Jesus had opposed Roman violence with violence of his own, the Romans could simply have said, as they said so many times about rebels and thieves, “You see, we are simply protecting the public good, establishing and maintaining order.”  But when they use violence to silence awkward questions and dissenting voices, they show how threatened they are.  Once Jesus decided to commit himself utterly to the Reign of God, Pilate could no longer control him.  From that moment on, Jesus reigns and rules, even if his throne is the ancient equivalent of an electric chair.

Jesus has a different idea about power than Pilate.  “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them,” Jesus told his disciples, “and those in authority over them are called benefactors.  But not so with you; rather the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves.” 

Jesus has a different idea about power and that is because he has a different idea about God.  Pilate is expecting God to act like a king.  Pilate is expecting a bigger version of himself.  Pilate is expecting to find God in halls of power, in the Roman forum, in the Oval Office, in the Kremlin.  But that’s not where God chooses to be. 

God is not the one who stands behind kings and keeps them in power.  The reign of God isn’t coming with invading armies or a coup d’état.  The reign of God will not come by a decision of the Council of Bishops. 

God chooses to be with the one on the cross.  And the one on the cross chooses to be with his society’s outcasts, misfits and rejects.  God’s power is at loose in the world in the least likely places and among the least likely people.  On the festival of the Reign of Christ we remember the king whose throne is a cross and who takes the side of the weak, the king who turns kingship upside down.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

The Eyes of Our Hearts (Ephesians 1:11-23; All Saints' Sunday; November 4, 2013

The Eyes of Our Hearts

All Saints' Sunday – C

Ephesians 1:11-23

November 4, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, IA

Four miles to the east of the city of Stirling, Scotland, lie the ruins of Cambuskenneth Abbey.  Founded in 1129, it was one of several abbeys established by David I of Scotland.  For several hundred years, it was the home of a community of Augustinian brothers. 

To get there, you have to park on residential street, and then walk along a path, across a pasture—being careful where you step.  A sign reminds you to close the gates.  A small herd of dairy cattle grazes near the path and apparently someone occasionally forgets and the cows wander into the abbey enclosure itself or out into the quiet neighborhood of neatly kept houses.

The church and its abbey lie in ruins.  All that remain are a few low stone walls and a tower that was rebuilt during the Victorian era when everything old was all the rage and old buildings were "restored" at great expense.  I say restored.  What I mean is that they were rebuilt to look more medieval than anything built in the Middle Ages, because that's what the rebuilders thought they should have looked like.  Think Middle Ages meets Disneyland.  Everything else has either returned to the elements or been carted off for building materials.

As a tourist destination it leaves a lot to be desired.  You don't find this place without knowing what you are looking for and how to read a map.  There are no attendants to take your money and tell you stories about who lived here and what their lives were like.

The National Trust Scotland has installed small placards at various places telling the visitor what function was served by each room:  Here is where the community ate its meals.  There is where the community gathered for chapter meetings, listening to the abbot read from holy books, submitting themselves to the spiritual scrutiny and correction of their brothers.  Along this path within the walls they walked in silence and prayed.

It is a sad place now.  Nothing is left of their shared life.  Nothing is left of their devotion, their stumbling pursuit of spiritual depth and holiness.  The echoes of their chanting voices have long since faded into silence.  No one is there but the cows and a few well-read tourists.

On a hill to the west is Stirling Castle.  The hill has been fortified since before the Romans and it's not hard to see why.  Stirling is the gateway to the highlands of Scotland.  To the east of Stirling the river Forth is too wide to bridge and too deep to ford.  To the west of Stirling is marshy ground, impossible for horses.  If you wish to invade the highlands from the south (and I have no idea why you would want to do that), you must use Stirling Bridge.  And you must come past Stirling Castle.  This is blood-soaked ground.

I wonder about these friars, these brothers.  Did their gospel of the gentle Jesus make any difference at all in their violent times?  Did their preaching of peace stay the hands of kings and rebels?  The history books don't even hint at that

Did they gather on some All Saints' Day centuries ago and hear these words from a pulpit long since crumbled into dust? 

I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, and for this reason I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers. I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know God, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which God has called you, what are the riches of God's glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of God's power for us who believe, according to the working of God's great power. God put this power to work in Christ when God raised him from the dead and seated him at God's right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And God has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

Were they struck, as I am, by the extraordinary irony of it?  The power of God, the very power that raised Jesus from the dead,  the very power that, at least in principle, has subdued every rival and exalted Jesus to rule over everything, that power is at work in us, at work in the church described here as the "fullness of Christ".

Yet that power doesn't often seem very much in evidence. When we summon the courage to cry for peace (and that doesn't happen very often), that power doesn't alter the counsels of the powerful.  That power doesn't seem to keep the walls of the church—even stone walls—from crumbling.  That power doesn't get the apportionments paid.  That power doesn't keep us from squabbling with each other.

Is it because we come short of those ancient heroic times?—those times I learned about a half-century ago in Sunday School classes taught by the ancient members of my church—those times when dedicated apostles were missionaries to the Roman empire, spreading the good news of God's peace in a culture that celebrated war, those times when Christians marched to their deaths in the arena with hymns on their lips and praise in their hearts.  Is it because we no longer have the fiery spirit of those earlier times?

No, those times were not so different from ours.  The Ephesians were not so different from us. When they faced persecution they were frightened, just as we would be.  When they faced their culture's pressures on them, they were discouraged, just as we are.  When they considered their mandate to demonstrate the life of the reign of God in a fallen world, they felt overwhelmed, just like we do.  They did not feel like God's power was at work in them.  They felt ordinary and small, too small, they feared, for what God was asking of them.

This letter was written to the church at Ephesus to tell them something they did not know.  They had eyes in their heads: they could see that they were few in number, probably fewer than a hundred. They had eyes in their heads: they could see that they were not rich.  They had eyes in their heads: they could see that they were not powerful.

But what they could see with their eyes was not the whole story.  The writer of Ephesians wants them to see more than the eyes in their heads will reveal, so he prays, “…that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know God, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened…”  With the eyes of your heart enlightened.  The heart sees what our eyes do not, the writer suggests, the eyes of the heart affirm—in a gesture of defiance and hope—a reality that our eyes deny.

This All Saints' Sunday, this text is asking us not to trust too much in what the eyes in our heads see.  This afternoon we will gather for our Charge Conference.  Five other congregations will join us and Jackie Bradford will be the ringleader, presiding over a six ring circus.  We’ll receive reports.  We’ll set the pastors’ salaries.  We’ll elect some leaders.  That’s what the eyes in our heads will see.  But the text isn’t asking us to see with the eyes in our heads.

This text is asking us to use the eyes of our hearts instead, to see three things, three things that the eyes in our heads cannot see.  It's asking us to see this Christ—crucified as a criminal under Roman injustice—with the eyes of our hearts as the one who reigns over all the rebellious powers of the earth: over war, over poverty, over disease, over death, over everything that opposes God's perfect purpose for us and for our world.  The text is asking us to see our church, First United Methodist Church—with all of its faults—with the eyes our hearts as “the body of Christ,” as the only way that Christ has of being present in this place, as the concrete embodiment of Jesus' love and mercy.  The text is asking us, finally, to see ourselves—in all our brokenness, in all our foolishness, in all our weakness—with the eyes of our hearts, as saints, as God's holy ones, set aside in this time and place for God's use.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Beta Release (2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Proper 27C; November 10, 2013)

Beta Release

2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17

Proper 27C (25th Sunday after Pentecost)

November 10, 2013

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

From time to time I have been accused of mixing religion and politics. 

In one sense I hope to deny that accusation.  If by politics we mean, partisan politics, advocating for the policies or endorsing the candidates of one political party or another, then I say that I work very hard to avoid doing this. 

Of course, like any other citizen, I have my opinions.  I am more persuaded by some arguments and less by others.  I find some candidates more winsome than others.  I can and do argue forcefully for my opinions, but I try to avoid doing that from the pulpit, for example.  Whether I succeed at that isn't really up to me to judge.  I know that there is some "leakage" from the part of me that is a citizen and a member of a political party and the part of me that is an ordained elder of the United Methodist Church and appointed to be your pastor.  I hope that you can overlook that occasional leakage and that you are not expecting your pastors to be politically uncommitted.

But there is another sense in which I could be accused of mixing religion and politics.  I would not only have to plead guilty, but I think I would be unfaithful to my ordination if I did not. 

If religion is more than simply believing that there is a God and trying to be a nice person, if religion is about our deepest commitments and our highest hopes, and if politics is more than partisan, if politics is about how we arrange the life of our community, our nation, and our world, and about how we share and exercise and think about power, then not only is separating religion and politics undesirable, it is impossible.  And we see that clearly in a reading like 2 Thessalonians 2.

It's not right on the surface, unless you know what to look for, but it's there.  In part this explains the strange language that we find: "the person who is lawless," the person "who is headed for destruction," and the one who "sits in God's temple, displaying himself to show that he is God."

Who is the writer talking about?  I believe that the answer to that is in that last phrase, "displaying himself to show that he is God".  There was in fact someone in the world of this text who did just that, whose image was displayed in temples all around the Roman world, especially in the eastern part of that world, where this letter was written and read.  And that person was the Emperor.

The Emperor, the writer tells us, far from being the person who guarantees order, is the "lawless" one.  The Emperor, far from being the one who brings security, is "headed for destruction."  The Empire worked hard to control its message, to impress its subjects with its power and wisdom, to present itself as inevitable and eternal.  "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," the Empire says.  But it's too late.  Our writer like some earlier version of Edward Snowden has pulled back the curtain and displayed the Empire for what it really is. 

Then as now, the Empire does not want the truth told.  Then as now, the Empire hunts down whistle-blowers.  The difference between now and then is the strategy that the whistle-blower used.  Rather than posting this revelation on WikiLeaks, or publishing it in The Guardian, the whistle-blower wrote in coded language that let readers know what was going on while maintaining "plausible deniability."  "What do you mean this is about the Emperor?  Where does it say that?"

So what about the writer's claim that the Emperor is actually "the lawless one headed for destruction"?  How can law enforcement be lawless?  It happens any time rulers decide they do not need to answer to anyone above themselves.  It happens when security agencies break the law to gather information and shield themselves in the secrecy that is supposed to protect us rather than them.  It happens when our jails are filled with drug addicts and those who wantonly destroyed hundreds of billions of dollars, along with the dreams of millions, walk around not only free, but richer than ever.  It happens when one man claims the power to deny with the stroke of a pen the right of a citizen, something even the Emperor would not have dared to do.  When criminality is institutionalized, whether it is the person of the Emperor or the agencies of a bureaucracy, we may speak of a ruler as "the lawless one."

This institutionalized lawlessness with its illusion of power and control, oddly enough, does not result in security.  This is the other claim in our text.  Institutionalized lawlessness makes our world less safe, not more.  It closes off debate that could lead to relief for those who otherwise have no way to resist except through violence.  It builds resentment among the weak.  When law does not lead to justice, law loses its claim to obedience. 

I've colored in the picture a bit, but the outline is all there.  Things are bad, says the writer of 2 Thessalonians, and they are going to get worse.  It's not a very optimistic outlook.  It's not a very American outlook. 

We are perpetual optimists.  We believe, or at least we have to say we believe, that everything is going to turn out okay.  All problems have solutions.  A new medicine will be invented.  A new invention will fix everything.  When we are sick we have to be upbeat even when we are scared and desperate.  Even cashiers have the cheek to command us to "Have a nice day!"  Like Scarlett in Gone with the Wind, who finds herself in the middle of a civilization that has collapsed with a useless plantation and rudely deserted by Rhett Butler, we are required to say, "Tomorrow is another day!" 

The Bible has a way of looking at the world without rose-colored glasses.  It looks reality in the face and names it fully.  Things are bad, says the writer of 2 Thessalonians, and they are going to get worse.  He is not optimistic.  Neither am I, for that matter, even if that brands me as suspect and perhaps even un-American.  "I’m not optimistic," as Wendell Berry says, "but I'm hopeful."^[1] 

There is hope in this text, but it isn't based on technology or management technique.  The hope comes because we are not the only actors in this drama.  There is an Other who has plans.  And it's a surprise.  God's plan for transforming a world system that institutionalizes lawlessness, a system in which human beings claim to be God and seek to be worshiped, a system that is doomed to self-destruction, God's plan is…us.

Really? Yes, really.  Not us as individuals, but us as the Church.  We as the Church—with our squabbling, our scandals, our worship wars, our fights between liberals and conservatives, our institutional inertia, and our commitment to our own comfort and our buildings—we are God's response to a broken world.

The writer here calls us the "first crop of the harvest" to bring wholeness and healing to the world.  The first crop of the harvest is often the best, the sweetest, the juiciest, the most flavorful, but I wonder if our writer isn't dressing things up a little.  I wonder if we're not something more like a beta release.

"Beta release" is an expression that comes from the software development industry.  When someone gets an idea for a new computer program or an app for a tablet or smart phone, they organize the work.  If it's a complex program, they will assemble a team.  The program gets broken down into its various parts.  Decisions get made about what it's supposed to be able to do and how.  It goes from someone's bright idea to a working version.  It gets tested in every way the designers can think of.  When a new program is tested it usually breaks.  The design team fixes it, patches it up and they test it again.  They do that until it works no matter what they throw at it.

But every computer programmer knows that the work isn't done yet.  They know that when real people in the real world get their hands on it, they will do things to their program that the designers never thought of.  The program will break.  A lot.  They know this, so they have a strategy, a deliberate part of the development process called a "beta release."

They give away the program to a few people in the real world.  Those users misuse the program, and find the bugs that testing missed, and have the fun of trying out a new program.  In return the developer gets information about improvements that need to be made and problems that need to be fixed.  Then the programmers go back to work. When those improvements and fixes are done, it's ready to be released to the general public as version 1.0.

We as the Church are the beta release of the Reign of God.  God has an idea—the Kingdom of God—for how to mend the world.  It involves new ways for humans to be in community.  The new community should shape new human beings modeled on Jesus.  The new human beings should be able to form new communities, in a kind of feedback loop, the opposite of a vicious circle, one that gets better and better instead of worse and worse.  That's the way it should work, but the real test of course is in the real world.  And that's where we come in.  We as the Church are the beta release of the Reign of God. 

The Reign of God is still pretty buggy.  It crashes.  A lot.  But we don’t need to lose heart.  A beta release is expected to crash.  The purpose of the beta release is to find the bugs and get them fixed.  So we're still full of bugs, but we're also on the way to something better. 

But I also note that the program is basically sound.  New community does fashion new people who make a new community.  In a violent world, it fashions people who believe that peace is a better way and who—some in big ways and others in small ways—practice living peacefully.  In a world that celebrates greed, it fashions people who will give away money that they need so that people whose lives have been shattered by winds and storm surges a half a world away can be sustained in life and helped to rebuild.  In a world that carefully protects the lies that keep it going, it fashions people who from time to time dare to tell the truth.  In a world governed by fear, it fashions a people who are sometimes able to live out of love instead.

Yes, it's buggy.  It crashes.  A lot.  But between crashes it runs.  Yeah, we're a beta release.  So we can stop expecting ourselves and each other to be perfect.  We're a beta release.  So we can stop indulging in optimism and pessimism.  We have, as our writer says, a "good hope" because the Developer isn't through with us yet.  Sometime—we don't know exactly when—the Reign of God version 1.0 will be released, without the bugs and with a beautiful, intuitive interface, a program that runs without glitches.  In the meantime, we have the privilege of having a hand in its development.  In the meantime, as the text says, "May God encourage your hearts and give you strength in every good thing you do or say." Amen.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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^[1] Wes Jackson, quoting Wendell Berry in Joshua J. Yates, "A Conversation with Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson," The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture, 14,2 (Summer 2012), 71.