The Best Joke of All (Easter; John 20:1-18; April 1, 2018)

The Best Joke of All

Easter
John 20:1-18
April 1, 2018

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

Our daughter Beth was visiting us over what seems an Easter in the distant past. We lived far away from each other and didn't get many chances to visit, so time was precious. And I was frittering it away writing a sermon on the Saturday before Easter. I was--as I always am--concerned that it be my best work. To Beth this seemed unnecessary.

"Dad," she said. "I've heard a lot of your Easter sermons. They are all basically the same. 'Jesus was dead. Now he's alive. Hooray! Now go eat ham.' You should just say that. That's always what you say anyway. People won't mind. They'll be grateful."

I don't know. Some of you might mind. Others might be grateful. But she's certainly right about one thing. She has heard the heart of what we proclaim this morning: "Jesus was dead. Now he's alive. Hooray! Now go eat ham."

“Jesus was dead. Now he's alive." The good news is not actually in the words themselves. The good news is what happens in the space between "Jesus was dead." and the next sentence, "Now he's alive." What we call the resurrection happens in that gap, in the silence between two sentences. We use the fancy word, resurrection, as if we know what it means, as if the word expresses what it means. But the resurrection happens in the wordless space between two sentences. Resurrection is a word that means "we don't know what happened, but something sure did."

Jesus was dead. Now he's alive. From then to now, from dead to alive, we know the beginning and the end, but of the event that connects them, we know nothing. That used to bother me, the knowing nothing. It bothers me less these days. There are a lot of things we know nothing about.

We know nothing about falling in love, except that it happens (if we are lucky). In one moment there are two people who know each other in one kind of way. In the next they are connected in a new way that changes their lives and (again, if they are lucky) sends reverberations down through generations.

We know nothing about dying. Of course we know about getting very sick or about being badly injured. What we don't know is how it happens that the one we love is there one moment and in another moment they are not.

So I'm a lot more okay with not knowing what happened in the moment between "Jesus was dead" and "Now he’s alive" than I used to be.

It's not just that we don't know. It's that there is a positive mystery here. There is a ground as holy as the ground Moses stood on when he saw a bush burning without being burned up, a ground as holy as the ground that we stand on when we see or speak with or touch another human being.

Sometimes people have tried to describe what happened. They've tried to fill in the silence with words. Mel Gibson, for example, after an hour pornographic violence in "The Passion of the Christ," attempts to portray Jesus' rising from the dead. In my view that goes beyond silly and risks sacrilege. None of the gospel writers dared to do what Mel did. There are times for words and there are times for silence, and Mel severely misunderstood which was which.

"Jesus was dead. Now he’s alive." Here are two sentences, either of which makes perfect sense without the other and which, together, are completely at odds with the rest of our experience. Death is the end of life, not its beginning. And so, "Jesus was dead. Now he is alive." is a very odd thing to say.

But that oddness is what makes those six words a story. Only "Jesus was dead" can render "Now he’s alive" into the proclamation of a wonder. It is very much like Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol that begins by telling us, "Marley was dead: to begin with" and goes on to tell us that, without understanding this, "nothing wonderful can come of the story." Dickens is right. Without "Jesus was dead," there is nothing wonderful about "Now he’s alive."

But wonderful or not, getting from one to the other doesn't seem to be possible without confusion and oddness. Mary Magdalene, to whom our tradition has been--without cause--very unkind, went to visit the tomb of Jesus early on the first day of the week. Remember that the first day of the week is Sunday, not Monday. That's why Christians disagree about all sorts of things, but the one thing that we agree on is that Sunday is the day of resurrection and the primary day on which the Church gathers. Mary found the stone removed from the entrance and the body of Jesus removed from the tomb. When she told Peter and the "other" disciple (John, presumably), what ensues next is an adolescent competition about which one is the winner. John wins the footrace to the tomb. (Yay! John is the winner!) But it is Peter who enters the tomb first (Yay! Peter is the winner!) Peter looks around inside, but it is John who "believes" first (Yay! John is the winner!). And then, like rival rugby teams, they go off together to have a pint.

Meanwhile Mary suffers a series of confusions. She thinks the body of Jesus has been stolen. She sees Jesus, but thinks that he is the gardener. Jesus speaks to her by name and she recognizes him (Remember Jesus said that the shepherd would call the sheep by name and the sheep would recognize his voice?). Mary tries to hug him (wouldn't we all?), but is told that she may not do this. Then, on Jesus' instructions, Mary announced "Now he’s alive" to the other disciples. What, I wonder, did John "believe" if it was Mary who announced aliveness?

The disciples knew that "Jesus was dead." They learn that "Now he’s alive." But they are no better off than we are when it comes to knowing how the truth of one sentence became the truth of the next. They are just as ignorant as we are when it comes to the darkness and silence between the two announcements.

How does past death become transformed into present life? How does despair turn into hope? How does apathy become faith? How does indifference become love? How do people convinced that they are unable to accomplish anything to improve their own lives, discover strength in the midst of weakness? How do people who are fearful for their own future and the future of their children become people who care about others? How does someone whose heart has been broken dare to love again? How does one generation of young people, discounted by their cynical elders, shake the halls of power and speak so clearly, so loudly, so resolutely that people who worship their guns are afraid? How does someone diagnosed with terminal cancer move from fear to confidence in the face of death?

I don't know. If you've come get an answer to that question, I am sorry to disappoint you. Truly. I do not know how this movement happens. I only know that it does happen. And I will tell you that I suspect that all of those reversals, every movement from captivity to freedom and from exile to homecoming is grounded in the movement from death to life contained in the Easter proclamation: "He was dead. Now he’s alive."

"Hooray!" I might have preferred "Hallelujah!" but that's a small criticism. Arguably, Hooray is just English for Hallelujah. This strange movement from death to life leads, in ancient Israel's experience, to praise. Trapped between the waters of the Sea of Reeds and the on-coming chariots of Pharaoh's army, Israel is as good as dead. They retreat into the water and something happens and they find themselves alive and the finest heavy cavalry in their world defeated, fled or dead. Just as in our story this morning, it is a woman, Miriam, who has the words: "Sing to Yahweh who has won this great victory, throwing horse and rider into the sea!"

The Easter is not simply a message that Jesus is risen from the dead. Easter is a movement to which we are all invited, a movement from death to life to praise, from despair to hope to praise, from oppression to liberty to praise, from exile to homecoming to praise, from self-protection to solidarity to praise, from brokenness to wholeness to praise, from failure to holiness to praise, from sin to forgiveness to praise.

Charles Wesley understood how things stand. He had moved from lost to found to praise. He knew that he would need a thousand tongues to praise God adequately.

From death to life to praise. From "Jesus was dead" to "Now he’s alive" to "Hooray!" and, finally, to "Now go eat ham." Well, okay, this movement does not require us to be meat-eaters. You may, if you prefer, "Now go eat yams," or just “Now go eat.” Death yields to life. Life yields to praise. Praise yields to acts as ordinary as a meal eaten with our families or friends. Praise yields to ordinary life now become extraordinary because we now live as those who have been snatched from death and ushered, we know not how, into life and praise. Ordinary life transformed is life lived by those who have passed through the empty and silent space between "Jesus was dead" and "Now he is alive." It is lived in the faith that is not superstition. It is lived in the hope that is not optimism. It is lived in praise and gratitude.

We have not yet fully lived into the Easter proclamation, but that's okay. It really is. That's why we have Easter every year. That's why we have Easter for seven weeks of the year. That's why we have Easter every week. That's why we have this baptismal font that is both the place where we are drowned and buried and the place from which we are born. That's why we have this table that reminds us of all the meals that Jesus has eaten with us and summons us to the meal that is God's dream for us, the meal to which everyone brings what they have and everyone receives what they need, the meal at which the wealth of the rich buys no more than they need, the meal at which the poverty of the poor does not mean that they will get less. That's why we have each other as companions on the journey to encourage and, if needed, to help us back to our feet when we stumble.

"Jesus was dead. Now he is alive. Hooray! Now go eat." Which is what we are about to do. But first, we sing!

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.

I (Hunger and) Thirst (Maundy Thursday; John 19:23-30; March 29, 2018)

I (Hunger and) Thirst

Maundy Thursday
John 19:23-30
March 29, 2018

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

You have been with me as I have gamely preached my way through John's gospel. I have tried to hear with open ears what he has to say. To do that, I made an interpretive decision based on the story of the man who had been born blind and his expulsion from the synagogue. I decided that I would read John as a gospel written for a community recovering from deep trauma.

I've also noted that the author, while allowing his community to feel what it feels, also nudges them toward a better way of being in the world. Heady ideas are great, but, in the end, this is a story about the Word become flesh. There is no escape from history. Yes, the community divides the world into two camps, but there are those, like Nicodemus, for example, who is both part of the Jewish leadership responsible for their expulsion from the synagogue and a follower of Jesus, if only at night. Not everyone can be classified as either for them or against them.

As we have worked our way through John and drawn closer to the events that brought Jesus' life to an end, it is understandable that some of these tendencies have become more pronounced. If John's community was traumatized by being thrown out of the synagogue, we can expect that trauma to be newly painful as we find ourselves in the middle of Jesus' arrest, trial, and execution. His is the original expulsion.

I understand this; I get it; I even approve of it as a part of John's attempt to bring his community to a place of healing.

But sometimes, sometimes, in his effort to allow for his community's story and to show them toward the new life of Jesus' resurrection, he tries to have it both ways. And it doesn't quite work.

In our text for this evening's service, we have an odd choice on the part of the writers of the narrative lectionary. We have Jesus crucified by the soldiers who divide his clothing among themselves. Then we have Jesus placing the care of his mother into the hands of "the disciple whom Jesus loved." Finally, Jesus spoke from the cross. He said, "I am thirsty." He was then given sour wine to drink. Then he said, "It is finished," and surrendered his spirit.

It's all very...what shall I say? painless. Yes, Jesus is crucified, but there are no cries from the cross as there are in the other accounts. Jesus seems calm to the point of being emotionless. He dies by giving up his spirit. He says that he is thirsty in order to fulfill scripture. Specifically, the scripture is the second half of Psalm 69:21, and only the second half of the verse, because the first half of the verse reads, "They gave me poison to drink" which clearly does not happen here even though the syntax of Hebrew poetry requires that the two halves cannot be separated.

He says, "I am thirsty," to fulfill Scripture, not because he is thirsty. Is there some reason why John cannot allow his Jesus to say he is thirsty because he is thirsty? Is there some reason John cannot allow his Jesus to be thirsty?

There are other writers who took this tendency to move away from a thirst grounded in a real body. Taken to its logical extension, the result was that Jesus, although resembling a human being, only seemed to be human. That his body, though it seemed to be a body like ours, was not like our bodies at all. And even that Jesus himself did not die on the cross, but only seemed to die, that God arranged for some last-minute substitution so that Jesus walked away unharmed. This was so common an understanding that it had a name. It was called Docetism, from the Greek word, dokeô meaning "to seem."

Docetism is still quite common in the church. Docetism is still popular because it seems so spiritual. If Jesus only seemed to be human, then God doesn't have to muck about with matter, or the real world, or business, or politics. And neither do we. In fact, if Jesus only seemed to be human, the best thing for us to do is to get as far away from the world as we can as quickly as we can. We shouldn't be mucking about with matter, or the real world, or business, or politics. Or at least we should realize that the real world has nothing to do with God or with being a follower of Jesus. We should separate heaven and earth, church and state, religion and politics.

I don't know if John intended this or not, but he certainly left that door wide open. So I tonight I have the audacity to offer up this correction to John's gospel:

After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (because he was thirsty), "I am thirsty."

I dare to do this because the heart of the Christian good news is the incarnation. The Word became flesh, not something that looked like flesh, not something that seemed to be flesh, but flesh. God became a human being, not something that looked human or seemed to be human, but a human being. As Karl Barth may have said (and if he didn't, I'll take credit for it), "The divinity of God is revealed in the humanity of Jesus." If Jesus only seemed to share our humanity then there is nothing to see in Jesus, neither divinity nor humanity.

Jesus was fully human, completely human, as human as you are, as human as I am. Otherwise we would not and could not see God revealed in him. Jesus was an infant, crying in the night because he was hungry or because his diaper was dirty or wet or for no apparent reason at all, like babies do. Jesus grew, learned to talk, and embarrassed his family but using impolite words to see how they worked. Jesus talked back to his parents. Jesus fought with his siblings. Jesus got into scrapes with the other kids in the village. He stayed out past his bedtime. And don't even mention that staying behind at the Temple, because “I must be about my father's business" business.

Jesus gave his rabbi fits. He had sexual desires. He had dreams for himself that he gave up reluctantly to answer his call. Jesus enjoyed the company of his disciples. He didn't like non-Jewish people very much.

He made mistakes. There were things he didn't know. He believed that the world was flat. He did not understand electricity.

He had a human body made up of matter. He wasn't made of some sort of special matter that wasn't really material. He wasn't a hologram projection. He had a real body. He had to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. He got hungry. When hungry he enjoyed eating. He liked wine. He sweat when it was hot or he was working. If he didn't bathe or wash his clothes he stank.

In short he was human and material.

In the good news that we tell, matter matters and we matter. We matter because we are human. God does not love us in spite of the fact that we are human or material. God loves us precisely in our humanity and our materiality. God made us to be this way. God meets us in this way. And, when our own time-line through history comes to an end, God will meet us in our humanity and our materiality. Our ultimate fate is not to become beings who float around in heaven in bodiless form. Our ultimate fate is resurrection: new life in new bodies that will be just as bodily as the ones we have now.

Jesus said, "I am thirsty," because he was thirsty.

That, in the end, is why we bring our bodies to this very material table. When we come we receive real, material bread. It is soaked in real, and material juices of the grape. We eat and drink. We take these things into our own bodies, bodies that are the means that we have to live out God's dream on this earth. We take these things into our bodies and we digest them. We use them as food and drink. They sustain our bodies in their small way. Some of this food and drink will be incorporated (that is, made a part of our bodies); all of this food and drink will eventually continue to be cycled through the natural order of our world.

This food and drink are perfectly ordinary. They are holy because they are perfectly ordinary. They are holy because that ordinariness is where Jesus met us. They are holy because one day a very long time ago Jesus said, "I am thirsty." They are holy because we are thirsty, too.

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.

Footsteps (Palm Sunday; John 19:16b-22; March 25, 2018)

Footsteps

Palm Sunday
John 19:16b-22
March 25, 2018

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

Who doesn't love a parade? We love them here in Decorah. We parade in the summer. We parade in the winter. We parade in the fall and spring. If we're not in the parade, we bring our chairs and blankets and stake out places on the Water Street sidewalk hours before the parade, so we'll have a spot in the front row where we can see everything but from where, more importantly, we can catch the candy. We love parades.

I've seen parades in a lot communities. I've even been in a few. Sitting on a flat-bed trailer on the 4th of July was my introduction to one town. From there I saw the community from a unique perspective. Coming as it did on the heels of ten years of life in an eastern city, I was plunged into culture shock so deep I really could have used defibrillator paddles. I saw three-generation families gathered along the route. I saw welcoming faces in a town where being the United Methodist pastor still confers high status--not as high as being a Lutheran or Catholic pastor, but high status nonetheless. I saw families whose homes were along the route grilling in their yards, bratwurst and hamburgers generating smells to make a carnivore salivate. I saw kids running alongside their favorite parade entries waving to friends and cousins, their parents unconcerned if they ended blocks away, out of sight, in a community that never thought to be afraid. I also saw that the 1% of racial and ethnic minority folks who lived there were entirely accounted for by adopted children in white families. A parade is an animated and choreographed version of a myth: a story a community tells itself about itself to explain itself to itself. Most communities are mostly good, so a parade is mostly an honest story about a good place to live.

I've been in a military parade or two and I've watched them. These parades are intended to project a visual image of power and strength, to comfort those who are being defended, and to induce awe and fear in potential enemies.

The Romans were past masters at the use of parades to send a message. The triumphus was one example. A triumph was, in the time period of the New Testament, a special honor granted by the Senate to a conquering general. The general would ride into Rome in a chariot, trailed by the enslaved enemy and tokens of plundered wealth. The general's armor, the chariot itself, and the horses' harnesses would be polished until they shone with the reflected glory of the gods whose favored mortal this general was. His armies, interestingly enough, were not allowed to enter the city itself, perhaps because it would be too tempting to the general being honored.

Another Roman parade was the adventus. This was the parade that began an emperor's official state visit to a city. In burnished armor and mounted on a war horse, the emperor would lead military units in their spit-and-polished best. They would be met outside the city by its leading citizens dressed in white who would throw themselves face down on the road. The emperor held in his hands both bane and boon--rich rewards and lavish punishments. He could grant either. In terror and hope the citizens waited to discover which it would be.

The people of Jerusalem had experienced neither triumph nor advent, but the Romans made the most of even ordinary comings and goings. Even a routine patrol would announce its return with trumpets, tighten its ranks, and enter the city as a disciplined body of men. The residents of Jerusalem would stand aside, pressing themselves up against the walls or into the doorways along the street between the gate and the barracks, watching with fear or respect or resentment as the occupiers marched past. It was that or be trampled.

The Romans knew how to project power with everything they did. It amounted to propaganda in human flesh. The Romans' message was simple: They were number one. They were the best that had ever been and the best that would ever be. Their power was natural, their rule was ordained by the gods. To oppose them was like opposing the tide. Revolt was suicide.

On the other side of town there was a different sort of parade. It was hard to tell just what it was. It had elements of triumph, elements of advent, shaken and stirred together, that added up to mockery. Here was "conquering general" dusty and unpolished with no armor at all and mounted on a burro. There were no captives, no loot, no trailing army, only his band of men and women, themselves foot-weary and dirty. Jesus' followers began the cheering, but the crowd quickly caught on to the game and joined in: “Hosanna! Lord, save!” It was a traditional prayer shout. “Hosanna! Lord, save! Blessed is the one who comes in God's name! Hosanna!”

If the Romans were sending the message that resistance was futile and stupid, what was the message that Jesus was sending that day? Was it a way of holding Roman pretense up for ridicule? Was it a reminder to the people of the covenant that the God of the covenant was also a player in the human drama of Roman Jerusalem? If it is true that every revolution begins in the imagination--whether it imagines a world without hunger or one without the threat of gunfire in school, then what space did Jesus' little street drama open up for imagining God's dream?

Of course, this parade came with its risks. Any dissenting parade risks the reaction of the powers that be, whether they are the Roman governor and his legion or the NRA and its legion of bought and paid for politicians. In the case of the hundreds of thousands of kids who marched for their lives yesterday in the United States and around the world, the risk is of a backlash from people who tell them that they aren't qualified to protest their own endangerment, that they aren't smart enough to see through thread-bare arguments, that they aren't dedicated enough to last for the long haul, that they are pawns in the hands of a manipulative left. They have been insulted by people who not as smart as they are. They have been impugned by people whose allegiance is for sale. And all this while trying to recover from the trauma of losing friends, classmates, and teachers at the hand of someone with a weapon no civilian has any legitimate reason to buy, own, or use. They will overcome this opposition. If they persist, they will win.

For Jesus and his friends, the stakes were, if not higher, then certainly more immediate. The Roman occupiers would not allow an insult like this go unpunished. The Roman machine--with or without the cooperation of the Jewish elites--would crush this resistance. The process was put into motion that day. The end result would be the judicial murder of Jesus.

Now, what tyrants hope for is that those who envision a different world will accept the tyrants’ terms of engagement. Tyrants work hard to maintain a monopoly on violence. They understand violence. They know how to use it. Tyrants hope for rebels planning a violent rebellion. The history of Roman Palestine is littered with crushed movements that thought they could beat the Romans at their own game.

But that's not what Jesus does. He knows that Roman power, not only their political and economic power, but especially their power over the imagination, depends on the Roman's appearing to uphold justice. If the Romans can be enticed into making clear that their so-called justice is a pretense to cover their lust for power, their control over the imagination will collapse. If the Romans can be tempted into executing someone who refuses to play their game, someone who will not recognize their claim to justice, someone who--in the face of a dehumanizing regime--refuses to surrender their humanity, if the Romans can be enticed into that then their ideological regime will collapse and all that will be left is naked power. People might fear naked power, but they will never respect it. People might obey naked power, but they will never give their hearts to it. Regimes that are forced into using naked power teeter on the edge of collapse.

To put this into theological terms, Jesus understands that God's story is always a movement from slavery into freedom, from exile into homecoming, from death into life. He not only understands this but is willing to commit his life to it. Jesus understands and is resolved on what he is doing. Pontius Pilate does not understand, but he sees the certainty and commitment in Jesus and it scares him, as well it should. That is because Jesus has put Pilate in a position where he has no winning moves. Pilate makes one losing move after another and never more than when he orders Jesus to be killed.

Of course, we can't recognize this without skipping ahead to Easter. But then, we cannot help but skip ahead. We know how the story turns out. We've already heard it and cannot pretend not to.

Still, no matter how many times we've heard it, it always surprises us when someone not only hears the story but believes it to the point of stepping into it. It always surprises us when someone joins in the parade. It surprises us because by joining the parade they launch themselves on a trajectory that goes from a palm procession to a trial that leads to death and burial and only then to new life. It scares us, too. That's only normal. We don't see ourselves as made for the sort of big things that overthrow regimes. We don't see ourselves as the hinge of history that pivots on our decisions toward or away from God's dream. We're just ordinary people, not heroes.

Of course, heroes don't see themselves as heroes. They just do what they feel they have to do, even if it can't be done. Oscar Romero is one of that kind of hero. He came from a modest background. He trained for the priesthood which promised a modest sort of comfortable life. He was an able student. He made friends easily, one of whom, Rutilio Grande, was to influence his life deeply. He said the right things around the right people. He worked hard, loved his people, and stayed out of trouble. The church hierarchy thought he was a safe choice as the bishop of San Salvador. And that's how it might have turned out.

However, less than six weeks after he was appointed as the bishop of San Salvador, his seminary friend was assassinated. Fr. Rutilio had gone beyond caring for the poor people of El Salvador to asking why it was that they were poor. The answers he found infuriated the powers that be who saw to it that he paid with his life. Knowing Rutilio as he did, Oscar Romero could not see any other alternative than to follow the same path, to use his office as best he could not only to give help to the poor, but to proclaim their deliverance from poverty as part of the gospel. About three years later, about the same time as the traditional length of Jesus' ministry, Romero and El Salvador's powerful families were deeply in conflict. Romero demanded an end to repression, an end to the death squads, and an end to the assassination of his priests. These demands were treated with scorn in San Salvador, Washington, and even in Rome.

A few days before he was assassinated he said, "As a Christian I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will be raised in the Salvadoran people." Like Fr. Rutilio and countless others before him, and like Jesus long before that, he knew that the path he had chosen would lead to Good Friday and he trusted that it would also lead to Easter.

If we walk the Palm Sunday parade in the footsteps of Rutilio and Oscar we know that like them we follow Jesus. We know that this path leads to the struggles to be faithful and to what that faithfulness will cost us. These are the events of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. We know that this path leads us to the darkness and silence of Holy Saturday. We trust that these footsteps also lead on to the light and new life that await us on Easter.

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.

Good News for Gentiles Is Not Bad News for Jews (5th Sunday in Lent; John 19:1-16a; March 18, 2018)

Good News for Gentiles Is Not Bad News for Jews

5th Sunday in Lent
John 19:1-16a
March 18, 2018

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

For centuries across Europe villagers gathered in churches on Good Friday. On this day of high solemnity the Eucharist--what some of us call a communion service--was not celebrated. Instead, the people received communion by means of bread that had already been consecrated and was reserved for this occasion. They heard the story of Jesus' arrest, trial, execution, and burial from the version in John's gospel. They prayed, remembering their own moral failings. They received communion. They were sent away in silence. That was how Good Friday was observed for centuries.

Some years were different. In some years events had proven difficult. There was more than the usual amount of suffering. Perhaps the beer went bad, or the cheese wouldn't set properly, or a two-headed calf was born, or there were one too many still births or miscarriages. The whole community would be on edge, looking for and not finding adequate explanations of why these things happened or, more importantly, how to set things right again.

Almost as if by magic or by pre-arrangement, the eyes of Christians turned toward their neighbors, and not just any neighbors. The collective hostile gaze of the community fell on their Jewish neighbors. Ordinarily, the Christian and Jewish communities lived more or less peacefully with each other. Sure, from the perspective of Christians, Jews were peculiar people. They dressed a little strangely. The men all had long, full beards. They wore side-locks. They didn't observe the Christian rhythms of time, the Christian year, and the Christian holidays. Instead, they had their own rhythms. Perhaps most suspiciously, they refused perfectly good food. What after all, could possibly be wrong with people who would not eat bacon?

And then there was what is known to history as Jewish "blood guilt." The classic beginning of this notion is found in Matthew 27. In this passage, Pontius Pilate can find no particular reason to have Jesus killed, but the Jewish crowd has been stirred up and it demands Jesus' death. Pilate, while washing his hands, says, "I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves." "Then the people as a whole answered, 'His blood be on us and on our children.'" (27:25) Here in the story of Jesus' suffering, Jews--both the Jews of Jesus' day, and Jews through all of history--accept the blame for Jesus' death.

So, on some Good Fridays, after the readings, the prayers, and communion, the Christian community turned their hostile and accusative gaze toward their Jewish neighbors. They gathered, not as a congregation, but as a mob. They hurled insults at neighbors with whom they at other times might enjoy cordial relations, neighbors whom they might greet with calls of "Gut shabbas" when they saw them on Saturdays, some of whom greeted them in turn on December 25 with calls of "Merry Christmas."

Sometimes insults were not all that they hurled. Sticks and stones followed words. A Jewish man who resisted might be beaten or even killed. Houses were set afire.

The hatred of Jews by Christians has a long history, a shameful and violent history. We may think of it as culminating in the Holocaust perpetrated by the people who were considered at the time to be among the most rational and cultured people in the world, leaders in science, technology, philosophy, and the arts, the people who brought us Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. The deliberate, industrial slaughter of six million of Europe's Jews stands as the worst manifestation of the hatred of Jews, at least so far. But antisemitism is far from vanished. The last few years have shown us over and over that the hatred of Jews is alive and well in Western Europe and in that most Christian of nations, the United States. Like a bold cockroach it has in recent years crawled out from the dark places where it has been hiding and dares to march in public carrying tiki torches and chanting hate-filled slogans. The haters of Jews have moved into the daylight. Our President can even say that their hatred of Jews does not disqualify them from also being good people.

Hatred of Jews has a number of roots, but clearly, it is deeply rooted in texts that we call holy. Antisemitism draws some of its nourishment from the soil of Scripture. And the Gospel of John is a rich and fertile loam in which that hateful weed has grown particularly well.

I've made mention of it from time to time. But I've been on my way to somewhere and have not wanted to stop, instead noting where antisemitism has taken root here and there, promising to come back to it later. And now it is later. It's time to keep my promise.

The New Testament is in some ways actually less anti-Jewish than it appears. Its writers were all Jewish as far as we know. Paul, James, John of the Revelation, the authors of the gospels, and even Jude were all Jews engaged in a struggle with other Jews to define what being a faithful Jew was really all about. They used Jewish sources, Jewish traditions, and Jewish rhetorical forms to do this. The New Testament is a Jewish document. When these writings criticize "the Jews" they clearly don't mean "all Jews." At very least when they write "the Jews" they mean this as shorthand for "those other Jews, the ones who aren't like us."

Then, too, the Jews who wrote the New Testament were not the only Jews struggling with other Jews to define what it meant to be Jewish. Other writings by other Jews have survived. They use the same strategies and the same rhetoric. Their opponents are called "the Jews" sometimes and sometimes "false Jews." Like Paul does, sometimes the opponents are "Jews" and "false Jews" at the same time in the same writing. If we don't know this, the New Testament looks even more anti-Jewish than it is.

On the other hand there is genuine animosity toward Jews in places like the Gospel of John. I hope we haven't forgotten that John's community had been traumatized. They had found themselves cut off from their own people, officially disowned by what passed for official Judaism in their city, exposed to threat of persecution by the imperial authorities because they could no long claim the privileges of a recognized religion. They could be forced to choose between making a sacrifice to the "genius" of the emperor or being punished with torture, exile, or death for being atheists and traitors.

For my part I don't begin to believe that what John's community was suffering was entirely the fault of the leaders of their synagogue. I suspect that they had been pretty obnoxious synagogue members. I suspect that they lobbied constantly for recognizing Jesus as Messiah against the opinion of the rest of the community. I suspect that their expulsion was also a kind of self-exile, the sort of thing that happens when we find ourselves in deep conflict with our boss and end up unemployed but no one can say for certain whether we quit or were fired.

Traumatized people tend to do two things and both of those things happen in John's gospel. The first is that they are unable to see any mixture of good and evil in those who had perpetuated this trauma. The second is that the circle of perpetrators tends to expand to include anyone who is not willing to join the survivors in their totalizing judgment against the perpetrators. "Those who are not with us are against us."

The Jewish leaders come off really badly in John's gospel. They often not only have bad actions, they have bad motives as well. There is nothing redeemable about them. And this rubs off on the Jewish masses as well, as we see in the crowd scenes.

Trauma becomes a distorting filter. An objective telling of the events is the loser. For example, Pontius Pilate comes off in our reading as a weak man, unable to enforce his will or govern his province. He lets himself be led around by the nose. At the slightest hint that the Jewish priesthood will report him to his superiors as being soft on treason, he caves and allows himself to be manipulated into killing Jesus who, according to him, is no threat to Rome.

This historian rises to say that this is nonsense. In the first place, Judea had a reputation as a province that was difficult to govern. There was never real peace there, only the absence of outright hostilities. Rome knew perfectly well that the only way to govern Judea was with an iron hand. In Pontius Pilate, they had a person who was able to do what needed to be done. Pontius Pilate was given a great deal of latitude for these reasons. He, not the local leadership, held the power.

One example of the humiliating powerlessness of the Jewish leadership was this: On the feast day of Yom Kippur, the high priest had to go into the Holy of Holies and offer sacrifices there. There were special vestments, special robes, that were worn only on Yom Kippur and only by the high priest. These essential vestments were stored, not in the Temple, but in the palace of the governor. The high priest himself was required to walk from the Temple to the Praetorium, to ask “pretty please” for his vestments, and to stand waiting outside the gate until they were brought out.

At most the local leadership were like the Jewish prisoners whom Nazis put in the completely untenable position of running the labor and death camps of the Nazi regime. The priests enjoyed a good standard of living and a little power when it came to matters relating strictly to the Temple (and not a great deal of that, even). In exchange for that they had to satisfy both the Jewish people and their Roman overlords. It was impossible.

John's Gospel goes pretty far not only to blame the Jewish authorities but also to excuse the Romans. And for good reason. Cut off from the synagogue, any hint that they held the Romans responsible for the death of Jesus would have been regarded by the Empire as a treasonable accusation of injustice. So we have the priests stirring up the crowd who demand Jesus' death. And we have a literary Pontius Pilate too frightened to respond as the real Pontius Pilate would have responded to such a breakdown of public order: He would have had his soldiers “disperse” the crowd with swords and spears. He would have had the priests arrested and flogged.

It is completely understandable that John's version is told the way that it is. I think it is even excusable.

What is not excusable is that Christians continue to read John and the gospel stories and conclude that the death of Jesus was brought about by the Jewish authorities. No, Jesus was killed because he represented a threat to Roman power. Period. End of paragraph.

The hatred of Jews has been supported for centuries by failing to read the New Testament correctly. A continuing failure places us--that is, Christians--on the side of the neo-Nazis with their tiki torches, their ugly chants, and the hatred that they want enshrined in public policy. Christians had a chance to resist this deadly ugliness some eighty years ago. We blew it. Six million Jewish men, women, and children were killed as a result.

It is time to recognize that we need a new reading of our foundational documents. It is time to recognize that, if early Christians had any reason to resent their treatment by the Jewish authorities, we have no cause for resentment at all. It is time to acknowledge the Jewish character of our sacred texts, the Jewish tradition of respectful disputation, and the long, sad history of the Christian hatred of Jews. It is time for Christians to recognize our great and unpayable debt to the Jewish tradition and our profound gratitude for the vision and grace that have come to us through the Jesus who was a Jew, born to Jews, raised by and among Jews, whose life and teaching were devoted to justice for Jews. It is time. This time we must not fail.

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Truth (Fourth Sunday in Lent; John 18:28-40; March 11, 2018)

Truth

Fourth Sunday in Lent
John 18:28-40
March 11, 2018

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

"What is truth?" Pilate wants to know.

Jesus left the question unanswered. I wonder if he did that because it wasn't a question that could be answered, at least not usefully, or because he decided to leave it as homework for us to do. A couple of centuries-worth of theologians and philosophers of religion thought it was their job to repair Jesus’ omission so they set out to answer the question that Pilate asks. They don't do that so much these days. The question has become a complicated one.

Truth has fallen on hard times. Subjected to "alternative facts" on the one hand and "fake news" on the other, it's hard for truth to get a word in edgewise. It's harder still for those who are listening to what passes for civic conversation to sort through all the noise and hear something that, if it isn't quite truth, at least bears some resemblance to it.

Part of the problem has to do with language. Language itself has fallen on hard times. Oh, there is no shortage of words. There are more words than ever. Cable TV has sliced and diced the available watchers into smaller and smaller tribes. The social media allow for any crackpot with a smart phone to spew their poison where some poor hungry souls come along and mistake poison for food and drink. There is no shortage of words.

But the words themselves don't seem to carry as much as they did, or at least as much as we thought they did. If the money supply increases without an increase in the goods and services for sale, the result is inflation. It's the same money, but it's worth less and less. Maybe if there are too many words and no increase in truth, the result is a kind of linguistic inflation, and words are worth less and less.

One category of truth can stand for the whole: promises. We're all familiar with what happens to truth in the game of politics where campaign promises are not commitments to policy, but ways of gathering this or that tribe of voter. But playing fast and loose with truth is not confined to politics. It is the meat and potatoes of advertizing. We are promised eternal youth in a jar and all we have to do is to buy it and smear it on our faces. Men are promised that they will have to beat beautiful women away with a stick if only they buy the right kind of car. Frankly, I'm glad that a Toyota Yaris is not on the approved list of cars; one beautiful woman is quite enough for me!

It was against this sort of erosion of truth that Jesus warned when he taught us never to swear an oath. We shouldn't have two kinds of speech: one that has no obligation toward truth and another that does. In my quest to keep advancing my knowledge of Spanish, I have watched a telanovela--what we would call a soap opera--or two. I have learned that, regardless of the context, the phrase, te lo juro [I swear it], always either immediately follows or immediately precedes a lie. Oddly, the other person in the conversation rarely notices this. The phrase te lo juro is emptied of any truth value and is simply a request for trust which trust has been or will be immediately broken.

Truth has fallen on hard times.

Most people outside of the academy have not really taken much notice of this, but language has taken a beating in the last three or four decades. We used to have some confidence that language and reality were pretty close companions, that reality could be described adequately with the right words in the right order. In the middle of the last century people who study language noticed two things. First, words have more to do with each other than they have to do with reality. A word is defined by other words and those words are defined by still more words and there really is no end. To paraphrase an anonymous Hindu, it's words all the way down.

Second, language is a tool for managing the social and material world around us. That is, while words can be used in the service of beauty or caring or any of a hundred other things, words are always also about power. And this is never more true than when they claim that they are not interested in power at all. This discovery has taught me that, when someone tells me that they want to be my representative in Washington that they will be in Washington and I will not. "I want to be your voice in Washington" means that they will be in Washington talking and my voice will be here in Decorah. Truth has fallen on hard times.

The worst blow of all, though, may come from the neuroscientists. We like to believe that when we make decisions we consider the facts and we reason our way to wise outcomes. Neuroscience has learned that decision-making is a complex process involving various regions of the brain most of which have nothing to do with logic. This raises the possibility that at least some decisions are made before we are even aware of them and the logic of the choice comes afterward. Truth has fallen on hard times.

For fundamentalists--Christian and otherwise--the response to this is to double down on truth, but more than that. Their response is to double down on truth as something they can access and even possess. The Franklin Grahams of our world are sure that they are the arbiters of truth. They have not only decided on truth for themselves, but have decided on it for all of us as well. They mistake their own limited perspective for God's.

When someone believes that they know the truth, that their perspective is God's perspective, they--in the words of the Lord's Prayer about the worst thing that can happen to us humans, the one thing we pray to be spared--are easily led "into temptation." They own the truth. The rest of us, in so far as we disagree with them, are living in ignorance. But it's not just ignorance. It's willful ignorance. Our ignorance to them is a moral failure that must be corrected. Thinking this is the first temptation.

The second temptation--even more awful than the first--is for them to decide that it is up to them to fix us with any means they have at their disposal. This is the moral justification that lies at the heart of abuse. It is because of this kind of thinking on the part of the leaders of their synagogue that John's community is going through their grief and pain. Someone has tried to "fix" them when they didn't need fixing. Pontius Pilate was a procurator sent by Rome to Jerusalem to fix the Jews, to turn them from superstition to embrace Roman truth and Roman law.

These ancient figures have their counterparts today. I suppose that Franklin Graham would like to fix me. I know that he wants to fix Muslims or, failing that, to destroy them. There are churches that want to fix gay kids and invite their parents to submit their gay children to "conversion" therapy--a kind of Stockholm-syndrome brain-washing--to turn them straight. There are men who believe that women need fixing so they will respond gratefully to their unwanted advances. There are parents who want to fix their children so that they no longer explore and question the world or speak out against injustice. These are the bullies that worry me the most, because they have the greatest power to do damage, but most of all because they sincerely believe that the damage they are doing is in the service of truth.

What they have all failed to notice is that we humans are finite, limited, and--in the grand scale of things--small. We only have 80 billion brain cells apiece. And that's not enough to grasp truth in anything like a comprehensive way even if we used all of our brain cells to do it, including the brain cells we now use to remember our favorite foods and how to scratch where it itches. Still less will truth fit into language in anything like a comprehensive way.

Agent Mulder of X-Files was right, but not quite in the way that he thought. The truth is indeed out there, but only in the sense that it is always beyond us and our power to comprehend it.

Comprehending the truth is harder than it looks. I've noticed this when people want to discredit faith as a way of living in the world. Here is what I hear them doing. They start with a notion that there is this big ball of stuff we don't know. Their claim against God is that God is merely a "God of the gaps", a figure invented to represent that big ball of stuff we don't know. But, they say, as science advances, we learn more and more about that big ball of stuff. We learn where babies come from. We learn how the solar system works. We learn about germs and how to fight them. The big ball of stuff we don't know gets a little smaller. We learn more and the ball shrinks. And, of course, the "God of the gaps" gets smaller right along with the ball. Eventually, they tell us, the ball will disappear. We'll know everything about everything and God's reason for being will disappear. And God will disappear right along with it. Then with ignorance defeated forever, humans will control their own destiny. This is the myth of the Enlightenment. It is the modernist dream.

But it all rests on a single metaphor: the big ball of stuff we don't know. But what if we start from the other end? What if we start with the little ball of stuff we know something about? Then our sciences, as they push into the unknown, as they answer questions, make the ball of stuff we know about bigger. It's like blowing up a balloon. The bigger the balloon gets, the bigger its surface area becomes. The bigger the ball of stuff we know about gets, the more questions emerge about what we don't know.

If we start from this end, the ball gets bigger and bigger. The more we know, the more we know how little we know. And there is no reason to suppose that this will ever change. Already it won't fit into 80 billion brain cells. So there is no possibility of our possessing the truth.

We might have taken a clue from the word "comprehension." The word has Latin roots. The prefix "com" comes from cum, "with," that usually functions as an intensifier when it's stuck on the front of a verb. The rest of it comes from the word prehendere, "to lay hold up, seize, grasp." When we claim that we comprehend something, the root idea is that we have "grasped" something, that now we have it, now we can use it, now we own it. But we may have that precisely backwards.

When I was appointed to my first charge in Iowa, the Vinton, Stewart Memorial and Urbana change, I often visited church members in St. Luke's Hospital in Cedar Rapids. In those days they actually had printouts of patients listed by denomination in the chaplain's office. There was a small sign with plain lettering on the wall where I could not help but see it when I went in to review the printout before I went to visit my church members. It said simply, "Humility is truth."

Jesus is not reported ever to have said, "Humility is truth" in so many words, but I think he would have agreed. A humble relationship with truth may have been in the back of Jesus' mind when he said, "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." That's when Pilate asked his question.

Jesus testifies. Jesus doesn’t own the truth; he testifies. Jesus tells what he has seen and heard and he tells what believes about it. We, we who listen to his voice, we who pay attention to his testimony, we do not have the truth. Truth has us. We do not comprehend. We have been comprehended. We don’t need to fix anyone. All we have to do is testify.

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