Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Nov. 25, 2012 Proper 29
John 18:33-3733Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” 34Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” 35Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?” 36Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” 37Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. 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.”
Welcome, friends, to this brave new world where Twinkies and Dolly Madison cream filled cup cakes are no longer available. The combination of the legalization of pot in several states occurring at the same time as the disappearance of these snack cakes has sent many stoners into a panic and yet the world marches on.
Personally, I’m suspicious of any packaged food that I can put on the shelf and just open and eat two weeks or two years later. The disappearance of items like this from convenience store shelves is probably good for public health but I am disturbed by the classically dishonest way that it has all been portrayed in the media.
Our age has become so pro-corporation and so anti-worker that we seem to be willing to believe even the most blatant of anti-union rhetoric from our corporate owned media. Yes, the employees who make less than $20 an hour at Hostess were on strike because, while corporate executives were giving themselves raises of between 60 and 100%, and the CEO gave himself a 300% raise…. These executives simultaneously were trying to cut baker’s pay by 8% and cut their benefits by more than 30%.
While filing for bankruptcy, corporate executives borrowed $160 million dollars from workers’ pension holdings…. Money they will not have to pay back in bankruptcy. But it was those poor, low salaried workers that drove Hostess out of business! Lily Tomlin once said, “No matter how cynical I become, I just can’t keep up.”
The morning news this week included very one sided reports on the war along the border of the Gaza Strip and Israel. A handsome, blond Israeli reporter with a very American accent spoke forcefully on CNN about the bombing of a bus in Tel Aviv in which 15 were tragically killed. The reporter went on to say that the terrorist bombing was being celebrated in Gaza with adults handing out candy to children in joyous reveling at the deaths of innocent civilians. He told us that Israeli’s try to avoid civilian deaths when they strike in Gaza but the Hamas militants target Israeli civilians.
They would have us to believe that the Palestinians are morally bankrupt if not actually sub-human. What is missing from the main stream media is any kind of honest description of the imbalance of the conflict. There are one and half million people living in Gaza, most of whom are not a part of Hamas. They have been under a blockade for more than 2 years.
Yes, they are firing missiles and they probably had help from Iran to build those missiles. But what they don’t have is a navy, what they don’t have are heavily armed F-16 fighter jets and they don’t have heavy artillery. Yes, Hamas stoops to terrorism, but given the military might of Israel, this is not a war…. It comes closer to being murder.
You will not hear that said on CNN or ABC or NBC but don’t assume that I am over stating the facts. They are under stating the facts and distorting the information. I’m not trying to be anti-Israel…. I count myself as being among those people who fell in love with Jerusalem upon my first visit there thirty years ago.
But people, there are numbers…. Facts are not conservative or liberal…. Math is not pro-Israel or anti-Palestine….. even counting that bus bombing there had been fewer than 20 Israeli deaths in this current exchange of missiles and more than a hundred deaths in Gaza. And even though this very handsome reporter tells us that Israel only targets military sites, among those 100 casualties there were 24 children and 10 women. Those are facts.
Ibrahim Shatali, a training officer in Gaza for the American Society of Friends teaches in a Palestinian youth program. He wrote this week:
My father sought refuge in Gaza after being forced to leave Majdal in 1948. He was only twelve years old when he accompanied his parents to what was thought to be a safer place.
Today, we have to go to a funeral at my cousin’s who lost his four-year-old twins and other members of his family. It is very sad. I live in my family’s home together with my five brothers, their wives, and offspring. You are talking about moving a human mass of thirty children towards the stairway every time an explosion is heard in the vicinity. The Islamic National Bank targeted this morning is 500 meters away from our home and 150 meters from the (our) office.
Every day the series of explosions begins at 6 pm and escalates until 6 am at which time we try to steal some hours of sleep. No one is exempt from this terrifying experience.
Israel has the big weapons and pro-Israeli interests own most of the big media, but you own the truth, no one can take that away from you unless you willingly give in to the empire.
Our scripture lesson this morning comes from that dramatic confrontation in John’s account of Jesus’ trial before Governor Pilate. A lot of progressive scholars tend to be very dismissive about John’s gospel. It is written long after the actual events and it shows little sign of being concerned about history. If you want to know what Jesus of Nazareth said and did, most scholars would tell you that John is a pretty pour source.
But, of course, we didn’t come here for a history lesson…. I hope you didn’t. Most gospel accounts are not historical. The gospels are sermons. The gospels tell stories that employ metaphor, similes, parables and stories.
Some of my students in my university classes object loudly that if they are not historical, why should we read them at all? That is a very modern sort of concern. We tend at times to be very fact literal about things without having an appropriate concern for meaning.
The gospel writers, and this is especially true for John, were not so concerned with filling the later church in on historical details…. They wanted to convey the message, the moral, the meaning of the Jesus movement. John isn’t showing us a photograph of Jesus before Pilate, he is painting a word picture.
It is an image of a poor, uneducated, tortured, powerless peasant standing in front of the heavily armed, very powerful representative of the empire that ruled the world and owned all of the world’s wealth. And the people who looked at this image John painted already knew what was going to happen….they knew that the powerful empire would murder the peasant in the most painful way imaginable.
The empire would seek to make an example of this poor man, nailing him up onto a post by the road like a billboard sign that reads, “This is what happens to those who defy the power of the empire.” And yet, Jesus is defiant, unafraid, in fact, it seems, the way John wants us to see it, Jesus is the powerful one because, when all the blood is dried and the crosses are gone…. No one sings hymns to Pilate. No one tells Pilate stories. No one defines their lives as being followers of Pilate.
The empire murdered the peasant, but look at us, 2000 years later, we’re still talking about the peasant in a million houses of worship all over the globe. But still, the metaphors of the gospels are not written to make you look at Jesus and say, “Wow.” Here is the truth of the matter….. these stories are not historically true because what would it matter if they were or they weren’t? They are morally true…. And not as stories about great martyrs who deserve for us to immortalize their names.
Men and women, these stories are not ultimately about Jesus….. Jesus had been dead for three generations when this was written down. This story is about the Jesus community. This isn’t about what happened; this is about what you can do tomorrow. The gospel isn’t buried in the past, it is buried in your heart so that when the empire asks you to believe a lie, to be passive in the presence of violence and bloodshed….
It asks you to stand up for the truth with the poor who are being fired and whose pensions are being stolen from them, when their homes are being foreclosed, when they are being denied access to health care or housing in the name of the religion of profit. This story isn’t about Jesus in any historical sense; this story is intended for you to see yourself standing in front of the empire, for you to think about it before it happens.
The real Christian religion has always been about orthopraxy over orthodoxy. The empire wants to turn all religions into orthodoxy…. Make it all about beliefs that exist only between your ears because that religion never threatens the empire… that religion, ultimately serves the empire. I often call traditional Christianity “the religion of Constantine,” the religion the emporer demanded that everyone follow. But that religion doesn’t follow Jesus, it worships Pilate and everything Pilate represented…. The religion of domination of the weak, of veneration of military and economic power.
Our religion, our faith, our practice, is to stand up before the empire, armed only with the truth. As Gandhi said in his battle with the empire that oppressed his people: At first they ignore us. Then they make fun of us. Then they fight us. Then we win.
In the case of Jesus there may be one more step…. First they ignore us, then they make fun of us, then they fight us, then …. They torture and kill us…. But, still, then we win.
