Sought Out by New Life and a New Civilization
A Sermon by Jeff Carlson
St. Pauls United Church of Christ, Chicago
April 6, 2014
Text: John 18:28-40
The Jewish leaders took Jesus to Pilate’s headquarters. It was early in the
morning. They themselves did not enter the headquarters, so as to avoid
ritual defilement and to be able to eat the Passover. So Pilate went out to
them and said, “What accusation do you bring against this man?” They
answered, “If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him
over to you.” Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and judge him
according to your law.” They replied, “We are not permitted to put anyone to
death.”
Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him,
“Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your
own, or did others tell you about me?” Pilate 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?” Jesus 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. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”
Pilate 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.” Pilate asked
him, “What is truth?”
After he had said this, he went out again and told them, “I find no case against
him. But you have a custom that I release someone for you at the Passover.
Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?” They shouted in
reply, “Not this man, but Barabbas!” Now Barabbas was a bandit.
Over the Sundays of Lent we’ve been slowly following Jesus through the last hours
leading up to the crucifixion. We’ve stretched Good Friday out over four weeks. I
don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m more eager for Easter than I’ve ever been!
Today we find Jesus standing alone, on trial for being some sort of king.
I nearly had us say the Apostles’ Creed this morning instead of our usual statement
of faith. That’s because besides the name Jesus, the names of two other people are
found in that ancient statement of faith: “He was born of the Virgin Mary. He
suffered under Pontius Pilate.” Mary at his birth, and Pilate at his death.
Our text today says he is taken to Pilate’s headquarters. The actual word in the text
is not “Pilate’s headquarters,” it’s praetorium. If that word sounds like Latin to you,
that’s because it is. It’s one of the rare Latin words that’s used in the New Testament.
The praetorium was the official residence of a Roman governor, sort of like the
Roman Embassy. It’s a reminder that Jesus is now standing fully on Roman turf. He’s
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in the praetorium, an outpost of the Roman Empire. The one who is being called
King of the Jews is standing before the representative of Caesar, who claims to be
king of the world.
Pilate had a tough job. He was placed in a province that was full of trouble-makers,
and rabble-rousers, and he was charged with keeping the peace. The Jews were a
difficult population to control, because they keenly resisted Caesar’s claim to be king
of the world. Jesus lived at a time when violent uprisings against the Empire were
commonplace in Palestine. Now Pilate’s been woken up once again in the middle of
the night, “Great, yet another agitator I’ve got to deal with.”
You can tell from Pilate’s questions that he is an urbane and sophisticated man. His
parents no-doubt afforded him an excellent education at the Latin School, being
Roman after all. Pilate is the voice of reason in this story. His education had taught
him to ask rhetorical questions from which he expected no real answer: What is
truth?
What answer would you give? How do you know whether or not something is true?
Does truth consist in facts? Information? Techniques? Is truth what gets results,
what works? Do you know that something’s true because it just feels right, or
because it’s the way it’s always been done?
Truth is a favorite word in John. It occurs in this gospel three times more than the
others combined. It’s in John that we hear Jesus make that audacious claim that
grates on our pluralistic ears: “I am the way, the truth and the life.” For Jesus, truth
seems to be less about facts or beliefs, and more about a lifestyle, a pathway; and he
links truth directly with himself.
But Pilate isn’t really interested in truth. Public opinion and pleasing the crowd are
more important to him than any ideal of truth. If he has to get rid of this so-called
King of the Jews to keep the peace, so be it. Truth, for Pilate, is meant to be
contemplated, not lived.
If you put yourself in his shoes, though, Pilate must have thought that Jesus was off
his rocker. This man claims to have a kingdom. A kingdom of one? Where are his
loyal subjects? Where’s his military? Where’s his wealth? And what kind of a
delusional character says, “My kingdom is not from this world”? If science fiction
had been a genre at the time, Jesus sounds like someone who believes he’s from
another planet.
We like to think of Jesus as a great, moral teacher, a spiritual leader. A prophet. And
he is all of those things. But we have done such a fine job of separating church and
state, of consigning Jesus to the spiritual realm, that we’ve managed to overlook that
the word kingdom is an entirely political word.
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Political language is in the Jesus story right from the start. We hear it every year at
Christmas, when Jesus is born of Mary. What do the magi ask after they’ve followed
the star? “Where is he that is born king of the Jews?” And when Jesus begins his
public ministry, the first thing he says is, “Repent, for the Kingdom of God has come
near.”
Remember the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness? The devil offers him all the
kingdoms of the world. Jesus could have grasped their power right then and there.
He could have taken charge of things. And we wish that he had. But to do that, Jesus
would have had to use violence, because the kingdoms of this would don’t give up
their control without a fight. What Jesus would have attained would not have been
the Kingdom of God.
Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to little things, things that have small
beginnings, like yeast leavening bread, or a mustard seed growing up into a tall tree.
His kingdom comes through eating meals with the wrong crowd and showing
hospitality to strangers. His kingdom comes through touching lepers, and feeding
the hungry. He directs our attention to tiny things: the birds of the air and the
flowers of the field. He responds to enemies by forgiving them. This is a kingdom
that comes among us peacefully and slowly.
And so, as he stands alone before Pilate, approaching his death, Jesus says that if his
kingdom were from this world, his followers would be fighting to keep him alive.
But this king chooses to be killed rather than to kill, because his kingdom is from a
strange, new world.
I enjoy science fiction films probably more than any other genre. It was with deep,
deep sadness that I watched the final episode of Battlestar Galactica. Despite the
reference to Star Trek in today’s sermon title, I’m far from being a Trekkie, not that
there’s anything wrong with being a Trekkie. I have dear friends who are Trekkies.
They go to Star Trek conventions where they dress up as Klingons and Romulans.
They learn their languages and table habits and customs and live an alternative,
alien lifestyle.
I was 14 the summer when Star Wars was released. I did not grow up going to
movies very often. My parents considered them too “worldly,” and they, of course,
were right. Movies are from this world, but avoiding the movies didn’t keep me from
growing up to be very, very much of this world.
I did get to see Star Wars, though, at the Vista Theatre in Boise, Idaho, and I was
blown away. I had never seen anything like those special effects in my 14 years. The
film created whole new civilizations, with their various languages and music and
that dualistic religious system. Of course, in the end, the Star Wars world is
remarkably similar to our own, because it did not come from a long time ago in a
galaxy far, far away. It came from the force within George Lucas’ mind.
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That same summer I went backpacking with my dad in the Sawtooth Mountains of
Idaho. It was a wilderness area, remote and removed. The only civilization there
was whatever we could pack in and pack out. We hiked several miles up into the
mountains and made our camp in high, alpine country. At night we sat under a vast
dome of stars, without any interference from the lights of this world.
It’s good for us city dwellers to do that. The artificial lights of the world tend to hem
us in under their dome. When you’re sitting at your desk in your office, trying
desperately to meet the demands of your demeaning boss; when you’re grieving the
deep loss of a loved one and keenly feeling the pain; when you’re anxious about your
health or concerned about your daughter who’s having a tough time at college a
thousand miles away, it’s easy to get so turned in on your life and its problems that
you lose your hope, you forget to breathe, you forget to look up.
But when you’re standing on the edge of Lake Michigan, or lying under the vast arc
of space, your mind can expand and overwhelm you with the sense of how small
your life is in the vastness of the universe. Feeling small can sometimes be a good
thing, because God pays attention to tiny things, like birds and flowers and seeds.
Lying under the stars, I asked my dad whether he believed there was life on other
planets. Now, I’ve told you before that for my father answers to questions of that
nature had to square with scripture. He believed the world was created in a literal 6
days, roughly 6,000 years ago. It was Noah’s flood that made the dinosaurs go
extinct. The reason we could see the light coming from those stars that were
millions of light years away was because when God created the universe roughly
6,000 years ago, he created the stars with ancient light.
But the answer he gave to my question about life on other planets, I was not
expecting at all. He replied, “Well, there might be.” Whoa! Where is that in the Bible?
He went on about how Jesus told the story of the shepherd who had 100 sheep. One
of them wanders off, and the shepherd leaves the 99 behind and goes out to seek
that one, lost sheep. There might be 99 or even hundreds of planets in the universe
with life on them that have not wandered away. But we have, our tiny planet earth.
God came to us in Jesus because our world is that one, lost sheep.
I think that’s one of the best answers he ever gave me.
Despite the best efforts of our civilizations, we are lost, because we still have not
learned how to live in peace: our violence and ethnic rivalry; the gross disparity in
the quality of human life; and the poverty of our world all attest to our being very,
very lost. But God has a heart for people who are lost.
In Jesus, a new life and a new civilization have come into our lost world, and it’s
called the Kingdom of God. We don’t have to travel to a galaxy far, far away to find it,
because it looks like Jesus, and it is right in our midst.
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We come to church to imagine together what it means to live in the world as if Jesus
really has brought us another kingdom. We come to church not to learn how to be
good US citizens or how to be nice people. We gather together each Sunday to learn
a new language, a new culture, one that has a more compelling claim on our lives
than shopping.
What does it look like to have our lives shaped by the story of Jesus? Well, we don’t
have to look that far. When I did research for my thesis a year ago about why we do
what we do at St. Pauls, a consistent theme kept coming up. When we founded
Uhlich Home and St. Pauls House a hundred and more years ago, it was because
Jesus cared for little ones, for the least among us. When we opened our gym in 1968
to teenagers that were being gassed in the parks, or the Oscar Mayer Room to the
homeless, or when we became open and affirming, it was because the life of Jesus
was defined by hospitality. Jesus teaches us to talk to strangers. It’s the story of
Jesus that has shaped our life together.
I confess, I tend to be a far better American than I am a Christian. The culture of
America shapes my life far more deeply than following Jesus does. But thankfully
Jesus said there is hope for people like me, even if my faith is as small as a mustard
seed.
Pontius Pilate couldn’t recognize it, because his life had been so shaped by the
kingdom of Rome, but the true kingdom was standing right in front of him, and it
looked like Jesus. It’s hard even for us, who desire to follow him, to know what to
make of this non-violent, compassionate and utterly truthful king.
And so we keep telling his story. We teach it to our children, week after week. We
keep gathering around this communion table where strangers are called friends,
because it shines an ancient and eternal light that is older than the stars.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that coming to church is like going to a Star Trek
convention every Sunday. It’s a bit odd. We learn the language and table habits and
culture of an alien civilization called the Kingdom of God. But there’s a paradox to
that, because the more alien we become, the more we realize that we’re becoming
the truly human beings God is calling us to be.
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