Political Stories

Mark 11

Palm Sunday 2018

Throughout the season of Lent we have spent time during worship engaging some embodied prayer practices, ranging from prayers around the baptismal font to planting seeds to walking the labyrinth up in the chancel, among others. I am particularly fond of labyrinth walking, and I have taken advantage of having our labyrinth laid out since Ash Wednesday walking it several times each week.

As a Lenten spiritual practice, the labyrinth works well for me. To walk a labyrinth you have to pay close attention to your own steps, so it lends itself easily to the idea of a journey inward, a time of self-reflection, of tending to the well-being of one’s own soul, of listening for that still, small voice of God calling to you.

One would never confuse walking a labyrinth with being in a parade. Palm Sunday, with its triumphal approach to the city, invites us to lift our eyes and begins to call us out of ourselves and into the wider world.

I’ll pause right here to note that none of this journey inward/journey outward rhythm ought to be fixed artificially to the church calendar or any other calendar. There are no perfect times for any of this, just seasons in our own lives, the life of the community, and the life of the wider world that call forth particular responses from each of us.

The journey inward/journey outward rhythm, in fact, is more like breathing – its rhythm is constant and its practices essential to life.

Nevertheless, I’ve been intentionally reflective in recent weeks, watching with particular care the path right in front of me, keeping my eyes focused on the next step. I’ve been doing so with regard to my own journey and to our communal one as well.

And having walked with my vision focused inward for a number of weeks, I now find myself having stumbled straight into Holy Week. Sometimes we can get so focused on where we are that we lose sight of where we are going.

The parade of palms, the shouts of “hosanna!,” the canted hymn “blessed is the One who comes in the name of the lord!” are all ways of insisting that we wake up, that we lift up our heads, that we pay attention to what is going on not only within us, but also around us.

The original parade of palms, after all, was not a liturgical observance. It wasn’t some quaint religious rite with no consequence. It was political street theater designed to provoke the authorities and undermine their power.

Riding to the city’s gates on a donkey punctured the self-inflated ego of military leaders who paraded through those same gates on war-horses. Walking into the temple to take a good look around, as Jesus does immediately after the Palm Sunday parade in Mark’s account, seems likely to have been a bit of reconnaissance prior to the direct action in the temple the following day. If this Jesus – King of the Jews – was to be ruler he was clearly imagining a different kind of reign and seizing a differing kind of power.

That his power and reign would be different does not mean that they would not be political. That is to say, this direct action campaign in Mark’s gospel was aimed at particular seats and structures of power and, specifically, Jesus aimed at systems that abused and disenfranchised the poor, women, and the ritually unclean. In other words, Jesus was taking aim at systems that took advantage of the marginalized and kept them in their place.

Reading this text compels me to lift up my head and take a good look around, to step out of the labyrinth and into the march. I can imagine the signs in that march: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” or “Love your neighbor – your poor neighbor” or “Welcome the stranger for you were a stranger once” or, simply “Do Justice.” Heck, some particularly smart-ass disciples might have come marching in waving signs reading: “Woe to you: You brood of vipers.”

The gospel of Jesus the Christ is a political story from start to finish; it demeans the text and diminishes the faith to claim otherwise. The question, of course, is what kind of politics?

I have said it often from this pulpit, and it bears repeating: God is not a Republican … or a Democrat. The story of Jesus is simply much larger than small-bore partisan politics. There is not a liberal education or taxation or defense policy that is Christian and a conservative education or taxation or defense policy that is not, nor vices to all those versas, as it were.

At the same time, Jesus did not come to Jerusalem and confront the powers that be of this world simply to say to his followers, “all this stuff I’m been teaching you about justice is about the next world and it has nothing to do with this world.” Indeed, had that been Jesus’ message, the powers that be in this world would have said, “oh, hey, that Jesus is alright with us.”

That’s not what the story says, because that’s not what happened. The powers that be in this world wanted Jesus dead.

They wanted him dead because he threatened their power. They wanted him dead because he threatened their position. They wanted him dead because he wanted them gone.

While the story of Jesus is much larger than our small-bore partisan politics, the values at the core of the politics of Jesus speak directly to our politics, and the first thing they say is, “think larger.”

That was perhaps the first thing the politics of Jesus said to his own contemporaries: think larger. Your politics are too small. Your vision is too narrow. Your imagination is … well, you lack any.

Throughout Mark’s gospel Jesus continuously prods his followers to lift their eyes, to refocus their vision, to expand their imagination, to get a new mind for a new time.

The weird little anecdote about the withered fig tree that follows directly on Mark’s account of the entry to Jerusalem underscores this. Figs were a symbol of peace and prosperity – everyone will sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one will make them afraid, as Micah put it. Heading into Jerusalem, where this direct action campaign will confront the temple authorities, Jesus points to the fig tree and says, in effect, don’t look to the traditional authorities, the powers that be, to provide the peace you seek. It is not their time, it is our time.

In other words, lift up your heads. Think bigger.

If we are to imagine a politics of Jesus in our time we must lift up our heads and think bigger. It is abundantly clear that the peace we seek, the justice we seek, the equal treatment before the law that we seek will not come from politics as usual in our time. That fig tree has withered.

If we lift up our heads, if we think larger, if we get a new mind equal to the challenges of our time, what will that look like? What would a politics of Jesus look like in this moment?

It’s really not that complicated. Politics is, as the roots of the word indicate, about ordering the city – it’s about the shape and distribution of power to create the commonweal. The politics of Jesus in this – or any – time share these fundamental convictions:

·      Every policy focuses first on the needs of the least powerful members of a community. Jesus didn’t turn over the tables and drive out the money changers to get business out of the temple, he did it because those economic practices exploited and abused the poor, the widows, and the ritually unclean.

·      Every voice matters in all decisions, but the voices of the least matter most for God has a preferential option for the poor. After all, the Spirit of the Lord fell upon Jesus ordaining him to preach good news to the poor not tax breaks to the wealthy.

·      Power is exercised only through nonviolence, for, as Dr. King put it, “power without love is reckless and abusive.” In the garden, at the moment of his arrest, Jesus said to his followers, “put away your sword.”

·      Truth matters, for, as Jesus put it, truth will set you free, and, as the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) insists, “truth is in order to goodness.”

We live in an age when national discourse is dominated by pernicious disregard for the truth, when our national leaders have demonstrated continuously that national policy will ignore the needs of the poor in favor of easing taxes on the wealthy, when disenfranchising the least powerful voters is blatant political strategy and giving voice to massive corporations and financial institutions is politics as usual for Republicans and Democrats alike, and when state-sanctioned violence at every level of government is the order of the day.

In such a context, it should be clear, articulating a politics of Jesus is daunting and dangerous. Looking for such a politics from within our current political system and structures is not likely to be any more fruitful than looking for figs from a withered tree. Moreover, building such a politics inevitably entails challenging the powers and principalities, and they are no more likely to appreciate such challenge in our time than were the high priests and temple officials of Jesus’ time.

All of which is to say, looming in the background of our parades and our politics, stands the cross. Its presence, as reminder of the consequences of challenging the powers and principalities, is certainly one of the reasons that so many of us prefer to keep our heads down, our eyes on our own next small step trying to stay within the lines of the labyrinth before us, our imaginations carefully circumscribed.

We may harbor dreams. We may even put them on some signs and carry them out along a parade route. But when the cross comes more clearly into view, most of us rush to set aside the dreams and cast the signs into the dustbin of history.

Our loud “hosannas!” turn so quickly into cries of “crucify him!”

As followers of the crucified one, we are left in the garden without the energy to stay awake to the profound challenge of our time. We enter holy week, longing to rush to Easter, unable to remain awake, unwilling to confront the cross.

Let us pray.

Cosmic Stories

John 12:20-36

March 18, 2018

There’s a lot going on in the world these days. So much tugs for attention, and it’s so easy to give in to distraction. It can all be overwhelming. I can’t quite imagine what Jesus must have felt like at the point of the story we catch up with this morning: he’s in Jerusalem – John’s account of Palm Sunday immediately precedes the passage we just read so we’re slightly out of sync here on the fifth Sunday of Lent. But that’s OK.

The crowds are growing, pressing in on all sides, and then “some Greeks” show up, apparently curious about the man at the center of the storm that was blowing through the city threatening that most frightening of all human conditions: change.

They just wanted to come and see for themselves. I think a lot of folks who flocked toward Jesus wanted to see something different from the way things were. But at this late date, the texts suggest, Jesus was beyond “come and see.”

If you recall, that phrase, that invitation, was how Jesus called the first disciples in John’s gospel. Jesus simply asked them, “what are you looking for?” And then said, “come and see.”

Some Greeks were looking for something, and they approach Philip, to whom Jesus had said, back in those simpler early days, “come and see.”

Philip, apparently a good Presbyterian, decides to form a committee. He goes to Andrew, to whom also Jesus had said, “come and see.” One imagines Roberts Rules emerging from the conversation between Philip and Andrew: “I move that we take the Greeks to see Jesus.” “I offer the substitute motion that we take the idea of the Greeks to Jesus.” “Shall the substitute motion become the main motion?” “So ordered.”

So, the ones who had heard, “come and see,” basically tell the Greeks, “sit and wait.” Then they go to tell Jesus about the Greeks.

Then things get weird. “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” And off Jesus goes.

This convoluted tale raises several questions that resonate for us:

First: Who gets to show Jesus, and how? Second: Who gets to see Jesus? And, third: what time is it, really?

Answering that first question – who gets to show Jesus – is one of the daunting challenges regularly poorly met by the organized church. That is to say, the institutional church has struggled for millennia to determine who shall be authorized to proclaim the gospel, to, in essence, show Jesus to the world.

The largest single part of the institutional church – the Roman Catholic part – has determined for centuries now that only unmarried, celibate men can be credentialed to show Jesus to the world. The Protestant part of the church, from its earliest days, opened the way for married men to become clergy. John Calvin, for example, was married during his years in Strasbourg, and he, along with many other early Reformers railed against the imposed celibacy of the Catholic priesthood.

If you think about that for even a solid second, you’ll see clearly that a religious movement grounded in the priesthood of all believers cannot long survive a celibate priesthood.

That, of course, was far from the final struggle over who can be authorized to proclaim the gospel by the institution of the church. In the past century, the Protestant church has struggled, schismed itself to pieces, and step by excruciatingly slow step authorized first women, then GLBTQ persons to be ordained to church offices.

Of course, even this extremely abbreviated side-trip through the history of ordination ought to raise for us the broader question of what it means to show Jesus to the inquiring world. That is to say, if “some Greeks” show up in our midst asking to see Jesus, how would we show them?

Last year I got to have lunch with Bishop Gene Robinson, and I’ll always recall his simple observation: people come to us seeking an encounter with Jesus and, instead, we give them the church.

I want to spend a couple of minutes in conversation about how we show Jesus to the world, but before we get to that, I want to touch briefly on the second question I raised earlier: who gets to see Jesus? That is also to ask, “who are these Greeks”? In the text, “some Greeks” is likely the author’s shorthand way of referring to the Gentile world, to the wider world beyond Jesus’ Jewish milieu, and certainly outside of his smaller circle of followers. That would have been a typical use of “Greeks.” For our purposes, we might say “some unchurched folks” or “some nones” – that’s N-O-N-E-S “nones,” as in those who check the “none” box in surveys asking about religious affiliation – dropped by and asked to see Jesus.

How would we respond? How do we show Jesus to the world? To begin with, it’s good to keep in mind the line that we print in the bulletin every single Sunday that names the ministers of the church. I’ll give you a couple of seconds to find that line ….

So, we share a common conviction that whatever it may mean to show Jesus to the world such ministry is our shared responsibility. We also understand, as the passage from Hebrews underscores, that Jesus offers the model for us to follow as the “high priest” of this priesthood of all. So, how do we do this? How do we show Jesus to the world?

* * * * *

That’s a fine beginning of an answer to the first complicated question: who gets to show Jesus and how do we do it? As to the second question, who gets to see Jesus, it is possible that the author of John also intended that “some Greeks,” in addition to representing the wider Gentile world, also represent folks most interested in the philosophical/theological question: who is Jesus?

Jesus response – “the hour is getting late” – suggests that the more pressing question is my third one: what time is it?

One could read the entirety of the gospel of John as a meditation on that question and on the nature of time. After all, the text starts with: “In the beginning was the Word,” and it ends with what I like to think of as the library at the end of the universe: “there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

In between, the author regularly includes references to time in setting the stories he does tell, and while Jesus is not in as much of a hurry in John as he seems to be in Mark – where everything happens “immediately” – he still knows the answer to that fundamental question: what time is it?

In the text this morning the answer is clear: the time for coming and seeing has past. Now it is time to come and follow.

Jesus understands the moment in terms of God’s time, Kairos time – it is a time to decide. That’s what makes this a cosmic story, a story the scale of the cosmos. Recall that in perhaps the best-known single verse in all of Christian scripture – John 3:16 – kosmos is what God so loves. The whole of creation – all of space and time, for now and for all time.

Jesus is concerned with cosmic questions because he understands the fierce urgency of now.

We tend to live our lives as if the steady tick-tock of the hours provides a comforting rhythm to the gentle flow of endless time that will always include us, until we wake up to the reality of our present time. The details of present disruptions to anything like a “gentle flow” is way too long for one Sunday morning, and even a simple list would take more time than we have.

In that context, the name given to next weekend’s action to reduce gun violence strikes me as perfectly appropriate to this moment: the March for Our Lives.

The kids providing the driving energy to respond to the massive disruption that gun violence is in America see time the same way Jesus did. It’s too late to come and see; it is time to stand up and follow.

There’s a reason they didn’t call the action next Saturday the March for Marginal Improvements to School Safety or the March for Incremental Changes to Gun Laws. They are marching for their lives.

We might want to keep that name in mind with respect to so much else that makes our time so fraught. After all, when we stand up to do justice, when we lean in to love with kindness, and when we walk humbly with our God, then we are marching for our lives.

When queer folks and allies flocked to the steps of the Supreme Court prior to marriage equality hearings, we understood that we were marching for our lives. When women organized people around the world last January, we understood that we were marching for our lives. When people of color and allies rose up to oppose white supremacists in Charlottesville last August, we understood that we were marching for our lives. When the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship joined Fossil-Free PCUSA to organize the climate justice walk from Louisville to St. Louis this June, we understood that we would be marching for our lives.

“Marching,” of course, is a metaphor, standing in for all that we do to strengthen and celebrate life in the midst of a culture of death, to create and sustain beauty in the midst of the ugliness of our time, and to build bridges of welcome to the immigrant and stranger when the powerful ones would prefer to build walls. When people come asking to see Jesus, if we want to show them Jesus, let us say, “come and follow; we are marching for our lives.” Amen.