John 18: 33-37

Revelation 1: 4b-8

Following the Child

November 26, 2006

So here are two scenes. Straight from the plazas of Rome to this sanctuary.

A week or so ago, I am sitting in St Peter’s square. I am one of tens of thousands of people. We have gotten there early enough to get a seat. Around me are people from all nations. Around me are people cheering and praying and full of hope. They are there to receive a greeting and blessing from the Pope.

Later that week, one of our group of women is caught up in a mob of people surrounding a limousine. She asks those around her what is going on as flash bulbs are popping and people are thrilling. It turns out she has encountered Tom Cruise and his soon-to-be-wife Katie. The crowd is charged with energy.

What these events have me moved by is the power of heroes in our culture. In the case of the Pope, we long for a religious figure who can help us to navigate life. In the case of Tom Cruise, we long for an entertainment figure who can help us to escape life.

As human creatures, we seem near desperate for larger than life people who can give us answers.

This Sunday marks the end of a church year. Next Sunday Advent begins and the church year begins anew.

But this Sunday, a Sunday we call in the church ‘Christ the King Sunday”, I want to ask us to look back.

How is it we have lived in the year passed?

To whom and to what have we sworn our allegiance, and to whom and with what have we joined our power?

The question, “what is truth” that Pilate asks Jesus is a question we are called to ask each day we are given to live

This is a rich year to look back on with those questions. We know that we are manipulated every day by forces that would gladly answer that question for us.

Truth is dispensed by: Fox news, Garrison Keillor, The Democratic Party, The White House, the United Methodist Church, the Supreme Court, the church Administrative Board, your Pastor, your parents, your teachers, your friends. How many of you had a negative reaction to at least one of those peddlers of truth? You see the problem Pilate’s question poses, because all speak convinced of the truth they speak.

So how are we to know what is right, what is truth, what God would have us to do?

Being in Rome was a rich place to ponder “what is truth”. I walked over cobblestones in a city in which emperors and popes and the pious and the profane have wrangled over who speaks for God. For thousands of years this posturing has gone on. And the testimony to the tension is so very grand. The Vatican and the coliseum and the Pantheon and the cathedrals on nearly every corner. Each mural and each statue spoke the truth of the artist, the truth of their realm, the truth of their time.

I was there to study the Rule of St Benedict. The Rule is a design for living in Christian community. Benedict lived in Rome some 500 years after the death of Jesus. He was distressed by the violence and terror of his time and so he removed himself from it. He spent three years in prayer in a grotto outside of Rome. From the prayers of his heart and the teachings of his tradition, he wrote a series of teachings for how Christians can live in community.

How do we live in community, we Christians, keeping Christ as the King of our hearts? The Christ who was born a poor baby in a manger. The Christ who taught us to kneel at the feet of our friends as servant ministers?

In the prologue to the Rule, Benedict asks those of us who would learn the ways of Jesus to “listen with the ears of our hearts”.

This kind of listening has the power to build the kingdom of Jesus, the way of Jesus, the vision of Jesus, here and now, just as Jesus sought to have Pilate understand so many thousands of years ago.

Jesus wanted Pilate and his followers to understand that in his teachings, a whole new way of understanding power and truth was being born. The question was, would the world be able to allow it, this way of living?

When Pilate asks the question, he is met with the silence of Jesus.

In reflecting on this passage, Frederick Buechner says:

“before it is a word, the gospel that is truth is silence, a pregnant silence in its ninth month, and in answer to Pilate’s question, Jesus keeps silent, and even with his hands behind him manages somehow to hold silence out like a terrible gift.”

The gift the Jesus holds out to Pilate is held out to us yet. We who continue to be a part of putting Jesus on trial on an almost daily basis as we choose how we are going to live his teachings. For either we seek to live into learning the truth of God’s vision for our lives and creation (with all of our failings and sure miss-steps), or we wash our hands of the whole messy business and turn our teacher over to an authority who will give us easy answers.”

What is truth?

The answers are not easy. They aren’t meant to be. Each of us is called to weigh the gift of our lives and our choices.

Here’s a strong suggestion. Go to see the movie “Bobby”. It’s playing at the Edina theatre. I know there are as many opinions about Bobby Kennedy and his politics as there are people in this sanctuary, but do not miss this opportunity to open yourself to the challenge of how it is we are called to live and create truth in this world we share.

We are hungry for heroes. For leaders who will helps us to trust that goodness can prevail over corruption, that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness sake will be filled. Among the many things the movies helps us to see is that each and every one of us has the power to be a once and future king. Each and every one of us who lives with Christ centered integrity, the kind of integrity that asks the question always: what is truth?

One of the women I have come to love through my Women Touched by Grace experience is someone who lives the “what is truth” question in the marrow of her life in these days.

She used to live in Detroit, Michigan. She served an African American church and she was the only white face in the building. She and her family chose to live in the city because they believe in the power of presence and community.

Her husband is also a pastor. He was miserable at his church. He was serving a suburban congregation in Detroit as an Associate and his heart was withering. So he sought out a call in his native South Dakota. He was offered a campus ministry position and the decision to move rested on whether Carla would get a call. She interviewed with one set of churches for a two point charge, and they decided she was too liberal. She interviewed with another set of churches - one South Dakota, the other in Iowa.

At her interview she was very honest with them about how much she did not want to leave Detroit and how liberal she was on various social issues. They offered her a call.

And so she and her two children and her husband moved. They left a community and ministry she had been at for fifteen years. And she now lives in the middle of a corn field in South Dakota.

She is talking to God almost constantly these days. Her husband is so happy in his appointment, and she is so lonely. Lonely for color in skin and culture and friends and noise and a world that is more Detroit and less South Dakota.

She is talking to God. And not hearing anything back. God has been silent. As she is on her knees and in prayer asking God what it is truth is she hears… silence. In the ways spoken by Buechner. The silence does not feel like gift. It feels scary and like some sort of cruel punishment.

But she prays yet. Because this she believes. Christ is the King of her heart and of her life. But living as though that is so takes every scrap of strength and faith and tenacity she has some days. The answers to the questions of why South Dakota and why the move and why the desolation of the prairie and why the pain. Those will emerge.

In the meantime, she prays even as she asks even as she chooses even as she grieves.

Knowing that choosing Christ as her ground there is much she gives up in the way of control.

She’s praying her way into the answer to her truth question.

And Carla Nelson is my hero.

Amen