Witness To The Truth (Newsletter message - November 2018)

Dear Emanuel Members and Friends –

“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 to the Jews. 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?’  John 18:33-37

The last Sunday in the liturgical calendar – and this year, the last Sunday in November - is known as Christ the King Sunday or, in inclusive language, Reign of Christ Sunday.   On this Sunday, the church lifts up Christ’s reign over our lives, as we belong to Christ in body, mind, and spirit.  At the same time, the church lifts up Christ’s ultimate reign over all things in heaven and earth.  This reign is obscured by the brokenness of daily life and the rebellion of those who grasp for authority, but will be visible to all at the end of time, when “every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Philippians 2:10-11)

Each year, on Reign of Christ Sunday, the gospel reading depicts Jesus as a king who doesn’t act like a king (at least not as we’d expect), a king who uses his power in ways very different from those of earthly rulers.   This year’s reading (John 18:33-37) depicts Christ before Pilate, explaining that his power does not come from this world.  Next year, we will read Luke 23:33-43, which contains Jesus’ word to the penitent thief, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”  The year after that, we will read Matthew 25:31-46, which portrays Jesus as a king who is to be found among the poor and dispossessed, and identifies so passionately with the poor that whatever we do for the poor or to the poor – for good or ill – we do to Jesus.  All three readings show Jesus as one who comforts the poor while confronting the powerful, as one who comforts the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable.  

John’s Gospel lifts up a very exalted view of Jesus’ foreknowledge of all circumstances and power over all things, even in his earthly ministry.  In the Gospel reading above, Jesus has been arrested and brought before Pilate, charged with inciting insurrection against Rome.  Formally, on paper, Pilate is in charge of the proceedings.  But as John’s gospel presents the story, even in chains, Jesus is fully in control of all that happens, while Pilate and others merely perform the roles assigned to them, like actors in a high school play.   

We also need to recognize that John’s gospel uses the term “Jews” in a specific way, to designate those Jewish leaders, along with their followers, who did not accept Jesus’ teachings. Jesus himself, along with his first disciples, were all Jews, and the contentions between Jesus and the religious leadership of the day were internal controversies within the Judaism of the day.  This caution is necessary because John’s words have been misused throughout history to bring blanket condemnation on all followers of Jewish faith, with tragic results. 

In their conversation, Jesus and Pilate appear to be speaking two different languages.  Pilate is fixated on power:  “Are you King of the Jews?....so you are a king?”  In other words, Pilate wants to know if Jesus is making a power grab.  Jesus, by contrast, is focused on truth:  “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, unimpressed with Jesus’ words, mutters cynically, “What is truth?”  meaning “Who cares about truth”.

Jesus testified that he came into the world to testify to the truth.  We live in a time when the very concept of truth is questioned.   There was once a time when everyone read the same newspapers, watched the same handful of television stations, and were informed by the same news.  From 1949 to 1987, under the Fairness Doctrine, as a requirement to receive a broadcast license, news stations were mandated to present controversial issues in ways that were deemed to be honest and equitable.[1]  But those days are long gone.  Phrases such as “alternative facts” and “fake news” are now part of our shared vocabulary, to the point where Pilate’s offhand, cynical question “What is truth?” holds far more relevance than Pilate himself could ever have intended.   Talk radio, cable news, and the internet allow persons on all points of the political spectrum – far left, far right, and anywhere in between - holding virtually any viewpoint imaginable to find kindred spirits and an echo chamber reinforcing their own views while drowning out the views of those who disagree.  Freedom of the press is explicitly protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.  But now members of the press are being called “enemies of the people” – a phrase with an ugly history[2].  Although there is a strong scientific consensus that human activities are causing climate change that threatens our planet’s ability to sustain human life[3] – even a recent Pentagon study characterizes climate change as a threat to roughly half of America’s military installations[4] -  politicians and pundits supported by the fossil-fuel industry[5] ignore this consensus and promote policies that promise only to accelerate climate change. 

Jesus said, “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.”  An internet meme – a photo or drawing coupled with a caption – does not necessarily equal a fact or convey truth.  Nor necessarily does that chain email forwarded by a friend.  Previously-published photos are often taken out of context and coupled with misleading captions intended to inflame rather than inform.  [A Facebook meme parodying this tendency has a picture of Abraham Lincoln with the caption, ‘Not everything you read on the internet is true – Abraham Lincoln”.]   So when we share a meme on Facebook or Twitter, or forward an email from a friend - we can do the work of Christ in testifying to the truth, or we can bear false witness.  We’ll need to engage in fact-checking and critical thinking in order to know the difference.  (Snopes.com is one of a number of websites that can be used in fact-checking.)  To repurpose an old slogan from Smokey the Bear, “Only you can prevent fake news.”  [This is one of the reasons that my sermon manuscripts and newsletter messages sometimes contain footnotes, not because I yearn for my long-ago college days of writing term papers at 3 a.m., but because I want to be transparent about my sources of information.]   In our day of “alternative facts” and “fake news”, fact-checking and critical thinking skills will serve us well.  Indeed, in today’s world, they are survival skills.   

It has been said that, “If our pain is not transformed, it will be transmitted.”[6]  We all view the world around us through various mental filters based on our own life experience.  While we may hold views inherited from our parents or based on what others taught us about Scripture or on long-ago high school civics classes, it is sometimes the case that behind our most strongly-held views are painful life experiences.   This is true for me; my own experiences of being marginalized have led me to care about those on the margins.   People with opposing views may be able to stay in dialogue if they are willing to share their stories, to share the experiences – however painful – that have shaped them and have led them to embrace the views they hold.  In sharing our stories, pain can be transformed into understanding, empathy, and reconciliation.

Jesus 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.” Jesus also taught, “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another.” (John 13:34)  Paul wrote to the Ephesians, “Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.” (Ephesians 4:14-15)  May we do our utmost to learn for ourselves what is true.  May we, as Christ’s followers, follow Jesus in speaking truth in love.

See you in church! – Pastor Dave

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_people

[3] https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

[4] https://climateandsecurity.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/tab-b-slvas-report-1-24-2018.pdf, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climatechange-military/climate-change-threatens-half-of-u-s-military-sites-pentagon-idUSKBN1FK2T8

[5] The website opensecrets.org contains information on campaign donations from a variety of industries.

[6] Richard Rohr offers a compelling meditation on this theme:  https://cac.org/transforming-our-pain-2016-02-26/

To See Or Not To See

Scriptures:              Jeremiah 31:7-9    Psalm 34:1-8      Hebrews 7:23-28         Mark 10:46-52

In our Gospel readings this month, Jesus has been making his way to Jerusalem.  Along the way, he told his disciples three times that in Jerusalem, he would be arrested, tortured and killed, and would rise on the third day – though the disciples likely didn’t have the slightest idea what that last part meant.  At the same time, the disciples were jockeying for position, engaging in intrigues and power struggles.  They  encountered a young man who had everything a young man could have asked for…..and yet still felt that something was missing from his life.  Jesus told him that in order to enter eternal life, he would have to leave behind his wealth, everything that comforted and satisfied him – and for the rich young man, that price of admission was just too high.

Today, Jesus and the disciples reach Jericho, their last stop before Jerusalem.  Some of our longtime members may remember singing, “Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, and the walls came a’tumblin down.”  But in Jesus’ day, Jericho was a dangerous place, full of robbers – we may remember that in the story of the Good Samaritan, it was a Jewish man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho who was set upon by robbers along the way. 

But in today’s reading, at Jericho we encounter, not Joshua, not robbers, not the priest or the Levite or the Good Samaritan, but a blind beggar named Bartimaeus.  He sat by the side of the road with his cloak spread before him to catch whatever coins were tossed his way by passers by.   Mark’s account of Jesus’ time in Jericho is very brief; we’re told that Jesus and the disciples entered Jericho, and the next thing we’re told is that Jesus left with his disciples and a large crowd in tow.  We’re not told what Jesus did in Jericho, but the mention that a crowd was following him on the way out tells us that whatever he had said or done, it had gotten people’s attention.  Meanwhile, Bartimaeus was by the side of the road, and while Bartimaeus’ eyes had failed him, his ears were working just fine, thank you very much.  He could hear a commotion and asked what was going on, and he was told that Jesus was passing his way.  He must previously have heard of the miraculous healings Jesus had done earlier in his ministry – and now Jesus was passing his way.  And so he started shouting, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”  And the next words Bartimaeus heard, not from Jesus but from the crowd were “Shut up!”   Perhaps not only from the crowd but from the disciples – at any rate, we’re not told that the disciples did anything to stop the hail of “Shut ups” raining down on Bartimaeus.  But Bartimaeus wasn’t going to be intimidated – his eyes had failed him, but just as his ears worked just fine, his lungs and his mouth worked even better, so instead he shouted louder, over the voices seeking to silence him, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”  And Jesus heard him.  We’re told that Jesus stood still – the procession that had been following him stopped in place – and Jesus said, “Call him here.”  And now where Bartimaeus had heard angry voices, he heard encouraging ones, “Take heart; he is calling you.”  Hey, Bartimaeus, you got Jesus’ attention!  We read that, “Throwing off his cloak” – the cloak that had kept in warm by night and which he had used to beg in the daytime – “Throwing off his cloak, he sprang to his feet.”  Jesus asked him, “What do you want me to do for you?”  And Bartimaeus replied, “My teacher, let me see again.”  So we learn Bartimaeus had not always been blind; he had once been able to see, but now he couldn’t….until that moment.   Jesus said, “Go, your faith has made you well.” We’re told that immediately Bartimaeus regained his sight – and he followed Jesus on the way, leaving his cloak behind, because he would no longer be begging for his daily bread.

I wonder what it was like for Bartimaeus when he was able to see again.  Remember, he had once been able to see before, and so before his healing, he had memories of what the world had once looked like to him.  I wonder whether those memories had faded as the darkness engulfed his field of vision, or whether they had become even more vivid as he struggled to hold onto them against the darkness.  And while he was overjoyed to see again, I wonder how he responded to what he saw.  Voices that he recognized connected with faces that now looked older – faces now heavily lined with age, hair gone gray – older than what he remembered from before.  While the major landmarks of his world likely hadn’t changed, perhaps Jericho was now a larger city than what he remembered from before.  While he was overjoyed to see again, might Bartimaeus in some cases have preferred his memories of the past to the realities to which his eyes were now opened? 

This text from Mark comes up in the lectionary every three years, and always on the last Sunday in October.  Since in our tradition the last Sunday of October is Reformation Sunday, in past years I’ve tried to connect the restoration of Bartimaeus’ sight to Reformers’ vision of a more faithful church – and how the Reformers, like Bartimaeus, were shouted down by those in authority.  In so doing, I’ve also preached that the work of Reformation is never done, that more than once the heirs to the Reformation themselves needed to be reformed – and those heirs themselves shouted down those who later pointed out the need for ongoing change -  that we in the church have been called time and again over the centuries from our captivity to the past and from our self-serving dreams to the vision of the reign of God as proclaimed by Jesus and the earliest Christians.

However, in those past years, we hadn’t just gone through a week in which pipe bombs were mailed to political leaders and a news organization.  In those past years, we hadn’t just gone through a day in which a synagogue in our own state had been invaded by a gunman armed, in the words of a statement from the national offices of the United Church of Christ, with an assault weapon, several guns, and hate.  At the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, while worship was in progress, including a bris ceremony celebrating new life, the birth of a baby boy, weaponized hatred invaded what should have been safe space, as at least 11 were killed and six others, including four police officers, were injured.[1]   We’ve seen the events of this past week unfold in our media, seen things we’ve never wanted to see, things that once we see them, we can’t un-see them, as the saying goes.  But we wish we could, or at least I wish I could.  it’s tempting, at least to me, to want to ask Jesus to do a reverse Bartimaeus, to plead with Jesus and to ask Jesus, “I can’t deal with all this.  I don’t want to see this.  My teacher, make me blind again.”

Bartimaeus was blind from natural causes – perhaps from age, perhaps from disease.  But there are many ways to be blind, and I think we all – every last one of us, including me - live with a certain amount of self-imposed blindness.  Connected as we are around the globe not only by radio and television but the internet and social media, our human minds just can’t begin to take in the full enormity of all that is happening, for good and ill, around the globe, in our country, or even in our city. Our brains aren’t designed for the task, plain and simple.  Indeed, we would have to be God in order to process all that, and we’re not, so we can’t.  We naturally focus on what is in front of us, and so the death of one child whose parents we know impacts us far more than the deaths of tens of thousands of children around the globe from hunger, war, and weather-related calamities.  It’s been said that the death of one child near us is a tragedy, while the death of tens of thousands of children across the globe is a statistic. 

However, sometimes we turn away even from unpleasant realities that are right in our face, because we don’t want to deal with the implications.  If your home has ever been invaded by pests such as fleas or roaches, intellectually you may know that if you see a flea on your leg or a roach skittering across your kitchen floor, there are many more hiding in the carpet or walls nearby.  And yet you don’t want to deal with it, even though you also know the situation will become so much worse if you ignore it, and so sooner or later – hopefully sooner - you call the exterminator.  Or I would refer to coal miners who carried a canary into the mines with them, knowing that if the canary died from the effects of toxic air in the mines, they’d be next if they stayed much longer.  So the death of the canary pointed to something larger.

It’s like that in our community life, in our national life.  The events of this week, the bombs sent earlier in the week, yesterday’s shootings, horrific as they are, point beyond themselves to a greater sickness in our national life.  Look on them as dead canaries, telling us that the atmosphere in our country has gone toxic.  For example, Robert Bowers, the gunman whose weaponized hatred claimed lives at the Tree of Life Synagogue, was consumed by hatred of Jews.  It was an obsession with him.  But he was also triggered by immigration in general, and more specifically recent news commentary about the caravan of immigrants making its way northward through Mexico.  He had heard about the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS for short – a group that lives out the mandate in the Hebrew Scriptures, what in our Bibles is called the Old Testament, from Leviticus 19:33-34, which states in part that “the alien among you shall be at the citizen among you.”  Mr. Bowers thought, rightly or wrongly, I don’t know, that HIAS was aiding and assisting the caravan, and more broadly that Jews were bringing what Bowers called “hostile invaders” to dwell among us.  Hours before heading to the synagogue, locked and loaded, Bowers wrote on the social media website “Gab”, ““HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”[2]

Bartimaeus told Jesus, “My teacher, let me see again.”  I said earlier that after this week I’m tempted to tell Jesus, “My teacher, let me go blind again.”   It’s a choice facing each of us – seeing, with all the untold beauty and horror that may entail, or blindness.  Which choice will we make?  Some have deliberately chosen blindness.  In some of the fever swamps of the internet and elsewhere, some speculated that the attack on the synagogue was a so-called false flag attack made by Jews but blamed on others in order to create sympathy for the Jewish community.[3]  Similar speculation took place about the bomb mailings, that they were false flag attacks; in fact, a coworker at my day job made a $100 bet to anyone who would take him up on it that the pipe bomb mailings were false flag attacks – just hours before the arrest was made of the perpetrator.   And more broadly, many look on these incidents merely as one-off attacks by isolated individuals – which, from where I sit, looks a bit like speculating that the dead canary in the miner’s cage just happened to die of old age.  Or perhaps treating that dead canary as if it were still alive, like the supposedly pining parrot in Monty Python’s famous dead parrot sketch.

Much of today’s political discourse is driven by hatred and fear.   The political atmosphere in our country has gone toxic.  Dead canaries abound, and not just from the two attacks this week.   But, as Scripture reminds us over and over, faith, hope, and love abide, and the greatest of these is love – and perfect love casts out fear.  I’m not speaking of the soft, romantic love of flowers and candlelight, but a tough and durable love that reminds that our lives are connected in what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail called “an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny”[4], that “whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly”[5], that finally we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper.  It is true that we are called upon to speak truth to entrenched power and to confront injustice, even if it means whipping a few moneychangers and tipping over a few tables.   In my own modest way, I’d like to think I’ve done that myself from time to time – I’ve been known to attend a protest or march occasionally – even though I’m more likely to bring a sign than a whip.  It’s a very different thing entirely to threaten the lives of our opponents, however reprehensible we may find them.  There is a clear and bright line marking the difference between political advocacy and street protests and civil disobedience on one hand, and murder of political opponents on the other.  If we as a nation get to a place where we can’t respect that clear, bright line in our heart of hearts, then we as a nation truly have gone blind.

Bartimaeus asked Jesus, “My teacher, let me see again.”  And Jesus said, “Go, your faith has made you well.”  May God’s faith, hope, and love heal us from the toxicity that swirls around us, restore our health, and heal our souls.  Amen.

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[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/us/active-shooter-pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting.html

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting-suspect-threatened-jewish-groups-pushed-migrant-caravan-n925256

[3] For example, http://themillenniumreport.com/2018/10/false-flag-mass-shooting-pittsburgh-synagogue-targeted-by-deep-state-with-another-white-male-patsy/

[4] https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/Letter_Birmingham_Jail.pdf

[5] Ibid